The Lower Frequencies
A podcast from the Ethnic Studies Council at the University of California.
The Lower Frequencies
Episode 4: UC Move Your Money!
Episode 4: UC Move Your Money!
In this episode of The Lower Frequencies, we speak with UCLA Associate Professor of Anthropology Hannah Appel (who is also Associate Faculty Director of the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and co-founder and organizer with the Debt Collective), about a new systemwide UC campaign that empowers faculty to begin the process of divesting from war and genocide. We walk through the three-step UC Move Your Money campaign and how it offers faculty a chance to take action today while building power for more ambitious efforts down the road.
Links:
UC Move Your Money website and Instagram
A brief primer on the difference between defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) plans.
Welcome to the Lower Frequencies, a podcast brought to you by the UC Ethnic Studies Council.
Sean:I'm Sean Malloy, a professor of History and Critical Race and ethnic Studies at UC Merced. And a member of the uc Ethnic Studies Council, I'll be co-hosting today's podcast with Darlene Lee, a teacher educator at UCLA and a fellow member of the uc Ethnic Studies Faculty Council Darlene.
Darlene:Today's guest, professor Hannah Appel of UCLA is here to talk about an exciting new campaign that empowers uc faculty to take action to divest their retirement savings from industries that support war and genocide. We will discuss the three step strategy behind the uc Move Your Money Campaign, including actions that faculty can take right now, as well as how this campaign is building towards the more ambitious goal of divesting entirely from state violence. Before we go any further, Hannah, could you please introduce yourself?
Hannah:My name is Hannah Appel. I use she her pronouns and like all of us, I wear many hats. One of them, and the way I know Darlene and Sean is that I am a professor at UCLA. I'm in the anthropology department, but I teach in global studies and international development studies, and I'm also the associate faculty director. Of the UCL Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, which is relevant because I lead something there called the Future of Finance Research Stream. So that's my academic hat. I'm also a co-founder of the Debt Collective, the nation's first debtors union. I organize quite a bit with them. That also feels relevant to what we'll talk about today. And finally, I am a mom. I have two kids and it's, we're recording this on Halloween, so you know, big day.
Sean:Thank you for joining us today for talking about the Move Your Money Campaign. Before we get into the details of the campaign itself, could you maybe talk a little bit about what brought you to this effort for faculty divestment and how you got involved in crafting this particular campaign?
Hannah:Yeah, absolutely. I gave a little bit of away, a little bit of it away in my introduction, on purpose, but. I am a finance nerd. When people say, what did you get your PhD in? I often say the anthropology of capitalism. So I have been a scholar of capitalism, a critical scholar of capitalism, and a scholar of finance for a long time, and God bless, occupy Wall Street, which helpfully and somewhat painfully transitioned me from a scholar of finance. I'm doing scare quotes. You guys can't see that because you're just listening to the audio here. To somebody who organizes within and against it. I met folks during Occupy Wall Street with whom I originally co-founded the Debt Collective. I've been doing anti-capitalist and collective organizing toward de financialization and decommodification for a long time. And I do run that future of finance research stream at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy. And more recently, I am a member of Faculty for Justice and Palestine. But anytime a divest divestment demand rings out loud and clear, you can certainly find me there. Even had there not been a divestment demand, I would still be a proud FJP member. Obviously the students both at UCLA, across the uc system across the country inspired all of us and we were and are supporting them. And that demand for a number of reasons. I think it made a lot of inroads that it's really important to acknowledge, right? Helping people understand how complicit. Obviously the United States and the US dollar in general, but our institutions in particular are, so the demand actually made a lot of progress, but in other ways, the demand was stymied. And so something I'll mention in a bit, there's been some fantastic research about uc, complicity, uc, investment complicity, but there hadn't yet been a kind of. Slow patient strategy put forward. And because slow patient strategy in finance is something I have a lot of experience in. I sought out some other folks I know and we all got together and over the last year and we have been meeting pretty intensively for the last year to. To hash out a strategy. And it's been a wonderful experience and I'm really excited to be talking about it here.
Sean:Thank you, Hannah.
Darlene:Thank you so much. Yeah. We're wondering if you might talk a little bit about what you've learned about investments that are held by the uc. How much are those investments, which investments are particularly problematic? What have you learned from all of your robust research?
