Divestment is an Urgent Task
I wrote and presented this speech at an event commemorating the 80th anniversary of the US bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in support of a comprehensive state bill divesting from the military industrial complex - divestment is and remains the most urgent task. The genocide in Palestine is ongoing, the occupation is as violent as ever, the foundations of the empire are cracking. We must move past imagining liberation and onto seizing it.
August 6th, 2025
Divestment is an urgent task. Today, we commemorate the estimated 200,000+ victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose lives were sacrificed in the name of imperial expansion and Western hegemony. Today we commemorate them, their descendants, and all people of the world impacted by US sponsored violence as we shed our own naïveté about this country and its evolving capacity and insatiable hunger for oppression in the name of capitalism, and destruction in the name of progress!
That insatiable hunger the US practiced in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago, is the same one we witness today as the government endorses, sponsors, and defends an ongoing genocide in Palestine.
That same insatiable hunger defines this country’s legacy of oppression from slaughtering indigenous communities, enforcing chattel slavery and Jim Crow laws, to occupying the largest military footprint in the world, one with nuclear, biological, chemical and explosive weapons arsenals, 700+ military bases overseas, the highest incarceration rate in the world, and increasing police brutality - all of which are somehow still not enough - as the US war machine sucks our social services dry to feed its military beast: from weapons research and development to military equipment to cop cities, again, and again, and again - using our tax dollars against us.
Divestment is an urgent task. It is up to us to propel ourselves toward a world we want to see and live in. The United States is built on an economy of violence; it invests, endorses, and sponsors violence every day: violence in our communities, violence against our communities, and violence abroad. Till this day, the US is the only nation-state to use nuclear weapons against another nation.
As if using our tax dollars to invent and develop these weapons is not enough, the US has a long history of testing these weapons on its own people, not just nuclear weapons, but chemical, biological, and explosive weapons as well. These weapons, weapons of mass destruction or WMDs, are the technology of a State committed to maintaining power only through violence. After all, the violence it commits abroad and the violence it commits on us is one of the same.
Divestment is an urgent task! We must demand an end to the State’s complicity in violence, both here and abroad. We must demand the State stop making us complicit in this violence, against our will. We must demand agency over our tax dollars and ensure our elected officials serve their people’s interests.
Divestment is an urgent task! The state of Massachusetts invests approximately $2.1billion in a global economy of violence through its public pension fund holdings in entities with ties to weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), not just manufacturers of WMDs, but investors, sellers, distributors, and facilitators of their use. This means that our tax dollars are used to facilitate the growth of exploitative companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Vanguard, and Blackrock, and many many more, while our communities are left to fend for ourselves with no affordable housing, no accessible healthcare, expanding food deserts, constant surveillance and policing, and looming climate disasters.
Divestment is an urgent task! That is why we are here today, as the Coalition for Responsible Investment, inviting you all to join our demand: the State must disclose, divest, and prohibit our monies from going to entities with ties to WMDs.
Our bill, An Act Promoting Responsible Investment, calls on the State to do exactly this: the bill requires that the State disclose, divest, and prohibit public pension fund holdings in entities with ties to WMDs, including WMD producers, sellers, distributors, and investors in these weapons.
An Act Promoting Responsible Investment also directs the State administration and its various institutions to sever contractual relations and prohibit future ones with vendors who have ties to WMDs.
An Act Promoting Responsible Investment is the first state bill effectively divesting our State monies from an economy of violence. To reckon with the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is to commit to defunding institutions of violence that perpetuate and profit off the same devastation. To reckon with the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is to demand we divest from this economy of violence.
Divestment is an urgent task and we invite you all to join us in demanding it. Take up the streets, Organize actions, Join the many coalitions and organizations working together to divest. Call, text, and email your legislators to support and advance this bill. And come find me or one of our coalition members here today to chat more!