Hello Friends!

Here, hot-off-the-press is the new bi-weekly: Stop the Money Pipeline Newsletter!

The STMP Newsletter is your one-stop-shop for all the latest news, updates, and gossip from the world of Stopping the Money Pipeline ― and, without further ado, here’s what’s hot this week!

PLANNING STOP THE MONEY PIPELINE 2.0 🔏🤔📝✊

It’s been a pretty dang successful first six months together: Former Exxon CEO, Lee Raymond, has been demoted as lead independent director at Chase; five of the six largest US banks have committed to stop funding Arctic drilling projects; our main targets Chase, Liberty Mutual and BlackRock have all passed new (albeit insufficient) climate policies since the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition came together just six months ago. Now we are coming together to deeply plan the next phase of the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition.

Over the next two months, we will be having as many conversations as possible with all of you about what is working well in STMP, what isn’t ― and we’ll be hearing from you about how you want us to work together in the future. We started this process during last week’s Partner Call. You can read the notes from that here. And we will be taking the next two Partner Calls to dive even deeper into the questions of: What work do we want to do together? What do we want to build together? How do we want to build it?

To help us in this process, we are asking all coalition members to please fill out this survey. It should take you between 10 and 30 minutes.

The retreat planning team ― which for transparency is currently Simone Johnson from Future Coalition, Alex Begay and Jasilyn Charger with Earth Guardians, Liz Butler with Friends of the Earth, Aya Nagano with Transition US, Emily Southard from 350.org and myself ― will be using your responses to this survey to guide our retreat planning process in the weeks and months ahead. Please do take the time to complete the survey.

SHAREHOLDER MEETING ACTIONS AND REVOLTS! 🔥🎆🔥

BlackRock: The BlackRock’s Big Problem campaign organized amazing, socially distant protests in New York, San Francisco, London and Brussels on the day of BlackRock’s AGM. There was a street mural in San Francisco and a hot air balloon in New York. While the day before the AGM, over a thousand people signed up for the virtual “People’s Assembly on BlackRock” which featured Congressman Jesus “Chuy” García (D-IL), Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer, and Indigenous and community leaders from the U.S., Brazil, Indonesia, and Liberia.  You can read more about it here.

Chase: The night before Chase’s largest shareholder meeting of the year, we beamed messages from hundreds of activists so that they were 30ft high outside of Jamie Dimon’s home in New York. The images made it into the Financial Times, Image Alpha and Common Dreams. The video was viewed over 20,000 times on Twitter and Facebook. And then the next day two things happened:

  1. The vote to dump Lee Raymond from the Board was doubled from last year to 15% ― and that came after he had been demoted. In a world where Board members are normally renominated with 99% of the vote, it was a strong rebuke to Chase for its failings on climate. In total, ten state treasurers that control massive pension funds and a major proxy voting advisory services came out against Lee Raymond. STMP partner Majority Action led on this campaign, and you can read their statement on it here.

  2. Nearly half of Chase shareholders voted in favor of a resolution that would see the bank produce a plan for how it will align its business model with the Paris Agreement. This is little short of a shareholders revolt. Views on it in Reuters and Common Dreams. Statements from RAN + Sierra Club, As You Sow and Majority Action – and my own wee op-ed here.

DUMPING DARTH VADER! 👿👿👿
Exxon’s virtual shareholder meeting is tomorrow. STMP Coalition Partners Texas Campaign for the Environment, Earthworks, and STAND.earth are using it as an opportunity to ask some of Exxon’s largest and most iconic institutional shareholders ― companies like BlackRock, the New York State Common Retirement Fund, CalPERS, CalSTRS and the Church of England ― how they can still support the Darth Vader of climate change. Join the #DumpExxon Twitter storm May 27. Click here to access the #DumpExxon social media storm Toolkit.

YOUTH PLEDGE TO NEVER BANK AT CHASE 💰💰💰

Organizers of the Youth Pledge, are asking all allies to participate in this online action! Take these five simple steps to join the action:

1. Create a 15-60 second video exploring this question: What has the coronavirus taught YOU about the climate crisis?
2. Post to Instagram and tag @earthguardians and @youthvsapocalypse
3. Tag 3-5 friends and ask them to join the challenge
4. Take the pledge to divest from destruction and invest in solutions.
5. Use the Hashtags #DivestfromDestruction #InvestInSolutions #NoOneIsDisposable #StopTheMoneyPipeline #EarthGuardians

Questions? Email Kellie@earthguardians.org.