Hannah:Yeah, absolutely. I actually wanna say. Something really important in answer to this question, and that is that we have been doing research, our small group that's faculty members and one union researcher, we've been doing research that is what you might call strategic research, and we can talk about that a little bit later. But all of the research on this question that you posed, Darlene, what are the problematic investments? Where and how are they held and which ucs. All of that was done by our extraordinary grad students for Justice and Palestine, SJP, also undergrad, SJP members, and UAW. Rank and file members. We use two. Extraordinary reports. They're linked on our website. Uc, move your money.org under the resources tab. But one is called Unmasking the uc. What does divestment mean to UCLA? Although it doesn't, it is not specific to UCLA. And the other one is who rules the University of California? So all of the research, and I'm talking about like a hundred pages each on the precise question that you just asked is in there so I can answer the question you just asked, but it is not based on our research and I do not wanna take any credit for it. Those reports were extraordinary. But if I just look, for example, at page 12 of the Unmasking the uc report. They list GE Aerospace, RTX, or better known as Raytheon Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, right? Very familiar kind of military, industrial, complex names, Elbit Systems. They have a whole list of passive investments in Israel's IT infrastructure starts on page 13. So there is really extraordinary fine grained research immediately at all of our fingertips, and I'm so grateful for the students. Who put that together? In terms of your broader question about what I've, and maybe what I can contribute that's new to this question is, let me just say big broad brush overview. Investment assets are divided into three big pools by far the biggest of those pools,$144.3 billion. Is in the pension is in uc, retirement, right? So this is faculty, this is staff. This is retirees. That is by far the most hundreds of billions, right? 144.3 billion. Then they have 30.2 billion in the endowment and 12.2 billion in what's called working capital. So that distribution is important for the strategy that we're gonna talk a little bit about today. The important takeaway there, I would say, is. The outsize role of the pension. It is in fact one of the largest public pensions on the planet, which means that those of us whose retirement comfort is invested there arguably have an outsize ethical, moral, political obligation to redress the investments that hopefully will make us somewhat comfortable in retirement. So those, I'll say that, and then I just wanna say one more thing. That is maybe something new that our strategic research has really been focused on. So historically divestment campaigns have really gone after direct investments, right? Hold stock in Honeywell. Hold stock in Blackstone. Hold stock in Raytheon and the uc. Some of you may remember if you've been paying attention, around the time of the divestment demand, or maybe six months after was like, we've divested all of our problematic assets and they were talking about direct investments. This was somewhat unsurprisingly, both true and a little bit of a sleigh of hand because what they were masking is the fact that most investment strategies now around the world are shifting from direct investments to what's called indirect investments or passive investments through index funds. So rather than the uc Investments office buying this much stock in Raytheon and this much stock in Northrop Grumman. They invest in index funds that then have stocks in all of these things, right? But there's a lot this, and now this goes to the disclosed demand. There is a lot less transparency around what are called passively held funds. And so one of the things that our strategic research revealed is trying to think about how to. Address that fact in strategy, right? How can we get at indirect investments that we can't necessarily see? And there's a twinned portion of that's about the shift from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans. That's super nerdy and I don't need to go into it, but basically like the pension that we're all invested in and we don't really have any say in it versus the pension that a lot of us are also invested in. This is called defined contribution, where we actually have a series of choices. And both the uc system, but also retirement in general, are moving toward a much more neoliberal version of defined contribution that gives us choice. And so the final thing I'll say is for all us good scholars of racial capitalism and neoliberalism, we hear choice and we bristle, right? But sometimes choice can be mobilized strategically against what it was designed to do, and that's part of what we hope to do in the campaign.
Darlene:Thank you. I really appreciate that overview. And it helps to understand why we're asking people to move their money, right?
Sean:I think it's a good segue to talk about the specifics of the Move Your Money Campaign, and you've already started to answer this, but I think it would help for our listeners to understand some of the ways in which this campaign for divestment differs from previous divestment efforts at the uc. Yeah. Why are you tackling the particular kinds of retirement funds that you are, how that distinguishes it from previous campaigns, and what are the advantages of the approach that this campaign is taking as opposed to some of the previous efforts that our listeners might have heard of?
