How You Can Take Trillions From War Criminals and the Corporations Dismantling Democracy
Don't just vote with your dollar. Vote with all of our dollars.
The ten largest companies dismantling democracy and committing war crimes abroad are funded, in enormous part, by the American public. Most of that money comes from the federal government, which is currently closed to us as a lever. The rest comes through channels our state and local governments still have authority over, and those channels are wide open.
By the end of this article you will know the names of the ten largest companies dismantling American democracy and committing war crimes abroad, the three channels through which your state and local pension dollars, contract dollars, and tax dollars fund them, the legal precedent that already settled whether states and cities can act, the officials in every state who have the authority to move that money, the names of the officials who have already done it, and exactly what to do tomorrow morning to bring this fight to your city.
A quick note on scale. The country contains thousands of public institutions, at every level from city council to state legislature, that each hold independent authority over some portion of this money. When we talk about the “three channels,” we mean three types of authority, each one exercised thousands of times a year across the country. Matching the scale of the campaign to the scale of the institutional authority is what turns an easily ignored protest into a lawfully created and serious crisis for a Fortune 500 Company. They will have meetings and angry shareholders and bad press and CEO pay cuts and it all hinges on the one thing that they care about. Money. Lots of money.
This piece is long because we spend considerable space documenting some of the alleged activities of these companies. At the bottom of the article are emails and call scripts ready to go for anyone who wants to get this done. That includes tailored calls and emails with different asks for your Governor compared to your State Treasurer compared to your State Representative compared to your City Council-member. They all have different powers available so the asks must be specific.
A quick note for psychological priming and framing:
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Here is what proper pressure looks like when a constituent uses it.
A Minnesota teacher pays into her state pension with every check. The Minnesota State Board of Investment, chaired by Governor Tim Walz, holds her money. Research by the Minnesota Anti-War Committee, drawing on the board’s own disclosures, documented that as of June 2025 the board held approximately fifty-five million dollars in Palantir stock on behalf of Minnesota’s public employees. In December 2025, in a federal courtroom in Oregon, an ICE agent testified under oath that he used a Palantir application called ELITE to find “target rich” locations for immigration raids. On February 5, 2026, the judge ruled that the arrests violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
The teacher funds the software. The software does what the agent said it does. The same arrangement runs through every state, every public pension fund, every company named below, and every public institution that holds any of their stock or signs any of their contracts.
The three channels.
Every public dollar flowing to these companies flows through one of three channels. The first is public investment: pension funds, state treasuries, university endowments, municipal investment pools, and the index products that hold these companies by default. The second is public contracts: cloud services, software licenses, surveillance tools, weapons systems, and detention services that states, counties, and cities purchase every day.
The third channel is public subsidies and tax breaks, which are two different things and deserve to be named separately. Subsidies are when the government hands a company money directly, through cash grants, direct payments, infrastructure built on the public dime, or relocation incentives. Tax breaks are when the government declines to collect money it is already owed, through abatements, exemptions, enterprise zone benefits, or credits. The first is a check. The second is a waiver. Both are public money flowing to private companies. Ending the first sits usually within a governor’s or state agency’s authority, while ending the second usually requires the legislature to rewrite the statute.
The campaign this article is describing opens a front on all three channels at once, in every place where a public institution holds authority over any of them. That multiplication is the piece previous campaigns have been missing. No Tech For Apartheid went at Google on Project Nimbus, a single contract, and Google still holds the contract. No Azure For Apartheid went at Microsoft, also a single contract, and Microsoft still has the contract. The BDS movement works primarily through university endowments, which is investment, and is spread across dozens of campuses but confined to one channel. The country contains fifty state treasurers, fifty governors, fifty legislatures, more than three thousand counties, more than nineteen thousand municipalities, hundreds of public university systems, and thousands of city, county, and state pension funds, and every one of them holds some piece of authority over investment, contracts, subsidies, or tax breaks. When the same three asks move through that number of institutions, the aggregate pressure runs into the trillions of dollars, and every revenue stream these companies count on is simultaneously under attack by a different set of constituents in a different set of offices.
The companies.
Every company on this list is either dismantling democracy inside the United States, committing war crimes abroad, or both. The ten companies are Palantir, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Elbit Systems, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BlackRock.
