If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
Globally, a burgeoning movement for local, cooperatively owned and community-oriented banks is blazing the trail toward a new, sustainable form of banking.
The "New Economy Movement" is a far-ranging coming together of organizations, projects, activists, theorists and ordinary citizens committed to rebuilding the American political-economic system from the ground up.
When individuals, religious institutions and local and state governments decide to move their money, it puts direct pressure on banks and on the federal government to change their policies. Cities and states have incredible leverage if they chose to use it.
The goal: to wrest control of our democracy back from the robber barons and CEOs that systematically block any effort to create an economy and a body politic that serves the needs of the vast majority of Americans and not the elite few.
Bank of America is actually doing a number of things congruent with the emerging needs of the economy. What's not to like about a big bank that actually depends on the goodwill of millions of individual consumers for its survival? So how can one mess this up?
If moving your money to a credit union won't make Bank of America or Wells Fargo small enough to fail, it is a rational consumer decision. Making the switch may not be a revolutionary act, but it will certainly make your life easier.
Credit unions serve more than 90 million Americans and play a key role in supporting our economic recovery. Unfortunately, current law imposes requirements which unfairly penalize healthy credit unions for growing to meet the needs of their members.
On Ash Wednesday, churches in San Francisco announced they were removing $10 million from Wells Fargo and called on the bank "to put an immediate freeze on its foreclosures and repent for their misconduct." The effort is part of several national campaigns to get consumers and community groups to remove their money from the big banks and transfer accounts to credit unions and smaller financial institutions. We're told that the banks, desperate when thrown a lifeline by taxpayers in 2008, are now stronger and better able to weather a crisis than they were. And yet, they continue to scream in protest and lobby on Capitol Hill against the ignominy of reform. Simple greed -- hey banks, how about giving that up for Lent?
The general pattern of the FDIC closing banks with weak operating characteristics and deepening asset quality troubles continues. The FDIC shuttered four additional banks today bringing the 2012 count to seven.
"We are being bamboozled by lobbyists, it's time for democracy to be restored," Deepak Chopra told his guests, Arianna Huffington and Dylan Ratigan at a DeepakHomeBase (DHB) event this week.
My university and many other Jesuit institutions uphold a great standard in their commitment to fighting for social justice. Is investing in corporate banks, which foreclose on families who they purposefully target with sub-prime mortgage loans, socially just?
If Americans set up their lives so that we depend less on Wall Street and Washington, both entities will notice. We will be hitting them in the place where it hurts the most: their wallet.
By keeping their massive endowments in big banks, colleges inherently support the behaviors of those banks and everything those banks invest in. And those things happen to constitute the seeds sowed from which we now reap this crisis.
Neighborhood credit unions could become an alternative to big banks for Chicago residents, if Second Ward Alderman Bob Fioretti is successful in passing an ordinance he introduced yesterday.
The 99% is a heterogeneous construct. Factors of race, ethnicity, age, and privilege constitute real obstacles to collaboration, a problem compounded by the tendency of groups to work within enclaves.
Because of the urgency to get their fellow comrades out of jail as soon as possible, the banking institution many protesters consider the cause of the economic crisis and inequity will now occupy the movement's money.
