Laura Bassett has an article up at the Huffington Post about NY Communities for Change‘s successful campaign to get the Village of Hempstead to move its money out of JPMorgan Chase. From the article:
The Village of Hempstead, a relatively low-income, minority-heavy municipality on Long Island, pulled its money out of JP Morgan Chase bank on Tuesday as part of a statewide campaign protesting the bank’s dismal mortgage modification record.
…
The Village of Hempstead is the first municipality in the country to close a bank account due to foreclosure policies. But a spokesperson for NY Communities for Change said many local governments throughout the state are planning to close their Chase accounts in the coming months. New York City Councilman Jumaane Williams marched into a Park Avenue Chase bank in February to close his account, and major unions have also announced their intention to pull their pension-fund money out of JP Morgan Chase.
…
The Village of Hempstead is the first municipality in the country to close a bank account due to foreclosure policies. But a spokesperson for NY Communities for Change said many local governments throughout the state are planning to close their Chase accounts in the coming months. New York City Councilman Jumaane Williams marched into a Park Avenue Chase bank in February to close his account, and major unions have also announced their intention to pull their pension-fund money out of JP Morgan Chase.
“Banks like Chase should be ashamed of themselves,” Hempstead Deputy Mayor Henry Conyers said in a press release. “They were bailed out with taxpayer money – now look what they are doing to the taxpayer: foreclosing instead of modifying.”
Click here to read the entire article at the Huffington Post.
When privately-owned banks create money as ‘loans’, the profits (interest and seignorage) go back to them. If we had more public banks, we could bank with them, get our ‘loans’ from them too, and the profits would go back to the owners as before except that this time, it being a public bank, it’s us! Every time we took out a bank ‘loan’, we the community would be the ones to profit, not private bankers! So, then let’s bring on the publicly owned banks, right? Wrong! Northern Rock, the only completely publicly-owned bank we have in the country, is being sold by the government, the one supposed to act on behalf of the electorate, back to the banking community that ran it into the ground in the first place! This is a disaster.