A huge influx of new groups have joined the BlackRock campaign recently, including Bernie Sanders, the Sunrise Movement, Mothers out Front, and Extinction Rebellion.
Larry Fink’s response to criticism at his annual shareholder meeting last month proved one thing: BlackRock’s senior leadership knows about our campaign, is upset, yet is choosing to ignore, deflect, and dismiss our criticisms.
Last month’s BlackRock shareholder meeting in New York was a gong show. The previous year saw a sleepy affair with fewer than a dozen attendees, lax security, and no real drama. Contrast that with this year’s fully packed room, excessively beefed up security, and dozens of people from all walks of life out front of the hotel where the meeting was taking place, protesting Fink despite it being very early in the morning and with torrential downpours.
Despite having all the requisite paperwork, many registered proxy shareholders of BlackRock – who had a story they wanted to tell Fink about the impacts of his investments on their local communities and our global climate – were flat out denied entry to the meeting.
Fink and his issues management team might think our campaign is small and will go away, but the opposite is true. In the past month we’ve seen four prominent and growing grassroots movements join the fight.
Mothers Out Front is a rapidly growing network of moms taking action to stop new fossil fuel projects across the US. With over 1,400 volunteers and campaigns in over a dozen states they have a strong track record of accelerating the switch to clean energy.
The Sunrise Movement is building an army of young people to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs. They are driving the Green New Deal at the national and state levels with an unprecedented level of grassroots energy and momentum. See one of their volunteer leaders, Lilly, in a video from the AGM here (starts at 0.59)
Extinction Rebellion has grown rapidly in cities around the world, particularly in the UK where their peaceful strikes and strategic blocking of traffic and public space has led to new federal action on the climate emergency.
And this week US Senator and leading Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders also joined the campaign, with his staff releasing this new video, “How Wall Street is Destroying the Planet.”
The video was posted on Bernie’s huge Facebook and Twitter channels where it’s already been viewed over 100,000 times in less than a day.
These new groups join an existing campaigning network that includes powerhouses like the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, 350.org (and their local NYC based chapters), Majority Action, Amazon Watch, CREDO, and New York Communities for Change.
How long will BlackRock – the world’s biggest owner of fossil fuels including coal – be able to ignore this growing global movement that is increasingly putting Larry Fink in its sights?
