Forum Post: A Practical Suggestion for a Campaign

A POLITICALLY ASTUTE FRIENDS OFFERS THE FOLLOWING -

If you're looking for an idea to float when you're next rubbing shoulders with the Wall Street protesters, here's a proposal consistent with my recommendation that some specfic action which is not illegal, can be implemented without much money or fuss, and would make its object take notice because it causes some pain for them

I assume that the NY people have already established contact with many movements throughout the US and in foreign countries, and seem to have chosen Chase Bank as a legitimate target that exemlifies their complaints.

Suggest to each of the movements around the US and overseas to get their adherents to withdraw any money that have with Chase: lines of credit, savings deposits, checking accounts,especially those with automatic contributions, etc.\

If they can mobilize say 10,000 people (a small number) to do this, and if the average bank usage is $5,000, then it would cause a run on Chase of $50 million, perhaps a small amount for Chase, but noticable, especially when they are trying to attract customers from Citibank, etc. If it were 100,000 people worldwide, and the average were $10,000, the withdrawal from Chase would be $1 billion: now we're talking money that would get everyone at Chase paying attention. The consumers money could be deposited with another bank that showed some interest in implementing the movement's objectives; if this didn't result in change, the money could be moved elsewhere.

The earliest success of the action tends to promote more people to participate; a reaction by Chase creates the sense that the movement has some influence, and teses are the intermediate steps necessary to help the movement achieve some power, and see that it has influence that could be used to achieve greater results..

Demonstrations have to cause some pain to the objective, and have to be relatively easy to implement, and not cause comparable pain to the participants.

An analogy would be the bus boycott in the south to make the bus companies allow blacks to enter indiscriminately. It worked, and it was one of the beginning for the civil rights movement.