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Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Economy Immigrants Against Wells Fargo

Posted by Charles Mudede on Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 8:08 AM

Latino and Somali immigrants are organizing in Minneapolis, Minn., against Wells Fargo, telling the bank to stop donating to anti-immigrant politicians and investing in private prison corporations while courting immigrant customers.

About 150 people, many of them Wells Fargo customers and Latino or Somali immigrants, gathered outside a Wells Fargo branch on Saturday to protest the bank. The protest was part of a larger effort by 84 advocacy groups calling for Wells Fargo to divest its money from companies that profit off of immigrant detention.

The protesters called Wells Fargo hypocritical for targeting Latinos and immigrant customers while also giving money to causes that immigrants largely oppose, such as private immigrant detention centers and bills that make it difficult to migrate legally to the United States. Wells Fargo uses its mutual funds to invest in two of the largest for-profit detention companies: Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, both of which spend millions each year lobbying for stricter immigration enforcement.

Big banks are now the universal enemy. And it's great that people are confronting them directly, rather waiting for the political process to eventually do close to nothing. The current mood is a consequence of Obama's failure to produce the goods he promised and the collapse of market-oriented ideology—the former followed the latter. It is, therefore, a double failure. The failure of the left to correct in any serious way a terribly unbalanced wealth distribution system, and the failure of a market, deregulated by the right, to correct itself.

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"Big banks are now the universal enemy. And it's great that people are confronting them directly, rather waiting for the political process to eventually do close to nothing."

But according to our resident experts here, the political process is voting (e.g. only for incumbent DEMs, third-parties are useless moron! Primaries are useless, moron!) and the political process is the only way to effect change.

Posted by dirac on October 18, 2011 at 8:28 AM

The also need to stop advertising how secure they are against "Apache raids".

Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe

on October 18, 2011 at 9:08 AM

It's about time people really started mobilizing. Politicians who want to change things need people to be actively working for change themselves; just winning an election is not enough..

Obama and his administration knew this, they practically begged us to remain active and working for change after the election. Instead, most people just sat on their hands and waited for change to happen. Now we've been crying that the administration wasn't able to accomplish what we wanted when we left them to face the opposition alone. The support and voice of people makes change possible.

Posted by wingedkat on October 18, 2011 at 9:38 AM

@3 I like blaming the victim too. It's fun.

Posted by dirac on October 18, 2011 at 9:46 AM

Good god, I had no fucking idea that we would outsource incarceration to private fucking companies. Holy shit that is bad, like serious and obviously bad. God what a horrible country with such monsters in it.

Posted by Fenrox on October 18, 2011 at 10:06 AM