Before the walkthrough, one piece of information about how the people running these companies get paid, because the structure of their pay is what makes the investment channel work as a pressure mechanism. Alex Karp is the chief executive of Palantir. His base salary is one million, one hundred thousand dollars. His total compensation for 2024, disclosed in Palantir’s own SEC filing, was six point eight billion dollars. For every dollar of Karp’s paycheck, he collected roughly six thousand dollars in additional wealth. Every dollar of that six point eight billion came from appreciation on stock he already held, because Karp has received no new stock grants from Palantir since 2020. His income is the share price. Executive pay at Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Boeing, Raytheon, and the rest runs on the same structure: salary is a rounding error, and the share price is what determines their wealth. Divesting the stock takes money directly from the person who signed the contract.
The ten companies, one at a time.
Palantir. Palantir is the company that built the targeting infrastructure for two governments simultaneously. In April 2025, ICE awarded Palantir a sole-source thirty million dollar contract to build ImmigrationOS, an artificial intelligence platform that pulls data from the IRS, Social Security Administration, passport databases, and license plate readers to identify, track, and deport immigrants, running through September 2027. In December 2025, an ICE agent testified under oath in federal court in Oregon that he used another Palantir application, ELITE, to identify “target rich” neighborhoods for enforcement operations, and on February 5, 2026, the federal judge in that case ruled that the resulting arrests violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. The current ICE operation is not new conduct. It is the scaled version of a platform Palantir has been running for ICE since 2013, and which was cited in the search warrant affidavits for the August 2019 Koch Foods raids that arrested six hundred and eighty people in a single day. Separately, the United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese identified Palantir in her 2025 report as the likely supplier of the infrastructure behind Lavender, Gospel, and Where’s Daddy, the artificial intelligence systems the Israeli military uses to generate kill lists and track targets to their family homes before striking. Palantir has received over nine hundred million dollars in federal contracts since January 2025.
Google. Project Nimbus is a one point two billion dollar cloud computing contract, split with Amazon, that gives the Israeli government and its military access to Google’s full suite of artificial intelligence tools and is currently actively being used in Gaza. Internal Google documents obtained by The Intercept in May 2025 confirmed that the company’s own pre-signing risk assessment acknowledged that the services “could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations, including Israeli activity in the West Bank,” and that the human rights consultancy Google hired recommended withholding artificial intelligence and machine learning tools from the Israeli military. Google provided the full suite anyway. As of this writing, Google continues to provide the services.
Amazon. Amazon is the joint contractor on Project Nimbus. Separately, Amazon’s Ring subsidiary continues to operate under a “good-faith determination” standard that allows the company to hand customer doorbell footage to American police without a warrant and without notifying the customer. The standard came to public attention in 2022 after Senator Ed Markey’s investigation documented eleven warrantless disclosures in a single six-month period, and Amazon has not changed the policy. Every Ring device currently in an American home is a surveillance node Amazon can access on its own judgment.
Microsoft. In August 2025, The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call jointly reported that Microsoft Azure hosts a mass surveillance archive operated by Israel’s Unit 8200, the military intelligence branch, containing approximately eleven thousand five hundred terabytes of data, roughly two hundred million hours of intercepted Palestinian phone calls, stored in Microsoft data centers in the Netherlands and Ireland. Unit 8200 sources told the reporters that the recordings were used to generate targeting data for airstrikes in Gaza. Microsoft’s own prior internal review had found no evidence of harm. The outside reporting forced a second review, which in September 2025 disabled specific Unit 8200 subscriptions.
Meta. Meta remains under active scrutiny for its role in the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar, which killed approximately twenty-four thousand people and forced more than seven hundred thousand to flee. The United Nations concluded Facebook played a “determining role” in the violence. Rohingya survivors filed a formal complaint asking Meta for a one million dollar investment in education, an amount equal to roughly zero point zero zero two percent of Meta’s profits for that year; Meta rejected the request in writing with the sentence “Facebook doesn’t directly engage in philanthropic activities.” Meta has paid no reparations and has made no structural changes to the algorithmic amplification systems that drove the genocide. Those same systems have since been documented driving content suppression of Palestinian reporting from Gaza throughout the current war.
Elbit. Elbit supplies approximately eighty-five percent of the Israeli military’s drone fleet, which has conducted continuous operations over Gaza from October 2023 through the present. An Elbit Hermes 450 drone fired three missiles in five minutes on a clearly marked three-car World Central Kitchen aid convoy, killing seven aid workers along a route that had been pre-approved with the Israeli military. That strike was one incident in an ongoing pattern. Elbit also supplies drones and surveillance systems to the governments of Azerbaijan and the Philippines, as well as to numerous European governments, and operates factories in the United States that produce equipment used in federal detention operations.