Hannah:Yeah. First of all. Most recently, which is to say in the wake of the extraordinary and inspiring Palestine solidarity encampments, I'll just keep it to the uc system, though of course they were far beyond the uc system, but the system that the three of us work in and hopefully many listeners work in as well, there was a very strong divestment demand that rightly. Called on the precedence of divestment from Sudan and called on the precedence of divestment from South Africa, and there is so much to learn from those divestment precedents, including not least that they are possible and that it is possible and that people saying it is not possible should understand their history. It's so often a wonderful role of history, but needless to say. Investment patterns have changed radically since then, and the special relationship between Israel and the United States is quite different than the relationship between the US and Sudan or the US and South Africa and so one of the profound setbacks that the divestment demand was met with in the wake of the encampments was in fact Drake himself forbidding, singling out a given country, Israel in particular, in a divestment campaign. Now, he did not address the hypocrisy or the contradiction of the fact that we are in fact also divested from Sudan and divested from South Africa. But in other words, it is now uc policy that you cannot single out the state of Israel. So that was one major hurdle that we had to overcome strategically. And then some of the other ways to answer your question, as you said I alluded to them, but I'll make them clear in the context of this question is remember, dear listener that I sketched out the kind of overall distribution of uc investment assets, and the vast majority of those assets are in our retirement funds. That means that. Whatever word you wanna use. The stakeholders, the ethical actors, the people who have leverage, the people who are profiting off of genocide and apartheid and ice raids and right is me. It is me as a faculty member, right? My students do not have the extraordinary luxury of already having an investments in this retirement fund. The students. Arguably have targets that can and should focus on the endowment. That should focus on working capital. That should focus on labs on campus, right? They're the stakeholders, they're the ethical actors in those. But this is my complicity. This is the complicity of my comfort. And that is true of latter faculty. That is true of a FT faculty. That is true of staff. That is true of a broad swath of people. The last time I checked, I think uc was the sixth largest employer in the state. We are talking. I don't know the exact number, probably a million people. Ton. Not employee, but like retirees. Everything, right? Tons of people. So that's another part of what is strategic here. It allows faculty who, rightly for those of us who are involved, are supporting students and being led by students and student visions and student effort. And we should always do that. But also I think something we are more reluctant to do is understand ourselves. As political actors and understand ourselves as organizers and people who should organize, not just support the cute college students who are doing that in college like we all did back in the day. Nobody likes that sentence that I just uttered. We know that it's hypocritical and yet many of us don't have organizing experience. That's fine. But we often look at others as agents of history for a variety of reasons, including our students. And I think that we, especially because of the political economy of uc, investment assets, as I just described, we have a very. Unique role to play that is very different from students' role to play. And then the final thing that I'll say, just to address this question of why the retirement fund is a little bit of what I said before about the move from direct investments to indirect investments, passive investments, and the move from the defined benefit, the kind of classic pension to defined contribution. What that means, and we are targeting the defined contribution plan, at least for now, or what's called the uc Retirement Savings Plan, which is actually only$41 billion of that 144 billion. But why are we targeting it? Because we, the faculty who have investments in there have a choice of where to put it. Drake can't stop us, jug deep, can't stop us. This is turning the neoliberal logic of choice on its head and saying, great. We have a choice, and this is the choice we're making.
Sean:Thank you, Hannah. I think it's a really well taken point about, the importance of faculty using their positions of privilege and power. And I hear a lot of well-meaning faculty say we should support the students and we should, but that should not absolve off of our own responsibility for taking action in places we can. And I will be sure to include in the show notes, maybe a little primer. A link to a primer on defined contribution versus defined benefit because I know some of us in this call have been talking about these issues for decades. It takes a little bit to get your head around. So for those of you who are still confused about the difference between defined benefit and defined contribution and why we are in the current situation, moving more towards a defined contribution pension, we'll include a link to a little primer on that in the show notes.
Darlene:Yeah. Thank you so much. I really love the idea of identifying myself and ourselves as ethical actors in this and, I know I felt so empowered when I learned, yeah, oh, I can actually move my money. I can actually do something to. Help the uc or to force the uc to divest from war on Genocide. I just really appreciate that framing. I think our next point is just asking you to walk us through specifically what are you asking faculty to do as part of this campaign. Can you just walk us through those specific steps and, we'll obviously post a link in the show notes to the Move Your Money website, which I know goes through this in great depth. But could you just talk us through that a little?
