(MintPress)— Occupy protesters from the West coast and beyond have been tangoing with big banks, and some of the institutions are bowing out in response to the pressure.
Minnesota-based U.S. Bank closed its branch office on the University of California Davis campus this week, after activists began protesting regularly outside the bank’s doors back in January, a report in The Sacramento Bee detailed.
U.S. Bank Senior Vice President Daniel Hoke said in a letter to the college’s regents on March 1 that Occupy protesters had intermittently blocked the door to the Memorial Union bank branch.
While the bank elected to close during some of those protests, Hoke said the situation had become intolerable, the report said, and he complained that customers could not access the bank and employees sometimes felt imprisoned in the branch, despite the peaceful protests.
The activists had argued that “banks created the country’s economic collapse that decimated state budgets and led to massive tuition hikes in recent years” the report read.
Hoke announced the branch would terminate its previous agreements with the school and “will hold the regents liable for all losses.” The college is evaluating the legal consequences of the bank’s termination of its agreements, which included a 10-year agreement to provide nearly $3million to support student services and bring the campus its first bank branch. The agreement began in 2010.
Occupy Wells Fargo
While other Occupy protests against big banks have caused banks to temporarily close branches, this appears to be the first permanent bank branch closure.
In late January, Occupy protesters temporarily closed Wells Fargo & Co.’s headquarters branch in San Francisco, shutting down traffic in the city’s financial district.
Shouting “give us our money back,” Bloomberg News reported that they chained themselves to the entrances of the bank.
Eighteen people were arrested, as protesters gathered at a federal courthouse in protest of a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that corporations have the same rights as individuals to spend money on political campaigns.
The activists said they “demand that banks end predatory evictions and foreclosures and that corporations lose the rights of personhood,” according to a statement. The arrests were made at the request of Wells Fargo, police Lieutenant Liam Frost was quoted by the news service as saying.
And more recently, in another incident targeting Wells Fargo, Occupy protesters gathered outside the San Francisco home of Wells Fargo chairman John Stumpf to protest home foreclosures in late February.
The protesters staged a mock-foreclosure and auction of the millionaire’s luxury condo, pronouncing the property foreclosed due to default to a Deed of Trust to the people.
Wells Fargo’s involvement with home foreclosures was again thrust into the spotlight earlier this week, when a California protest put on by Good Jobs LA, an activist group with ties to the Occupy LA movement, called for an end to home foreclosures by Wells Fargo.
PressTV reported that the protesters sang “Happy Birthday” at the bank’s front door and chanted slogans such as “We are the 99 percent,” “Si se puede” and “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.”
Three hundred protesters said that Wells Fargo is not paying its fair share of taxes and allege that the company “engages in discriminatory and predatory lending,” according to a press release, which also read, “After Wells Fargo helped crash our economy, taxpayers gave them a $43 billion bailout. Over the last three years, Wells Fargo made $49.3 billion in profits but got
$17.96 billion in tax breaks and a $681 million federal tax refund. When rich corporations like Wells Fargo fail to pay their fair share in taxes, local communities can’t afford teachers, firefighters, police officers, health care and other public services.”
In an interview with MintPress, Refugio Mata, a spokesman for Good Jobs LA said that “while Wells Fargo claims to be in local communities and doing great works, in reality it’s the opposite.”
While the protest in Los Angeles was peaceful, and Mata said that demonstrators, who have worked with Occupy previously on other issues, “shy away from violent protest” there was still a strong showing of local law enforcement at the event.
“We hope that overall Wells Fargo gets the message that people are aware of the double speak, on the one hand say they invest in communities, and on the other hand they engage in predatory loans. We are trying to correct that.”
Of those gathered to protest, including several families facing homelessness due to foreclosure, jobless people, local union members and community members, Mata said, “This is a community effort, people really feel like they need to make a difference.”
The group said that Wells Fargo leads the U.S. in home foreclosure rates.
Wells Fargo Sued for “Deceptive and Discriminatory” Practices
Wells Fargo was recently sued by the cities of Memphis and Baltimore, who charged that Wells Fargo engaged in “unlawful, irresponsible, unfair, deceptive and discriminatory mortgage lending practices” that specifically targeted people of color in oppressed neighborhoods.
Yale Law School professor Ray Brescia has written, “At the height of the subprime mortgage frenzy of the last decade, subprime lending had a distinctly racial tinge. African-American borrowers, with similar economic profiles as White borrowers, were nearly twice as likely to be steered into subprime loans as their White counterparts. In a series of lending discrimination lawsuits filed against Wells Fargo, affidavits of former employees allege that bank officials routinely referred to African-American borrowers as ‘mud people’ and subprime loans as ‘ghetto loans’.”
East Coast Involvement?
Also, those who sympathize with Occupy have been targeting big banks on the East coast. Earlier this week an alleged Occupy Wall Street protester was arrested for dumping buckets of human waste in a Chase bank in New York.
According to a report in the Huffington Post, surveillance footage shows the suspected Occupy demonstrators spreading human waste in a plaza on Nassau and Cedar Streets, and then on the floor of a downtown Chase.
Police in New York arrested 25-year-old Jordan Brooks Amos of Philadelphia, who owned the van which transported the waste, and and charged him with Unlawful Possession of Noxious Matter and Criminal Possession of a Weapon, after a stun gun was discovered in his van.
However, a spokesperson responded to the allegations stating that they believed an Occupy protester would not do such a thing.
And Mint Press has previously reported on how infiltration of political movements, such as Occupy is being carried out by governments and law enforcement agents in recent months, in order disrupt proceedings of the movement, and paint the protesters in a negative light.
“Not all actions against banks are Occupy related,” Kanene Holder was quoted by the news organization as saying “Occupy Wall Street did not endorse such an action. However, we cannot control the ways in which people are searching for American justice. Big banks stink!”
Police waited to announce the arrest until a day later, sending an email out about the incident which read in its subject heading, “OWS Human Feces Arrest – It Happens.”
The email came on the heels of another police clash with Occupy protesters in Union Square, where at least 5 people were arrested after they had gathered to protest the arrest of 73 others during a prior demonstration at Zuccotti Park, and also to demand that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly resign.