If you’ve ever looked at your TIAA account statement and felt like you needed a finance degree to make sense of it, you’re not alone — and you’re not wrong. These documents are genuinely complex. But here’s the good news: understanding what’s in your retirement account, and taking steps to align it with your values, …
WASHINGTON — International speculation in farmland is contributing to a land grabbing crisis in Brazil’s Cerrado savannah, fueling record deforestation and displacing indigenous and traditional agrarian communities, according to a new report released November 19 as COP30, the United Nations Convention on Climate Change draws to a close in the Brazilian city of Belem. The …
Read more “Financial Speculation Drives Massive Land Grabbing, Deforestation in Brazil’s Cerrado”
Recent years have seen strong growth in an industry known as “private equity.” TIAA manages approximately $43 billion in private equity assets. Since you (understandably!) may be too busy with work and life to be following the ins and outs of financial instruments, we’re going to do our best here to explain how private equity works …
Read more “TIAA is a Private Equity Investor: what’s the big deal?”
Readers familiar with TIAA-Divest! may remember that the campaign was born from the unsuccessful fight to block a massive methane gas fired power plant that TIAA financed in the environmentally and financially disadvantaged community of Dover, NY. TIAA maintains several subsidiary companies devoted entirely to dirty, climate destroying fossil fuel power plants. This is the story of …
Read more “TIAA’s never-ending love affair with fossil power.”
We, the undersigned—academics, environmental advocates, TIAA-clients, and concerned citizens—are alarmed by TIAA’s role in the Brazilian farmland market, especially in the Cerrado, a vital biome for biodiversity, peasant farmers and Indigenous communities. Within the Cerrado region, Nuveen’s data indicates a significant role in rural land markets, with over 1 million acres in Brazil and 3 million globally. Financial …
A few years ago, Cornell Professor of Natural Resources and the Environment Dr. Marianne Krasny asked a financial advisor to help her to move her TIAA retirement savings to environmentally friendly investments. He offered her two fund options. “I looked at them, and they still had all these things I hated,” she said. “But they were my …
Read more “TIAA-Divest! covered in Forbes – An interview with the author”
On Tuesday, April 15th, over 110 people gathered for a powerful webinar focusing on the costs of TIAA’s massive agribusiness operations in Brazil. The event was organized by a coalition that includes TIAA-Divest!, Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos, ActionAid USA, Grassroots International, and the Stop Land Grabs coalition. Streamed live from Johns Hopkins University, this coalition brought together cutting-edge research …
Read more “Powerful webinar highlights TIAA’s abusive land speculation in Brazil”
In 1919, Elaine, Arkansas Black landowners and sharecroppers rose up in protest against white buyers, who refused to pay a fair price for their crops. What followed the protest was the largest massacre of Black farmers, and one of the largest massacres of Black people, in US history. The white farmers took over the land and for over …
Read more “Webinar: How TIAA purchased a legacy of racism & murder”
Executive Summary provided by IEEFA: Over the last decade, a number of institutional investors have set a new standard for leadership on climate change. Universities, pension funds, churches, banks, and entire nations have divested their holdings in fossil fuels, driven by the long-term weak financial performance of coal, oil and gas stocks; the increasing frequency …
By Janet Pelley What kind of teachers would educate their students about the dangers of climate catastrophe while investing their pension savings in one of the biggest carbon polluters in the world? That is the moral dilemma faced by many participants of pension giant TIAA. The university educators pension fund is the world’s second-largest holder of …