Hannah:Absolutely. So first I'll just tell you the overall goal and then I'll tell you the three steps, but with the focus on step one because like I said, this is a long-term campaign we're trying to build here. It will take a while, but I'll focus on step one, but let folks know the three steps as well. So here's the overall goal. The goal is to build and win a campaign to divest faculty, pensions and staff. But we're gonna focus on faculty'cause we are faculty. If staff wanna jump on and organize staff, that's amazing to divest faculty pensions. From industries and companies that enable or facilitate state violence. This includes military aggression and occupation. This includes prisons. This includes border security regimes. This includes apartheid and genocide. So as you can hear from the language I just used, this specifically includes, but is not limited to companies that have provided Israel with weapons or other military equipment or technology that facilitates apartheid and genocide in Palestine and in Gaza in particular. And we are doing that both we,'cause we actually think it's the right thing to do, right? As we watch Masked Ice Agents, kidnap our friends and neighbors and community members off the street, or as many of us have been involved in the fight against mass incarceration for so long, right? State violence is the common denominator here. And focusing a campaign on divestment from state violence also helpfully. Allows us to include Palestine solidarity, but not be limited to it in the way that was foreclosed by Drake's prohibition. So it is, we actually think it is both a wonderful and capacious political frame, especially maybe for people who are a little. Confused or on a different side of the Palestine thing, but are enraged by ice or enraged by what's happening at the border, or enraged, rightly so by mass incarceration. So it casts a bigger tent of solidarity as well. So that's the biggest goal. Now, as we know from theories of reformist and non reformist reforms, right? When you have a big goal like that. You have to win non reformist reform steps along the way. Often when you go for something complete like that, you can just get stymied by the institution and folks in power saying no. And so what we have proposed within that large goal is three steps. But I'm really just gonna focus on step one in my answer for right now, and you guys can ask me if you want me to go on. But step one is so achievable and so easy. So the very first step we are asking is for all faculty across all 10 uc campuses, whether you are ladder faculty, whether you are a FT faculty to log into their Fidelity net benefit account and move their money. We're actually asking you to only move a very small portion of your money. What you log into when you go on to Fidelity net benefits are your defined contribution plants, and there you get to choose from a menu of funds. One of the funds that the uc has already provided to us is called the social equity Fund. And the social equity fund is already divested from the military industrial complex, or more narrowly, I should say, from weapons manufacturers, from munitions manufacturers, from anybody who has recognizably producing weapons of war. So many of those companies that I read to you right from that great resource, the unmasking, the uc, so GE Aerospace, Raytheon, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, not Northrop Grumman Lados. We actually already have a fund that is divested from those. So all you have to do, it will take you 10 minutes. You go in to your Fidelity net benefits account, all the directions, step by step, or on our website, you choose to. Sell 10% of whatever you have probably in just for most people, just have it in whatever uc defaults them into note. They do not default you into social equity sell. We are asking for 10% of all faculty across the uc system to divest. Minimally 10% from any one of those kind of normal funds, the default funds, and then invest in the social equity fund. All you have to, it sounds maybe complicated. It's not. You just cl you just click sell and they say how much? And you put 10% and then they're like, great. Good job. And then you say, buy in social equity. And they're like, how much? And you say 10%. And they say, great. Good job. The only second step, which will take you from six minutes to 10 minutes maybe, is that you can do it with the money you currently have in there, and then it's a separate step to say, and I want you to do this with all of the rest of the money that goes in there. Until I retire. So you have to do that twice, both with your current pot of money and to say, going forward, I want this to happen to the rest of my money as well. And I'll just end step one by saying a lot of the questions we've got as we've started to publicize this plan is, are you asking me to go broke? Are you asking me to be broke in retirement? In fact, the return on investment over the last many years of the social equity fund has been higher than the return on investment of the default pathways, right? Many people I've spoken to, including quite senior people, I will say, have divested a hundred percent of what they find in U-C-S-R-P and invested it a hundred percent in the social equity fund. We are not financial advisors and you can always talk to Fidelity net benefits about why, to make what decision. Keep in mind, a lot of people still have most of their retirement funds in that defined benefit plan. So for some people this is a small portion of their investments. But the balance between stocks and bonds is something that financial advisors ask you to think about. And the social equity fund is all stocks, which are considered more volatile, but again, its return on investment has been quite high over the last several years. So that's it, that's step one. As Darlene or Sean said, there are tons of details on our website, but if I'm, I have convinced you now, just log into Fidelity and do it. It will literally take you 10 minutes. And if you wanna step by step, like screenshot tutorial, you can find that on our website as well.
