According to The Ecologist, 8th December 2011 The Occupy movement is one form of protest against this system, but there are other ways of expressing dissent.
Major banks claim to serve the needs of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), but the financial crisis has demonstrated that most of their lending goes into speculative investment, creating bubbles in property and commodity prices, creating economic instability and negatively impacting poorer countries. Through these activities senior bankers have earned huge sums underwritten by taxpayer funded bailouts, and then, to top it all, have avoided paying tax using webs of tax havens.
Banking oligopoly is in nobody’s best interest, so why not challenge it directly by delinking yourself from it. Here are four strategies to do that.
Strategy 1: Switching bank accounts
When you deposit money with major banks, you may be indirectly supporting negative activities. You are also providing them with a cheap source of funding that they can use to subsidise more risky aspects of their business, like investment banking trading.
Switching bank accounts to a socially responsible bank is a good first step.
Read the whole article here.