 as Greta with World Beyond War. And again, feel free to use the chat box if you haven't yet to introduce yourself. Perfect, and since we're two minutes past the hour, I might just get us started if that works. Great, we should be streaming. Welcome everybody. Like Greta said, if you are looking for a tax on ESG investment and what they mean for our movements to divest during the right spot, we're really glad to have you all here. I'm just gonna give a brief introduction and then we're gonna get into the center of the conversation. Just as an initial note for all of CodePink's webinars, we like to outline some community agreements, which is just to be in this case in the chat, respectful towards ourselves, each other, speakers, participants, encourage healthy debate, but want folks to disagree agreeably. Putdowns are not tolerated and we wanna stay on topic in the chat. Other tech housekeeping, we are gonna have a community Q&A at the end. So if you have questions, please feel free to add your questions to the chat and we'll get to them later. And you can also just share, yeah, your general thoughts, add your questions to the Q&A, add your general thoughts and connections to the chat. And for folks who want to turn on closed captioning, you can click the three dots in the bottom right hand and you will be able to turn that on there and view a full transcript. Yeah, so just as a brief intro, my name is Shay. I'm with CodePink and I coordinate the Divas from the War Machine campaign. I'm really glad to be here today. Greta, do you wanna do a quick intro? Sure, thank you so much Shay and welcome everyone. My name is Greta Zaro and I'm the organizing director with World Beyond War and I'm excited to be co-hosting this webinar with Shay today. Shay and I work pretty closely on divestment campaigns across the country and this was very much of interest for both of us to dig into ESG investing and to speak with Andrew and really be able to kind of bring this topic to CodePink and World Beyond War's audiences and discuss kind of what it might mean for our divestment movements. So excited to be here with you all. Absolutely and just a quick overview before we get into the more nitty-gritty details of this issue. ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance Investment and it's one of the frameworks that financial institutions use to assess investment risks and opportunities including workplace diversity, worker safety, the risks that climate change poses and more. Few of any ESG funds are engaged in boycotts of sectors for political or ethical reasons. So, you know, you might wonder why Greta and I as divestment organizers are so interested in this topic and holding this webinar on it tonight. As many of you likely know, earlier this month Congress passed a resolution to overturn Biden's 2022 rule that permitted ESG investment. Biden vetoed this resolution this past Monday so his rule stays in place but there was a lot of back and forth here and this wasn't even the full story. Bush and Obama when they were in the presidential office also had rules surrounding ESG investment that were volleyed back and forth. These presidential rules all address the freedom of choice that investors have and whether they can use ESG criteria and their own investments. So this governmental back and forth is determining the ability of investors to account for types of risk in their work. These rules do not mandate ESG investment by any means. Beyond the federal level, there are also lawsuits occurring around ESG investment and the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank was blamed by some politicians on ESG investments. We're interested in discussing ESG investment because it is directly linked to our divestment organizing and because we see the rising attacks on ESG investment as a response to the growing power of various forms of economic activism such as divestment also boycotts, sanctions and beyond. Neutralizing these threats to ESG is a critical aspect of forwarding the movement for divestment because these threats are targeting the ability of investors and fiduciaries to account for climate chaos and clear threat and dips in these destructive yet financially hegemonic industries. We want folks to be able to determine what is feasible. On the other hand of why we see this as very relevant maintaining investors' ability to practice ESG will bolster divestment efforts by demonstrating that alternative and sustainable investments are strong and feasible and more safe in the long term. Just as a quick side note example of that in Philadelphia, Greta and I are working with a coalition to divest the city from nuclear weapons and we are really building to move that campaign forward off of a resolution that Philadelphia recently passed to phase in ESG investment in the city and we're using that to demonstrate how our demands are just really in line with the cities and moving where that money is being put. So those are my top line thoughts but I'm not an expert Andrew is so I'm really excited to be introducing him. You can speak to this all in much greater detail than I can. Andrew is the CEO of As You Sow which is the nation's leading nonprofit practitioner of shareholder advocacy and engagement with a 30 year record of success as You Sow advances values aligned investing and uses shareholder power to compel companies to reduce material risk on issues including climate change, toxins in the food system, ocean plastics, diversity, equity and inclusion, racial justice and wage equity. Previously Andrew was a documentary filmmaker and entrepreneur founding startups developing an innovative physiological monitoring medical device and grid scale fuel cells. He is currently on the board of the responsible sourcing network and his book The Shareholders Action Guide Unleash Your Hidden Powers to Hold Corporations Accountable was published in November 2016 by Barrett Kohler. Welcome Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. Well, thanks for inviting me Shay and you did a pretty good job there covering it. Wonderful, so yeah let's dig into the questions. We have several questions for Andrew who's going to walk us through this issue and then after that we will make time for audience questions as well so feel free to put your questions in the Q&A box so Andrew let's dig into it. Give us a little bit of an overview bring us up to speed on what in the world has happened in Congress in the past month in terms of what is this rule that Congress is trying to overturn that Biden had passed and now Biden vetoed that? What's going on? Most people don't know what ESG investing is and now all of a sudden this is in the news. Yeah, there's a lot of political fear going on so a lot of people, a lot of arm waving and a lot of loud voices that are funded by far right groups. In