#disclose divest

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

HARVARD ID’s STUDENTS FOR SILENTLY PRAYING FOR PALESTINE AT DIVINITY SCHOOL

Today, Jewish students at Harvard Divinity School, a nonsectarian school dedicated to the religion scholarship, led a pray-in for Palestine in the library.

Nearly 70 students attended and prayed silently with religious materials in hand and signs against the ongoing genocide and Harvard’s complicity. Admin quickly arrived to ID all participants, including people who were simply holding prayer books without a sign or keffiyeh.

This is the first pray-in during a wave of recent study-ins across the university — students have been undeterred in their solidarity with the Palestinian people despite receiving bans from their own libraries.

[belongstolove]

University of Phoenix, Arizona

[eveningdove]

damn

my uni has a pro Palestine encampment that I've spent a lot of time at over the last 5 days. I wasn't there this morning bc I have a 12 hr final I needed to be home for, and they swept the camp to arrest people this morning...

i feel both lucky and horrified. I was honestly hopeful that things were moving in a positive direction after the organizers were able to get a meeting with the administration yesterday, but I suppose I can see how well that went...

[learnandturn]

I was punched and pepper sprayed by cops that my university administration set on student protesters yesterday. Including once where a cop ripped my mask off my face, grabbed my jaw, and sprayed pepper sprayed straight into my mouth. The university sent out an alert in the middle of our protest canceling classes for the rest of the day, only citing “adverse conditions”. After protesters dispersed under threat of even more violence and three buses of riot police from all over the state with rubber bullets and bully sticks parked in front of one our school’s famous landmarks. I staggered over to a couple of friends who were watching on the sidelines. They gave me water and an apple and held a bag of ice on my very pepper spray irritated face. As they were walking me back to my dorm we ran into one of their roommates. She had taken cancelled classes as an opportunity to get crumbl cookie with her friends. Standing in front of her, happy in a floral blouse with her box of cookies, in my pepper spray and water soaked tshirt, keffiyeh sadly hanging off my shoulder, holding an ice pack to my mouth, felt like a slap in the face.

After putting my pepper spray soaked clothes, shoes, and keffiyeh in a plastic bag and taking an extraordinarily painful shower, a friend and I went for dinner just off campus. There we had a pot of green tea and ramen to soothe pepper sprayed throats. We got ice cream after (shared a cup with chocolate and raspberry pomegranate with strawberry pieces on top, it was very good). From our spot outside the ice cream place we watched a steady stream of groups of sorority girls in matching jeans shorts and blue bikini tops walking back to their apartments after some apparently raucous parties. The cognitive dissonance was insane. I really felt a little like I was going crazy.

Even this morning, waking up to the smeared sharpie of the National Lawyer’s Guild’s phone number on my arm, a black and blue chest from where a grown man straight up clocked me while I was held up by two other protesters in a wall, and a still sore throat and eyes from the pepper spray, life goes on like normal. I still have final papers to write and a math exam to review for.

I’m not sure I really have a point. But, this feeling only makes me want to fight harder for a free Palestine. So, fuck Israel for being an apartheid state and all of their crimes over the last 76 years. Fuck university administration for not disclosing their level of investment in Israel. Fuck university administration for not divesting from this genocide. Fuck Joe Biden for actively supporting this genocide. And fuck the police.

[catdotjpeg]

UCLA launched their Gaza Solidarity Encampment today. Their demands are as follows:

1. DIVEST: Withdraw all UCLA Foundation funds from companies & institutions that are complicit in the israeli occupation, apartheid, & genocide 2. DISCLOSE: Provide full transparency to all UC-wide & UCLA Foundation 3. END POLICING: End targeted repression & policing of pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus, & sever all ties w/ LAPD 4. BOYCOTT: Sever all connections to israeli universities, including study abroad programs, fellowships, seminars, research partnerships, & UCLA’s Nazarian Center. 5. END THE SILENCE: Call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and end to the occupation and genocide in Palestine.

[autismdogg]

Hi everyone! Autismdogg update! 🐶

Haven’t been posting a ton bc I’ve been living in the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University.

If you’re able, please support the encampments happening at universities around the world any way you can. Together we can help end the funding of the genocide in Palestine.

Disclose! Divest! Free Palestine! 🇵🇸🍉

[delirious-clownfish]

NEW YORK TIMES OPINION

TRUMP’S

BIGGEST

BENEFICIARY:

HIMSELF

By Steven Rattner

Mr. Rattner, a contributing Opinion writer, was counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration.

