This past weekend, the weather in all of our locations was great for getting out and doing things like talking a walk, running some errands or delivering donations to the needy (like some of those at the Occupy DC encampment). For hundreds of thousands of Americans, this past weekend was also a great weekend for moving - specifically, moving money away from the biggest banks in America.
From Seattle and Texas, to San Francisco, the Quad Cities, Philadelphia, Des Moines - and yes, even Wall Street - Americans have finally begun putting their money where their interests are. From clergy to college students, Americans are yanking their funds away from the big banks that quite obviously don't give a damn about the needs of Americans.
According to the Credit Union Association of America, since September 29th of this year, 650,000 Americans have moved their money from big banks to credit unions and smaller local banks. That's more people moving their money to smaller, more locally focused financial institutions since September than all the Americans who joined credit unions in 2010.
Like other facets of the Occupy movement, the Move Your Money project also appears to have worked successfully - a fact we're fairly certain many of our colleagues in the mainstream, corporate-owned media will ignore today.
While some of the media is still claiming that the bigger banks simply don't care about the kinds of customers that are leaving for the credit unions, the fact is, those customers are worth millions, or possibly billions of dollars. If the average checking account balance of those 650,000 customers was only $2500 - less than half the average checking account balance - the big banks just lost $1.6 billion dollars in the last five weeks.
That's not the kind of money even the big banks can afford to let get away at that speed.
Yet, even Wall Street insiders admit: the people who control the Wall Street banks and the large corporate entities those banks often prop up, just can't seem to handle some hard and ugly truths about current Wall Street business methods and who they really are.
One of those truths is something the Occupiers are dead right about when they blast the richest of the rich in America as mostly "Wall Street" types. The overwhelming majority - 60% - of the top one-tenth of one percent of the wealthiest people in America work on or with Wall Street, banking, and large corporate interests.
Another ugly truth is that nearly 300 of the biggest corporations those one-tenth percenters ran paid little or no taxes over the last three years. Thirty of those companies paid no income taxes at all, or even got paid by the U.S. government. During that same period, those same companies raked in profits of $160 billon.
The truth that should shock the Wall Street types the most is the one we bet they'll refuse to focus on - and the one we think you should remember most today. It's what the Occupy movement did, through millions of Americans, with this past weekend's Move Your Money day.
We - the little people, the peons if you will - took our small piles of money to our small local banks and credit unions, institutions that WILL lend and support our local economies (unlike many of the big banks), and took more than $1.6 billion away from the tons of cash the big banks have to play with.
And we did it in just over a month. Imagine what we could accomplish if we kept up that kind of pace over the next year. This is only just the first step.
There's an old saying about how it's better to be pissed off than pissed on. Now more than ever, we think maybe the Wall St. one-percenters are having to re-learn that lesson the hard way.
