Withdraw thy savings from ye olde school bank!
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There are two parties urging you to do this.
Jerry Stiller
One of the parties is Jerry Stiller:
Jerry Stiller in New York City for a book reading for Festivus.
[Photo: Daniel Krieger via Wikimedia Foundation]
I could not navigate the copyright quagmire well enough to show you the actual ad. But Jerry is a paid spokesman for the 1%.
Capital None
We, the 99%, urge you to move your money out of any for-profit bank and deposit it in a not-for-profit credit union. It is not a radical idea, but is does fall within the scope of direct action broadly understood. I heard it proposed by two time gubernatorial candidate Grace Ross1. There was one earlier attempt by Occupy_Boston.2 I was told that the banks simply refused to give them their money. The current effort appears to be nationwide. Like many things associated with Occupy .*3, leadership is “dynamic and evolving.” The Facebook incarnation lists Kristen Christian from LA as originator and it is called Bank Transfer Day. Occupy Boston lists Move Your Money.
The Move Your Money Project describes itself on the bottom of it’s home page as Another Stadia Studio Project. It appears to be a for-profit venture from St. Louis MO. I’ll reserve judgement about whether that is a problem for what I hope will qualify as an anti-capitalist movement. Occupy Wall Street was started by Adbusters Magazine. A reporter from the Wall Street Journal took that to be proof that we are at heart a capitalist movement. Wikipedia paints a picture of Kalle Lasn at the very least opposed to corporatocracy. And my new friend Liam tells me that Lasn is “the real deal.”
The project has produced a video which has very high productions values. Footage from “It’s a Wonderful Life” is intercut with footage from CNN and CSPAN from 2008. It is well done, but I’m concerned that folks will buy into the idea that banks are the only way to aggregate capital but had strayed just a bit in Frank Capra’s time. By 1946, the New Deal and/or World War II had mitigated the worst of the Depression. But in the early days of the Depression a lot of folks were more with Woody Guthrie in The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd:
Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.
Despite it’s fairly moderate approach, I do think Move Your Money Day is worth doing for those that have some4. It is a way to support Occupy .* It is not radical, but it may help. And perhaps it will inspire more dramatic efforts.
We, at Dewey Square and others sites around the nation and around the world would not still be in place were it not for the outpouring of community support. Thank you. I hope, fairly soon, to discuss what I have learned about Consensus, Contradiction, and Community.
To add some energy to this movement, some friends from Occupy Boston will leave Dewey Square on a tour of the Financial District Saturday morning Nov. 5 at 10:30 AM.
I will be at Harvard guarding the library.
1Grace ran once on the Green-Rainbow Party ticket. It was the Massachusetts branch of the national Green Party. Green-Rainbow still exists, but is has been demoted to a ‘political designation’ due to low vote count. She ran again as a Democrat. She gave an excellent talk at Community Church of Boston.
2If you want to appear hipper than you really are, you can follow @Occupy_Boston on Twitter.
3I have used the language of regular expressions in the title of a previous post. I repeat the explanation. Regular expressions are a part of the Chomsky Hierarchy – Class 3 according to Wikipedia. I had used them for thirty years. In all that time, I never heard Chomsky’s name connected with them even though I heard his name at anti-war rallies all the time. The dot is the symbol for any single character in the alphabet of the language. The asterisk indicates “zero or more occurences”. Combined, they match any number of anythings i.e. all possible sentences of the language. Occupy is growing.
4I’m not penniless, but close to it thanks to the recalcitrance of Mr. Leo Godwin of the Quincy office of the United States of Blackwater Revenue Service. Even without Leo, Harvard’s campaign to reduce the standard of living of it’s low wage workers would have me homeless as I am. But what money I do have is in the Harvard University Employees Credit Union.
