May-June 2005:
Building Counter-Recruitment
Raytheon, Merchant of Death
Caterpillar in Palestine
Argentina’s Recovered Factories
Elmer Maas, War Resister
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Another Merchant of Death
Caterpillar in Palestine

By Jim Haber

pril 13 was a national day of action against Caterpillar, Inc., the Illinois-based manufacturer of farming, construction and demolition equipment. It was the day of Caterpillar’s shareholder meeting in Chicago, and this was the second year in a row that a resolution was before the meeting concerning the company’s sales to Israel. In addition, scores of organizations nationwide had signed on to a “Declaration Regarding Caterpillar Violations of Human Rights.” As part of the “Stop the Merchants of Death” campaign of the War Resisters League’s Anti-Militarism Task Force, WRL West had endorsed the declaration and was co-sponsoring a local demonstration against Cat in San Francisco.

Since 1967, the Israeli army has used Caterpillar equipment—like specially modified D9 and D10 bulldozers—to destroy more than 12,000 houses in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, leaving tens of thousands. Other Caterpillar equipment has been used to uproot hundreds of thousands of olive and other orchards, causing widespread economic hardship and environmental degradation in rural areas of Palestine.

The home demolitions have gone on even when the army was notified that residents were still inside the targeted homes, resulting in the death of dozens of Palestinians. In one such instance, in April 2002, Nabila al-Shu’bi, who was seven months pregnant, was left to die in the rubble of her bulldozed Nablus home, along with her three young children and four additional members of her family.

The sale of Caterpillar bulldozers to the Israeli army may contravene the U.N. Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights has written to Caterpillar CEO James Owens that “allowing the delivery of your … bulldozers to the Israeli army … in the certain knowledge that they are being used for such action, might involve complicity or acceptance on the part of your company to actual and potential violations of human rights.”

U.S. taxpayers are complicit as well. The purchase by Israel of Caterpillar bulldozers to destroy homes is partly financed by U.S. tax dollars. Israel is the world’s largest beneficiary of U.S. military and economic aid. In FY2003, for example, Israel received around $15 billion in U.S. aid, including nearly $4 billion in military grants. A considerable portion of the military grants come back to U.S. corporations as purchases of arms and equipment.

When the Anti-Militarism Task Force launched “Stop the Merchants of Death” campaign, its initial aims were to educate people on the companies that are profiting from war; analyze the interconnectedness of militarism, materialism and racism; search for effective nonviolent strategies to stop the merchants of death; and develop skills that empower people to take action.

While those goals reflected the general issue of war profits, they didn’t get to the point of what Stop the Merchants of Death has shifted to address, and what makes it unique. As WRL’s Anti-Militarism Coordinator G. Simon Harak has noted (NVA, September-October 2004), we “have come to realize that those very companies and corporations are literally calling the shots of the U.S. government’s war-making policies. It’s not so much that they are making profits from war—their power and influence are so great that it is more accurate to say that they are making war for profit.”

The top profiteer that fits this profile would be Lockheed-Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer. In one day Lockheed’s CEO makes four times what a U.S. soldier in Iraq makes in one year! Lockheed spends millions on campaign contributions—and receive billions back in U.S. military contracts, as does the Number Two profiteer, Boeing. Raytheon is another corporation in this mold (and is highlighted in this magazine on page 5). With all those corporations, there appears to be a strong correlation between campaign contributions and contract amounts; their corporate officers also sit on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, a key governmental body that draws on leaders in the arms industry to set military priorities. This body is so shadowy that the Anti-Militarism Task Force has been unable to find out when its four meetings a year occur. The board is a point of influence on government composed of 30-plus representatives of industry, technology and military contractors. Those who stand to profit are making high-level policy recommendations worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Caterpillar doesn’t quite fit the Merchants of Death profile. The current campaign against Cat isn’t charging that it is fomenting Israeli or U.S. policy, only that it’s capitalizing on it. But Cat has one quality Lockheed Martin, Boeing and the other arms makers lack: Most of the main war promoters don’t have very touchable public faces. Many of them aren’t publicly traded, so their records aren’t as open for scrutiny. Many don’t operate in a consumer market. And, as activist Arundhati Roy said in January 2004 at the World Social Forum, “This movement of ours needs a major global victory.” She went on to articulate the need to focus on one or two major corporations to be able to apply more pressure in one point.

So even though Cat isn’t a prime instigator of war, it has a public face and is therefore reachable. A campaign already existed addressing its war profiteering, so something didn’t need to be started from scratch. Direct action at dealerships, postcard and fax-blasting drives, street theater with mock home demolitions, leafleting of Cat board members’ workplaces and neighborhoods, and two successive years of shareholder resolutions all have been components of the Cat campaign.

In 2004 the Sisters of Loreto and some Mercy Sisters brought a well-drafted resolution to the shareholder meeting with help from Jewish Voice for Peace. This year Jewish Voice for Peace and the Maryknoll and St. Francis Sisters from Philadelphia joined as resolution co-filers. The resolution challenged Caterpillar to “review if [the Israeli] sales are consistent with Cat policy and explain the review process” within the context of its own “Code of Worldwide Business Conduct.” It didn’t ask Caterpillar to boycott or end sales to Israel, nor to take any political stance.

The Results
Disappointingly, the percentage of shareholder votes in favor of the resolution actually went down from four percent last year to three percent this year despite the fact that a more organized and broad-based coalition had worked on it.

Those numbers aren’t as low as they might sound to those not used to the world of shareholder activism. The resolution was backed by investors with holdings estimated to be well over $600 million, including CalPERS, the largest pension fund in the world. More than 100 organizations and 500 individuals signed onto the Declaration Regarding Caterpillar Violations of Human Rights. Significant and cooperative organizing created a solid and expanding base of support for promoting this campaign.

Michael Passoff, Associate Director of the As You Sow Foundation’s Corporate Social Responsibility Program, said, “That size vote is common for a resolution as controversial as this one. That shareholders with holdings worth over half a billion dollars voted yes on our resolution is a victory because it means mainstream investors were voting for this issue, not just social investors. Today’s public protests against CAT in over 30 cities and Cat’s three percent drop in stock price today assure that the company will have to deal with this issue sooner rather than later. And if not sooner, then we expect to be back next year with another resolution.”

Jewish Voice for Peace member Sara Norman said: “Since shareholder resolutions are non-binding, our primary goal was to put this issue front and center in the minds of the Caterpillar board. By that standard, today was a remarkable success. The issue of Cat’s role in demolishing homes of Palestinian families, and the use of CAT D-9s to violate various human rights laws, completely dominated the discussion in the shareholder meeting.”

Within a couple of weeks, Caterpillar stock had rebounded, prompting Sydney Levy, a member of the Cat working group of Jewish Voice for Peace, to note, “Our objective is not to bring their shares down, but to have them change their policies. Bad publicity can get us there. We should measure our temporary success by the bad publicity we are generating (and we are generating a lot of it), not by the vagaries of the stock market. Bad publicity is undeniable; a change in prices can always be explained away by one or more economic factors.”

A week after the national day of action, Caterpillar recruiters decided to skip the usually fertile grounds of a job fair at the University of Illinois, Chicago, because of the fear of more demonstrations. Matt Gaines of Chicago’s Stop Cat Coalition said, “Caterpillar is so image-conscious that it actually sued Disney to block a children’s movie featuring evil Caterpillar bulldozers. The threat to the Cat brand caused by news footage of real life bulldozers crushing family homes makes the damage caused by movie bulldozers look like child’s play. Cat should just get out of the business of destroying homes.”

Jim Haber is the coordinator of WRL’s San Francisco local, WRL West, and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace.