Update: We won thanks to your pressure! TD told a Bloomberg reporter that it no longer holds the shares in GEO and commits to not have financial ties with private prison corporations in the future.
---
We just found out that in the midst of the pandemic, TD Bank increased its shares in private prisons giant GEO Group by a whopping by 8000%.
And now, TD has blood on its hands from COVID deaths because of its GEO investment -- people are dying of the virus at GEO Group’s facilities because of a total lack of preventative measures by the corporation.
That's just the tip of the iceberg of GEO Group’s appalling track record of human rights abuses. Along with CoreCivic, they run Trump’s concentration camps along the Mexican-US border where kids are held in cages and separated from their parents.
This is why every major bank in the world promised to end financial ties with GEO Group and CoreCivic in 2019 -- a massive victory against the American prison industrial complex.
The message from bank customers was clear - do not profit from in private prisons.
Sign the petition calling on TD to cut financial ties with Trump’s private prison corporations.
It's not just customers that want out of GEO Group. Investors, alarmed by the rising death toll at GEO's facilities, just brought a class action lawsuit against the company over its blundering response to the pandemic in July.
TD's purchase of GEO Group shares goes against the public image it wants to cultivate. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, TD paid lip service to Black Lives Matter while holding tens of thousands of shares in GEO Group -- a corporation that is notorious for profiting off the mass incarceration of Black people.
And not only that, TD received an ‘F’ in the Is Your Bank Loaded? report card due to its heavy investment in the gun industry -- involvement that has led to the disproportionate gun deaths of Black people.
So we’re asking TD Bank: why did you increase your investment in GEO Group by over 30,000 shares? And also, what other financial ties do you have with private prisons corporations like GEO Group, CoreCivic, and other profiteers of the US prison industrial complex?
TD: End your relationship with GEO Group and the American prison industrial complex once and for all.
Action by SumOfUs members calling for the divestment of GEO Group has been successful before. Through the pressure of tens of thousands of SumOfUs members, including hundreds who showed up at CPP’s public events, we forced a giant 300 billion dollar pension plan to stop its investment in GEO Group.
And just last month, after thousands of SumOfUs members emailed, called, and posted on social media about Walmart’s All Lives Matter shirts, it stopped selling the dog-whistle shirts.
Now, lets hold TD accountable in its role in supporting the prison industrial complex.
More information
Guns Down America.
U.S. Securities Exchange . 13 May 2020.
The Guardian. 5 July 2019.
Newsweek. 20 July 2020.
Forbes. 19 September 2019.