Community members demand ethical investment at San Jose City Council committee meeting
San Jose, CA – On February 19, community members gave public comment at the San Jose Public Safety, Finance, and Strategic Support Committee meeting to demand that the city pass an ethical investment policy.
The PSFSS Committee consists of five city councilmembers and oversees the city’s finances, including its investments. Over a dozen people called on the city to divest more than $115 million in city funds from corporations with ties to ICE and Israel, including Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Microsoft, Caterpillar, Honeywell and Amazon.
Community members held signs reading, “Ethical investment now” and “Divest from genocide” as they stood at the podium to give public comment. People spoke on behalf of organizations including San Jose Against War, Showing Up for Racial Justice, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Students for a Democratic Society.
Philip Nguyen, a SEIU 521 steward, stated, “We have investments in companies that have historically aided and facilitated the tearing apart of families, the killing of people at home and abroad, with Alphabet having a partnership with Lockheed Martin, to make their war machines kill more effectively, as well as CBP to make their tactics of surveilling the border more deadly.”
Nguyen continued, “Then there’s Microsoft, who has supplied their Azure cloud software to the Israeli military, to more efficiently track and kill Palestinians, commit war crimes against Palestinian men, women and children. Microsoft is also enabling ICE’s terror operations that have killed innocent people: Keith Porter, Renee Good, Alex Pretti and the people who have died in ICE’s detention centers.”
Wendy Greenfield of the South Bay chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace said, “These ongoing attacks, this genocide, is opposed by the majority of people in San Jose, in this county, and around the nation.” Greenfield continued, “The attacks also cause climate pollution, principally in Palestine, but also worldwide, producing over 31 million tons of carbon emissions in just the first 15 months.”
Dina Saba, a longtime Palestinian-American resident of San Jose, drew the connection between ICE terror and Israel’s genocide against Palestine, asking the councilmembers, “Did you know that the IDF trains ICE? Did you know that there are 121 ex-IDF soldiers that have been hired by ICE?”
Anthony Aguilar, who served as a Green Beret in the U.S. army for 25 years and became a whistleblower against the U.S. military’s atrocities through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, also spoke, “While I was in Gaza, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation utilized Palantir Gotham, software powered by Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet, to target unarmed civilians. The same technology that is now being leveraged here in our cities through drones, biometric data collection, policing, security operations. U.S. citizens are now the target of these operations, and I have seen their lethal effect firsthand in countries around the world. The terror that we export, the oppression that we export, is coming home and it is coming home to our streets, here in California.”
Shaena Reyes of San Jose Against War spoke about the city’s 2020 decision to ban investments in fossil fuel companies, stating, “The precedent has been set regarding letting justice and equity guide investment decisions.”
Reyes continued, “I’m calling on the city to be consistent on our city’s clear values by introducing and passing an ethical investment policy against companies that support Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, against companies that are funding and directly involved in the terrorism in our own country, in our own state, by ICE.”
The city’s investment policy will come up for its annual review by the full city council at the San Jose City Council meeting on Tuesday, March 10 at 1:30 p.m., where community members and organizations plan to show up again to give public comment supporting ethical investment.