Boeing. Boeing munitions and Boeing satellite guidance kits attached to General Dynamics bombs are active in multiple current theaters and have been recovered from civilian casualty strike sites across the decade-long Saudi-led coalition campaign in Yemen, during which the Yemen Data Project recorded twenty-five thousand fifty-four airstrikes that killed or maimed over nineteen thousand civilians. Saudi Arabia has ordered over six thousand guided bombs from Boeing worth approximately three hundred thirty-two million dollars, and Boeing manufacturer markings have been recovered from Gaza strike sites including the al-Wahda Street airstrike in Gaza City, where Palestinian investigators matched bomb fragments to Boeing’s St. Charles, Missouri facility.
Raytheon. Raytheon munitions have been identified at dozens of civilian casualty strike sites across the Yemen conflict, including the January 2022 Saudi-led coalition airstrike on the Sa’adah detention facility that killed at least eighty people and wounded more than two hundred. Saudi Arabia has ordered over twenty-seven thousand missiles from Raytheon worth at least one point eight billion dollars since 2009. The munitions remain in Saudi inventory and in active use, including in the renewed US-UK air campaign against Yemen that ran from January 2024 through May 2025, during which the Yemen Data Project recorded over three hundred airstrikes and dozens of civilian casualties.
Lockheed Martin. Lockheed manufactures the F-35 fighter jet, currently operated by the Israeli Air Force in continuous operations over Gaza, and the GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb, which has been identified by Human Rights Watch and CNN munitions experts at multiple Saudi-led coalition civilian casualty sites in Yemen including the Dahyan school bus strike that killed forty children under the age of fifteen. Lockheed markets the F-35 as creating jobs in nearly every state in the country, though over half of the actual jobs sit in Texas and California; the geographic spread is a political insurance policy designed so that no member of Congress can vote against the program without appearing to vote against jobs in their own district. In 2023, seventy-three percent of Lockheed’s sixty-five registered lobbyists had previously worked in government.
BlackRock. BlackRock manages approximately fourteen trillion dollars in assets as of its fourth-quarter 2025 reporting. Its own disclosures state that it offers more than two hundred billion dollars in sustainable assets with optional exclusionary screens that can avoid firearms, fossil fuels, tobacco, and alcohol. Two hundred billion of fourteen trillion is less than one and a half percent of the total. The unscreened index products, which hold every other company on this list at default weights, are the default allocation for almost every state pension fund in the country. Moving public pension money out of BlackRock’s unscreened products and into the screened alternatives is the single highest-leverage financial move any state treasurer can make, because it touches every company on this list at once.
What to ask of each kind of official.
State treasurers. Pull direct holdings of the ten companies. Move pension assets out of BlackRock’s unscreened index products and into screened alternatives that already exist and are already sold by BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. Vote proxy shares against management on any remaining holdings. The mechanism is settled law. A Republican-led pension board used it against BlackRock in 2022, when the Missouri State Employees’ Retirement System demanded BlackRock abstain from voting proxies on the fund’s behalf, BlackRock refused, and Missouri Treasurer Scott Fitzpatrick, a Republican, announced that the system was pulling approximately five hundred million dollars out of BlackRock entirely. That precedent established that a state investment decision can be conditioned on how an asset manager votes the state’s shares, and that an asset manager’s refusal is grounds for a complete exit. The authority is the same in 2026, and the direction is reversible.
Governors have two asks. First, issue executive orders terminating state contracts with any of the ten companies on human rights grounds. Second, direct state economic development agencies to end any active subsidy agreements with those companies. The mechanism exists in the opposite direction. Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy’s Administrative Order 352, still in effect, conditions all Alaska state contracts over one hundred thousand dollars on the contractor not participating in any boycott of Israel. A governor used an executive order to condition state contracting on political criteria, and the same executive authority that terminates a contract can terminate a cash subsidy, because most state subsidies run through economic development agencies under direct gubernatorial control.
State legislatures have three asks. Pass model legislation ending tax breaks to the ten companies. Codify the contract exclusions and investment restrictions so that the next governor cannot undo them. And write fiduciary cover into state pension statute so that every treasurer who comes after has explicit statutory authority to exclude these companies on human rights grounds. Congress settled the legal question in 2007 with the Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act, Public Law 110-174, which passed the Senate by unanimous consent and the House four hundred and eleven to zero, and whose statutory text explicitly states that state and local divestment measures are “not preempted by any Federal law or regulation.”
