I have been hypocritical. For those of you who read my Market Updates, you know how critical I am of “big banks.” I’ve ranted about how they have received bail-out loans from our government—the antithesis of a truly capitalistic system where the Invisible Hand and Survival of the Fittest determine winners and losers. And yet, where have I kept my bank accounts: personal, business and client trust funds? At one of the Giants about whom I’ve been the most critical, that’s where. Convenience is nice: they have ATMs on nearly every corner in nearly every state. And their online banking had me hooked: every bill was quick and easy to pay.

Yet what I was I for keeping my and my clients’ money at an institution I feel to be immorally run? Hypocritical, lazy, “bought off” for convenience sake, grist for the mill of Big Banking. Not a client—but a tool of the system.

In his last speech, Martin Luther King noticed this problem relating to fair treatment of sanitation workers in Memphis:

“Now the other thing we have to do is this: always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now we’re a poor people. Individually we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never forget that collectively--that means all of us together—collectively, we are richer than all the nations in the world with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? . . . That’s power right there, if we know how to pool it. . . We just need to go around to these stores and to these massive industries in our county and say. . . ‘We come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment where God’s children are concerned. Now if you’re not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for WITHDRAWING economic support from you.’ Either we go up together, or we go down together.”

I like thinking about who “we’re a poor people,” represents today. Part of my musings led me to close all 6 of my accounts and move them to a private, local bank. Through the withdrawals I made, I hope I withdrew a little bit from my hypocrisy, made myself a better mortgage broker and maybe also made myself a little bit better as an American.