Occupy Wall Street Archive

Tommy Tomlinson  wrote a commentary for the Charlotte Observer praising the $5 monthly fee BofA will impose for debit card use and furthering the lie that the Occupy Wall Street protestors are rebels without a cause. I’m sure it went over real big in Charlotte, the company town that is the home to Bank of America. McClatchy distributed it nationally. Here’s my response:

You deserve to get zinged for this one. It praises the uncomplicated nature of the $5 fee with not one word of background about why the fee is necessary. It certainly isn’t necessary to pay for the transactions themselves. They’re automated and cost the banks a fraction of what they’re charging merchants today. Their former charges were so inflated and usurious that the government cut them. The $5 fee is an end run to make up for a whole slate of charges that weren’t as confusing as they were unfair or rigged to soak the poor and small business.

Admitting that the press can’t cover [Occupy Wall Street] “because the protesters don’t have a specific agenda” says more about the press than the protest. Covering these demonstrations requires old fashioned journalism, not the new kind where the camera crew and reporter shows up at the site expecting a one-sheet press release and a “press information officer” that knows how to button up an interview after a series of soundbyte-styled answers.

A few hours of web research will reveal lots of sites where potential demands are being discussed and voted on. This protest, with its high number of college graduates whose issues revolve around unemployment and loan debt, is a rich vein of knowledge. Sure, we’ve got our doofuses with their “deadhead vibe” whose contribution ends at good pot. But we’ve got some very smart folks as well.

Let’s just start with one demand: that somebody in the executive offices of the banks of marble actually face criminal prosecution with the possibility of going to jail. You’ll find this demand in nearly every proposed list. All the homework has been done and is in the civil lawsuits that the FHFA (Fannie and Freddie’s overseers) have brought against the banks. The names of the vice-presidents who likely perjured themselves are in the defendants’ lists.

So all we need is an indictment. Maybe we’ll get one if we have a press that starts writing about these things, instead of bemoaning that it cannot figure out what the protestors actually want without taking the time or trouble to find out the old fashioned way.

There are subtle signs everywhere that many of the people who might be least likely to endorse the Occupy Wall Street movement are closet supporters. It’s not just the police whose rank-and-file seem to act differently than their white-shirted managers.

A few days ago a package showed up in my mailbox that I found most fascinating.

In 1905 the Wobblies, or Industrial Workers of the World, was founded in Chicago. IWW members were the most radical of the union organizers and their union remains the most violently suppressed through modern American history

The Wobblies were big on using media to spread their message, and in 1905 that meant singing protest songs. I’ve always wanted one of their little red songbooks, which they re-printed at their 100 years anniversary. I finally bought one on ebay.

But when it arrived and I carefully unwrapped it, I found it enclosed in a large manila envelope, folded such that you couldn’t see what the envelope really was.

It was an inter-office document carrier obviously from a large bank with a huge mortgage company and title plant, lifted by a worker for the job of bringing the protest book to me.

It was just one more example that you never can tell how well your message is resonating with people who are not in a position to publicly agree with you.

I’m sure some of these songs are being sung again on Wall Street today.

But the banks are made of marble
with a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
that the farmer sweated for.

–Banks of Marble ( page 9)
Words & Music by Les Rice,

The movement to encourage everyone to pull their money out of Bank of America has a compelling populist ring. Among the gang of thieves that wrecked our economy, BofA holds a special place. You see it in the defendant lists in the suits against bankers who lied to sell iffy mortgages as triple-A. If you count their subsidiaries, BofA is number one.

The angry people who #OccupyWallStreet are learning from each other. We all helped the collapse along by our lack of attention to detail and far more than the torches and pitchforks, the banks fear a population that cannot be placated by the half-truths and corporate doublespeak that they’ve become so good at spewing.

Photo courtesy Scott Lynch

Our financial predicament is complicated, and for #ows to really make a difference we need a movement quite unlike what we’ve seen before. We need a crowd that understands a nuanced answer well enough that each person in it can make a nuanced argument.

That’s why a successful movement that pulls all the money out of BofA is a bad idea. This financial crisis is more insurance fraud than knocking over a bank vault. When you steal money that others have pledged to replace, your crime affects far fewer people, and your ability to avoid prosecution for it grows large. That’s why no banksters are in jail today.

Because we don’t want bank failures, we told depositors that no matter what, we’ll cover most of their deposits regardless of what the bank does. So if BofA drives itself into the ditch, the taxpayer has to run in and pay off the debt, and the bankers have proven they don’t mind playing chicken with other people’s assets.

We need to remove money from BofA slowly. It may, in fact, be what they want: now that the government won’t let them soak the poor, they only want the rich as clients. So $5 fees and closing branches in poorer areas only helps them shed the folks that are no longer of any use to them.

That is why we need a nuanced approach: slowly reducing the size of the institution so that they don’t show up with a tin cup at the Fed’s door. It’s also why an audit of the Fed is a dangerous proposition. While we probably ought to know how bad things are, we always need to be mindful that there isn’t enough money to satisfy all the depositors should they show up at the same time.

When you’ve lied for so long, suddenly telling the truth can have some sudden and disastrous results. An understanding of nuance can help us embrace the truth without creating the panic that has driven the bailouts and the lies for so long.