Draining Banks Of Cash Is a Fool's Errand
Banks: Using the Guy Fawkes mask emblem of Occupy Wall Street and the "Anonymous" hacker group, leftists are planning a big Nov. 5 to-do to pull their money from big banks and put it into small banks. It's economic idiocy.
Led by the likes of MoveOn.org, Arianna Huffington and a supposed Los Angeles art gallery owner named Kristen Christian, the leftist game of "blame the banks" for the acts of Democratic politicians is coming together Friday - Guy Fawkes Day in England - in an extravaganza of events alternately titled "Bank Transfer Day," "Move Your Money" day and "Make Wall Street Pay."
These Facebook-based groups have drawn tens of thousands of "fans," with thousands "pledging" to close their accounts at banks with more than $65 billion in assets - Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank, Chase Bank, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley - and take them to credit unions and community banks.
Big banks, you see, are evil, having taken TARP money and caused the financial crash, while smaller banks are virtuous and therefore worthy of patronage.
It's absurd. All banks, whatever their size, have in fact been victims of political conditions created by Democratic politicians now supporting Occupy Wall Street.
Expropriatory "reforms" in the Dodd-Frank bill, for instance, have dictated prices while forcing banks to lend to uncreditworthy but politically favored borrowers. That's forced banks to cut credit to productive businesses and consumers, and to raise fees to compensate for the interference in the market.
And as our own Paul Sperry reported this week, these crushing diktats hit banks of all sizes. But the desire to blame the big banks instead of examine political conditions goes on.
"The more business credit unions have, the more loans with low rates they're able to offer to small and medium-sized businesses," declared Christian's "Bank Transfer Day" Facebook page.
This will increase growth at the local level as these businesses are able to expand and hire additional employees," missing the irony that shifting money to credit unions will make them big banks, too.
But the real aim is to put big banks out of business - the same agenda of Big Labor, which in the early months of the Obama administration dispatched SEIU mobs to bank locations to disrupt business, and then to bankers' homes, terrifying their children.
Fortune reporter Nina Easton witnessed one such siege in her neighborhood last year. SEIU was $4 million in hock to the bank and wanted to unionize its employees, she noted in her report.
It's also the same agenda that Huffington launched with her "Move Your Money" media campaign, which drove states and cities to move money from big banks to credit unions regardless of their needs.
This is also a bid to lay the blame for the economic crisis at the feet of bankers instead of Obama and congressional Democrats who are backing the radicals as a means of deflecting attention from their own failures. It's time to put the blame where it belongs.
