Medicino County

Medicino County

In November, the Board of Supervisors in California’s coastal Mendocino County unanimously agreed to remove the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) from its investment portfolio—funds worth $3 million. The Board took this action after a citizen group, Mendocino County for Ethical Investing (MCEI), presented information about RBC’s role as a financier of companies that “manufacture weapons used to kill civilians across the globe,” including in the genocide of Palestinians. In addition to the Royal Bank of Canada, MCEI has named Bank of America and Caterpillar as potential divestment targets.

Community members formed MCEI last May, partly in response to the escalating deaths in the Middle East. They concluded that “one of the most effective tools at their disposal” would be to influence where their tax dollars are invested. Historically, divestment and boycotts—forms of shunning—have shown that they can be powerful strategies for change.

RBC is one of the largest banks in the world and has long been the target of activists opposed to its investments in the oil and gas industry. As a group called Action Network also has taken repeated pains to point out, RBC is a major shareholder in Palantir. Action Network objects to Palantir’s provision to Israeli security forces of AI systems such as Lavender, “skew[ing] the predictive power of the AI analysis to focus upon the types, locations, and Palestinians currently in the database.”

MCEI, too, is concerned about fossil fuels and the “worsening climate crisis,” connecting those to the military-industrial complex. MCEI member Linda Hellend states, “The U.S. Military is the number one climate polluter in the world.” Back in 2018, in “An Intelligent Conversation about the Environment,” Catherine asked environmental groups why they “so often continue to support the financial interests most associated with central government control” and urged them to develop an integrated map of reality:

“Our environmental problems are symptoms of an invisible governance system, which has a different map of reality than we do and appears to have different goals than ours…. I am happy to discuss the environment, including the climate, from a vantage point of reality. However, if you censor aspects of reality or uncertainty, I can’t have an intelligent conversation with you about it.”

We applaud MCEI and Mendocino County for connecting the dots leading to genocide and for stepping up to take responsibility for their tax dollars. For those interested in greater transparency of local investments and tax dollar expenditures, we encourage you to read (or revisit) Solari’s report, Taxation: With or Without Representation.