Sean:That's fantastic. I'm intrigued. Let's hear about step two because my understanding and you would obviously know better than us, is that the social equity fund is an improvement over the default funds, but doesn't really match with the overarching goals of divesting from state violence entirely. What's the next step How do we go from this I think important not just symbolically but potentially materially first step to achieving some of the broader goals that you sketched out at the start of our interview today.
Hannah:Yeah, it's a great question, and you're absolutely right. This is a, an initial important. Materially meaningful, but very limited step. And that is why it is step one. Everybody can do it. And in part, it is an organizing step to organizers out there. It is a list building step, right? Can we find this 10% of faculty across the uc system? Can we find 50% of faculty across the uc system who are willing to take this first step with us first because yeah, divest us from a bunk of the military industrial complex, which is great. But it also, one of the things that Jagdeep Singh, who's the Chief Investment Officer at uc Investments has often said is, yeah, there's all this talk about divestment, but really not many people are invested in our social equity fund. So that shows us that nobody actually cares about divestment. You all are just talking, but there's not actual demand. By showing jug deep that there are 50% of faculty or 10% of faculty across the uc system, and then by having their email addresses and contact information, we have built a very serious organizing base to move to step two. Okay, so what is step two? We all know that weapons are a crucial part of state violence. But they are arguably, increasingly, if we think about drones, if we think about ai, if we think about cloud computing arguably a smaller and smaller part of it. So step two is to create what we are calling a no state violence fund. The social equity fund is divested from tobacco, it's divested from firearms, whatever, but it is not divested from state violence, right? So it remains invested, for example, in big tech. Microsoft, Amazon, Google all of which have been shown by A FSC and so many others who have done this great research to be complicit, for example, in Israeli human rights violations, but also with for-profit prison policing, border surveillance regimes, right? So when we move to create a no state violence fund, which would be an index fund, right? It would be one of these passive investment funds. We would want to build with groups who are already organized, like no tech for apartheid, right? So the idea is not just to dive, if you divest from tech right now, you're gonna essentially lose your entire retirement savings plan. So the idea, because tech is a huge overinflated bubble, perhaps by the time many of us retire, that will no longer be the case. But that is certainly the case now, right? People rightly would be like, I'm concerned, Microsoft is my entire retirement portfolio. Though they did recently make a very big announcement about the IDF, so we can say that, but we still have Amazon. We still have Google. So the idea is not just to withdraw our investments as like a matter of conscientious objection, but to pressure these companies by threatening divestment, right? Concerted divestment from one of the most public. So the most powerful public retirement systems in the us right? It is a way to actually force them to change some of their investments, some of their practices, lest many of their investors. A huge powerful, that uc system set of their investors is saying, we have a bunch of organized people and we are going to divest unless you do this right? So there's no Palestine exception here. This does mean divesting from Israel's occupation, apartheid and genocide, but it's also companies with no connection to Israel. But deep ties to mass incarceration, immigrant repression in the United States, and we're building a lot on the American Friends Service Committee research here, which is also up on our website on that same resources page. So their shortlist includes the Region's Financial Corporation, citizens Financial Group. These are two banks that are super heavily invested in US private prisons. It also includes Axon Enterprises. Formerly known as taser a word familiar, probably too familiar to us all, which was a MA major supplier of less lethal weapons. So moving from military industrial comp or weapons specifically to a no state violence fund starts to get us into a much broader and more capacious understanding of the state violence industrial complex perhaps in which we are. We are so enmeshed. And step two, particularly because of the barrier of big tech, will be a major lift, right? But thankfully, we will have a list optimally of 50% of faculty across the uc system, and we will have a number. Look how big the social equity index fund has grown. We are threatening potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of divestment from these companies unless they make some small changes, right? To no longer contract with private prisons, to no longer contract with border surveillance, to no longer contract with the IDF. There's plenty of other profitable shit out there, excuse my language, right? But that would be step two. It would be to create a no state violence index fund. And then the last thing I'll say, which hints at step three. It would be to create a no state violence index fund using the market power of uc investments. Because the cool thing about an index fund is it's just like any commodity, which is to say, if we make an index fund, if we use our market power in the uc system to make a no state violence index fund. Anybody who is invested in a pension plan, any institution that has a big endowment, so this is higher education across the country. This is unions across the country. This is museums across the country. Could purchase that same, or could invest in that same index fund. It becomes an off the shelf way to inject momentum into a national and international divestment campaign that has stalled a little bit. So even though it's somewhat small at the uc system, which is to say we still haven't even tackled the defined benefit plan, right? Which is where the, that's the big fish. This actually allows us to expand way beyond the uc system and stir up the momentum and the demand, the national demand that would be required to force uc eventually to divest its other holdings along a no state violence framework.