No presidential administration is completely free from questionable ethics practices, but Donald Trump has pushed us to a new low. He has accomplished that by breaking every norm of good government, often while enriching himself, whether by pardoning a felon who, together with his wife, donated $1.8 million to the Trump campaign; promoting Teslas on the White House driveway; or holding a private dinner for speculators who purchase his new cryptocurrency.

Mr. Trump’s blatant transgressions have swamped those of any modern president and even those of his first term. Remember the outrage when he refused to divest his financial holdings or when he used a Washington hotel he owned as a kind of White House waiting room? Those moves seem quaint in comparison.

In his trampling of historically appropriate behavior, Mr. Trump appears to be pursuing several agendas. Personal enrichment stands out: Imagine any other president collecting a cut of sales from a cryptocurrency marketed with his likeness. There is the way he is expanding his powers: He has ignored or eliminated large swaths of rules that would have inhibited his freedom of action and his ability to put trusted acolytes in key roles. And then there’s rewarding donors, whether through pardons or favors for their clients.

I was working in the Washington bureau of The Times when Richard Nixon resigned, and even he — taken down by his efforts to cover up his misdeeds — did not engage in such a vast array of sordid practices.

The corruption of Trump 2.0 has not gotten the attention it deserves amid the barrage of news about Mr. Trump’s tariff wars, his attack on scientific research and his senior appointees’ Signal text chains. But self-dealing is such a defining theme of this administration that it needs to be called out. Like much that Mr. Trump has done in other areas, it announces to the world that America’s leaders can no longer be trusted to follow its laws and that influence is up for sale.

Just as in the post-Nixon era, when guardrails were established to prevent transgressions, the next president could decide to restore some of the sound government practices that Mr. Trump has trampled on. But the damage he has inflicted by, say, pardoning his donors or lining his own pockets is irreversible.

The below represents just a sampling of what’s transpired these past 100 days.

He Eliminated Guardrails

He turned a legitimate federal employee designation into a loophole. By giving senior officials such as Elon Musk the title “special government employee,” Mr. Trump avoided requirements that they publicly disclose their financial holdings and divest any that present conflicts before taking jobs in the administration.

He ended bans that stopped executive branch employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists or seeking lobbying jobs themselves for at least two years.

He loosened the enforcement of laws that curb foreign lobbying and bribery.

He Fired Potential Resisters

He dismissed the head of the office that polices conflicts of interest among senior officials.

He jettisoned the head of the office that, among other things, protects whistle-blowers and ensures political neutrality in federal workplaces.

He purged nearly 20 nonpartisan inspectors general who were entrusted with rooting out corruption within the government.

He Rewarded His Wealthiest Donors

Rewarding donors is part of any presidential administration. Every president in my memory appointed supporters to ambassadorships. But again, Mr. Trump has gone much further.

Jared Isaacman, a billionaire with deep tentacles into SpaceX, gave $2 million to the inaugural committee and was nominated to head NASA — SpaceX’s largest customer.

The convicted felon Trevor Milton and his wife donated $1.8 million to the campaign and Mr. Milton received a pardon, which also spared him from paying restitution.

The lobbyist Brian Ballard raised over $50 million for Mr. Trump’s campaign, and Mr. Trump handed major victories to two Ballard clients. He delayed a U.S. ban on China-owned TikTok his first day in office and killed an effort to ban menthol cigarettes, a major priority of tobacco company R.J. Reynolds, on his second.

Mr. Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire who spent $277 million to back Mr. Trump and other Republican candidates, requires his own category.

As a special government employee, Mr. Musk is supposed to perform limited services to the government for no more than 130 days a year. By law, no government official — even a special government employee — can participate in any government matter that has a direct effect on his or her financial interests. That criminal statute hasn’t stopped Mr. Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency from interacting with at least 10 of the agencies that oversee his business interests.

He installed a SpaceX engineer at the Federal Aviation Administration to review its air traffic control system. The F.A.A. is reportedly considering canceling Verizon’s $2.4 billion contract to update its aging telecommunications infrastructure in favor of SpaceX’s Starlink product. (SpaceX has denied it is taking over the contract.)

SpaceX is a leading contender to secure a large share of Mr. Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense project, an effort that could involve billions of dollars in revenue for the winner.