City councils and county supervisors have the same authority on a smaller scale: pass resolutions directing municipal investment pools and pension funds to divest, and condition city and county contracts on human rights compliance. On September 4, 2024, the Portland, Maine city council voted unanimously, nine to zero, to divest municipal funds from eighty-five companies connected to the war in Gaza, even though the city’s finance director had already confirmed Portland held none of them. The vote itself was the product; the public record of it became the permission structure for every city and state that came next.
Democratic officials, specifically, because the first objection from a Democratic treasurer or governor is going to be that divestment is politically risky. It is not.
In March 2026, Washington State Treasurer Mike Pellicciotti sold sixty-two million dollars in Caterpillar bonds, making Washington the first state in the nation to divest from every company on the BDS short list. That was the state version of a move a California county treasurer had made fifteen months earlier: in December 2024, Henry Levy, the Democratic treasurer of Alameda County, sold thirty-two million dollars in Caterpillar bonds on human rights grounds, reinvesting the funds in women-owned business economic development and in a World Bank bond to the Bank of Palestine. Levy, who is Jewish, published an op-ed in J Weekly explaining his decision as “nonviolent, creative, transparent, and my way of following my Jewish values.” No lawsuit followed either action. No law was broken. Internationally, Norway’s largest asset manager Storebrand divested its entire Palantir holding of twenty-four million dollars in October 2024, citing the risk that the company’s work for Israel could violate international humanitarian law. A county first, then a state, then an international asset manager, and next will be the jurisdiction that reads this and acts. That is the cascade. Every official who acts creates legal air cover for the next official who acts, which means a Democratic treasurer, a Democratic governor, or a Democratic city council member considering this today is being asked to do what has already been done.
Then we show up.
On October 21, 2025, in the lobby of the Retirement Systems Building in St. Paul, advocates staged an all-day sit-in at the Minnesota State Board of Investment. The board, which had been canceling or moving its quarterly meetings to virtual format to avoid constituents, held that day’s meeting online only. Eleven people were arrested for trespassing. Three weeks later, records obtained under the state Data Practices Act revealed that the board had quietly sold nearly all of its Israel Bonds, down from a peak of thirteen point three million dollars to four hundred and seventy thousand dollars, even as the board publicly insisted its investment policy had not changed. The constituents were winning, and the board would not admit it yet. That is what winning early looks like.
Where Occupy camped in a park with a grievance and no destination, this campaign arrives at the building with a named demand, three specific actions, ten specific companies, and the name of the person inside who can sign the order. The demand, the address, and the authority to act all exist already, and the work is to stand in front of that building and stay there until the order is signed.
What you can do today.
Go to your state treasurer’s office, your governor’s office, or your city hall. Bring the list of ten companies. Bring the asks that match each kind of office. Bring the precedents: Pellicciotti, Levy, Storebrand, Dunleavy, Fitzpatrick, Portland. The address of the building where the decision-maker works is public record. Find it. Put it on the calendar. Show up.
The Minnesota teacher’s pension still holds approximately fifty-five million dollars in Palantir stock. The treasurer who manages that pension has the same authority Henry Levy had in December 2024. Levy settled whether a treasurer can do this. What remains is whether the teacher, and every person whose paycheck and retirement flow through these same three channels, will go to the office of the person who can sign the order and stay there until the order is signed.
What this article laid out.
Three channels move public money into these companies: investment, contracts, and the combined channel of subsidies and tax breaks. Every previous campaign has worked on one channel at a time. This campaign opens a front on all three at once, in every state, county, and city in the country. Ten companies anchor the campaign. The law is already on our side, the financial precedent is already on our side, the political cover is already on our side, and the mechanism for every ask is already built. What has not yet happened is enough constituents, in enough states, walking into enough offices, with the same list and the same asks, at the same time.
Why I wrote this. The people who win this fight are the ones who show up at their state treasurer’s office with the list, the asks, and the precedents. Hoping the federal government will wake up does not move money. Waiting for permission does not move money. Writing letters to the New York Times does not move money. Showing up at the office of the person who can sign the order does. The point of this article is to put the list, the asks, and the precedents in enough hands that the number of offices being visited goes from dozens to hundreds to thousands. That is how the money moves. That is how the financial relationship between the American public and these companies changes. City by city. State by state. One treasurer at a time.
Scripts and contacts.