particular there's one character named Leonard Leo who was given $1.6 billion to and by the way he is one of these people he's the head of the Federalist Society that brought us our current Supreme Court but he's been given $1.6 billion to go out and fight against this thing called ESG. And ESG is simply a framework for assessing risk. So what they're fighting against is that they don't want anyone to assess risk which is a very strange thing because it's well it's required of anyone who does any investing at all. You want to invest in companies that have less risk that have better management teams that are evaluating risk on a daily basis. This is what good management teams do. Certainly what good investors do. If you're gonna have someone help you do your investing who's a fiduciary for you that means they're responsible for you. You want them assessing risk and you want them assessing all kinds of risk. You want them assessing environmental risks. You know maybe why invest in a company that's going to not have any supply chain. Let's say it's a company that makes t-shirts and socks. If they can't get cotton because Pakistan has had massive floods and they had no cotton harvest last year and Texas lost 70% of its cotton because of massive droughts. Well, maybe that's not such a great investment if this management team at this peril company is not assessing risk. So you have to make choices. And so it just, it's logically, it makes logical sense to work with companies that are assessing risk. So that's what it's all about. Now, what it is though and why all of this fervor around it is that they've basically made it political. It's part of this culture war, this whole agenda to try to restrict what people how they can think, restrict how they can invest. So this is really about your freedom to invest. This is about your freedom to make your own choices. And, but in particular, so let's get into this rule. So not to go back too many administrations but let's just say before Trump, you could choose if you were, if you had a retirement plan, you could make a choice. I want to use all of the data available in order to make my investing choice. What Trump said is, no, you can't use any environmental, social or governance data, information, risk assessment to make that choice, which is kind of impossible first of all. And so they said, you can't do that. What Biden did is like, no, we want to give people the freedom, we believe in a free market. It's, so it's essentially just returning us to a basic free market that a fiduciary, if they so choose and use this risk framework to decide how to invest, that's all it is. And so, but it's created a lot of political theater and Biden's veto is of course the right thing to do because ultimately we want to have a free market. We want to assess risk. And I can see already in the chat, for instance, there's someone here who is a teacher, part of a teacher's union. Now, if you're a teacher and there's been a mass shooting at your school, do you want to own assault weapons in your retirement plan? Do you want to profit from assault weapons? Generally, most teachers say no. The Biden's rule says you can now assess that and you can make a choice. The previous rule said, no, you're not allowed to assess that. So it just takes away people's freedom is what it's about. And so that's really the fundamental question here is do you want to have freedom or do you not want to have freedom? You don't have to use it, but if it's there, you can use it, it's really interesting. Yeah, and I guess touching on that point, it's interesting how in some ways in Congress, as you said, it's become this partisan issue. It's become politicized when really it shouldn't be. And you're drawing attention to the free market aspect and I was reading that there have been polls done of Republican voters and Democrat voters, even showing that Republican voters favor ESG because of the argument you're making that it provides a free market choice. It's not specifying any one decision or the other, it's just giving that choice. So it's interesting looking at those polls that even the Republican voters didn't have a problem with and yet for some reason, these majority Republicans are leading this charge in Congress. I think you need to separate between Republicans in a more traditional sense or conservatives in a traditional sense who tend to want smaller government, tend to want more freedom. And then this new group of radicals who are trying to use big government to restrict freedom. You look at what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida. I mean, he's banning books that's really reaching into people's, how their children are being educated, what they're being taught. The fact that he wants to ban, well, the story of Rosa Parks. I mean, the story actually, I read about that they're banning Columbus's diary because Christopher Columbus wrote about how they abused and oppressed indigenous people, indigenous societies. And so Christopher Columbus himself is no longer acceptable to be taught. So again, that's using big government to restrict freedom. That's this, I don't know that they're actually, maybe they seem to call themselves Republicans, but there seems to be just a major split within the Republican party of those who are more traditional, small government and freedom, and those who want big government and take away your freedom because you have to think like them. So that's, I think, where you have the confusion. So as you said, Biden did veto this. This was his first veto in office. So what are the implications of that? And we want to be clear. We know that ESG investing does not equal divestment, but are there potential knock-on effects of this? Now that the rule has been maintained, will it encourage more ESG investing and do you see a potential knock-on effect of it encouraging divestment from certain sectors? The interesting thing, and this might sound a little confusing, but actually, if you only use financial metrics, the word is pecuniary. You've probably seen this word pecuniary a lot, which means the financial, the returns that these mutual funds. So if you have a retirement plan, if you work at a company and you have a 401K plan, or you work at a university, you have a 403B plan, they're generally mutual funds. And there's usually one that's called the default option. And it's generally a target date fund, which means it's like you'd say, oh, it's a 2050 fund or a 2060 fund. You pick the year that you're going to retire and then it adjusts itself. It's more equities when you're younger, it shifts to more bonds as you get older. So it gets a little bit more, just less risk in your portfolio. So these target date funds, that's where most of the $10 trillion in these retirement plans sits. These are big, these are funds of funds. So these cover