X, Mr. Musk’s social media outlet, has become an official source of government news. The White House welcomed a reporter from the platform at a recent briefing, and at least a dozen government agencies started DOGE-focused X accounts.

As Mr. Musk’s political activities started to repel many potential customers of Tesla, his electric vehicle company, Mr. Trump lined Tesla vehicles up on the White House driveway and extolled their benefits. Then Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Fox News viewers to buy Tesla shares.

DOGE nearly halved the team at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that regulates autonomous vehicles. The agency has been investigating whether Tesla’s self-driving technology played a role in the death of a pedestrian in Arizona.

He Went All In on Cryptocurrency

Critics of crypto argue that it has demonstrated little value beyond enabling criminal activity. Despite this, Mr. Trump has wasted no time eliminating regulatory oversight of the industry at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department, even as his family grows ever more invested in it.

By enabling money to be delivered anonymously and without any bank participation, crypto offers the possibility for any individual or foreign state to funnel money to Mr. Trump and his family secretly. Moreover, Bloomberg News recently estimated that the Trump family crypto fortune is nearing $1 billion.

On the eve of his inauguration he released $Trump and $Melania memecoins — a type of crypto derived from internet jokes or mascots. Next, the S.E.C. announced it would not regulate memecoins. Then last week, Mr. Trump offered a private dinner at his golf club and a separate “Special VIP Tour” to the top 25 investors in $Trump, causing the price of the currency to surge and enriching the family. (That tour was initially advertised as being at the White House. Then the words “White House” disappeared, but the rest of that prize remained.)

The S.E.C. eliminated its crypto-enforcement program, ending or pausing nearly every crypto-related lawsuit, appeal and investigation. That includes the civil suit against Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who had separately purchased $75 million worth of tokens tied to Mr. Trump’s family after the election.

The S.E.C. also suspended its civil fraud case against Binance, the huge crypto exchange that pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations and allowed terrorist financing, hacking and drug trafficking to proliferate on its platform. Soon after, the company met with Treasury officials to seek looser oversight while negotiating a business deal with Mr. Trump’s family.

World Liberty Financial, a crypto company that Mr. Trump and his sons helped launch, said it had sold $550 million worth of digital coins. A business entity linked to him gets 75 percent of the sales.

The Trump family has said it will partner with the Singapore-based crypto exchange Crypto.com to introduce a series of funds comprising crypto and securities with a made-in-America focus.

The federal government’s “crypto czar,” David Sacks, Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Musk all have connections to the market. (Mr. Musk named DOGE after a memecoin.)

He Is Always Closing

Mr. Trump is reportedly on his way to raising $500 million for his political action committees — highly unusual for a president who cannot run for re-election.

A new Trump Tower is underway in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second largest city, with plans for two more projects for the kingdom announced after Mr. Trump’s November election victory, all in partnership with a Saudi company with close ties to the Saudi government.

Mr. Trump’s team asked about bringing the signature British Open golf tournament to his Turnberry resort in Scotland during a visit of the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, to the White House.

He posts news-making announcements on Truth Social, the company in which his family owns a significant stake.

It’s all a sorry and sordid picture, a president who had already set a new standard for egregious and potentially illegal behavior hitting new lows with metronomic regularity.

[belongstolove]

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

The Trump administration is poised to begin offloading public land, achieving a long-held conservative goal of reducing the government’s footprint in the West. Federal agencies manage around 640 million acres, or about 28 percent of the nation’s land, an invaluable resource Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has called “America’s balance sheet.” His membership in a luxury real estate club in Montana provides an apt example of how private interests stand to profit from federal lands.

Last month, the Interior Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced a plan to make large tracts of government land available to developers. “As we enter the Golden Age promised by President Trump,” Burgum wrote on March 17, “this partnership will change how we use public resources.”

Little has been shared so far about the process for identifying parcels or how they might be sold or transferred. Burgum told CNBC the Interior Department would consider selling hundreds of thousands of federally managed acres within 3 miles of urban areas. Jon Raby, the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, told Bloomberg News the initiative would consider land within 10 miles of towns of 5,000 people. “Either they are making this up as they go along, or the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation group. 

The task force said it will deliver a report to the National Economic Council by today, identifying parcels and outlining how much housing would be built. It also will offer recommendations to “reduce the red tape behind land transfers or leases” by “[s]treamlining the regulatory process.” The Interior Department declined an interview but said in a statement to Grist that “all options are being explored.”

