A New Way Forward – Restore the Economy in the Public's Interest

The thing about breaking up with your big bank that we are hearing from all over is that it feels so good. We’ve had a lot of great responses and some big links yesterday. Tons of people are writing to us to say that they’ve been wanting to close their Bank of America accounts for a while, but that we’ve inspired them to do it now. Thanks to Lou for these great billboards.

The Valentine’s Day/abusive relationship metaphor really seems to work. But, unfortunately, the hook expires on February 14th. We can have a huge impact if we can get this out wider in the next few days. We want to get up to $1,000,000 dollars divested for V-Day. But we need your help, go and say how much you have in a local bank or will move to a local bank here.

Based on some questions or issues people have brought up, I thought it would be good to address there here as well:

Credit cards are important to think about. Many people love their credit cards because they get rewards. The problem is we each are paying for those rewards anyway, so why not do the free market capitalist thing and choose what you want to buy more directly than subsidize each other getting gifts and rewards (this time through a big corporation). To get out of the tangle or catch, it would be great if we all stopped using credit cards/rewards and we didn’t each shell out 427 dollars extra every year to VISA and the big banks. First step can be just use debit pin.

The point is though that anything that big is that big and will stay that big because they will do anything to keep growing, including gouging you if you aren’t looking or pretending to play nice. For example, some credit cards will be charging new fees because their well-known overdraft or late checking fees are being addressed by Congress. Thus, they may introduce the fee for paying on time and not spending enough.

It’s also hard to switch out of using credit for some. So, we say get a credit union credit card and make sure it’s not issued by a big bank card. Hopefully, as this movement grows, your credit union will divest from their big bank business too.

By the way, credit unions are a part of the whole banking system, so they do what any bank does and shuffles money throughout the system. That means that they do do business with the big banks in one sense, that they sell loans to them to invest in other loans. But that is just what money is, it gets shuffled around between each other so that there can be movement and “growth”. Just make sure your credit union or community bank isn’t just a fake and is actually owned by the big banks.

For example, Ally Bank has ads all over the internet and makes the switch easy and calls themselves the progressive bank. They’re that purple logo, be aware of it. We even believed them and listed them as an alternative. Well, they’re owned by GMAC.

This breaking up movement requires work, but it is the kind of infestation and dangerous weaving of tentacles that has caused the problem in the first place. We need to do our homework and get out of big banking because they are simply too dangerous for a working economy. They just crashed the country, for heaven’s sake.

What’s one of those issues we need to figure out some more? “From 1989 to 2006, overall  credit card debt grew by 415% to $876 billion. Over the same period, the credit card industry’s profits grew by 575% — from $6.4 billion in 1990 to $36.8 billion in 2006. In 2006, the credit card  business was 3.5 times more profitable than retail banking.” Look, credit and debt is out of control. We need to re-examine debt as we have talked about before.

Great news on the “getting sick of big banks”movement. Divest, divest, even at the government level. Our SF group has been taking this on too: