Time For Citizens To Move The Money

By James Donahue

Arianna Huffington, publisher of the web’s popular Huffington Post, launched a campaign urging Americans to withdraw their money and stop doing business with the four “too big to fail” banks and move it into local community banks that are struggling to stay afloat.

Huffington wrote that the idea was concocted in a meeting she had with staffer Rob Johnson, political strategist Alexis McGill, writer and filmmaker Eugene Jarecki and Nick Penniman of the HuffPost Investigative Fund.

In an article penned by Huffington and Johnson, they said  they “began talking about the huge, growing chasm between the fortunes of Wall Street banks and Main Street banks, and started discussing what concrete steps individuals could take to help create a better financial system.”

The group quickly concluded that the best and easiest way for citizens to fight the system would be “Move Your Money.”

The article noted that the “Big Four banks,” JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, took billions in taxpayer bailout money but cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.

“Meanwhile, America’s Mail Street community banks – the vast majority of which avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of – are struggling.” Many of these banks were closed in the past year.

And if we thought the rich hand-outs to cover bad behavior and risky lending were over now that Mr. Obama is in the White House, guess again.

According to the Washington Post, the Obama Administration pledged on Christmas Eve to “provide unlimited financial assistance to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack, an eleventh-hour move that allows the government to exceed the current $400 billion cap on emergency aid without seeking permission from a bailout-weary Congress.”

And a commentary by David Reilly, a columnist for Bloomberg News, revealed that the so-called financial reform legislation working its way through Congress, includes a few “business as usual” clauses and fails to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, adopted after similar risky investment practices brought on the Great Depression of 1929. The act was repealed under the Clinton Administration and this opened the door to the careless lending practices that brought about the financial meltdown.

The proposed new reform act would authorize the Federal Reserve banks to provide up to $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes, the Reilly article said. “That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into markets this time around. The size of the fund makes the bribes in the Senate’s health-care bill look minuscule,” he wrote.

From where we sit, watching our nation’s economy circle the drain and the big bank and corporate CEO’s only scrambling for new and better ways to rape the system, will not bring reform or fix anything. It looks like the power brokers are still in charge and plan to conduct business as usual on Wall Street and in Washington. They don’t seem to care about salvaging a crumbling nation that needs to be returned to its status as a beacon to the world .

We strongly support the Huffington plan to call on action by the American people to Move The Money out of not only those big banks, but stop buying from and supporting all businesses that are showing contempt for the people on the street.

Each closed account may not seem like much to those giant banks, but collectively hundreds of thousands of money draws will at least cause an itch and hopefully gain some attention.

As The Huffington-Johnson story concluded: “Think of the message it will send to Wall Street – and to the White House. That we have had enough of the high-flying, no-limits-casino banking culture that continues to dominate Wall Street and Capitol Hill.”

We urge readers to link to the Huffington website and read the story in full. Click on: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/move-your-money-a-new-yea_b_406022.html