Join the Posse: Main Street's Billion $$$ Revenge Against Big Banking

Not since the French Revolution has the aristocracy been so worried about their physical safety. Paul Craig Roberts puts these fears in context in his well documented article Trickle-up economics: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me, OpEdNews, December 3, 2009.

Roberts cites no less than Bloomberg news for evidence of the fears harbored by those who have raped the financial system and left everyone else holding the bag:

"Goldman Sachs senior executives are arming themselves with New York gun permits, according to Alice Schroeder on Bloomberg.com. The banksters "are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.'"

If you're among those about to join the posse, may I suggest you put down the rope. Let's just all get together and stage a protest that will deprive Big Banking of a billion dollars a year.

That's right, and it's all legal. Plus, unlike violence, it will not give the authorities any justification to label Main Street an angry mob and commence cracking heads among the 90% of us bearing the brunt of the economic crisis.

Goldman Sachs executives' guilty paranoia aside, I don't know anyone willing to take such extreme measures, though we all have our fantasies. But, we can hit them where it will hurt by depriving the current banking and finance cartel of income and profits.

Posse lookin' to apprehend them bank robber barons

No, really, this is how: Right now, there is a growing movement to Use Cash instead of credit and debit cards whenever possible. Once it gets going it will terrify the Banksters.

How much money can we deny the banking/finance corporations? A lot.

Let's say a typical Use Cash protester can switch just $35 of spending from plastic to cash a week -- buying gas for the car, and a couple other small purchases. That will deprive Big Banking their average merchant vigor of 3.5%: $1.

But $35 of lost credit or debit card "spend" also denies Big Banking enormous additional potential revenue. And, that's where they make a killing on cardholders. Penalties and fees forgoing over limit or usingover draft "privileges" that can range from $30 to $50, not to mention double cycle interest accumulations on prior balances.

Just sticking with $1 per week per protestor, if a million people join in that's a minimum of $52 million dollars a year.

But this is not a march on Washington. A million people is nowhere near the limit. And, for many people, switching $35 per week of plastic spending to cash is nothing.

Visa cardholders in the U.S. spend more than $1 trillion a year on their cards. (Source: Visa USA internal statistics, 4th quarter 2006.)

So, it's easy to easy to imagine putting a hurt on Big Banking to the tune of a billion dollars a year. That's just $35 billion in plastic spending switched to cash, only3.5% of Visa's annual volume.

This relatively easy, non-violent action against the banking abuses and financial scams that continue to plague our economic system has many advantages:

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