A new bill in the Rhode Island legislature would require the State of Rhode Island to divest its state pension funds from weapons manufacturers and military contractors.
🎉Exciting news: there is now legislation in the Rhode Island state legislature which would require the State of Rhode Island to divest its state pension funds from weapons manufacturers and military contractors!
House Bill #2026, which can be read here, was heard by the House Committee on Finance on Thursday, March 11, 2021.
To show wide-spread support for the bill, activists with Just Peace Rhode Island called on residents to give verbal and written testimony in support of HB#2026. William J. Astore, an acclaimed author and anti-war activist, submitted written comment which he published in the LA Progressive as an Op-Ed, making an eloquent case in favor of divesting from war and investing in peace and sanity.
Activists with Just Peace Rhode Island created a Divestment Fact Sheet to educate the public about the urgent necessity of the bill, stating that divestment from war:
- Allows us to redirect our investment dollars toward socially productive corporations addressing important social assets like climate resilience, health, and education, which aid economic growth;
- Seeks to move money away from corporations whose output foments violence, death, destruction, and social chaos.
- Educates the general public about the role of weapons manufacturers in the cycle of tax breaks, lobbying largesse, increasing military budgets and weapon sales.
- Reduces the flow of scarce economic resources to military weapons manufacturers by reducing public investment;
- Sends a message to the US Congress that we need to sharply reduce investment in military weapons where the costs are increasingly public (ever increasing health bills for traumatized and injured vets of the endless wars, reconstruction bills in foreign lands, ever increasing maintenance bills and graft on weapons systems) and the benefits are private (lobbying firm profits, huge weapons manufacturer bonuses and excessive CEO pay packages).
This is just the beginning of an exciting campaign to divest Rhode Island from the war machine! If you’d like to learn more about how you can get involved in the campaign to divest Rhode Island from the War Machine moving forward, sign up using our interest form.
