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Fighting the backers of Trump’s agenda, with José Lopez


Major corporations spend a lot of time burnishing their brand images, but under the surface, they’re often involved in things that would make their customers cringe. A new campaign aims to highlight a few of those cringeworthy practices–specifically, the investment in the Trump agenda from some of America’s biggest corporate names. This week, they’re targeting JP Morgan Chase and the megabank’s investment in private prison companies that house thousands of immigrants arrested and awaiting deportation. I spoke with José Lopez and Daniel Altschuler of Make the Road New York about this week’s action targeting JP Morgan.

Right now, a ton of the financing for the expansion of GEO Group and CoreCivic is coming from JP Morgan Chase. GEO Group and CoreCivic currently are the country’s largest private prison and immigrant detention companies. What we want to point out is that if the financing and the connection is coming from JPMorgan Chase, and they are connected to the current administration in many ways, we want to be able to draw that connection for people.
It has everything to do with profit. I think the message tomorrow is we want to be sure that companies like JPMorgan Chase are not profiting off of the backs of immigrant families and are not putting profits before a moral obligation to keep families together, to keep mothers with their daughters and their sons and their husbands and their loved ones.
There has been a ton of work over the last couple of months. Some escalations and some arrests have happened a couple of months ago in front of the JPMorgan headquarters. There was a shareholder meeting that took place in Delaware where hundreds of people marched on the shareholder meeting and a couple went in to confront Jamie Dimon. We just want to continue the drumbeat of going after corporations like JPMorgan Chase who stand to profit off of the misery and suffering of our communities.

Up at Truthout.
Up at In These Times.
Up at The Progressive.
Up at Moyers & Company.
Interviews for Resistance is a syndicated series of interviews with organizers, agitators and troublemakers, available twice weekly as text and podcast. You can now subscribe on iTunes! Previous interviews here.

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