350 Wenatchee Climate Conversations NCW

• Participant’s Agenda
• RSVP Form – please RSVP by Saturday, August 1st. (Note – you need to RSVP to get the zoom link for the calls.)

To help us in our planning, we’re going to be conducting several “snap polls” between now and the end of the retreat. These will be polls with 1 or 2 questions that will take you less than sixty seconds to complete. The snap polls are a way to get real-time feedback from y’all on the direction of the retreat! Here are our very first questions… 

• First snap poll on what breakouts we should be doing in days 2 and 3 of the retreat. 
• Second snap poll to get a temperature check on the idea of a week of action in late September.

In the last month, we have had nearly 500 people on the White Supremacy Built Wall Street webinar, around 400 on Part 1 of Banks and the Fossil Fuel Industry, and more than 350 on both the Liberty Mutual and the BlackRock webinar with FOE and Mijente. The next webinar is tomorrow: Banks and Fossil Fuels Part 2, @ 9PST / 12 EST. Webinar toolkit and socials to share to help promote tomorrow’s webinar:

• https://www.facebook.com/StoptheMoneyPipeline/posts/177218673860758
  
• https://twitter.com/StopMoneyPipe/status/1288504322167316485
  

We also now have all of our webinars in one place. Here: https://stopthemoneypipeline.com/webinars/. Cheers to Charlie for getting this up on the site!

Pushing back against racist language in the Climate Finance Movement ✊🔥🌍

Last month, Rev. Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus had this op-ed in Common Dreams about the use of the racist term “brown finance” in climate finance spaces. Bloomberg also picked up on it this week.

After discussing this with the Hip Hop Caucus, Stop the Money Pipeline has made a commitment to ensure that we, as a coalition, are not using this racist language in our work. We also made a commitment to name it as racist language and give feedback to others whenever we see or hear it used. This includes committing to give feedback to our friends and fellow coalition partners, non-coalition partners, and reporters when we hear this term used.

We would encourage all partners involved in Stop the Money Pipeline to please make sure you’re not using this racist term in your work, and that you also commit to naming it and providing feedback on it whenever you see or hear it. 

On Monday, the Guardian broke the story that fossil fuel companies and Wall Street are major funders and supporters of police foundations, opaque privately funded institutions that spend millions of dollars buying the police weapons, surveillance technology, and other tools they use to oppress and brutalize communities.

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be working to support Color of Change and amplifying a campaign they are running in response to this. We’ll be directing people to a petition they are running, and also 350.org is providing some support in creating a shareable video. Watch this space for more. In the meantime, there is an organizational sign-on letter here that we very much encourage all STMP partners to sign on to!

Insurance: wins and momentum! 🔥🌍🔥 Trans Mountain’s lead insurer Zurich dropped the Indigenous rights-violating tar sands pipeline last week. Boom! Pressure is now mounting on Liberty Mutual and other US insurers to follow suit. Here are two easy things you and your organization can do to support:

• Send Liberty Mutual leadership in Canada a message here (and ask your supporters to do the same)
• Sign your organization onto this open letter to the remaining Trans Mountain insurers. The deadline for sign-ons is TODAY! (There was a pretend deadline last week, but that was just a joke – obvs. The real final deadline for sign on is today 🙂

BlackRock: Funding Deportations as well as the climate crisis🙌💻🙌 

STMP partners have teamed up with Mijente to call on BlackRock to stop funding Palantir, a data mining company that supports ICE, inhumane deportations, and detentions.

• Sign-on letter for groups: https://bit.ly/BLKPalantir
• Individual petition: http://foe.org/BLK-Palantir

Banks: wins and momentum!👏👏👏 

Deutsche Bank, one of the largest European banks, drops Arctic and oil sands projects. (Important to note, however, that, just like the US banks, Deutsche Bank hasn’t excluded corporate financing and so can still finance companies that are drilling in the Arctic and the Boreal; they just committed to stop funding for specific projects in these areas.) You can read the thoughts of some STMP’ers on it in this Common Dreams piece here. And there is a Sierra Club call to action targeting Bank of America here — BOA is the only major US bank to not yet pass a Arctic policy.

Morgan Stanley and Citi have become first US banks to commit to measuring the climate impacts of their lending joining the Partnership for Climate Accounting Financials. This is kinda wonky and may sound a little underwhelming, but this is a super vital step toward getting the banks to align their business models with the Paris Agreement. More details here. Let’s make sure all the banks are doing this by the end of the year!

No fossil fuel bailout letter to Federal Reserve ✒ ✒✒

Bunch of STMP partners are working on this. Does what it says on the tin. Organizational sign-ons accepted through the end of day TODAY. It will be released tomorrow; please be ready to amplify!

Vote for the Earth Livestream: 🌍🌍🌍 Livestream to mobilize the youth vote, including live voter registration and featuring frontline Black and Indigenous youth, including Stop the Money Pipeline steering committee member, Jasilyn Charger. This is being organized by Future Coalition and other leading youth climate strike groups. Learn more here – and help spread the word if you can!

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