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People Have Power to Beat ‘Money Trust’
By Christopher J. Petherick
Are you sick and tired of waiting for Washington to rein in Wall Street and shut down the Money Trust? A new financial movement is putting the power back into the hands of Main Street by giving consumers the ability to take their money out of the coffers of the so-called “too-big-to-fail” financial firms and put it into accounts at smaller, locally owned community banks.
Called the “Move Your Money” campaign, new technology on the Internet is allowing individuals and businesses to tap into online databases to search for local community banks. All a person has to do is enter his zip code, and he can find a local bank near his home. The idea is that he can then close down his account at one of the top banks, such as Bank of America, JP Morgan or Citibank, and open a new one at his community bank. Upon entering my own zip code, this writer found 21 banks within 30 miles of my home.
To most populists, the very notion of fractional reserve banking—and the profits it generates for even small-time bankers in the form of interest—is enough to turn one’s stomach. However, the realities of conducting life and business for most Americans unfortunately necessitates working within the framework and calls for using Federal Reserve notes to some capacity. Consequently, most people have to use banks.
And that is what makes the Move Your Money campaign appealing to so many. If you don’t like the greed endemic to Wall Street’s biggest firms, you can get out and stop enabling it.
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Robert Johnson, the brains behind the big bank boycott, believes that if enough people move their money out of the megabanks, spreading it thinly across the country, that they could accomplish what Washington has so far refused to do: Break up the Money Trust.
“The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster,” wrote Johnson in a recent commentary promoting his plan. “Meanwhile, America’s Main 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. . . .As a result, a system which was already dangerously concentrated at the top has only become more so.”
Johnson is optimistic that his movement can impact the big boys.
“JP Morgan/Chase, Citi,Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs may be ‘too big to fail’—but they are not too big to feel the impact of hundreds of thousands of people taking action to change a broken financial and political system,” says Johnson. “Let them gamble with their own money, not yours. Let’s turn big banks into smaller banks. We’ll all be better off—and safer—as a result.”
To search for a local bank in your neighborhood, log onto moveyourmoney.info or visit AFP’s site at AmericanFreePress.net and click on the “Move Your Money” link.
Christopher Petherick is a journalist and publisher based in Maryland. For more information, see his website at www.brandywinehouse.us or write directly to BRANDYWINE HOUSE BOOKS AND MEDIA, P.O. Box 638, Cheltenham, MD 20623. Petherick encourages all readers with Internet access to sign up for AFP’s free weekly email newsletter. It’s loaded with house news and special offers available only to newsletter recipients and AFP web site users.
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(Issue # 8, February 22, 2010)
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