Lunchbreak Link-A-Thon
Remember, Remembers
(Over Mimosas)

You’ve likely heard that today is Bank Transfer Day.

As my own bank account will attest, I understand very little about finance and even less about industry, and if I’m honest, I have to admit that deep down, in a place preceding logic, I actually believe the phrase “monetary instruments” was devised by a shadowy cabal of Frank Luntzes whose sole mission is to piss me off. (Oh Frank, you had me at “death tax.”) But since TARP, it’s become increasingly clear that very few of the people who understand the financial industry very well are looking out for me. Perhaps you’ve come to a similar conclusion.

And so I’ve gotten up early to bring you a special Saturday Brunch edition of the Lunchbreak Link-a-thon, wherein I’ve compiled, from sources more knowledgeable than I and more trustworthy than Timothy Geithner, all the information you’ll need to understand and participate in this unprecedented people’s holiday:

• It’s more apparent every day that the financial institutions most responsible for our global economic collapse will face precious little consequence for their actions. They’re being granted immunity left and right for the kind of change they can find behind the cushions of their corporate couches, ensuring the full extent of their rampant foreclosure fraud will never come to light. Of course their most dangerous practices seem in fact to have been perfectly legal, and this situation, too, shows little improvement. After three years, we still haven’t broken up the too-big-to-fail banks, we haven’t reinstated Glass–Steagall, and we don’t have Elizabeth Warren looking out for us at the helm of the CFPB.
• It has thus become clear that the only way to rein in the big banks, to curb their excesses and shrink their outsized influence on our government is to do it our damn selves. Enter Bank Transfer Day:
  

  Remember, remember…to close your bank account and transfer your funds into a credit union on the fifth of November?

  That’s what more than 32,000 people on Facebook have pledged to do as a form of protest against the much-reviled debit card fees that some of the nation’s largest banks are testing or planning on introducing.

  Remarkably, all of those people came together in just over a week under the umbrella of a single Facebook event page, the aptly-named “Bank Transfer Day,” created by Kristen Christian, a 27-year-old Los Angeles-based independent art gallery owner.

  The Facebook pledge now has well over 80,000 signatories.

• This idea rapidly outgrew its Facebook event page. Organizations like the Move Your Money Project and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee quickly circulated their own similar pledges, and more remarkably, unaffiliated citizens began promoting the idea with their own time and ingenuity. A Daily Kos diarist’s uncanny story of police officers defending his right to publicize the event outside major bank branches went viral:
  

  BofABoss comes out with a triumphant smirk. Officer1 turns to him:

  “He has the right to speak and the right to hand out flyers. Unless he blocks you or causes a disturbance, he has the right to be here – please don’t call the police again if he is not bothering you. If you don’t like free speech you should move to another country.”

• So will this work? As always, the answer depends on how you measure success. But like any act of protest, the more people participate, the louder their message rings out:
  

  With the sheer volume of media coverage and credit union mobilization, Bank Transfer Day is finally providing fed-up, frustrated consumers with what they need: a real course of action….

  The 80,000 consumers who have pledged to move their money won’t break a sweat on banking executives’ brow quite yet. To put it in context, that’s less than 1 percent of Bank of America’s 57 million customer base. However, if all of those consumers encouraged four or five friends to join BTD and 400,000 consumers hopped the bandwagon, that’s the kind of hole in big banks’ pocket to garner attention.

• Which begs the question, are people participating? In a word, yes:
  

  In a survey of 5,000 of its credit union members CUNA estimates that at least 650,000 consumers across the nation have joined credit unions since Sept. 29, the day Bank of America unveiled its now-rescinded $5 monthly debit card fee. Also during that time, CUNA estimates that credit unions have added $4.5 billion in new savings accounts, likely from the new members and existing members shifting their funds.

• Mother Jones’ Josh Harkinson researched the subject by moving his own money from Wells Fargo, with whom he’d had an extended, abusive reltionship, to a local Credit Union in San Francisco:
  

  Try as I may, I can’t find any other reason not to sign up. Free online bill pay: check. Fee-free overdraft protection linked to a credit card: check. Free online check deposits: check. Free banking on smart phones: check. Free change-sorting machine: check. The Fire Credit Union will even give you a personalized debit card. The khaki-clad employee pulls out his own card, which bears a picture of his golden retriever….

  When I challenge a Wells Fargo banker to give me one good reason not to move my money over to a credit union, he really can’t.

  He then compiled a handy guide to moving your money

• Sounds great, but how does one find a new bank? The Move Your Money Project will help you find a community bank or credit union near you. You can research the reputations of those Credit Unions at Credit Karma. Yelp is also a valuable resource for this sort of thing.
• But Kenan, you’re thinking, you took way too long to post this, and my crummy multinational bank closes in like twelve minutes. It’s okay. Monday’s another good day for moving your money. Besides, this is just the beginning:
  

  Tracing out the cause-and-effect connections here are tricky. Bank overreach, Occupy Wall Street and Bank Transfer Day are all feeding into and reinforcing each other. If Bank of America hadn’t announced plans to charge a $5-a-month fee for debit card use and Occupy Wall Street hadn’t pointed an accusing finger at the financial sector with such a powerful media-amplified voice, Kristen Christian’s Bank Transfer Day might never have advanced beyond her own family and friends.

  But now the genie is out of the bottle. Because it doesn’t stop on Nov. 5. The movement to go local, go independent, and make sure that our money serves our own values rather than the bottom line of huge banks will only gain energy as word spreads, and small victories accumulate.

• Make some noise:
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