Want To End Wall Street Crimes? First Step: Stop Banking With Them [video]

The Occupy Wall Street movement made economic inequality and Wall Street two of its primary focuses in the fall of 2011. Since then, Wall Street has been prominently featured in the public discourse since the failure of the political system to address the dismal outcomes of the 2007-8 recession. Public criticism stubbornly persists in 2015 owing to the stagnating economy for workers competing for 1.4 million fewer full-time jobs since 2008 in a landscape of four decades of real wage decline. By contrast, Wall Street profits have ballooned to new highs under the protection racket of the Obama administration. Not one prosecution or even a single arrest has been made of a Wall Street banker, due to the plethora of documented criminal acts leading up to or during/after the crisis. Meanwhile, over 7,700 protesters have been arrested protesting Wall Street banks.

Although the Occupy camps across the United States have been cleared-out due to the collaborative efforts of the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the Wall Street banks themselves, popular resentment towards the nation’s largest and most powerful banks is at an all-time high, and the question of what to do about the bordello of Wall Street dirty deeds culminating in the financial crisis of 2007-8 lingers on.

The first-step answer, as the title of this piece recommends, is to quit banking with Wall Street banks. Seldom comes anything good by rewarding criminals with your own money. It’s something nearly any individual with a bank account can do to make a meaningful contribution to curbing Wall Street power, one dollar at a time.

The Bank Transfer Day campaign in 2011, although not as successful as organizers first claimed, demonstrated that a simple campaign message can mobilize tens of thousands of people to take action against Wall Street banks. This Jenga-like strategy of removing money from the lower portions of the power structure could ultimately lead to the toppling of the largest pyramid scheme on the planet.

So who are the “Wall Street banks”?

Too Big Has Failed, a collective of activists advocating for moving money out of Wall Street banks, have identified the top 10 banks by assets. They are: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of NY Mellon, US Bank, HSBC N. America, and Capital One.

The group has put out a video outlining three ways Wall Street banks hurt you. They explain the best way to switch banks on their website.

The Inquisitr reported on a new Brad Pitt thriller called The Big Short, based on the book by Michael Lewis, that tells the stories of several individuals with Wall Street backgrounds who predicted the 2007-8 crash and profited from it.

[Image via Vlad Lazarenko/Wikipedia]