Category: News

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wells Fargo Complicit in Private Prison Industry: City of Portland Committee Recommends Divestment

February 22, 2016
Contact: Amanda Aguilar Shank of Enlace, amanda@enlaceintl.org, 503-660-8744

After several months of deliberation and community input, today the Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) committee voted unanimously to recommend that the City of Portland divest of their holdings in Wells Fargo & Company due to the company’s financing of for-profit incarceration, and their “morally bankrupt” lending practices.

Paulino Ruiz of Woodburn spoke at today’s SRI committee meeting about his two years in immigrant detention, and his role is catalyzing hunger strikes at the GEO Group owned Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. He said, “I was retaliated against for [the hunger strike]… I had no access to my attorney, my case information, or family support… Just during my detention, prisons and investors like Wells Fargo made over $100,000 that could have been spent doing good for the community instead.”

This decision marks the first time that a public body has voted for divestment from Wells Fargo due to their complicity in the prison industry. This comes on the heels of recent prison divestment by Columbia University and the University of California, and pledges by Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders to outlaw private incarceration.

“We are thrilled that the committee made the right decision today. Our Black, Latino and immigrant communities have suffered enough from incarceration,” said Mary Mendez of Enlace, the Portland- based organization that is convener of the national Prison Divestment Campaign. “Divestment from private prisons is part of a larger movement to end mass incarceration and immigrant detention.”

“Today’s decision indicates that it is time to take the profit motive out of incarceration,” said Kayse Jama, Director of the Center for Intercultural Organizing and coalition partner of the Portland Prison Divestment Campaign. “Private prison corporations and their financial backers like Wells Fargo should not be profiting from incarceration, and should not be allowed to lobby on criminal justice and immigration policy, because their motivation is to put more and more people behind bars.”
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Jeff Halper Israeli Peace and Human Rights Activist

Tuesday Feb. 23 at 7:00PM

First United Methodist Church (Collins Hall)
1838 SW Jefferson Portland

Event is Free and open to the Public.

Jeff Halper is an Israeli peace and human rights activist, co-founder of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Nobel Peace Prize nominee (2006), author and lecturer.

Event is Free—donations accepted. Jeff Halper’s new book will be for sale.

“Jeff Halper’s book, like his life’s work, is an inspiration. Drawing on his many years of directly challenging Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, he offers one of the most insightful analyses of the occupation I’ve read. His voice cries out to be heard.”
 Jonathan Cook

Get your Flyer HERE!

…..Speaking at a security conference, Mr. Shapiro said, correctly, that Israel’s quick-moving expansion of settlements on Palestinian lands “raises honest questions about Israel’s long-term intentions” and commitment to a two-state solution. What really enraged his critics was an observation that during a time of increased violence in Israel and the West Bank, “Too many attacks on Palestinians lack a vigorous investigation or response by Israeli authorities, too much vigilantism goes unchecked, and at times there seem to be two standards of adherence to the rule of law: one for Israelis and another for Palestinians.” A statement from Mr. Netanyahu’s office denounced the second comment as “unacceptable and incorrect.”

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Summary

Almost immediately after Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank in June 1967, the Israeli government began establishing settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. From the outset, private businesses have been involved in Israel’s settlement policies, benefiting from and contributing to them. This report details the ways in which Israeli and international businesses have helped to build, finance, service, and market settlement communities. In many cases, businesses are “settlers” themselves, drawn to settlements in part by low rents, favorable tax rates, government subsidies, and access to cheap Palestinian labor.[1]

In fact, the physical footprint of Israeli business activity in the West Bank is larger than that of residential settlements. In addition to commercial centers inside of settlements, there are approximately 20 Israeli-administered industrial zones in the West Bank covering about 1,365 hectares, and Israeli settlers oversee the cultivation of 9,300 hectares of agricultural land. In comparison, the built-up area of residential settlements covers 6,000 hectares (although their municipal borders encompass a much larger area).