Burgum’s connection to the Yellowstone Club demonstrates the potential conflicts of interest that can arise with federal land transfers. According to documents filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, which declined to comment, Burgum has not divested his financial interest in the Yellowstone Club. The luxury real estate investment firm owns an exclusive community that covers about 14,000 acres and includes a members-only ski resort. Burgum owns two homes and additional financial interests in the development, which is about an hour south of Bozeman, Montana.

Over the last 30 years, the Yellowstone Club has used public land transfers and sales to amass holdings that include a private mountain, trophy trout waters, and an exclusive resort that caters to the wealthy and powerful. Its most recent deal saw the company, which declared bankruptcy in 2009 and was acquired by private equity firm CrossHarbor Capital for a fraction of its value, embark on a controversial land swap in southwestern Montana.

That deal was finalized January 17, during the last days of the Biden administration and two months after President Trump nominated Burgum to lead the Interior Department. Private landowners received 3,855 acres from the U.S. Forest Service in the readily accessible foothills of the Crazy and Madison mountains, including 420 acres for the Yellowstone Club. In exchange, the Forest Service, which is part of the Department of Agriculture, received 6,110 acres of land with fewer recreational opportunities and less valuable wildlife habitat. The value of the exchange, which critics argued dramatically reduced access to the mountains by eliminating access to established trails, was never disclosed. 

[vague-humanoid]

Islington Council in London has announced its commitment to divest from companies involved in illegal settlement activity in the occupied West Bank following months of local campaigning.

The council pledged last week to divest £2.6 million ($3.35 million) from its pension fund, which had been invested in companies complicit in the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

Moreover, Islington Council has committed to revising its procurement policies, including reviewing its banking systems with Barclays bank, which activists claim “is bankrolling Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians”.

In a statement to MEMO, the council said: “Islington Council takes Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) matters very seriously and has discussed these with Barclays, including in a meeting with Barclays Bank Chief Executive. The council will review its banking services contract in 2025. We will incorporate robust criteria around ESG when the council’s banking services contract is reviewed.”

The Islington Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) welcomed the news but insisted that more action is needed. With Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, campaigners are calling on the council to disclose and divest from any arms companies linked to human rights violations.

“We welcome this decision, but we believe more can be done and we need your help,” PSC wrote in a post on Instagram. “With the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the council must disclose and divest from arms companies.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Prem Thakker at Zeteo News:

A federal judge ordered Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk to be released from ICE detention on Friday. Öztürk, a Turkish national, was detained by masked immigration agents as she was walking down a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, in late March. A video of her arrest shocked many worldwide. As with others like Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri and Columbia University student protest leaders Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, Öztürk has committed no crime; the Trump administration is attempting to deport her on spurious charges of compromising US foreign policy – a rarely-used authority that already tests the bounds of the constitution. The Department of Homeland Security claims Öztürk “engaged in anti-Israel activism in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israelis on October 7, 2023.” Specifically, a senior DHS official wrote that Öztürk “co-authored an Op-ed article” that “called for Tufts to ‘disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.’”

But an internal State Department memo itself admits the department had not produced any evidence showing Öztürk engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization. Despite this, Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed off on Öztürk’s arrest on “foreign policy” grounds. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” Rubio said two days after Öztürk’s arrest. “Her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of people in this country who are not citizens,” Judge William Sessions said during Friday’s hearing. "There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the op-ed. I mean, that literally is the case,” he added. [...] The judge’s decision on Friday comes just days after a federal Appeals Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that Öztürk be transferred from Louisiana to Vermont. In the immediate aftermath of her arrest, Öztürk was not able to speak to her lawyer for more than 24 hours, and not until after she was sent to an ICE facility in Louisiana – despite a court order that she not be moved from Massachusetts, where she was initially detained. [...] Blow to Trump Administration Öztürk’s ordered release is another major blow to the Trump administration over its effort to deport international students and scholars who speak out for Palestinian rights. Palestinian Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi was released on bail last week.

About time the wrongly detained Rümeysa Öztürk was freed from ICE detention over her support for Palestine.

