Forum Post: New Strategy

Other approaches besides sitting on wall street also need to be used. The approach with Bank of America of people taking their money out after the new fee was imposed worked. People used their actions to affect Bank of America's profits and got a response from the institution.

The same approach needs to be used for the corporations on wall street. The best defense is educating yourselves about how the corporations work. While all the occupiers are out there the corporations are just going about their business. In order to get them to cooperate occupiers need to educate themselves about how corporations work.

Corporations know the rules and that's how they are exploiting them. Some books I recommend occupy wall streeters to read include "Rich Dad Poor Dad" and books on how investing works and how companies are divided up into shares like "The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing".

These companies start out small. The way these companies get so large is because they get lots of money paid to them when they go public and and offer shares of their company for sale. With this money they are able to expand themselves and become larger and larger.

Look at the Dow companies. The movement needs to educate themselves on what these are. These are the top 30 companies that have the most gross sales in the country. They are huge. I will give you an example of how much power these companies have. Say you go to work for walmart (a Dow company). You think you are working with one entity but really the ownership of walmart has been divided up into shares and been sold to many shareholders so each of these shareholders wants walmart to be as profitable as possible so that their shares will be more valuable and worth more. They therefore create pressure on the company which trickles down to the worker to work harder. The company becomes more profitable but the worker sees none of it and gets paid minimum wage.

The occupy wall streeters and general public need to see how we are getting played by corporations. We need to look at each of our interactions with institutions. Your bank for example, moving to a credit union is a good idea because you remove those shareholders from your relationship with the institution. Many people banking with bank of america, for example, think they're banking with one entity but really they're banking with all the shareholders of bank of america who want to raise fees to increase their profits. If you move to a credit union, it is member owned and you remove those shareholders from your relationship. When the credit union does well the money will be passed along to you via interest (i get around 3% on the interest in my credit union checking account) on your money or lower interest to borrow money, instead of the money going to shareholders. You have to examine all of you interactions with institutions to see where shareholders are creeping in. You may want to continue doing business with them or working with them but at least you will be aware of what is going on. But we all need to realize how we are making these corporations larger, by shopping at the, working at them for minimal pay, and doing busness with them in general.

The government is not doing enough to change policies but we have more power than we think, possibly refusing to work for a publicly traded company or doing business with a publicly traded company if they are not treating people right may be what we have to do. I think we have the tools to take these publicly traded corporations down with twitter, facebook, and social media if we have to.

I am not an expert in business, I am an engineer but I have been reading about this for a long time now. Once you discover this you can either choose to take part in this or you may realize that this system will destroy our country because it will lead to a huge division between the haves and have nots.