By Marc Keyser
My friend Bernice Requenez and I attended a recent meeting of the Central Valley Partnership (CVP) for the first time. It felt good to be in a room full of social activists and progressives, decent people who care about social issues and about the future of this nation.
I’m retired. I spend much of my time writing about Trump and Trump Republicans in Congress, and it’s so damned depressing. I feel like I’m staring in horror at a world turning weird as this malignant tumor takes over. Looking down deep under Trump’s skin is terrifying.
Humberto Gomez Sr. and Stan Santos shared stories of the plight of undocumented immigrants in the Central Valley. These are hardworking, decent people with families who are being arrested and deported. The injustice, the cruelty to them and their families is an outrage against humanity. It’s shades of the way Hitler treated the Jews in Nazi Germany. Trump is race baiting, pitting people against one another in his rise to power.
Fresno is at the heart of the breadbasket of the world. The economic damage to the labor force in the farming industry that gives America its abundance of food is a double-edged sword. Nothing is more fundamental to the U.S. economy than our abundance of low-cost food. The potential damage of Trump’s racist policies to our food supply is staggering.
When I meet people who are not Trump Republicans, there is an ominous feeling of frustration and helplessness in the fight against the Trump regime. It’s easy to talk about the Trump problem, but it’s hard to find solutions. The old ways of protesting are just not working.
There were some 3.5 million people who joined the Women’s March over a weekend in January. It was a media event, but it did not put any real political pressure on Trump or Republicans in Congress. They are just as arrogant and evil as ever.
At the CVP meeting, I made a modest proposal: Protest by phone. Call Bank of America and its stockbroker, Merrill Edge, in solidarity. Overload and crash their communications. Shut them down to create a financial crisis on Wall Street severe enough to force Congress to see things our way.
Take to the streets: March on the nearest branch of Bank of America and Merrill Edge.
Take your money out: Go inside the bank by the hundreds and tell them you won’t bank there. Get in their face. Take your money out of Bank of America and Merrill Edge.
Take to the phones: Call the local numbers of Bank of America/Merrill Edge by the thousands, and jam the phones and disrupt business as usual.
Take to e-mail: By the hundreds of thousands, e-mail and crash their servers. Disrupt their communications.
Take to Twitter and Facebook: Social network and activate millions of people around the globe to call Merrill Edge. Destroy their brand name. Cripple their communications, disrupt their business and incite stockholder panic to crash their stock.
Speak to those in power from a position of power: Shut down Bank of America/Merrill Edge with nonviolent, non-cooperation on a global scale. Disrupt business as usual.
There were about 50 people at the CVP meeting. If all of us called one branch of Bank America here in Fresno, we could get their attention. But if each community leader in that room activated the members in their organizations to use their smartphones to activate people on social media, we could easily put a few million people around the globe on the phones calling and crushing Bank of America/ Merrill Edge.
Shut down Bank of America/Merrill Edge to impose sanctions on Congress. Put their feet to the fire.
Bank of America can’t afford to lose its business, and Congress can’t afford to lose Bank of America and face a financial crisis on Wall Street.
Take control of the phones and disrupt business at Bank of America/Merrill Edge, and we will have the leverage to negotiate with Congress from a position of strength. Congress will meet our demands or Congress will lose Bank of America and Merrill Edge.
We the people have the constitutional right to call and complain, and we have them outnumbered.
As consumers, we have every right to call Bank of America/Merrill Edge. If they can’t answer their phones fast enough to clear the lines that’s their problem. We have the right to demonstrate in front of each branch to encourage consumers not to the bank there. We have the right to take our money out of Bank of America/Merrill Edge.
We have the right to call and jam the phones at Bank of America to convince them to tell Congress to stop supporting the Trump regime. We have the right to fill social media with comments on Bank of America/ Merrill Edge and call out their antisocial, criminal behavior. We have every right to encourage consumers around the globe to join us in calling and boycotting Bank of America.
We choose to non-cooperate on a massive scale.
Calling together, we can give Congress a financial crisis on Wall Street so costly that the fallout forces these corrupt Trump Republicans in Congress to impeach President Trump just to save Bank of America from going under and to stave off a meltdown on Wall Street.
Congress can have our cooperation when Congress protects the Mueller investigation and impeaches Trump. Then and only then will we stop calling Bank of America/Merrill Edge and allow them to conduct their business unimpeded.
We insist must that Congress impeach Trump. Trump conspired with Russians to rig the election; he cheated, he committed treason and he must be stripped of his title and the office of President.
Russian curlers in the Winter Olympics were forced to return a bronze medal after failing a doping test. Everyone knows when you cheat you lose.
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Marc Keyser is the author of www.TheResistance.blog, and he’s on Twitter at TheResistance. Contact him at ogkeyser@gmail. com.