the whole economy. Now, what's intriguing here is if you look at the BlackRock 2050 target date fund, the Vanguard 2050 target fund, the TIAA-CREF, and then there's one that is sustainable called the Natixus target date fund. You look at the 2050 of each of those and you sit them side by side. Well, Natixus has a lot less weapons, a lot less deforestation, a lot less big oil and that sort of thing. It also outperforms. It outperforms in the three months, six months, one year, two year, three year, four year, five year, just outperforms the other ones. So you make more money. So you actually, you can choose the sustainable option and actually outperform. What's confusing is when any of these folks say, oh, you have to only use the cuneary, that would actually force everybody into ESG. But then they say, but you're not allowed to use ESG. So that's where people get very confused because here's a law that says I must only use financial metrics, which means I'm gonna buy the sustainable fund, but the law also says I'm not allowed to buy the sustainable fund. So now I'm confused and that is confusing. Yeah, I mean, you're touching on one of the quintessential questions that we hit up against every time we work on a divestment campaign. And that is the financial argument and people, you know, pension fund managers, city council members are often saying, but what about the financial impact? What about the financial impact? And, you know, recently it's become even harder for us because fossil fuel stocks are soaring and weapons stocks are soaring with the Ukraine war. And so, you know, what is your response to that? We need some talking points. We are looking to your suggestions of how can we best respond in the way that you're saying essentially looking at this holistic picture and making the argument that this is not a financial risk and fact it can be beneficial financially. So, well, even if you look right now, again, comparing to Texas and Black Rock and Vanguard and TIAA, it's still outperforming. Three years ago it was off the charts outperforming because, you know, oil was going down, down, down, down for 10, 12 years. So there was a very clear financial argument, but yes, with the aggression, Russian, the Russian genocide, I don't call it the Ukraine war by the way. I refer to it as the Russian genocide because it was not Ukraine that started this thing. It's pumped up the price of oil and obviously also demand for weapons of mass destruction and all kinds of weapons. So those two industries are doing, that oil and weapons are doing well together, which generally is what happens. So those are making mutual funds that hold those kinds of stocks doing better. They're still not doing as well as the other ones. So I think you can still have the financial argument. Now, the thing is that it's, but it's a bubble. I mean, when that aggression stops, what's gonna happen is anyone who's bought in now at these high prices of oil, it's going to drop. I mean, you see that oil is already dropping and that a lot of the funds that are all oil, that, you know, some of these, there's some new ones that were created actually as part of this whole anti-ESG crusade that's happened. These are funds like YAL, Y-A-L-L, it's all just oil and guns. And those are not doing as well as everybody thought. And a lot of the pension funds are now being required in the red states. They've passed laws to actually shift money from a diversified fund into these oil and guns. And so there's a lot of risk. What could happen when those stocks drop is that the pension funds, the nest eggs of all of the firefighters and teachers and people who work in the state of Texas and different Republican states, they can lose their life savings. And that's the risk. That's why you diversify your portfolio is because you wanna be able to hedge against that kind of a risk. Absolutely. And I wanna bring in your organization's work a little bit here. As you so produces these incredible databases where you can sort through these funds and check different boxes, whether you want fossil free funds or weapons free funds or gender equitable funds. Tell us a little bit about that work and can we use that as a tool, especially in these times when this is such a touchy issue, could we point people to that website or utilize that to make the case for ESG and investment? Yeah, absolutely. If you put it in the chat, investyourvalues.org. So this was actually started in 2015. We were involved with the divest fossil fuel movement starting back in 2011. And what we found is we started to, we were working with a lot of students on campuses trying to get their endowments to divest and then with a lot of high net worth individuals as well as institutional investors. There's now $40 trillion that has signed a pledge to divest fossil fuels. So we were working very early on with them. And what we found is that most people have their life savings, their retirement money is in mutual funds. It's in these 401K, 403B plans. And we did a survey and we found all these people signed a pledge, I want to divest and nobody knew what they owned. Just literally no one knew what they owned. It was universal. And so we decided, why is that? And we couldn't find, it was actually very difficult to even find what was in the, as you sow 401K plan. So we said, well, we got to help this out. And so we built this tool that every month we updated and it shows you all the holdings within every mutual fund. And then we grade them on what fossil fuels do you have? What deforestation you have? What weapons that you have? And Code Pink actually funded us to expand out to do both weapons of mass destruction, military weapons and also civilian weapons. So we do assault weapons, handguns, also stores that sell ammunition. So because people want to know, I mean, people who are just, they start in a job and they go, yeah, great. I'm getting a retirement plan and the company's matching. If I put in 4% of each paycheck, the company matches it and I get a tax benefit from this. So then they just click a box for the default option. And they are invested in the entire extractive economy. They are invested generally in these indexes that are not creating a world that is going to make a livable planet when you retire. So, but it goes beyond that, the pension funds, there's $27 trillion in pension funds in the US or trillion in the UK. All these people, so just right there, you've got 20, some 30s and you have 40, let's call it $40 trillion of people who are working every day, putting away a little bit to retire and they don't even realize that what they're investing in is a non-livable planet. They're investing in their own destruction, but no one ever told them that because it's so buried under layers and layers and layers. There's, I mean, there's five people getting fees