Darlene:That's amazing. It's very exciting to me and I think to many others. I also just really wanna appreciate how you're showing the interconnectedness of all of these issues, right? Ice and border security and genocide and apartheid and the ral systems of policing and prisons. We, you can't think of any of those things as separate. And so I really wanna appreciate this approach. I don't know if you would wanna just talk us through step three at this point before we move on to the next question.
Hannah:Yeah, I said it already, but step two I, in many ways, I think will be the most difficult. I think it will probably take us a couple years, but we'll be to use the base that we've grown in step one. To demand, to build enough power to demand and have leverage over uc, investments office.'cause you need somebody to make you an index fund, right? And this happens all the time. This isn't a weird thing. Somebody made the social equity fund that I told you about before, right? Because there was investor demand for it. This is the language in which folks in the investment world think, right? Step one shows that there's investment demand. For the social equity fund, but then those same folks who have di invested in the social equity fund say This isn't enough for us. We want a fund. That is, we understand that state violence isn't just weaponry and we want an investment option that allows us to live our values, that allows us to, to live the things most of us teach in our classroom every day. And yet, our comfort in retirement is predicated on the opposite, right? And so our lives, while we hope our work. Changes the world. We also have to be real about the political economy within which we're working. So developing that no state violence fund in step two will be a huge lift after, which I think easy and. With foresight, but step three will be easy, which is Hey world, we created this no state violence fund. Let's all invest in it. In other words, it's to make it that kind of off the shelf option and to nationalize it and to internationalize it and to give it to outfits like faculty unions, staff unions, the American Association of University professors, right to say and in that way. An important thing to say in this particular political moment in which higher education is under a new kind of attack. You in ethnic studies know it's been under attack for a long time, but it also enables us a kind of strategic road through which more and more faculty organizing and faculty power can happen across institutions. All of us look on. Horrified as our administrations, not the Trump administration, our university administrations sell us out, don't communicate with us. Refuse somehow to take organizing 1 0 1 lessons and collaborate with other institutions to push back against the draconian impulses of the Trump administration. We as faculty know that it's up to us to organize to not only save, but improve higher education going forward. And this is another mode of very meaningful. Material, political, ethical faculty, solidarity that can expand not only across the 10 campus uc system, but across the world. And because of the way financial, sorry, across the country and because of the way financial markets work across the world. And so I also see it, I see step three as I see all of this as like building forms of faculty power, building union power as it were, right? Like building power over our conditions of employment. Which is something that those of us on the tenure track don't have. We're not unionized and we should be, and big up to the faculty associations making that push. But this is adds an arrow to that quiver of national and international, frankly, faculty organizing.