STMP WEBINAR SERIES 📽💻📽
The Stop the Money Pipeline team is organizing a webinar series! Our first webinar, Climate Finance 101 had over 1,000 people RSVP, and over 500 actually attend! The webinar team is pulling together a plan for a 6 – 8 part series now. Please complete this short survey to let us know what webinars you want to see included!

STMP WORKGROUP & CAMPAIGN UPDATES! 🔥🌍❤
Communications Team: We got some great media coverage this month, from profiles of our push to unseat former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond, to our work to stop the Trump Administration’s fossil fuel bailout, to the largest faith divestment announcement in history (not to mention the University of California system completing full fossil fuel divestment)! We’ve also been upping our oped game: re-read Sulakshana’s and Tamara’s great discourse on insurance in Rolling Stone, check out this piece in the Colorado Sun by Mario Molina, the ED of Protect our Winters, Jamie’s piece in the Deseret News about the GOP’s attempts to stop banks from divesting from oil and gas, or Alec’s recent write up of the earthquake we created at Chase.

Policy Team: In the last two weeks, the STMP Policy Team worked closely with Senators to raise questions about fossil fuel bailouts, and we are continuing to build public support for the ReWIND act, which would prohibit bailing out the fossil fuel industry. You may have also seen that Republicans are up in arms about US bank policies restricting Arctic oil and gas financing, and Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette even referred to these policies as “redlining” (yes, for real). We put together a messaging guide to address the GOP temper tantrum. In other news, STMP Policy Team members have also been busy publishing reports on fossil fuels and bailout: RAN investigated fossil fuel company eligibility for the Fed’s bond-buying programs, (The Guardian called the report findings a “coronavirus bailout bonanza”); Global Witness did a deep dive into Occidental and how it stands to benefit from government bailouts, following intensive lobbying efforts; and Friends of the Earth tallied up lobbying activities across Big Oil in the first quarter of the year.

Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Team: Our Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Team has started meeting weekly. This crew is vital to the shared success of our work. If you want to join them, shoot Amy an email: volunteer@350colorado.org
College Campus Organizing: Last week students in the College Climate Coalition organized a virtual phone bank to tell KKR to back off Indigenous lands, and they are hosting a #NoCoastalGasLink Day of Action TODAY from 3-5 pm EST. In addition to resisting the Coastal Gas Link pipeline, students are strategizing their virtual organizing for the summer. Additionally, twelve students from a variety of North American Universities will be training and organizing in the Divest Ed fellowship for the summer.

Insurance Campaign: Stop the Money Pipeline CT is ramping up pressure on insurers located in Hartford, the insurance capital of the world: support them by amplifying this awesome projection action, petition, and powerful op-ed. TOMORROW (and please keep this on the DL until then) is going to be a rocky day for Liberty Mutual: a new report is coming out revealing that Liberty Mutual and other insurers are some of the biggest backers of Fox News programs that promote misinformation about COVID-19 and climate change, and separately, a group of legislators across MA will also be delivering the company a strong message. Stay tuned: RAN and Insure Our Future will send around social media material to amplify soon! Plus, over in Australia, the #StopAdani movement escalated its campaign on Marsh, who is arranging insurance for the Adani Carmichael coal mine (check out this incredible online rally with 600+ people); Marsh spewed a whole lot of greenwash at its AGM last week, and so the campaign continues. Pension Fund Campaigns: A lot of effort is being put into Exxon’s AGM tomorrow – see above! And in other news, the DivestNY campaign continues to build momentum, signing up more legislative sponsors for divestment legislation. Share out this new op-ed in the Albany Times Union about why we are so mad at the NY state comptroller for failing his fiduciary duty. In California, everyone celebrated the completion of divestment by the University of California system – noting that a good chunk of the $126 billion was made up of the UC pension fund. It turns out that UC getting out of fossil fuels was a wise move – a recent Fossil Free CA study showed that as of May 12, CalSTRS lost $1.6 billion on 22 tar sands and fracking companies alone, and CalPER lost $1 billion from comparable investments in extreme fuels.
And, that’s a wrap! Congrats to all who made read this far. There is a lot going on in this here coalition.

And, don’t forget, please do take 10-30 mins to complete the STMP 2020 Strategy Planning survey to help us plan what is next!

In solidarity
– Alec PS: Do you have feedback for me about this newsletter? Or anything that you see in the coalition? Please let me know! Feedback is only way we can learn to do this even better 🙌🙌🙌


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