that you don't even know about and it's very hard to tell. So we said, let's just simplify it. You go there, you just type in the name, you can type in the word Vanguard. I could demonstrate it if I could share a screen, type in Vanguard, picked your fund and boom, it just tells you it gets an F on fossil fuels or it gets a D on private prisons. You'll find if it's a Vanguard fund, it's probably gonna get a D or an F on private prisons. They own a lot of those. And then there's other funds. There's funds by Calvert that get A's and Parnassus that get A's in green century, trillion. There's literally, when we started this in 2015, there were maybe a dozen fossil free funds. There's now, I think like four or 500 of them. It was like $1 billion in fossil free. Now it's like 400 billion. So people, the money, the capital is flowing in that direction. Now, this not only pulls money away from risk, so in fossil fuels, but it also invests it in new technologies which are the companies that are going to be outperforming in three, five, 10, 20 years. You wanna invest for, so capital will flow into the companies that are gonna build, well, a livable planet, a safe planet, a just planet. So this is what we focus on, is how do you shift capital toward justice and sustainability? Absolutely, yeah. It's an incredible tool, Andrew. Congratulations on it. And Shay put the link in the chat. That's asusow.org. We encourage everyone to check it out. And yeah, I mean, I think you've spoke to a few critical points, which has won the pervasiveness of these destructive industries in our lives. People don't even realize, as you said, that they're investing in fossil fuels and weapons and all these things. But also on the flip side, using this tool and using other resources that we have at our disposal, the agency that we do have as individuals, as institutions, that we can make these changes and it can make a very tangible change. And that's personally what gets me very excited about divestment movements. People are very, you have so much more power, people that then you realize. The reason I wrote my book is because I just wanted people to realize you've abdicated your power without knowing you even had power. And so when you realize that and you go, what do you mean I'm giving away my power? How do I get it back? Well, here's how you get it back. You go to work, you use investor values and you look at your 401K plan and you go, oh, wow, I'm invested in the most, the mutual funds that are the most opposite of my values. But there's a few here that are actually closer to my values. You'll often find that. It takes you 20 seconds. You can literally shift your money there. You'll also, if you look at the returns, I'll give you an example at Amazon. So then we aggregate all these mutual funds up for 401K plans at Amazon, about 60% of all the money is in the Targetate fund. They happen to have one sustainable fund. It outperformed the Targetate fund by 5 percentage points last year, but it only has less than 2% of the money. So no one's using it. So you could shift your money into there. And I'm not saying all of it, I'm saying be diversified, but you could align yourself within literally, it shouldn't take you more than an hour to just with what you've got. Now, some companies have nothing sustainable. It's take Comcast. They're in Philadelphia and the most, this is a city that has the highest incarceration rate. And we noticed that they're very heavily invested in mass incarceration. And we started doing a survey of their employees going, do you realize you're profiting from private prisons of mass incarceration? No, I don't have any idea. Do you think that's a good idea? No, I went out, but there's nowhere to choose. There's no choices in their plan. So if you go on that on our site and you click on the hamburger menu, the three bars, you'll see there's an action toolkit. There's letters that you could, emails you can send to your peers to say, hey, we should go together to talk to human resources and ask them to add something. There's letters for human resources, for HR department. There's all kinds of tools that you can use so that you can sit down at HR and say, you're the admin of our 401K plan. There's nothing for me to invest in that aligns with my values. It's my money. I earn that money and the match is from the company. I want to invest it, align with my values. They have to give you something to invest in. And if they say no, well, maybe they'll do that if you're one person, if you're 10, they really can't. If you're a hundred, game over, they're going to have to add some options that are for gender equality and are weapons free. Yeah, we've been talking to a lot of teachers about this going, you don't want to, because they tell us we don't want to be invested in assault weapons. And so well, you've got, and they have no choice. You need to go and ask for it and you can ask for it. Now, beyond that, all these mutual funds are starting to give people who are, it's your money again, the right to vote your proxy. So at every company, there are all of these decisions that get made at every annual meeting. Who's on the board? As you so files, shareholder resolutions with these companies. So they may be resolutions around political spending, around racial justice, around climate. We want a climate transition plan because it's good for the company. So right now you've abdicated your vote to Vanguard or BlackRock or any of these big asset managers. They're starting to allow the underlying share owners, the people who earn the money, the right to vote your fractional shares, but you have to ask for it. So if you go to your HR department, say, by the way, ask for the right we all want to vote. They will give it to you. And now you can start to vote in a sustainable way. So in terms of your power, you've now moved your money. You've now asked your HR department to create options. And ultimately, you want your default option to be sustainable. You can get back your vote. That might take a little bit of time. And then you start to look at the way you spend your money. If you're choosing between two different brands of sneakers, well, look them up on our site. You'll see which one. We've rate and ranked 1,000 companies on racial justice on diversity, equity, inclusion. Pick the one that's got a better racial justice score and then send them a posting, send them a tweet or a Facebook post and say, the reason I chose your company over the other one is because you get a better score. They're gonna love that. Tell the company you didn't buy from. The reason I chose the other company over you is because you got a worse score. They get 10 messages like that. They will come and get to us and say, how do I get a better score? We've seen it happen. It's amazing how 10 people, 10 tweets can get a company