Sean:I really appreciate the very methodical approach here that begins with very small, achievable steps that any faculty member can do, but doesn't set the horizon at those small, achievable effects. I think that's a really novel part of this plan, and if you are a uc faculty member, your next steps are pretty easy. You go to the Move Your Money website, which we will link in the show notes you follow the instructions there and correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like an important part of those instructions is not just to move your money, but then to let you all know that it happened so that they can collect those pledges and collect emails and use that as something that this group can use to build momentum. For the second part of this, which is the no state violent fund,
Hannah:a hundred percent. This is if the tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it, did it really fall? Whatever that weird cliche is, if you move your money, that's wonderful, but if you don't sign the form that says, I moved my money on our homepage. We won't know, right? Because the social equity investments aren't transparent and we won't know to reach out to you to keep you informed and we won't, I made that argument about being able to say, to jog deep, we know that motivated by their desire to divest from state violence, this many people over this long put their money in the social equity fund, right? We won't have those numbers to be able to assert our power. So yeah, you can just go to uc, move your money. Dot org and find that form. The other thing I will say is, hopefully this podcast is enough to get some folks to do it, and there are step-by-step instructions there. But you'll also see on our website, we have a schedule. So you can come to a faculty to faculty Zoom presentation where members of our group present the entire thing, present some of our research justification. You will have an opportunity to ask questions. We have frequently asked questions up on our website. We also have Zoom tutorials, right? If you're feeling confused by Fidelity net benefits, if you are somebody who is intimidated by tech finance, we have we hope, all of the resources that you need to take this step with confidence. But for those of you who are like, yep, I'm ready to do it. I know how to log on to Fidelity, it will literally take, step one will take you 10 minutes.
Sean:So it sounds like the path forward for uc faculty is pretty clear. In mentioning this campaign, even casually to faculty at other universities, there's been a lot of interest but a lot of uncertainty in what to do. And I hear a lot of, but we have TIAA craft, what are we supposed to do? Totally. Eventually if this no state violence fund is approved, then that provides an option. But in the shorter term, as someone who has worked on designing this campaign behind the scenes prior to the rollout, if there are faculty who are interested in doing something similar at another university, would you have any advice for them on how to proceed?
Hannah:Yes. Yes, I do. My first ask is as follows. I know. As a faculty member, as a parent, how overwhelming our jobs are and our lives are, and how stretched thin, overextended, resentful, exhausted. I would say probably the vast majority of us feel, especially in this political moment, but certainly before it too. But I would ask folks at other institutions who are not yet involved in a concerted organizing effort. Their lives. If you already, run the anti-ice neighborhood Mutual aid. This is not to you. This is to some of those other folks who aren't yet involved in an organizing project but are enraged by the state of things, and probably were enraged by the state of things long before Trump. The question that Sean just posed does, does this translate outside of the uc system and how. Is a question for other organizers. I have some answers to it, but what we did, in part because the uc is so big and is such a market maker, and we knew by focusing on the uc, we could move the dial for essentially the rest of the world. We have really focused on the specificities of the uc system, right? But this even a version of step one will work at other institutions. You just have to do the kind of basic inve critical investment research that thankfully are extraordinary students handed to us, but all of us more or less are capable of doing. But let me to return to something I said earlier in the show. Most institutions at this point of higher education are moving from defined benefit pension plans to defined contribution pension plans. That means that it is very likely, it is in fact increasingly likely that you have some choices. Go look at your menu of choices. It wasn't until we looked at our menu of choices that we realized the uc already provided us with this social equity fund choice, and the social equity fund choice is already divested from military weapons, munitions, firearms, et cetera, right? We did not know that until we did some very basic research. Don't do it by yourself. Find a couple other colleagues who are willing to slog through some paperwork for you or go talk to your SJP chapters or your FJP chapters. Did they do any in institutional investment analysis during that moment, during that divestment moment? What did they learn? Because it is an organizing project that I hope others will take up alongside us. And I will say for others who aren't in the uc system, obviously come to our website and come to one of our presentations. Maybe the specificity of our presentation will help you think, okay, what are our first research questions? What do we have to find? Do we have some defined contribution plans where we can make a series of choices? So yes, this is applicable to other universities. We have been focused in our spare organizing time on the 10 campus uc system, and I hope others can find some spare organizing time. To focus on their institutions.
Darlene:Amazing. I just, I feel really excited about the potential to mobilize faculty across the nation around divestment. Yeah. Just wondering if you have any last questions or or comments or advice or reflections you wanna offer.
