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Voting doesn’t work anymore. If it did, Americans would get what they want — or at least some of it — from Washington.

But they don’t.

Instead of the people’s priority, which is jobs, country club conservatives in Congress stubbornly fixate on deficits. Instead of ensuring millionaires and corporations pay their fair share, House Republicans passed a budget that would destroy Medicare and Medicaid.

Corporate and clandestine campaign contributions have undermined the power of traditional voting, the kind done at polls on election day. Rather than voters, politicians now serve donors — billionaires and banksters — who invest untold millions and demand returns in the form of self-serving policy.

This is demoralizing to those who cherish democracy and the sanctity of one person, one vote.

Hope, however, arrived with the debit card fee victory. The 99 percent forced Bank of America to back off its proposed fee. Average Americans accomplished this by voting differently, not at the ballot box but at the twitter account, the Occupy march and the teller window, where 1 million depositors went to move $4.5 billion from the big Wall Street banks to community banks and credit unions. They found another way to exercise their franchise and force the powerful to respond.

The 99 percent must exploit the method of this triumph to get what they need. Because politicians sure as hell aren’t giving them what they want.

The numbers don’t lie. Coin-operated conservatives in Congress have rejected President Obama’s jobs plan, parts of the jobs plan and Obama’s pitch to raise taxes on the rich to pay for it.

And yet, the electorate strongly supports both surtaxing millionaires and the elements of the jobs plan. In a CNN poll in October, 75 percent favored sending federal money to the states to hire teachers and first responders and 72 percent favored infrastructure investments.

A whopping 76 percent wanted millionaires to pay higher taxes.

In that same CNN poll, there’s another compelling statistic. Sixty-one percent said reducing unemployment was the most important issue. Reducing the deficit didn’t even come close at 35 percent.

The numbers aren’t flukes. Another survey, taken a week later by CBS found the same thing. (more…)

Just this week, Rebuild the Dream (an organization that I helped to found) launched a Move Your Money website, where people are pledging to close their accounts at Wall Street banks in protest of their outrageous behavior before, during, and after our nation’s financial crash. I am stunned to report that as of this morning at 9am Pacific, 69,127 have already made pledges, and the number keeps climbing.

Tomorrow is a big day. Saturday, November 5 is a huge “Move Your Money” day. Tens of thousands of people all over the country will leave the big banks and move their money to community banks and credit unions — where people remember things like customer service and loyalty.

For the past decade, our economy has been hijacked by Wall Street banks. Banks that knowingly made bad loans to homeowners and sold them as “can’t miss” investments. Banks that took our tax money to bail themselves out, while handing out billions in bonuses to their executives. Banks that have so far escaped accountability for their role in our nation’s economic crash.

If you use a big bank, like so many of us, now’s the time to make a change.

We need to stop feeding what we are fighting. Let’s fund banks that will fund our American dreams, not our American nightmares. (more…)

By Mike Lux
Author, “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be”

One of the most discouraging things about the last two years was seeing swing voters in focus groups, when asked what President Obama’s economic strategy was, repeat different versions of “Well, I know he said we needed to save the banks. Beyond that, I’m not sure.” When Obama in his first State of the Union gave a vigorous defense of bailing out the banks, saying he knew it about as popular as a root canal, and saying “I get it”, it was very memorable to voters. But when his predictions about what would happen when the banks were stabilized — they would start making loans to businesses, and businesses would start hiring — didn’t happen, and instead the banks gave themselves record breaking bonuses, voters turned on Obama fast. In exit polls on Nov. 2nd, when asked who was most to blame for the bad economy, voters by a wide margin said Wall St. was most to blame, and the voters who said that went Republican by a 14-point margin.

Obviously, saving the banks hasn’t been the President’s only economic strategy. The stimulus bill, while too small, was an important job creator/saver. Saving the American auto industry was an incredibly important thing to do. Health care reform was in part a long term economic strategy. The infrastructure bank idea is a great potential job creator. Extending unemployment insurance helps keep money in the economy. And all the tax cutting going on is clearly meant to have some stimulative effect, although how much is highly debatable.

However, there have certainly been times where Secretary Geithner, who has been the main driver of the economic strategy, seems to think and act as if helping the big banks and helping the economy amount to the same thing. The tepid reaction to the foreclosure crisis has sure felt that way — apparently we can’t freeze foreclosures or do much to help homeowners because it might “endanger” the banks. In fact, I would argue the exact opposite: that our number one economic strategy right now should be to shift money from the big banks to the real economy, to Main Street businesses and workers and consumers. The big banks are hoarding extraordinary amounts of money, and they are clearly not investing it in job creating businesses. They are speculating with it, they are trading with it, they are investing in complicated financial instruments that do nothing to create jobs- in fact, they are sucking capital out of the real economy that might actually create jobs. These massive financial conglomerates have way too much concentrated wealth and market power, and that is weakening the rest of the economy. (more…)

By Don McNay
Award winning financial columnist and structured settlement guru

My father was a professional gambler and used to carry a roll of money that he called “walking around” money.

