Friday, March 25, 2011

California divestment campaign. Going from Failure to Failure

Californians, it never ends.

Phase I of the Israel Divestment Campaign has ended. In failure. Complete failure. Simply , people could not be persuaded, bribed or cajoled or even mislead into signing the statewide California divestment initiative. Rumor has it that the haters were unable to gather even 10 % of the needed signatures for the referendum to appear on the ballot. But they aren't admitting it,not publicly anyway.

But, wait. Building on their previous failure, the Israel Divestment campaign has lowered the bar. the Israel Divestment Campaign (IDC) is launching Phase II of their campaign to annoy California citizens on March 30th

Their announcement: "We will be taking a new turn in our campaign as we organize to exert more direct pressure on the two largest public pension funds in the U.S. - the California State Teachers’ Retirement System and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (California PERS and STRS)to divest from companies that facilitate Israel's blah blah blah...." I'm paraphrasing....

Yep. Its another petition. But this one won't have those pesky checks and balances of the statewide divestment initiative.

I've got an idea, IDC. When you ask people to sign your petition, ask people if they want their investments to earn them maximum return? Do they really want to divest from a country that, according to Bloomberg news "bounced back from the global recession faster than many developed economies, with growth accelerating to 7.7 percent in the last quarter of 2010, the fastest pace in four years.?"

If its a choice of maximum return on your pension, or advancing a deeply flawed ideology, its seems like a no-brainer, California. And thats precisely why the BDS'ers are on the wrong side, yet again.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As of now, less than 400 people have signed the petition- and the vast majority did not have pension accounts with California PERS and STRS, but rather simply identified as "California tax payers"