See Also:

HuffPost: Rümeysa Öztürk, Student Visa Holder Detained For Writing An Op-Ed, To Be Released On Bail

The Guardian: Judge orders release on bail of Tufts student battling deportation order

Law Dork: Breaking: Federal judge in Vermont orders Rümeysa Öztürk be released "immediately"

[catdotjpeg]

🚨 STATE TROOPERS ON THE GROUND IN AUSTIN 🚨 Today, Palestine Solidarity Committee at the University of Texas started their Popular University movement on campus, and were welcomed by massive university and state trooper repression, with at least 16 arrests made so far.

Akin to Columbia, NYU, Harvard, and other universities across the country, UT students sought to host a liberated space on campus to hold programming and demand that their university disclose their investments and divest from Israeli genocide profiteering. University of Texas administration made their intention to repress this movement clear as soon as they caught wind of it, sending a mass email out to UT faculty, claiming that the call to action is from non-student groups, falsely claiming that these encampments call for violence against Jewish students, and using university policy to crack down on our students. Upon beginning their campus initiative, students were welcomed by a draconian police presence, refusing to allow them to use their campus space for political speech. DPS, including horse mounted state troopers, violently handled student protesters, pushing them away from their desired campus space, and demanding dispersal. Students have held steadfast, refusing to heed until their demands are met.

So far, police and state troopers have made at least 16 arrests, with more likely to result as the state cracks down on these brave students. We stand with our students, and remain by their side! FROM COLUMBIA TO AUSTIN TO GAZA, WE STAND TALL 🇵🇸

-- Palestinian Youth Movement, 24 Apr 2024 3:27 PM EDT

[wheelie-sick]

🥳🎉UNM disclosed their investments!!!!!!!!🎉🥳

next goal: divestment! we will not stop, we will not rest

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Organizers of a pro-Palestinian protest encampment at the University of Toronto say the university is ignoring their demands and instead focusing on the logistics of the demonstration.

Erin Mackey, one of the spokespeople for the protesters, says university administrators are giving them "the runaround" by discussing sanitation and other issues related to the encampment but are "not addressing the core issue."

Demonstrators have been calling on the university to disclose ties with the Israeli government and divest from Israeli companies.

Full article

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[ghost-1-y]

I normally do not speak about my personal life on this blog, but I can no longer stay silent about this.

My university uses our tuition money to fund the genocide in Palestine. In response, we, the students, set up an encampment on our campus as an act of protest in order to demand the divestment of our university from the genocide that they fund, and from any partnerships that also fund or support Israel or the IDF. In response, our university has conducted a mass suspension of students (I am fortunate to not be one of them), increased police presence on campus, and has purposefully villianized our encampment, charging us with “disorderly or lewd conduct” despite our constant de-escalation of confrontations provoked by the so-called “peaceful” counterprotestors – consisting of both professor and student – whom have engaged in harassment towards the students in the encampment.

The university has been uncooperative and hostile with our negotiations team, giving them limited time to respond to negotiations and offers and accusing us in broadcasted emails to all students of being uncooperative and unwilling to meet – despite our frequent and informative communications with the university’s negotiators and the chancellor’s Chief of Staff. 

As of today, our encampment has expanded and we have reclaimed one of our lecture halls in the name of Alex Odeh – a martyr of the Palestinian movement who was assassinated in 1985. This alone was enough for the university to deem our protest a violent one, and within minutes the police presence on campus increased substantially. The university has called upon eight police departments of neighboring cities to not only intimidate protesting students, but to attack our encampment. They carry guns with rubber bullets, and are equipped with tear gas. They are here to make the protest unsafe. The police are the ones who are making this protest violent, not the students. 

I am ashamed of my university. I am ashamed of it’s complicity in genocide, and I am ashamed of the awful treatment that the students – who pay thousands of dollars to learn – have received from the university and from the police. 

I am not disclosing the name of my university for personal privacy reasons – not for the sake of the university. 

I will use the rest of this post to ask those who are able to please donate to Operation Olive Branch. I know I do not have a large platform, but if even one of you who sees this post can donate, then that is enough for me. For those who do not know, Operation Olive Branch is a grassroots organization with the purpose of amplifying Palestinian voices. They currently have a spreadsheet of families that are currently in Gaza/Rafah that are in need of donations in order to escape the ongoing genocide that is taking place. 

If you cannot donate, please become active in your local community if you haven’t already. We need more voices, we need demonstrators. These protests that are taking place at universities like mine need to expand into the general community. We – not only the students, but the people – are responsible for what our government(s) have failed to do. So again, I ask you to speak out against this genocide and to get organized.