Read more at Human Rights Watch

UN OCHA PRESS RELEASE
 
UN officials call for an immediate revocation of plans to transfer Palestinian Bedouin in the Jerusalem area

Jerusalem, 19 January 2016
 
Today, the Coordinator for Humanitarian and UN Development Activities for the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), Robert Piper, and the Director of UNRWA Operations West Bank, Felipe Sanchez, called for an immediate end to Israeli plans to transfer Palestinian Bedouin currently living within the occupied Palestinian territory in the Jerusalem area. The call follows a visit today with diplomats from 17 countries* to the Palestinian Bedouin community of Abu Nuwar, the site of recent demolitions and aid confiscations by the Israeli authorities. 
 
Twenty-six Palestine refugees, among them 18 children, including four with disabilities, were displaced on 6 January 2016 following the destruction of their homes, and other basic structures. On 10 and 14 January 2016, Israeli authorities confiscated eight donor-funded residential tents that had been provided to the families as post-demolition humanitarian response.
 
“We came to Abu Nuwar to hear firsthand what residents have been through,” said Mr. Piper. “We left with a strengthened resolve to continue our support to them.”
 
Abu Nuwar is located in the E1 area, planned by the Israeli authorities for the expansion of Ma’ale Adummim settlement, long opposed by the international community as a violation of international law and an obstacle to the realization of the two-state solution. Abu Nuwar is among 46 communities located in the central West Bank – the majority Palestine refugee communities – slated for transfer to three designated sites away from their current location. A forced relocation of Bedouin communities to urbanized townships would threaten their culture and livelihoods. Bedouin families that were already “relocated” in the 1990s lost their income sources while their communities’ social fabric was severely damaged.
 
The UN Secretary-General has placed on record that implementation of plans to transfer Bedouin communities in Area C would amount to forcible transfer and forced evictions, contravening Israel’s obligations as an occupying power under humanitarian law and human rights law.
 

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[Pro-Israel groups is taking Campus BDS very seriously as a huge threat to Israel’s continued settlements, occupation and system of injustice . . .]

Joining a list of like-minded groups, the Academic Engagement Network aims to engage academics on 50 to 100 campuses, to counter the rising tide of vocal supporters of boycott, divestment and sanctions.
 
 
NEW YORK – Enlisting faculty members at American colleges and universities as allies in the fraught battle against the BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanctions) movement is the main objective of a new organization that is being launched on Wednesday.
 
The Academic Engagement Network seeks “to preserve and defend freedom of expression on university campuses,” said Ken Waltzer, its executive director – especially at a time when students are protesting against and preventing pro-Israel presentations and debates on campuses around the country.
 
“We want to promote a sane middle ground of support for a two-state solution, and embrace uncompromising support for human rights for Arabs, Jews and others,” Waltzer, emeritus professor of Jewish studies at Michigan State University, told Haaretz. “[We] are adamantly opposed to the BDS movement, and want to catalyze campuses in robust debate in matters regarding Israel, Palestine and the Middle East.”
 
“We’d like to have five to 15 faculty members [affiliated with the AEN] on each of 50 to 100 campuses,” said Mark Yudof, chairman of the organization’s national board of advisers.
“We’re well-connected with the leadership of higher education in America. There are strong relationships,” he said. However, he added, “We don’t delude ourselves. Most faculty don’t want to be involved.”

 Read more on Haaretz  . . . . http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/.premium-1.690705

Last weekend the Brookings Institution in Washington hosted a three-day US-Israel conference that focused on such issues as the “future for Israelis and Palestinians” and, according to its own published agenda, there were no Palestinian speakers.

– See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/12/brookings-conference-palestinians

Supporters of the international legal framework – which has, with mixed success, governed international affairs since the end of World War II – have long expressed concerns over the prospect of former senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton becoming president. Her support for the US invasion of Iraq (a flagrant violation of the UN Charter), as well as her hostility toward the International Criminal Court, her support for international recognition of Morocco’s illegal annexation of occupied Western Sahara, and her attacks against the United Nations and a number of its key agencies raise concerns that her election would bring a return to the Bush administration’s neoconservative rejection of longstanding international legal principles.

Read more at Truth-Out.org