To find your state treasurer: search “[your state] state treasurer contact.” To find your governor: usa.gov/state-governor. To find your state legislators: openstates.org. To find your city council member: search “[your city] city council” and look up your district. Every office has a public email and a public phone number. Use them.
Email to your state treasurer.
Subject: Request to divest state pension funds from ten companies documented in this article
Dear Treasurer [Last Name],
I am a constituent writing to ask your office to consider pulling direct holdings in ten companies whose ongoing conduct is documented in federal court filings, United Nations reports, and major investigative journalism. The companies are Palantir, Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Elbit Systems, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BlackRock.
Palantir built the platform ICE used to conduct raids a federal judge ruled unconstitutional in February 2026, and the United Nations has identified Palantir as the likely supplier of the infrastructure behind the Israeli military’s Lavender, Gospel, and Where’s Daddy targeting systems. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft provide cloud computing and artificial intelligence services used to generate targeting data in the ongoing war in Gaza. Meta’s algorithmic systems played a determining role in the Rohingya genocide and remain in use. Elbit drones killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in April 2024 along a pre-approved route. Boeing and Raytheon munitions have been recovered at civilian casualty strike sites across Yemen, where over nineteen thousand civilians have been killed or maimed by Saudi-led coalition airstrikes. Lockheed’s GBU-12 Paveway II killed forty children on a Yemeni school bus. BlackRock holds all of these companies at default weights in the unscreened index products used by state pension funds across the country.
The ask is threefold. First, pull direct holdings in these ten companies. Second, move pension assets out of BlackRock’s unscreened index products and into screened alternatives already sold by BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. Third, vote proxy shares against management on any remaining holdings.
The legal authority is already established. In December 2024, Alameda County Treasurer Henry Levy sold thirty-two million dollars in Caterpillar bonds on human rights grounds, with no lawsuit and no legal consequence. In March 2026, Washington State Treasurer Mike Pellicciotti made Washington the first state to divest from every company on the BDS short list. In October 2022, Missouri Treasurer Scott Fitzpatrick pulled approximately five hundred million dollars out of BlackRock when the asset manager refused to abstain from proxy voting on the fund’s behalf. The Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act of 2007, Public Law 110-174, states explicitly that state and local divestment measures are not preempted by any federal law or regulation.
I would be grateful for a written response within thirty days on the steps your office is considering and the timeline, so I can share the update with others who are asking about this.
Thank you for your work on behalf of pension holders in this state.
[Your name] [Your address in the state]
Phone script to your state treasurer.
“Hi, my name is [name] and I’m a constituent in [city] and I’m calling to ask the Treasurer to consider pulling direct holdings in ten companies documented in federal court filings and United Nations reports as involved in war crimes abroad and constitutional violations at home. The companies are Palantir, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Elbit, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BlackRock. I’m also asking the Treasurer to move pension assets out of BlackRock’s unscreened index products into screened alternatives, and to vote proxy shares against management on any remaining holdings. Alameda County did this in December 2024, Washington State did this in March 2026, and Missouri did something similar in 2022. The Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act of 2007 makes the legal authority explicit. I would be grateful for a follow-up within thirty days on what the office is considering. Can you pass that on and have someone reach me at [phone or email]? Thank you for the work you do.”
Email to your governor.
Subject: Request for executive action on state contracts and subsidies to ten companies documented in this article
Dear Governor [Last Name],
I am a constituent writing to ask you to consider two executive actions. First, an executive order terminating state contracts with ten companies whose ongoing conduct is documented in federal court filings, United Nations reports, and major investigative journalism. Second, a directive to state economic development agencies to end any active subsidy agreements with those companies. The companies are Palantir, Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Elbit Systems, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BlackRock.
Palantir built the platform ICE used to conduct raids a federal judge ruled unconstitutional in February 2026, and has been identified by the United Nations as the likely supplier of the infrastructure behind the Israeli military’s kill-list targeting systems. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft provide cloud computing and artificial intelligence services used to generate targeting data in the ongoing war in Gaza. Meta’s algorithmic systems were central to the Rohingya genocide and remain in use. Elbit drones killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in April 2024. Boeing and Raytheon munitions have been recovered at civilian casualty strike sites across Yemen. Lockheed’s GBU-12 Paveway II killed forty children on a Yemeni school bus.
The executive mechanism is already established and in use in the opposite direction. Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy’s Administrative Order 352 conditions all Alaska state contracts over one hundred thousand dollars on the contractor not participating in any boycott of Israel. The same executive authority that conditions contracts on one set of criteria can condition them on another, and the same authority that signs a contract can sign an order terminating it.
