Success at Caterpillar annual shareholder meeting 2007

June 15, 2007

For the fourth year in a row, Jewish Voice for Peace, joined by the Sisters of Loreto and the Sisters of Mercy, returned to the Caterpillar annual meeting to introduce a shareholder resolution which raised the issue of Caterpillar's profiting from Palestinian home demolitions. (Read Sydney Levy's statement introducing the resolution here.)

This year was the most challenging for us-- in an attempt to minimize damage caused by the presence of human rights activists and journalists, Caterpillar moved Wednesday's annual meeting to a remote suburb some 40 miles outside of Chicago; tightened up rules about speaking at the conference; and added heavy security. But none of these actions prevented JVP from achieving every one of our objectives, yet again:

1. The shareholder resolution met the minimum threshold of votes to return next year.
2. The issue of home demolitions framed the entire meeting, with StopCAT protestors effectively shutting down the meeting early.
3. Global media covered the event with headlines like "Protesters toss wrench in Caterpillar meeting," and content linking Caterpillar to home demolitions and the death of Rachel Corrie.
   

Protesters decry Caterpillar's support of CO2 limits
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=25339

Background
Over 4 years ago, JVP helped reinvigorate the global Caterpillar campaign when we introduced the first-ever shareholder resolution on Israel-Palestine in a US corporation.

The resolution won the support of shareholders owning hundreds of millions in Caterpillar shares, including CalPERS, the largest pension fund in the world.

We worked directly with church groups such as the Sisters of Loreto and the Sisters of Mercy who co-sponsored the resolution, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch who supported efforts to make Caterpillar accountable, other anti-home demolition groups like StopCAT, and individual activists like Craig and Cindy Corrie, the parents of Rachel Corrie who was killed by a caterpillar bullodozer.

We called an international day of protest which generated actions in over 40 cities around the world.

Over each of the 4 years we've introduced resolutions, we've worked hard to make the story a focus of feature articles in numerous major media outlets including Agence France Press, Salon and American Public Radio's Marketplace.

In fact, we've helped generate literally hundreds of stories that educate people about Israel's illegal practice of demolishing homes of Palestinian families, often with less than a half hour's notice.

In response, Caterpillar recently announced a multi-million dollar global PR campaign to fight the bad publicity, its first in over a decade.

This year, with a organizer Sydney Levy on staff, and chapters across the country, as we expand the campaign to educate the world about home demolitions.

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