File:SJS - May 26, 2021 Proxy memories.jpg

SJS:

In 1970 and 1971 a group of University of Southern California students started up the Center for New Corporate Priorities. The Center spun off of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee and the first Earth Day organizing. Looking back, the origins can be clearly seen.

The modern environmental movement that had come into being with the revelations of Earthrise and that the first Earth Science and then the results of a multi-decade plan for Earth Science research from Space brought us connections as planet citizens.

The years 1968-1971 changed forever our awareness as planet citizens, planet scientists. [A A whole earth vision was springing up across borders of nations. A 360 perspective of the home planet was in the process of begin created. Activists organizing was growing and shaping a new found environmental, green diversity.

At USC, our group of activist students was in many ways at the center of the anti-Vietnam war movement and first Earth Day was looking to 'shift the priorities' of corporate 'business-as-usual'.

The Los Angeles Center for New Corporate Priorities had two initial campaigns:

~ Mobilize a network of peace groups to continue anti-Vietnam war organizing and re-envision what an 'intelligent' (as opposed to self-defeating) national defense strategy will need to consist of ...

and

~ Oppose banking policies that segregate cities into lending and anti-lending zones... the Center for New Corporate Priorities published first-ever maps of US cities that identified "redlining" practices by banking. These redlining maps were then used by state legislatures to prevent discrimination that for decades had prevented wealth building thru real estate and economic development in poorer "redlined" neighborhoods in US cities...

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BANK OF AMERICA BIG COAST TARGET

Via The NY Times

May 1971

>The Center for New Corporate Priorities, started by students at the University of Southern California, has charged that the bank supports large farmers, thus repressing farm workers, and that it finances economic imperialism abroad, yet refuses to help minorities at home.

>The Center's major complaint, however, is the bank's involvement in Vietnam.

>Bank officials have many times “specifically rejected the charge that we as an institution support and profit from the war in Vietnam.” The bank also distributes personal statements by its officers who oppose the conflict.

>War Goods Are Financial

>Mr. Sullivan (of Bank of America) readily acknowledged, however, that “we finance many companies who produce goods and material used in the war.

>He added, “We have a role in letting our opinions be known about the war, but we shouldn't let those opinions cloud our banking decisions.”

>The root of the conflict between the bank and its critics is not over facts, but over premises. The bank continues to believe that “banking decisions” should be made, as Mr. Sullivan put it, on the basis of “economics, not politics.” Profit is still its major goal.

>To Ed Scanlon, of the Center for New Corporate Priorities, this attitude only “feeds the status quo” and does nothing to alter basic power relationships in the society. Louis B. Lundborg, who recently retired as chairman of the bank's board, recognized this cleavage in a speech last year.

>“We are facing a real honest-to‐God disenchantment,” he said, “not just a passing momentary flare‐up that will go away if we just keep it cool for a while.

>There is a new value system emerging in America, starting with the youth but becoming one of the new facts of life for the rest of us to deal with.”

~