I would be grateful for a written response within thirty days on what your office is considering and the timeline, so I can share the update with others who are asking about this.
Thank you for the work you are doing on behalf of our state.
[Your name] [Your address in the state]
Phone script to your governor.
“Hi, my name is [name] and I’m a constituent in [city]. I’m calling to ask the Governor to consider two executive actions. First, an executive order terminating state contracts with ten companies documented as involved in war crimes abroad and constitutional violations at home. The companies are Palantir, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Elbit, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BlackRock. Second, a directive ending state subsidies to those companies. Alaska Governor Dunleavy used the same executive authority to condition state contracts on other political criteria in 2024, so the mechanism is established. I would be grateful for a follow-up within thirty days on what the office is considering. Can you pass that on and have someone reach me at [phone or email]? Thank you for the work you do.”
Email to your state legislator.
Subject: Request to introduce legislation on ten companies documented in this article
Dear [Representative/Senator] [Last Name],
I am a constituent in your district writing to ask you to consider introducing or co-sponsoring three pieces of legislation targeting ten companies whose ongoing conduct is documented in federal court filings, United Nations reports, and major investigative journalism. The companies are Palantir, Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Elbit Systems, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BlackRock.
First, a bill ending state tax breaks and incentives to these ten companies. Second, a bill codifying contract exclusions and investment restrictions so that future administrations cannot undo them. Third, a bill writing explicit fiduciary cover into state pension statute authorizing the exclusion of these companies on human rights grounds.
The legal foundation is settled. The Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act of 2007, Public Law 110-174, passed both chambers of Congress with the support of every member who cast a vote, and its statutory text states that state and local divestment measures are not preempted by any federal law or regulation.
I would be grateful for a written response within thirty days on whether you would consider introducing or co-sponsoring this legislation, and the timeline, so I can share the update with others who are asking about this.
Thank you for your service to our district.
[Your name] [Your address in the district]
Phone script to your state legislator.
“Hi, my name is [name] and I’m a constituent in [Representative/Senator Last Name]’s district. I’m calling to ask [him/her/them] to consider introducing or co-sponsoring three bills: one ending state tax breaks to ten companies documented as involved in war crimes abroad and constitutional violations at home, one codifying contract and investment restrictions on those companies, and one authorizing state pension funds to exclude them on human rights grounds. The companies are Palantir, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Elbit, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BlackRock. The Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act of 2007 already settled that states have the legal authority. I would be grateful for a follow-up within thirty days on whether [he/she/they] would consider this. Can you pass that on and have someone reach me at [phone or email]? Thank you for the work you do.”
Email to your city council member.
Subject: Request to introduce a divestment and contracting resolution on ten companies documented in this article
Dear Councilmember [Last Name],
I am a constituent in your district writing to ask you to consider introducing a resolution directing municipal investment pools and city pension funds to divest from ten companies whose ongoing conduct is documented in federal court filings, United Nations reports, and major investigative journalism, and conditioning city contracts on non-participation with those companies. The companies are Palantir, Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Elbit Systems, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BlackRock.
On September 4, 2024, the Portland, Maine city council voted unanimously, nine to zero, to divest municipal funds from eighty-five companies connected to the war in Gaza, even though the city’s finance director had already confirmed that Portland held none of them. The vote itself was the product, and the public record of it became the permission structure for other cities to act. I would love to see our city do the same.
I would be grateful for a written response within thirty days on whether you would consider introducing this resolution, and the timeline, so I can share the update with others in the district who are asking about this.
Thank you for representing us.
[Your name] [Your address in the district]
Phone script to your city council member.
“Hi, my name is [name] and I live in [Councilmember Last Name]’s district. I’m calling to ask the Councilmember to consider introducing a resolution divesting city funds from ten companies documented as involved in war crimes abroad and constitutional violations at home, and conditioning city contracts on non-participation with those companies. The companies are Palantir, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Elbit, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BlackRock. Portland, Maine passed a resolution like this unanimously in September 2024 and it became a model for other cities. I would be grateful for a follow-up within thirty days on whether the Councilmember would consider this. Can you pass that on and have someone reach me at [phone or email]? Thank you for the work you do.”
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This is absolutely incredible work. Time to do our end!
Armitage: you're my favorite voice (and there are a lot of good ones) because yours gives me specific things I can do to make a difference. You are an outcome-based fella, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate that.