Our Report from the Caterpillar Shareholder's Meeting
Last Wednesday, JVP's Lynn Pollack and Hampshire College student Matan Cohen attempted to hand-deliver an enormous box filled with nearly 8,000 letters and signatures from you to Caterpillar's CEO Jim Owens. CAT security barred them from bringing the letters into the corporate boardroom - but we made sure Mr. Owens knew all of you want CAT to get out of the business of making money by violating international law (and he'll get a friendly reminder from us soon enough in the form of a FedEx package filled with signatures.)
Along with 5 others from our partner organizations, Matan Cohen, on behalf of JVP, was able to give a searing talk about CAT complicity in Israeli human rights violations to a boardroom that included CAT directors, shareholders, and journalists.
Cohen reminded the room that just a few months ago, a New York-based U.S. district judge broke new ground by allowing lawsuits to go forward that accused companies like General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co., and IBM Corp. of aiding South Africa's former apartheid regime.
The judge reasoned that the companies knew that their products and services were used to violate the human rights of South Africans.
Back in 2003, JVP and our partners like the Sisters of Loretto made history when we filed the first shareholder resolution that challenged CAT on the use of their products to violate the human rights of Palestinians.
Since then, we have filed new resolutions every year, and our many partners, such as the US Campaign to End the Occupation and the Stop Cat Coalition, have been making sure CAT knows its products are being used to illegally destroy homes and orchards of Palestinians.
That's probably why, after hearing six people in a row talk about home demolitions, CAT shareholder Randy Towry spontaneously got up and told CAT CEO Jim Owens he was concerned that CAT would soon be held liable for what is being done with its equipment. Owens' response to his shareholder?? "Sell."
That's right. CAT CEO Jim Owens actually told Mr. Towry, one of thousands of CAT shareholders, that if he didn't like the possibility that CAT might be held liable for human rights violations, he should just sell his stocks.
In the recent court case about U.S. corporations aiding apartheid-era South Africa, Tyler Giannini, a Harvard Law School lecturer and lawyer for the plaintiffs, said, "It's a signal that corporations can be held accountable for contributing to human-rights abuses abroad... these corporations are going to have to face further proceedings in the court."
Chances are that Caterpillar will one day be held accountable in a US court.
And our shareholder resolutions, through which we've educated Caterpillar stockholders and the general public about the use of CAT equipment to violate human rights, may very well be admitted as evidence against CAT.
Until that time, we're making sure that Caterpillar is held accountable in the court of public opinion. Your letters, calls and hard work for the CAT campaign have made the campaign newsworthy and important; over the years, Salon, public radio's Marketplace, Bloomberg, Democracy Now, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and others have reported on it. By now, because of the effort and commitment of so many of you, few can hear the words "Caterpillar, Inc." without associating them with Israeli war crimes.
For the last six years, our CAT campaign has made sure that the issue of Palestinian human rights - and the use of CAT equipment to violate them - is prominent at the CAT annual meeting. We succeeded in keeping the issue high on the agenda again this year. We hope that in the next twelve months, CAT will come to their senses and refuse to let Israel use its equipment against Palestinians. If they don't, we'll be there at next year's meeting, again.