to take action. So another way to use your power, where do you bank? What kind of, if you have a credit card, which was your credit card? If you're a JP Morgan, you're at the company that provides more loans for fossil fuel extraction than any other company in the world. You might not wanna be there. There are other banks. And I know people are very, right now about smaller banks understood, but there are options and there are companies that are better. So there's an awful lot that you can do just with what you've got right now. That's wonderful, Andrew. Yeah, thank you so much for providing those concrete steps. That's what people are always looking for. And again, we encourage folks to go to the website as you so, that's S-O-W as you so.org to find these tools that Andrew is talking about. I have one more question for you, Andrew. And then we're gonna move on to some action steps that we'd like to share. And then we'll do audience Q and A after that. So the final question is just to turn us a little bit to the local level in the sense that I've heard in addition to this congressional fiasco happening, there's also these battles happening on the state level and various state legislatures against ESG and then also lawsuits happening. Can you fill us in a little bit on that and where you see that going? Sure, so I guess it's probably over a year ago. The Texas state legislature passed a bill, it's called a state bill 13 that says that the state of Texas can no longer work with banks or asset managers that are quote, anti-oil. And the way they determine what's anti-oil is they send a questionnaire to these banks. And we're talking all the big banks in the world, the black rocks, all the asset managers. So 159 of these. Now, some of the questions are, do you believe climate change is real? Do you, did you vote on it as you so resolution? Things like that. Actually, just this morning, there was a posting on a website that said that the number two thing you could do to be anti-woke, is it anti-woke? I get them, yeah, to be anti-woke is to vote against all as you so resolutions. So they're taking notice. So all these things, so they gathered all this information back and they go, okay, well, we can't work with, oh, JP Morgan city bank, Bank of America, all these big banks. So the treasurer then went to issue some bonds, municipal bonds. There were no banks there that could bid because they'd all been boycotted. So they ended up paying much higher interest rates for their bonds. So Texas basically flushed $500 million down the toilet for political theater because they wouldn't work with any of the banks. The state pension, in six other states that adopted the same law, there's a thing called ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, took the law and clunged it in six other states. Together, those states, they wasted another $700 million. Sorry about $1.3 billion paid in excess interest for no particular purpose, just for political theater. The state pension funds are moving their money out of BlackRock. BlackRock's been, is it on the boycott list? There's 300 mutual funds on the boycott list. So what are they investing in? Well, they're investing in oil and guns. Well, oil and guns just took a big drop in the last couple of weeks and will continue. I mean, the oil bubble is, no one wants oil anymore. I don't know. I'm sure that they've read the IEA reports that say, we don't need to go and find any more oil and the internal combustion engine is becoming obsolete, China, India, California. The EU is, there's not gonna be internal combustion engines 10 years from now. And so no one wants this product that they make. So if you're thinking ahead, these are companies that are going to either have to wind down or transition. In Europe, a lot of the oil companies have transitioned. So anyway, at the state level, this is what they've been doing is just to make a political theater, they're making their citizens suffer. They are putting their citizens' nest eggs at risk and they will continue to do this until their citizens stand up and say, stop it. We're not gonna reelect you folks because you're throwing our money down the toilet. And you look at what's going on in Florida and Ron DeSantis is, he's building an entire presidential persona around all of this theater. He's not actually, all he's doing, he's wasting money and he is taking away people's freedom. Thanks so much, Andrew. I'm gonna turn it back to Shay and Teddy to share some action steps and then we'll come back for Q and A with the audience after that. Perfect, thank you so much. Yeah, so I'm really excited to be building on all that information we just received to talk a little bit about what folks are doing on the ground with economic activism in ways we all can be plugging in. So I'm just gonna briefly find Teddy and see if I can add them here. Sorry about that technicality, Teddy. But thank you so much for joining us. Teddy is the War Is Not Green campaign coordinator with Code Pink and they have been up to some really exciting economic activism work as of late and they're gonna tell us a little bit about it and how it ties into what we've been discussing tonight, so I'm gonna kick it over to you, Teddy. Yeah, thanks so much, Shay. And thanks so much, Andrew and Greta, as well. I'm learning a lot continually from everyone here and had the opportunity to also learn from Andrew as I was working on the Shareholder Activism Project at Code Pink that I'm about to describe. So yeah, I started working with Code Pink this last October, but about six months before that I was working alongside environmental groups in New York City, including Sunrise Movement and especially Extinction Rebellion, now a group called Reclaim Our Tomorrow targeting fossil fuel finance. And so it really can't be understated how much in tandem with Shareholder Activism, this pressure, this on-the-street pressure is really crucial for the movement and for divestment. So actually at Black Rocks Annual Shareholder Meeting last year in 2022, I was at an action where we were blocking the entrance of the building and I was actually arrested during that, protesting Black Rocks continued massive amounts of investment in fossil fuels, including our dirtiest fossil fuel coal, which is stunning that there's still $400 billion into coal at this juncture, especially given the critiques now coming from the right that Black Rock is doing too much for the climate. And so this is an irony now of course of this cultural conversation on ESG that we're facing, but actually this year at Black Rock I won't be blocking an entrance, I will be walking in in a suit and tie to present our Shareholder Resolution that Code Pink with the help of, as you saw in Andrew has submitted. Sorry, have I frozen? There we go, okay, I was worried. So Code Pink for the first