Chase 5

On March 13th, Five Seattle Occupiers go to trial for a November 2 occupation inside  a Chase Bank branch in Capitol Hill.  That day,  hundreds rallied outside and disrupted business as usual.  This action preceded a large demonstration that evening against JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon as he spoke in Downtown Seattle.

Press Statement of the Bank Occupiers of November 2, 2011

We, independent members of the Occupy Seattle movement, are occupying this Chase bank to interrupt business as usual. We are here to show you that the polished, sanitized spaces of our day-to-day lives are places of horror. Banks don’t simply add arbitrary fees to debit cards or double your interest rates. They perpetuate poverty. They drive homelessness, and with it joblessness and the denial of healthcare. They force people out of homes through sub-prime lending and foreclosures, gentrifying neighborhoods in their wake by investing in real estate and construction firms that build condos and drive up market rates. They help make your “up-and-coming” neighborhoods whiter and wealthier and dispossess everyone needed to make them so. And for those who operate at the margins of society, committing victimless “crimes” or trying to save themselves and their families from starvation, banks are there to dehumanize them when they land in a private prison or get locked up in an immigrant concentration camp, like Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center (its extensive human rights abuse courtesy of Wells Fargo). All while executives reward themselves with millions for lives they have ruined and will ruin again, for a bottom line written in blood.

This movement isn’t just about bailouts. It’s not even about CEO salaries, corporate taxation, or campaign finance reform. The extremes of social and economic injustice most people experience today existed way before the recession, before Citizens United, and before executive pay skyrocketed in the last half-century. It’s about a culture. It’s about the logical consequences of capitalism. It’s about what those of us who grew up in America have heard since day one—the strong survive, the cream rises to the top. But the strength of those on top rests on the backs of millions who were never given a chance to achieve, the cream stays white, and the playing field is never even. It’s about the expectation your value as a person lies in your ability to drain money out of other people, and not in your ability to pursue your dreams in solidarity with fellow dreamers.

We refuse to live in a world in which power matters more than human lives and transactions more than relationships. We refuse to live in a world where survival—”getting a job”—means increasing the wealth of our bosses. We refuse to live in a world, in a country that never outgrew slavery—only sublimated it to the point we don’t recognize it, because its whips and chains have been replaced by redlining and unaffordable healthcare, or else hidden in the prisons that warehouse the people of color once enchained out in the open. We refuse to live in a world that inevitably confers privilege to upper-class, straight, white men, as it does under the rule of capital and the perpetual indentured servitude of the oppressed. We refuse to live in a world where we are accountable to anyone other than our interdependent equals. We refuse to live in a world where we are anything other than absolutely free.

Live your desires. Join us. This world is ours—all of ours—and don’t let them tell you anything different. We will build it together.

In solidarity with you in your own struggles,

Occupiers of Seattle

Mic-Check: Statement Read on November 2nd outside Chase Bank in Capitol Hill

We, participants in Occupy Seattle, have independently chosen to occupy, to put our bodies on the line in order to shut down a location of Chase Bank.

Chase Bank, the corporation that owns it, and the system that it represents, act to defend and fortify the 1%. They enable the river of wealth from which the 1% drink, they make the flow of wealth from the many to the few possible and profitable. Chase Bank and every other bank make obscene profits from massive foreclosures and the suffering of people throughout the US and the globe.

Banks uphold and enable a rotting system. Both democrat and republican parties and the governing bodies they manage have proven incapable of solving this crisis; they’ve proven incapable of meeting the needs of people; they’ve proven incapable of stopping the mechanized domination of other nations and people. Rather than serve us, politicians serve the 1% and their system.

The list of grievances of the 99% is practically without limit.

Our occupations have proven once and for all:

Mic Check! [Mic Check!]

The world [The World]

Does not [Does not]

Have to [Have to]

Be this way! [BE THIS WAY!]

Banks are not only responsible for crisis, poverty, and extreme wealth inequality but they are also working directly against the Occupy movement. The day after the NYPD “kettled” and arrested 700 New York occupiers, the Chase bank donated 4.6 million dollars to the New York City Police Foundation-the largest in its history.

We are occupying this bank and risking our safety in order to show you, the people, we are fighting for a world without banks, without poverty, without the wealth of the world owned by a tiny minority. We are out to change the whole planet. Starting. Right. Here.

Today the call from Occupy Oakland goes out: “General Strike!” We stand with them. Occupy together. Occupy the world.