Hannah:Yeah, I guess just a couple things. First, Darlene and Sean. Thank you so much for inviting me on here. I've come to know both of you actually through the Faculty for Justice and Palestine work. Am I allowed to say that on the air? You can edit that out if you need to. But I, I just, I know that, you I don't know. You guys are who I aspire to be and I, i'm just so thankful for all the work that both of you have done for so long in the uc system. And so it's, it's so cool. Cool that you run this podcast. I'm honored to be on here. So there's that. The second thing I wanna say is we've now given this presentation to, I don't know, maybe a hundred people. We had a little soft launch. We sent everybody emails. We're not going super hard on our 10 campus organizing yet. We need to develop that plan a little more. We're gonna do a bunch of one-on-ones. We're gonna have teams on every campus. There's a lot more to come. I would say there are probably a couple hundred people out there who know about this campaign. Last I checked, which was sometime yesterday afternoon, 25 people had moved their money. So it sounds compelling and people get super excited and they don't do it. And so I think it's because maybe people are intimidated and we're all overextended, but especially for those of us. Who have claimed that we support the struggle for Palestinian liberation, especially those of us who have claimed that we are incensed by what ICE is doing or by mass incarceration. You have to do this. We have to build this kind of power, and it will literally take you 10 minutes or you'll struggle with it, and we are here to help you, right? We are organized to help you. So I really ask. Here is a nice use of this cliche, put your money where your mouth is, friends, and please do this. And then the final thing I'll say is somebody they're going to remain anonymous, but a quite senior colleague of ours in the uc system sent me a text today and they said, and I'm reading the text, Hannah, I finally had a moment to breathe and moved 100%,$176,000 of all my retirement accounts with fidelity. So note that's these choice things to social equity. Woohoo, right? People are doing it. And if just one faculty member moved 180 k, do you understand the collective leverage we have over this problem? I am not bullshitting when I say that uc has extraordinary collective market power, but market power is not an abstract concept. It is literally each of our retirement accounts. Do it. That's all I can say.
Sean:I can't think of better words to end on. And we really want to thank you for not just appearing on here today, but I know it's you and a number of other folks who have been working on this campaign. I wanna extend our collective thanks to everybody involved in this campaign. And in a moment when things are very difficult in the movement I think we have to be honest about the challenges we're facing. It is really refreshing to see some new ideas and something that we can just practically do. And then. Build on. And we really appreciate the work that you and your comrades have put into this program as well as the, can I name some
Hannah:comrades? I'm so sorry. Yes, please. I wanted please name comrades. You reminded me. So some of our comrades wish to remain nameless because they are more vulnerable and have certain things. But some of our comrades are, here I am, Hannah Pel, look me up. Please don't docx me. Happens all the time, whatever. But, Charmaine, huge shout out to Charmaine Chua, who is a professor of geography at uc, Berkeley, and an extraordinarily dedicated organizer. Huge shout out to Noah Zatz who is a law professor at UCLA, who has just been an extraordinary member of this group. And huge shout out to Aaron Rogers, who is a math professor, who has also been an extraordinary member of this group. And perhaps, needless to say, given their ex background expertise is a whiz with spreadsheets and numbers and comparing things. So it's just been, and the group is quite a bit bigger than that, but these are those of us who feel comfortable and. We are accepting organizers. So if you feel excited about this beyond simply moving your money and beyond getting 10 of your comrades or colleagues to do the same, there is a form on our website for you to join join our organizing efforts, and we would really like folks to figure that out because again, people get really excited. We are academics, we say a lot of stuff. We write a lot of stuff, but we are often not as experienced in doing politics. And there are very easy ways to get involved in this, and we would love more of you involved.
Sean:And I'll highlight something you said earlier, Hannah and also extending thanks to the students and workers who did the amazing work on those divestment documents. We'll make sure, in addition to linking to the Move Your Money website, we'll directly link to the unmasking UCLA and WHO rules the uc report because this kind of organizing requires building on and sometimes generational efforts, and that rules the uc report goes back a while. And I, it really has informed the way I think about the way the uc operates. And I think the value of research like that is it can help empower campaigns like this one
Hannah:a hundred percent. And I will also say they're linked on our resources page too. So if you go to our website and hit the resources tab, those two reports are there, as is the American Friends Service Committee guidelines,
Sean:and we'll maybe even have some of those folks on this podcast in the future. We'll see.
Darlene:Thank you, Hannah. Thank you so much. Thank you both.