A new social contract rooted in human dignity
Why we launched the campaign for an Ethical & Socially Responsible Investment Framework in Howard County.
“The revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has acquired at the expense of damning over one-third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease and early death….”
— Grace Boggs and James Boggs
Existential crisis at home
We in Howard County and the United States face a serious existential crisis—not only of politics, but of daily survival. After decades of extraction and austerity, our very social fabric is being destroyed.
Affordability, health, and a narrowing future
Health care costs alone are crushing families: job-based family health insurance premiums average about $26,993 per year, with workers paying about $6,850 out of pocket, and medical debt has touched more than 100 million people in the United States. Housing has become a quiet emergency as well: by 2024 the country reached a record 43.5 million cost-burdened households, and in rental housing 22.4 million renter households were cost-burdened—paying more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. Student debt deepens the squeeze, with outstanding student loan balances around $1.66 trillion, delaying adulthood and limiting mobility. The damage shows up in our minds and bodies too: in 2023, over 49,000 people died by suicide. And for many young people trying to enter the workforce, the future is narrowing rather than expanding—recent college graduates faced worsening labor-market conditions at the end of 2025, with unemployment around 5.7% and underemployment rising.
Corporate power, precarity, and violence
Multinational corporations keep wages low while workers rely on SNAP, Medicaid, and other programs to survive, effectively shifting labor costs onto the public while executives and shareholders win. Meanwhile, the proliferation of guns turns daily life into a roulette wheel: Sandy Hook (December 14, 2012) is a permanent marker of what “normal” has come to mean, where 20 children and six educators were killed in minutes.
These pressures are not separate problems—they are connected symptoms of a system that concentrates wealth, privatizes public goods, and treats human needs as costs to be minimized.
The troubles do not end there. The unfortunate contradiction and tragedy is that we in the United States are also beneficiaries of human suffering, not because ordinary people are uniquely cruel, but because our economy and foreign policy have been structured to deliver material comfort here by shifting costs elsewhere. The result is a world where instability is manufactured, displacement becomes inevitable, and exploitation is treated as a business model, abroad and at home.
Manufactured instability and displacement
U.S. meddling abroad has often served the interests of multinational corporations and geopolitical dominance, and the downstream costs show up as displacement and “refugee crises” that get blamed on the displaced.
A stark historical example is Guatemala in 1954, when the United States carried out covert action to remove the elected government amid intense controversy over U.S. commercial interests and influence in the country.
People then flee instability and violence, only to collide with a punitive system at the border and in the courts: by December 2025 the U.S. immigration court backlog reached 3,377,998 pending cases, including 2,339,623 people who had already filed asylum applications and were waiting for a hearing or decision.
And when legal pathways are blocked, migration becomes deadlier: the UN migration agency reported at least 8,938 deaths on migration routes worldwide in 2024, the deadliest year on record. That same manufactured vulnerability then functions as an economic pipeline: major corporations pay poverty wages, workers lean on public programs to survive, and taxpayers quietly subsidize business models built on low pay—what the Institute for Policy Studies describes as public assistance being used as “corporate welfare” by top low-wage employers.
Militarize. Extract. Profit.
The same logic—militarize, extract, profit—runs through the Middle East. The United States maintains major bases and facilities across the region, including Al Udeid in Qatar, the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, and major installations in Kuwait, the UAE, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, making entire societies staging grounds for escalation and permanent insecurity.
In Palestine, U.S. funding and diplomatic cover help sustain a system that many human rights organizations describe in terms of apartheid, and the UN Security Council has stated that Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory have “no legal validity” and constitute a “flagrant violation” under international law.
And as violence is normalized abroad, it echoes at home—the “imperial boomerang” describes how methods developed to control subject populations return to be used domestically, hollowing out civil liberties in the name of security.
Resources, minerals, and mass suffering
In Africa, the race for strategic minerals and resource control has helped finance armed actors and intensify mass suffering: the United States formally determined on January 7, 2025 that members of Sudan’s RSF and allied militias have committed genocide, and reporting has repeatedly traced how war profiteering and resource capture help sustain the conflict.
In that context, U.S. security cooperation and arms relationships with the UAE have persisted despite extensive reporting of coalition-caused civilian harm in Yemen, and amid serious allegations that UAE-linked supply networks have fueled armed actors in Sudan.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, violence in the east has long been entangled with control of mineral-rich areas and supply chains—“conflict minerals” are widely documented as a funding stream for armed groups—and the U.S. has long treated Rwanda as a security partner even as UN expert reporting and U.S. government statements have repeatedly called on Rwanda to cease support for M23, a driver of violence and displacement in eastern Congo.
Why this campaign — and why investment policy matters
Put together, it’s no surprise that so many people say the social contract is breaking down: the same oligarchic machinery that fueled Trump’s ascent—concentrated wealth, captured institutions, manufactured fear—will not stop on its own. The only credible response is to demand a new social contract that centers human dignity: human life over profit, public goods over privatized extraction, and democratic control over the systems that currently treat suffering—abroad and at home—as a line item.
Against that backdrop, it matters how Howard County manages our public dollars. Today, the County’s investment policy is built around prudent fundamentals: investing in a way that conforms to state and County law, meets daily cash-flow needs, and targets returns that track the three-month Treasury bill yield.
The County’s formal objectives prioritize safety of principal first, then liquidity, then yield, and it uses diversification limits (including caps by institution) to reduce risk. Those guardrails are important—and they should remain—but they are not enough in a world where prosperity is so often built on violence, extraction, and exploitation.
That’s why we launched this campaign: to add clear ethical and socially responsible investment criteria on top of financial prudence, so County funds are screened to disallow prohibited investments tied to human rights abuses, weapons, fossil fuels, exploitative industries, discriminatory practices, housing monopolies, and predatory finance—and to prioritize investments aligned with human dignity.
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