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Oct 11, 19
Filed under: Announcement, Immigration, US
This coming Tuesday, please help us flood the phones of Venkat Viswanathan and Marie Thompson, two VPs at State Street Corp with offices in Durham, NC. State Street Corp is heavily invested in CoreCivic and GEO Group, two companies that run detention centers for ICE, as well as other private prisons. Background info, a sample-script, and a link to a signup form can be found below.
Last month, the Rose of Sharon Catholic Worker community got a few friends together and disrupted the offices of State Street Corp in so-called Durham, NC in response to a call to action by Block the Wall to #ShutDownICEProfiteers. You can read about that action here. State Street is a significant investor in CoreCivic and GEO Group, two of the largest private prison corporations in the so-called United States. Our message was simple: if you invest in, underwrite bonds for, or otherwise support companies that imprison and murder immigrants, including migrant children, we are going to shut you down.
This Tuesday, October 15th, we are asking friends and comrades anywhere and everywhere to call in with the same message. Our goal is to make sure that the State Street execs in Durham can’t use their phones for the whole day because they will be fielding calls from us. Their names and numbers are as follows.
Venkat Viswanathan (Vice President/Director – IT) – 919-703-9172
Marie Thompson (Project Manager/Assistant Vice President, former Project Analyst/Officer) – 617-985-3545
If you are willing to give us a name (it doesn’t have to be your real name), please consider filling out this SignUp Genius form with when you are able to call. You don’t have to fill out the form to participate, but, if you do, it will help us keep track of when folks are calling so that we can spread calls throughout the day. Making multiple calls throughout the day is definitely encouraged! Remember, our goal is not to persuade or inform but to stop these people from being able to do their jobs, since them doing their jobs is literally killing children.
When you call, you are, of course, free to say whatever you like and we encourage you to speak your conscience and/or get creative. However, if you are more comfortable reading from a script, here is what we suggest you say.
Refugees of all ages, including infants, have and will continue to die in concentration camps that CoreCivic and GEO Group own and operate. As a key investor in these companies, State Street Corporation profits directly from the human beings who are forced to endure inhumane conditions within these camps simply for seeking survival in the US.As a vice president of State Street Corporation, you can’t pretend that you don’t have any role in this.By failing to speak out, let alone quite your job, you are clearly demonstrating your willful complicity in the well-documented physical and mental abuse that occurs in CoreCivic and GEO Group concentration camps.Do you take pride in this? Are dollars more important than human lives to you? At this point, how can you claim to be any different than the various corporations and employees who did business with the Nazi regime?Your inaction has already contributed to great harm, but it is not too late to act. However, if you fail to act, you should expect more disruptions like the one a few weeks ago. They will become larger and more frequent until State Street Corporation divests from CoreCivic and commits to no future investments in operators of the private detention industry.Make the right decision on your own, or face resistance that will prevent business as usual at your office. This is not a threat, but a warning.
If you get through all of that and you still want to do more, consider calling some of these other “very fine people” who work at State Street’s Durham office.
Anil Ambati (Vice President/DLT Security Lead) – 617-842-2694
Brian Healy (IT Project Manager/PMP Project Manager) – 617-347-7464
Brian Buchanan (Senior Software Engineer/AVP of Architecture) – 919-308-4423
Thanks in advance for all your help! As always, feel free to get in touch, especially if you are interested in plotting our next action with us (or if you like dumpster diving, serving dinner on the street, hugging tree sitters, supporting nuclear weapons resisters, community gardening, or just hanging out and sharing life together) feel free to get in touch. Our group email is [email protected]. You don’t have to be a Catholic to be a Catholic Worker (most of us aren’t). For that matter, you don’t have to work either.