Walking around money is what the SEC settled for in the Goldman Sachs case.

$550 million is walking around money to a company like Goldman Sachs. It is less than 5% of the $10 billion in bonuses it paid itself last year.

Maybe “walking around” money is an understatement.

The stock market understood that Goldman got the best of the deal. Goldman’s stock price surged 4.43% on rumors of a settlement. As the Huffington Post pointed out, the stock gain was probably enough to cover the $550 million fine.

Also, Goldman got a monkey off its back. It can go on without a lawsuit hanging over its head. If the SEC had taken the time to do a through and complete investigations, who knows what they would have found. (more…)

 By Stacy Mitchell
Senior researcher, New Rules Project’s Community Banking Initiative 

The New Rules Project, in partnership with HuffPost’s Move Your Money campaign, is using its Community Banking Initiative to get out the word that banking locally can put the power back in the hands of individuals and communities, rather than Wall Street’s CEOs.

Those who wonder whether public anger at big banks and the Move Your Money sentiment sweeping the country is substantial enough to impact these giants need only look at the banks’ own marketing over the last few weeks to see the proof.

In a spate of new advertisements and PR maneuvers, the nation’s largest banks are working hard to win us back. They are, in effect, standing on our doorstep, flowers in hand, trying to convince us they’ve changed.

They’re using words like “local” and “community,” because they know quite well that there’s a rival for our affections. A recent Zogby poll found that nearly one in ten Americans had moved at least some of their business to small banks or credit unions.

One jilted lover, Citibank, has launched a blog devoted to showcasing the “new Citi.” The site, which Citibank is promoting through newspaper and magazine ads, features a video statement by CEO Vikram Pandit, who offers a few vaguely apologetic statements before detailing how Citi is a changed bank.

We’ve given up boozing and gambling, Citibank seems to be saying as Pandit assures us that the new Citi has embraced “a culture of responsible finance.”

In his opening post, Pandit describes this as a “new chapter” and invites us to participate in a conversation. “We promise we’re listening,” he writes.

So far, many of the user comments, which are moderated, appear to come from Citibank investors, but a few disgruntled customers have managed to get through. “What Cit has done to ‘help’ me in the last year: interest rate increase to 29 percent!” writes Peter. “I have never been late with a payment… [You have] a total lack of caring toward your customer base.”

“No amount of empty words can help you guys,” comments another, now ex-, customer of Citibank.

The site makes rather conspicuous use of the words “local” and “community,” suggesting that Citigroup, which has assets of $1.3 trillion, knows exactly where its customers are moving their bank accounts. When you load the site, a pop-up window that fills the center of the screen describes the company as a team of “local community bankers.”

Citi is not the only giant financial conglomerate wrapping itself in the mantle of a local community bank. During the Olympics, Wells Fargo, which has $1.2 trillion in assets and some 10,000 locations, ran television commercials in which it described itself as “the nation’s leading community bank.”

Although there’s no set definition of a community bank, it’s commonly defined as a bank that is rooted in one place and has no more than $1 billion in assets. Wells Fargo is about 1200 times that size.

In a biting response to the commercials, Camden Fine, head of the Independent Community Bankers of America, warned, “Wall Street mega-firms better be careful what they call themselves lest they be confused with actual community banks that regulators allow to fail.”

It’s no surprise that big banks are grabbing onto words like “local” and “community,” says Tim Pannell, president of Financial Marketing Solutions, which develops branding and advertising for banks. “Big banks understand that those are the key words that are creating success for a lot of community banks,” said Pannell. “That’s what they’ve been hammered with in all these local markets, where the community banks have said, you don’t need a big bank, what you need is a local bank.”

Rather than pretending to be small itself, JPMorgan Chase has taken a slightly different tack. New print ads running in the New York Times and elsewhere present the bank as a generous financial backer of small businesses: “At JPMorgan Chase, we recognize that small businesses are critical to economic recovery and to building America’s future…. When creditworthy businesses come to us for help, we look to find every opportunity to provide the funding they need to grow.”

According to FDIC data, however, JPMorgan Chase is very much a laggard when it comes to small business lending. With just 16 percent of its commercial lending going to small business loans in 2009, Chase is not even remotely in the same league as community banks, which devoted more than half of their commercial loan portfolios to small business. But even more stunning is the fact that Chase even lags other giant banks (those with $100 billion or more in assets), which allocated an average of 19 percent of their 2009 lending to small business loans.

(Take a look at these graphs to see just how little support for small businesses big banks provide.)
All of this is just an early taste of what the rest of year is likely to bring. Nervous about customer defections and holding a lot more cash than they had last year, big banks are planning to spend big bucks on marketing this year. We should expect more speeches about how they’ve changed and more false claims about community and small business. But let’s not be seduced into taking these jerks back.

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Stacy Mitchell, who has tracked corporate “local washing” across a variety of industries, is a senior researcher with the New Rules Project and its Community Banking Initiative.

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