time has submitted a Shareholder Resolution for Black Rocks Annual Meeting and we drafted a Shareholder Resolution which calls on Black Rock to initiate an impact report on one of its iShares exchange-traded funds or ETAs. So this one's called ITA and the long version of that is the US Defense and Aerospace Fund. So this ETF, this investment vehicle packages all these different aerospace and weapons manufacturers. You have your Raytheons, your Boeing's and your Lockheed Martin's all in this and this is one of those investment vehicles where many people don't realize that their money, their pension funds are being poured into it and fueling death and destruction around the world. And our impact report or our resolution rather is it is merely calling for an impact report, right? It's saying we investors have the right to know precisely what this specific investment vehicle is doing to the planet and then presenting them without information, they're informed to make a proper decision about where they'd like to put their money. And first of all, we expected some challenge from the SEC or the US Securities and Exchange Commission in even submitting this resolution, but it wasn't no action. It has been, it is going to a vote on May 25th next month and that tells us a few things. First off, the first thing it tells us is that in writing it, we didn't go by over 500 words which was the hard part. It also tells us that it met the criteria for the SEC which means we made no false or misleading statements by their judgment, which means that in the resolution when we say that continued investment in this exchange-traded fund puts shareholders themselves and their children at risk from climate chaos. We said that explicitly in the resolution and it has gone, it's going to a vote, right? So we already know the SEC deems this to be true. And it also means that BlackRock is deemed to have the power to implement this resolution, right? Which calls for an impact report. BlackRock, some of their employees had a meeting with us asking us to retract the resolution and they were trying to make the case that they don't even have the power to implement it at all. Well, we know that's not the case because it is going to a vote. And we've received their opposition statement already. So their board of course is making the case that this is not going to be good for BlackRock's funds for its investors and so they're opposing it. So we're using this as a moment to make a lot of noise to show in many ways also from the financial end of things, ceasing and moving money from weapons manufacturing and fossil fuels to sustainable and life-affirming funds is actually a better investment financially. And it protects our posterity, it protects our planet. And so we're beginning this campaign in earnest about a month from now around Earth Day because that gives us a month leading up to the shareholder meeting itself. And so keep an eye out for CodePink actions online and in New York City if you're in the city to continue to pressure and to continue to educate around this shareholder resolution because it's really, really crucial that people outside of the shareholder meeting know that these massively consequential funds are going to an investment vehicle that people don't even know is farming the planet the way that it is. So keep an eye out for that. Also, if you're in New York City tomorrow there's a BlackRock action, we'll be routing outside at 8.45 a.m. to call BlackRock to divest from Lockheed Martin. So there's lots of tie-ins here, of course with CodePink's campaigns on BlackRock. So I just wanted to update everyone that on that campaign it's really exciting the first time we're engaging in shareholder activism at BlackRock with many thanks to Andrew of course for advising on that. So I'll share that link to our BlackRock resolution here. It looks like Shays shared our wing site and I'll just put the direct link in our chat and I'll wrap up there. Thank you everyone. Thank you so much, Teddy. It's excellent to hear what you all are doing and I'm so excited that you all have the chance to get in the room with them especially because that's so clearly not what the Board of BlackRock wants. And it's so interesting to see, you know this bugging in that BlackRock's being made out to being all caught up in this woke investment, quote unquote when they aren't willing to engage with these basic demands to build a livable future. So thank you for the work you're doing. And I am just updating the action slides we have right now just to link to the resolution. But yeah, for the next step I'm gonna bring us to just a couple of steps including that resolution ways that people can be plugging in and make sure to stay on right now and add any questions you have to the Q&A box but these are just ways that you can be engaging further with the topics we've talked about tonight. Step number one of course is following along with the BlackRock resolution that Teddy was just discussing that campaign will be launched more in earnest next month during Earth Day but please do follow along and if you're based in New York City there is a really active code pink anti-militarists climate justice contingent there that are clearly always in action so you should get in touch with Teddy. Yeah, major kudos to getting that introduced I'm so excited to see how it goes. The next step that we have on the list here is a staff targeting or oriented towards the federal government. Like we said last Monday Biden used his first veto to maintain the rule permitting ESG investment. And so we are just encouraging folks to reach out to the White House. The number up here is for the White House switchboard. If folks feel so inclined, you can reach out you can call and you can just say thank you for doing this this was the right step. And I encourage you to continue supporting this form of investors freedom. I'll be sending this information out in the follow-up email as well but we do think it's really important to have positive reinforcement when we agree with something that our electeds do especially in this department when it's a little bit rare. And we have a sample script right down here but obviously feel free to edit that to your liking. This is just what I drafted up myself what I might say, what I will say. And yeah, the next action step Greta I might take it over to you to touch more on local organizing for folks not based in New York City but aligned with what we are discussing. Yeah, so we also wanted to give a pitch for the divest from the war machine coalition which is a coalition that was founded by a number of organizations including World Beyond War and Code Pink. Back in 2017, I think it was around there and it's a national coalition with dozens of organizations involved focusing on divestment and then that can take so many