Background

Israel has destroyed at least two-thirds of all homes in Gaza since October 7th. Its relentless attacks–nearly 75,000 tons of bombs and counting–have left 1.9 million Palestinians internally displaced and starving. Israel blocked access to the Rafah crossing, blocked access to humanitarian aid, and blocked access to aquifers. It has destroyed desalination plants and cut power to Gaza's wastewater treatment plants, leaving sewage flowing in the streets of Gaza and the Palestinians residing there with negligible access to clean water. All of this, amongst a plethora of other human rights abuses, has killed nearly 40,000 people in the past eight months and injured over 85,000, according to reports from Gaza's Ministry of Health. These numbers are a gross underestimate due to Israel's widespread destruction of infrastructure. Zero fully functioning hospitals in Gaza remain.

Many corporations are not only profiting off of this ongoing genocide but are complicit in it. Amazon signed a $1.22 billion joint contract with Google called Project Nimbus, in which both companies provide cloud computing services, such as facial recognition and AI technology, to the Israeli government, military, and weapons manufacturers. This technology mass surveils Palestinians, targets them, and kills them.

Palestinians are not the only victims of mass surveillance at the hands of Amazon technology. The data mining company Palantir designed the Investigative Case Management (ICM) system used by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). This system mass surveils US immigrants, stores their public and private data, and often deports them. Palantir has migrated this algorithm and data to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon also works for ICE's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). AWS hosts the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology database for the DHS, which houses at least 270 million profiles of people, including 1.1 billion images of faces.

Amongst this, Amazon employs a disproportionately high amount of Black and Latine workers, injures its workers at higher rates, and steals their wages. Amazon's PDX9 Warehouse in Troutdale injures a quarter of its workers. The company was also involved in the largest wage-an-hour class action lawsuit in Oregon history, accruing over 40,000 hours of unpaid wages. When workers attempt to unionize to protect themselves against Amazon, it stops that too. Amazon spent over $14.2 million on anti-union consultants in 2022 alone. It has had over 220 unfair labor practices cases with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

In addition to retaliating against unionization, according to the NLRB, Amazon has also illegally retaliated against workers who protest its climate injustice. Amazon successfully lobbied against Oregon House Bill 2816, which would have regulated emissions from its data centers and required them to run on clean energy by 2040. In 2019, Amazon pledged to become carbon neutral by 2040. However, their carbon emissions increased nearly 40 percent in the following two years. An increase that was severely undercounted, according to an investigation from Reveal.

Multnomah County's Role

Multnomah County's most recent investment report includes nearly $20 million in Amazon securities, actively reaping returns from the suffering of Palestinians, immigrants, asylum seekers, and workers. This raises ethical concerns about the county's corporate investments, causing us to question whether the county truly stands by its values of racial, economic, and climate justice. A further look into the county's most recent investment report substantiates these concerns.

The county also has Bank of America, Apple, and Citibank holdings. Bank of America had to pay $250 million in government penalties. The bank illegally accessed private customer information to open fraudulent accounts on people's behalf without their consent. It also wrongfully withheld credit cards and double-charged its customers. Apple's support of child labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) shows an apparent disregard for human rights. The DRC recently called on Apple to substantiate its mineral sourcing claims, explaining that there is little evidence to support that Apple ethically sources the minerals used to manufacture its products. Citibank has "the largest foreign financial presence of any institution in Israel." Citibank is financing the IOF's weapons and funding the tech that Israel uses to surveil Palestinians.

It's imperative that the county not only divest from the companies above but thoroughly investigate all of its current and future holdings. Multnomah County must inform constituents how it determines its future holding with a clear and public metric.