Occupy Wall Street Bank Card - Priceless?
Red Ice Creations: The Occupy Movement is well known for its international protests against social and economic inequality, but did know they’re also in the money biz?Occupy members (anonymous insiders in the banking industry) are putting together a ’financial services cooperative’ to service people who are of the "99%" and "unbanked" and "underbanked" - those who have poor access to mainstream financial services.
The Occupy Money Cooperative (OMC) will team up with a bank (the very institutions they’re fighting!) which will issue debit cards. Many question the motives and the people behind the cards, as well as the fees and obligations that will be involved. Where is that money going? How is this any better than the banking system that exists now? Does this reflect the truth of where Occupy came from, and where it’s headed?
If you can’t beat em, join em?
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Exposing the "Occupy Money Cooperative" and the Subversion of a Movement
By Brendan Hunt | BrendanHunt.com
With slogans like “it’s time to take the financial system back: join the revolution” and “a protest with every purchase,” here comes the Occupy Money Cooperative, Inc. [1]
This article will examine the background of the Occupy Money Cooperative (OMC) and their “founding board,” as well as other so-called Occupy Wall Street organizers. It will expose the group of individuals who are co-opting the Occupy community to serve their own partisan political and financial agendas. The evidence will show these groups are directly linked to George Soros, the U.S. State Department, al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist networks, the Federal Reserve and much more.
FALSE ADVERTISING
The Occupy Money Cooperative (OMC) bills itself as “the start of the financial services revolution,” whose “target market” is “the unbanked and underbanked… over 30 million households.” [4][8] Some, however, see the OMC as a betrayal of the original purpose of Occupy, which was to serve as an external agitation challenging the financial and banking industry. [9]
Many organizations have tried to ride the momentum of Occupy Wall Street by labeling their projects "occupy"-this or "occupy"-that. In mainstream articles, from Forbes to Credit Union Times, and on their own website, the OMC group consistently, and falsely, represents itself as the official Occupy Wall Street organization. [8][12]
For example, on their FAQ page, the OMC writes “Why is Occupy launching a card?” [4] A Forbes article states “the Occupy Wall Street movement… has given birth to something new: a financial institution.” [8] These claims are deliberately phrased to be misleading and deceiving.
The Occupy community is not pushing this money-making scam. It’s merely a small group of well-off individuals using their influence to manipulate the movement and profit from a “cashless economy.” [7]
The main product they’re pushing is a pre-paid debit Occupy Card. [4] Once the OMC gets sufficient funds for staff and other operating expenses, it will launch the Card, which will cost 99 cents a month and be issued through a bank, the very institutions Occupy Wall Street was protesting. [4][8] At the time of this writing, it is still unclear which bank the Occupy Money Cooperative team up with.
When asked whether, like many other prepaid debit cards, it will charge for ATM withdrawals, balance inquiries, reloading the card, transaction statements, declined transactions and more, the group’s founder (Carne Ross) said that the details of the card would be revealed when the card is launched. “Like any prepaid card, there will be a range of fees.” Yet in other literature the OMC misleads people to think it will only cost 99 cents.
Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com, said that with the few details offered so far, it’s hard to tell how Occupy’s debit card will fare. Prepaid debit cards have had a reputation for gouging their customers with fees for everything from checking the balance to calling customer service to reloading money onto the card. [8]
From the OMC website: “when people use a debit card, pre-paid debit card or a credit card, a revenue stream is generated each time the card is used in a transaction. A significant part of that revenue will now go to the Occupy Money Cooperative instead of a conventional financial institution that has additional costs like dividends to shareholders.” [4]
Notice the deliberately nebulous language. They write “a significant part” of the revenue will go to the OMC, but are careful not to mention how much. The sentence is also structured to diminish the fact that a portion of the “revenue stream” will be going directly to conventional financial institutions. “The Occupy Card will be on an innovative platform that is integrated with the Visa platform. Your Occupy Card will be accepted everywhere Visa is.” [4] VISA will be getting “their standard share of any transaction revenue,” yet the OMC has the nerve to call this “a big change.” [4]
Who exactly on the OMC’s founding board will be handling the money? And what exactly will it be spent on? The OMC website says, “donations will fund the development costs of The Occupy Card platform, the hiring of a staff, a permanent office location, community outreach, our permanent website, and legal funds… Once we reach a certain size, revenue from operations will supply sufficient resources for our maintenance, growth and the development of additional services.” [4] OMC founder Carne Ross adds, “at this point, we’re not offering anything like the services of a credit union, where you can have a checking account or savings account… but we hope to eventually.” Already signing up members, the OMC is in the process of raising money. [8]
[...]
So let’s take a closer look at the existing OMC Board of Directors, a group that will most likely stay in power after any voting done by their “customers.”
Robert Hockett: a finance Professor at Cornell University Law School, Fellow of the Century Foundation, and author for the New America Foundation. Hockett also does regular consulting work for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the International Monetary Fund in Washington, Americans for Financial Reform, and a number of federal and state legislators and local governments. He holds advanced degrees from the University of Kansas; the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar; and Yale University. Following law school, he also clerked for the Honorable Deanell Reece Tacha, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. [5]
Cathy O’Neil: Senior Data Scientist at Johnson Research Labs. Cathy earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, and postdoc at the MIT math department. She was also a professor at Barnard College and is co-authoring a book called “Doing Data Science.” She worked as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, and then for RiskMetrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks.
Read the full article at: brendanhunt.com
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Bill Still - Hour 1 - The Money Masters & The Secret of Oz
Ellen Brown - The Web of Debt & The Manufactured Financial Crash
Bill Still - Hour 1 - Fixing Greece, The Crumbling EU & Monetary Reformation
Joan Veon - G20, Global Credit Crisis & Public-private Partnership
G. Edward Griffin - The Collectivist Conspiracy
Daniel Estulin - The Octopus Deception, WikiLeaks & Bilderberg
Susanne Posel - Hour 1 - Mortgage Fraud & False Memory Implant