different forms on the local level whether it is divesting your personal funds as Andrew was talking about or kind of scaling up from there looking at institutions that you're a part of whether that's a university whether that's your employer as Andrew was talking about whether that's your place of worship and then scaling up from there looking at municipal funds looking at state pension funds, et cetera. So the campaign takes many forms around the country and around the globe focusing on divesting from all weapons and Shay and I in particular work very closely together to support activists across the country to be able to start up their own localized divestment campaigns that often takes the form of divest your city from the War Machine Coalition so we have divest Chicago from the War Machine we have divest Philly from the War Machine we've been working with divest Corvallis which was a successful campaign a few months ago so it kind of takes these localized forms and focuses on different issues depending on each region and Shay and I are able to provide remote support to activists so if you're interested if you've been inspired by today's webinar please don't hesitate to contact us and we can provide you that kind of support whether it is setting up petitions whether it's sending out emails to our subscribers in your region to recruit people to work together on the issue with you so that's the kind of support that we can offer up here on the screen we have the website for this is for the National Coalition divestfromwarmachine.org you can go there if you want to read a little bit more about the campaign and some tool kits and resources that we have and we can also put our emails in the chat and again we'll send a follow-up email as well with all this information and hope that you're inspired to reach out to us thanks thank you so much Greta yeah and I think we'll be sending that information out in a follow-up but we do have a little bit of time left at the end for Q&A we have a few questions on board and one that I might start us off with that I that I you know Greta mentioned this earlier but comes up a lot in our local divestment organizing is related to what Norm asked yes the fund that outperformed again yeah so I see Andrew that you're answering that in the chat but I'm just curious because we get asked so often about the financial feasibility of phasing out these funds with a lot of weapons manufacturers invested I'm curious if there are other funds that come to top of mind or success stories of asset managers or funders that are doing really great things and performing very well that are not invested in these traditional and destructive companies you know if I could share screen if that's okay I mean I can just take you through teach you all in five minutes how to use the tool and should answer that question because I don't know it off the top of my head I tend to go and just use the tool because it changes every month to month so I don't know if that's okay but I can tell you some fun families that I would look at but I can search database for you but I'm disabled from screen sharing oh shoot okay let me see if I can but Parnassus does great work Calvert does great work Green Century Trillium there's this Walden does they have great funds these are funds run by people who are incredibly thoughtful who have spent 20, 30 years working on this there's one called Sphere 500 like a sphere that is the S&P 500 without any oil companies and it's ended outperforms so these are all these folks are really thinking this through about how do I actually align my values with my investing and outperform the benchmarks so again there's a lot of people working on it but again if you go to the site and just tell it what you want it'll sort 3,000 funds in a second for you and by the way we're expanding to 6,000 funds by the end of the year so we're gonna be adding even more mutual funds into the system so just to give people more things to look at and here's the thing none of them are perfect you're gonna find oh wow this one gets an A on private prisons but it's only getting a C on weapons oh but it's getting a B on you know what allocates some money there some money there you just there is not going to be a perfect fund and funds that get straight A's they might not be diversified enough for you so again it's really it's a very very individual thing about where you invest and what are your values and what are the most important things to you I mean the question is do you wanna be making money from assault weapons, missiles, guidance systems you know and it's sometimes it's a funny thing where you look at a company and we go into great detail so we'll show you every company within a fund so say what is this why does this one fund has this company called Ball don't think they make those jars that we for pickles and stuff yes they do but they also have a division that has space laser like basically laser guidance systems in space so they bought a system that's used for missile guidance systems so they're on the list because they are a major weapons contractor so again you have to get into the nuance of what each company does and also what proportion of their revenue is coming from these different divisions so we do all that math for you excellent and I think I enabled screen sharing for you so if you do wanna show folks what you're talking about it's an incredible resource I mean if you're not successful though and I can do it I'll do it but you might have other questions too so let me just go here so can you see the Vanguard FTSE social index getting an aid of funds okay so the way I got to this let me just so I just typed in let me just take it through it so investorvalues.org so at the top it's got all the 401K plans of 42 different companies but you can also say just show me mutual funds in ETFs and it'll skip you down here so you could type in for instance Vanguard and you can see there's a whole bunch that you could pull down so you could, you know so you can see all these different ones so let's just pick one here I usually like to see well here this one's not gonna show you whenever you go to look at a Vanguard fund we have this little box here because if you click here you can send Vanguard a letter that says I'm not happy that you guys you guys got out of the net zero alliance because basically Texas was kinda yelling at them a lot and so they quit the net zero alliance so this is a letter so this is what it looks like this is, it gets a B in fossil fuels a C in deforestation, gender so it's not bad for Vanguard it's not half bad they're a lot better, a lot better but this is the one that Amazon offers out of all of their, out of all their funds so again if you, so that's how you can you can jump around in here but let me just give you a little bit of a tour just so