Divestment From Florida PRIME
Orange County Comissioners
The liberation of working class is bound up with that of Palestine. Please sign our petition to divest from Florida PRIME - a hedge fund manager that does not deserve tax money as capital for multiple reasons. There are transparency and fiduciary risk issues with Florida PRIME. However, the way large corporations that prioritize profit over human need and wellbeing is another aspect that cannot be ignored.
Public funds should always be under the control of the people, and our county policies should always reflect this fact.
Sponsored by
To:
Orange County Comissioners
From:
[Your Name]
County Commissioners,
I write to urge you to vote in the interests of the people of Orange County, not corporations. Currently, Orange County's investment portfolio allocates between 1.2 and 1.4 billion dollars of public funds into large corporations via corporate bonds - a process facilitated by Florida PRIME. The professed goal here is for the county to get a financial return, but in practice this enormous sum ends up as freebie capital for large corporations instead of serving the needs of our county's communities. For starters, Florida PRIME's investments lack any meaningful form of constituent oversight. PRIME professes to practice "full transparency" on its investments - but its investments are anything but. PRIME makes it a habit to invest via "middlemen" banks and other shell companies, and it is these organizations which funnel public funds into corporate bonds with no input or oversight from the people who produced these taxes. How is this transparent? And how can constituents have any say over how our public funds are invested if the benefactors of our tax funds are hidden behind bureaucratic red tape?
There are also fiduciary risks associated with investing via PRIME. For one thing, PRIME functions by giving large corporations unsecured loans. Isn't this exactly the financial risk Florida laws advise against? For another thing, providing corporations with over a billion dollars in capital produced by Orange County means that those funds are pretty much leaving our local communities. Why not invest in municipal bonds instead? This would allow the money to stay in our local financial ecosystem, benefitting the people who paid the taxes in the first place. Even investing in treasury bonds instead would allow us to avoid the fiduciary risks associated tying the well-being of Orange County to increasingly unsteady markets.
While there are social and political dimensions to divesting from PRIME that cannot be ignored by your constituents, there are also the transparency and fiduciary issues above. At the end of the day, policies should always be the product of democracy - the voices of the people - not the will of corporations. As such, I urge you to vote for and support a policy that divests from Florida PRIME.