How Main Street Is Moving On, While Wall Street Is All Wet

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.

Friday Funday: Hope & Clowns

For a week filled with ups and downs of all kinds, our staff begins today with an odd sense of both peace and hopefulness. We're not sure why we feel this way, though - which is especially disconcerting to certain members of our staff.

Some of that positivity comes from seeing the beginnings of the next phase of the Occupy movement. We're not talking about the vandalism in places like Oakland. Actually, what gives us hope is the fact that both members of Occupy Oakland and the Oakland Police Department agree that Occupiers didn't cause the damage and confrontations that some media outlets (especially those on the right) have been focusing on.

In truth, both police and legitimate protesters discovered it was "anarchists and provocateurs" - people who've purposely wanted to make the Occupiers look bad - who are to blame for the destruction and mayhem.

Police and protesters, coming together, to agree on the facts. There's a positive turn.

We were also pleased by the work of the Nebraska Legislature this week, which settled on five different potential bills to solve the problem of the Keystone pipeline. Many of Nebraska's state senators are Daily Felltoon readers, and we were chief among the voices earlier this week encouraging them to focus on their obligation to their constituents rather than on what the TransCanada oil company wants. That those senators seem to have listened to us is another thing contributing to our cheerful outlook.

These are good things, yes - but we're not getting all kumbaya on you. There are still plenty of clowns out there and as Nate Silver noted, one of those clowns could still win the Presidential election next year, if President Obama doesn't. That says nothing about all the clowns ramping up to run for other major offices next year. ['Joe The Plumber' (who isn't even a licensed plumber ) for Congress? As Charlie Brown would say, "Good Grief."]

There are still plenty of ways our fellow Americans and other humans on the planet could send our collective futures spinning into disaster. It's crunch time for the supercommittee - and their success is anything but guaranteed. Also, right-wing, anti-worker billionaires are attempting to buy the election on the anti-worker bill next week in Ohio.

The Senate, for the THIRD time in recent weeks, has decided it won't even allow DISCUSSION of one of the President's ideas to create jobs.

Even that doesn't entirely disappoint us, though, as Senator Ben Nelson - who voted with the Republicans to NOT allow discussion of legislation to help create jobs - has said he might not run for Senate next year. Considering the way Nelson's voting record is littered with votes against the best interest of Americans, we're inclined to think that it might not be such a bad thing if Ben sat this one out.

Some of our generic hopefulness may even have to do with the turn towards the holiday season, and all the festivities the season brings.

Whatever the reasoning, we're entering this weekend looking ahead to the next few months - and even into 2012 - with a bit of hope.

From our perspective, it's not a bad way to start a weekend.

When Hell Freezes Over...

As members of our staff travel around the country, we often get into discussions, with friends and strangers alike, that more often than not involve politics.

These discussions are sometimes effective to help educate, inform, and change the minds of people, including us. Much of the time, though, we realize that these discussions are simply words, people venting to one another, looking for some kind of answers to questions that make all of us - left, right, and center - shake our heads in collective frustration.

Putting words into majority-supported, positive political action isn't something Americans have been well-known for, over the last few decades. Our U.S. Congress - both House and Senate - has become the poster child for this kind of failure of conviction, with actions like the reaffirmation of the official U.S. motto by the House on Wednesday.

The legislatures in many statehouses across the country aren't much better.

This lack of action - almost everywhere - is one reason we were so excited to see what happened in Oakland on Wednesday, with the first general strike anywhere in the country in 65 years.

Most of our readers, and our entire staff, have never really experienced a general strike, so we understand that some of you may be a bit concerned about what is involved in a general strike.

In short, a general strike shuts down almost everything, in a predominantly peaceful way. Businesses, activity at ports, bus service, and most other economic activity shuts down, due to workers not showing up or even just walking away for a day. In short, a general strike is what happens when a significant majority of people follow the example of the character Howard Beale, in the legendary film Network, when he says, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

Contrary to the propaganda from some on the right, the general strike in Oakland has thus far been very effective in what they've been attempting to do - stop the flow of normal activities for a time.

We agree with others who've made the important point that the general strike in Oakland isn't about the recent police brutality or even the Occupy Oakland movement and its disputes with the city. The general strike in Oakland is about the same thing the Occupy movement has been about, both in the U.S. and abroad - that REAL actions need to be taken by those in positions of power, and that those politicians need to take responsibility.

With that in mind, it's also important to remember that in a system of government like ours, in the U.S., it's WE who have the power, - and the responsibility. We can take responsibility for things that are hard choices, like President Obama has done this week with the economy and with the final decision on whether the Keystone pipeline will even be allowed to go through. Or we can deny, obfuscate, and generally make excuses, like Herman Cain about allegations against him and his campaign, or Rick Perry, with his recent odd speech in New Hampshire.

With respect to the inequalities that lay at the heart of the Occupy movement's concerns, like it or not, Americans will soon have a choice. They can follow the president's lead and be responsible, pushing their politicians to clean up the system, and raise the real collection of tax dollars from those who have been wealthy enough so far to skate out on paying their fair share.

Or we can cry, whine, accuse others, and attempt to avoid the responsibility of accepting the reality that - as a country - we're simply not collecting the taxes we need to operate our government effectively.

For those people who've said, in the past, that the rich in America will have to pay their fair share only when hell freezes over?

Let's just say we don't think it's only the weather in Nebraska that's getting colder.