everybody can, well let's see so this is another Vanguard fund if you go here to the menu and you go to, well this is the action center that I told you about so let me just show you that real quick so if you click on for employees it'll take you through this step where you can learn about sustainable investing you can know what you own it's got target date funds and all this information it's got all these emails you can send to your admin you can, you can send to your company sustainability team you can also email your colleagues so it's got all of that kind of stuff now another way you can get into all of this stuff is through fossil free funds they all converge they're all coming from a lot of different angles but again you can go to, let's see and what this does it takes you to it'll show you for instance all the oil and gas companies all the fossil fired utilities that are in a given fund let me try and take you to one that I actually wanna show you if you go to search funds this is where you get into more fun where you can go here and you can say if you set your search settings you can say only show me diversified funds so that means like a themed fund is a pharmaceutical fund or a real estate fund this will show you that have multiple sectors and you can say show me funds that I gotta get a B on fossil fuels I gotta get a, I'm just gonna set these a little bit lower like a B on weapons oh get me a C on prison industrial complex and it resorts them in real time now you can also go and say and sort them by three year financial performance so now you've got not only funds that you like by your grades but you're getting the ones who are outperforming so you can click on a couple of these anything you like and you can literally see them side by side if you hit this compare button so now you're looking at these are four different funds you can see which ones are sustainable you can see all their fees you can see all their grades and then you can see their returns so you can see that over five year returns which ones are outperforming the others and that's how you can start to really get a sense of I'm not giving up this the financial returns for aligning with my values and look at all the funds that are in your 401K plan and you'll get a really a good sense of what's going on so you can do all that kind of sorting I'm not going to go into much more depth but the site goes way deeper than this there's each one of these just like each one of these given funds you can go and you can you can look at it you can look at it for you can look at each different aspect of it you can go and see every single company within each of these different funds so I'll stop sharing go on to the next question that's great not to put you on the spot Greta but you did have an interesting question that we were just messaging about would you be willing to jump in on that? Yeah, well I was just gonna say for Shay and I the bulk of the work that we do is on the city level trying to get city councils to pass divestment resolution so are there ways that we can use these as you sow resources to convince the city councils because it seems like it's primarily towards companies as you've been talking about but can we kind of utilize some of this or do you have any recommendations for how we can leverage this for city councils? So city councils that are investing money in a like in the retirement funds for city workers, that kind of thing? I'm gonna quickly Well, it happens on different levels so yeah, sometimes we're looking at city pension funds sometimes we're looking at city operating budgets so either of those and then kind of looking into what sectors they're investing in and we're seeing that they're investing in fossil fuels and weapons usually. Right, I mean, you'll see like a city like Seattle they're really leading I mean, they've really like the city pension fund is really cleaned up there's other cities that are following suit and saying, oh, we can control this yes, you can decide it's your money, you can decide you have freedom to choose and that's what's really important so I would say, when I talk to a city it would be, what are the values that the city is trying to express? Who are the employees? What are the employees wanna do? And oftentimes at a company level that's one of the things we recommend to a company is ask your employees what they care about do a little survey and you'll find wow, 80% of them care about climate change wow, 70% of them care about weapons. Well, then you know how to design your plan don't just go to your advisor and they're just gonna give you just own the whole extractive economy just own the whole destructive economy that's all they're gonna do they're just gonna say I want everything that's not necessarily the best move because when you ask your employees or ask the people in the city who work in the city when you listen and then you design the plan around what they want now they feel like they're participating they actually, we found that companies who asked the amount of money that participants put in first of all, the number of participants doubled in the first year went from 40% to 80% and the amount of money that each person put in went from 3% to 6% so they quadrupled the amount of money if people were saving for the future because they were participating so that's what's really important and it creates a culture at the company where oh wow, management's listening to us suddenly becomes a great place to work so you get much higher productivity so these are all the benefits of just open communication transparency like the basics. Great thanks, I'll pass it back to you Shay. That's excellent, thank you so much Andrew it's really heartening to talk with you and just learn from your expertise in this department but also know that we're not just fighting for scraps and we're not just pushing socially responsible investment as an alternative to the extractive economy we're pushing it as something that's really feasible and good for workers and actually providing a positive framework and tools for the world we wanna build it gives me a lot of hope so grateful for you being on this call and yeah, all the information that you've shared out I'm really excited to have this be a resource for us and for everyone who attended an RSVP will be sharing these resources out in the follow-up along with the recording but yeah, just thank you so much for joining us this has been great. My pleasure, thank you for the work you're doing and continue to do. Thank you so much. All right, I know that it's a bit late especially on the East Coast where Teddy and Greta are so I'm gonna wrap it up I think but thank you all so much for joining I'll be sending the solve in the follow-up and yeah, Andrew thank you for your working for joining us. Great, take care everyone. Wonderful.