Happy Bank Transfer Day!
Really, you only need a few basic resources to move your money. Here they are, via the Move Your Money Project website:
—A short primer on why you should take your money out of corporate banks.
—A tool to find community banks and credit unions near you and to check your local banks’ IRA rating, which tells you how sound an institution is.
—An easy seven-step guide to switching banks.
That’s it! That’s everything you need to know about moving your money. And it seems that this message is already getting out. Last month, some 650,000 Americans joined a credit union — that’s more than the number of people who joined a credit union in all of last year. Will you join their ranks?
Remember, every day can be Bank Transfer day — it’s not too late to move your money! Here’s a list of addresses where you can find your local credit union in several countries.
Oakland, California: Citibank and other banks shut down by strikers, youth and families.
Photo: @USGeneralStrike
THE OCCUPY movement’s most powerful unifying factor has been its clear and simple identification of the key problem in American society: the divide between the vast majority of the population—the 99 percent—and the richest and most powerful 1 percent.
This 99 percent/1 percent formulation isn’t just a statement about income inequality in the U.S. today. It’s also an acknowledgement that the 1 percent largely controls the government and is therefore able to rig laws, taxes and regulations in its favor.
If you look at opinion polls on questions like taxing the rich, regulating Wall Street, spending money on jobs, prioritizing economic growth over cutting the deficit or preserving and protecting Social Security and Medicare, you’ll find popular, often lopsided, majorities opposed to austerity and in favor of “redistributionist” policies.
Yet the dysfunctional government seems incapable—and not even much interested—in doing much of anything to meet these popular demands. By contrast, Congress acted with tremendous speed—and with little regard for the deficit—to appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars for the banks and other corporations when the financial crisis struck in 2008.
In theory, we’re all equal at the ballot box, and so popular majorities should be able to force politicians to address their concerns. But the Occupy movement has caught fire because millions of Americans realize that the way Washington works in reality bears no resemblance to the political science textbook explanations.
So how does the 1 percent get away with it?
Noam Chomsky speaks at Occupy Boston (part 1 of 3)
(Note: the first video is a bit squeaky since he is using two microphones, but the others are much better.)
