Where’s your church’s money? Banking for the common good: Banking for the common good
The classic film It's a Wonderful Life is making a comeback—not as a nostalgic feel-good story but as the centerpiece of a campaign to change the way we bank. It's George Bailey versus Mr. Potter played out at the local ATM.
The Move Your Money project began as a New Year's resolution at the Huffington Post website. The project enlisted filmmaker Eugene Jarecki to create a mashup YouTube video (which has attracted over 518,000 views) that combines clips from It's a Wonderful Life with C-Span footage and commentary to urge people to move their money from scandal-ridden megabanks to local institutions. In response to the housing crisis, predatory lending, subprime loans and rampant gambling on derivatives, individuals can change the banking industry by moving their money from the six largest banks—Citi, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley—to community banks or credit unions.
This sentiment was echoed in a recent announcement from the Appleseed Fund, a socially responsible mutual fund, which declared that it would no longer invest in what it counts as the five "too big to fail" banks (unlike Move Your Money, Appleseed does not include Wells Fargo in the list because that bank's derivative holdings are less than $10 trillion). Appleseed is the first socially conscious investing firm to exclude banks from its investments—in effect adding banking practices to other issues of moral concern, such as alcohol, tobacco, pornography, working conditions, environmental impact and weapons production.
