Tag Archives: Bank of America

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Support HRC with everyday purchases

11/21/2010 Nativegrl77

Human Rights Campaign

Every time you go to the movies… Every time you buy lunch at the deli… Every time you shop online… You could be helping HRC secure equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.

The HRC Debit Card and Checking Account are offered by Bank of America, a National Corporate Sponsor of HRC with a 100% score on HRC’s Corporate Equality Index.

How? By using your HRC Debit Card from Bank of America.

Open a checking account online now to start using your HRC Debit Card! It’s fast and easy to do.

Your personal checking account will help generate contributions to HRC with every debit card purchase you make¹!

You’ll also get access to these exciting features:

Online banking;
Mobile banking on your cell phone²;
Optional Bill Pay³;
No required minimum balance; and
Access to more than 18,000 paperless ATMs.

In addition to these great benefits, you’ll get automatic savings after you enroll in the Keep the Change^® program – where each debit card purchase is rounded up to the next dollar and the difference is transferred from your checking to your savings account. Plus, since you’re an HRC supporter, Bank of America will match 5 percent of the transfers, up to $250 every year. And to help you get started, Bank of America will match 100 percent for the first 3 months⁴.

With this checking account from Bank of America, you can turn your purchasing power into equal rights power.

Once you’re signed up, you can also register for the Add It Up^® program⁵, a web service featuring over 270 top participating retailers. You’ll save time and get additional cash back on purchases you make with your HRC Debit Card.

Make sure your shopping supports equality. Open an HRC Checking Account now and use your debit card for all of your purchases.

Warmly,

Joe Solmonese
President

P.S. If you’d prefer to open your account in person, you can use Bank of America’s branch locator to find a banking center near you.

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Our homes

11/17/2010 Nativegrl77 1 Comment

Mortgage lenders are recklessly foreclosing on homes. Some are even breaking the law.

Help protect your home, or your friends’ and family’s, with this simple tool:

Dear Barbara,

The big banks are at it again. First they targeted minority communities with subprime loans and other predatory lending schemes, helping to make Black Americans and Latinos 70% more likely than Whites to be in foreclosure.¹

Now we’re learning that the very same banks and mortgage lenders have been foreclosing on homes around the nation without verifying that they have the right to do so.²

The stories are horrifying: in Ohio, a bank foreclosed on a man after insisting for months that it didn’t hold his loan and refusing to accept his payments.³ In Florida, Bank of America tried to take a house away from a man who never even had a mortgage.⁴ The more we learn, the worse it gets.

If you’re a homeowner, one possible way to protect yourself from the banks’ bad behavior is to demand your note and make them prove they own your mortgage. A new online tool makes it easy. Check it out and please share this information with your friends and family. It could help to save your home or that of someone you love:

http://www.wheresthenote.com/colorofchange

The banks have been trying to write off their failure to properly verify ownership as a mere technicality. But it’s much more serious than that, and Attorneys General in all 50 states have banded together to investigate the illegal foreclosures, and several elected leaders have called for criminal charges to be filed against the banks.^5,6

You would think that it would be easy to produce the documents needed for the banks to verify ownership. But during the real estate boom, banks cut corners with paperwork in order to make as many loans as possible, and then sold the loans to other lenders in complicated financial maneuvers designed to maximize the banks’ profits.

Now it has come to light that banks have been paying “foreclosure mills” to take homes away as quickly as possible, before homeowners even realize that anything might be amiss. And it appears that these foreclosure mills are operating without actually following the law — foreclosing without the proper legal documentation.⁷ In some cases, notaries responsible for verifying the documents aren’t even reading them.⁸ And in other cases, the documents are just being fabricated — made up to cover the banks’ tracks.⁹ This is foreclosure fraud. It’s not legal, and it’s not right.

Given their role in creating the foreclosure crisis through predatory practices and deception, banks should be doing what they can to avoid foreclosures and keep people in their homes. This could be done by lowering interest rates, or better yet — reducing the principal to reflect the crash in housing prices. Foreclosures are only further devastating communities already hard hit by record unemployment.

But the banks seem uninterested. It appears that they would rather commit mortgage fraud to protect their bottom line. That’s why it’s up to us to make sure that they’re following the law to the letter. And if enough of us do so, we’ll help to create a new financial environment where banks are held more accountable to homeowners and the legal system. If you have a mortgage, protect yourself and your family by demanding your note, and please share this information with your friends and family. It takes just a moment:

http://www.wheresthenote.com/colorofchange

Thanks and Peace,

— James, Gabriel, William, Dani, Natasha, and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team
November 17th, 2010

Help support our work. ColorOfChange.org is powered by YOU — your energy and dollars. We take no money from lobbyists or large corporations that don’t share our values, and our tiny staff ensures your contributions go a long way. You can contribute here:

https://secure.colorofchange.org/contribute/

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Move Your Money

06/02/2010 Nativegrl77

The big banks on Wall Street — JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — have had an incredible year, getting huge taxpayer bail-outs, making record profits and paying out multi-million dollar bonuses to their CEOs while many of them are still participating in all the highly leveraged activities that caused our housing and credit crisis in the first place.

I’d like to say the good news is that Congress is poised to pass major financial reforms later this month, so the President can sign the bill before the 4th of July. The problem is the bill they’re planning to pass isn’t good enough. Don’t take it from me. Here’s what the New York Times said about it last week:

The financial reform legislation making its way through Congress has Wall Street executives privately relieved that the bill does not do more to fundamentally change how the industry does business.

Despite the outcry from lobbyists and warnings from conservative Republicans that the legislation will choke economic growth, bankers and many analysts think that the bill approved by the Senate last week will reduce Wall Street’s profits but leave its size and power largely intact.

In other words, too big to fail banks will still be too big to fail. It’s time to take matters into our own hands. So today we’re joining the Move Your Money campaign started by the good people at The Huffington Post. Declare your independence from big banks and pledge to Move Your Money to a local community bank or credit union today.

PLEDGE TO MOVE YOUR MONEY TO A COMMUNITY BANK OR CREDIT UNION RIGHT NOW

Community banks and credit unions don’t act like the big banks. Typically, they’re more responsible in how they manage their money, they’re more closely connected to the people and businesses who live near them, and they’re more inclined to make loans they know will get paid back. And your local credit union isn’t going to ask Congress for a multi-billion dollar bail-out either. These are the qualities most people want banks to have.

The idea is simple.

To regular Americans this issue isn’t Left or Right — it just makes sense. If enough people move their money from a big bank to a smaller, more local, more traditional community bank, we can break up the big banks ourselves. By working together, we won’t have to wait for Congress make change happen.

TAKE THE PLEDGE AND FIND A CREDIT UNION OR COMMUNITY BANK NEAR YOU

We can send a message to Congress, the President and every candidate running for office that we don’t trust big banks with our money. But it’s up to us to do it.

Let’s get started right now. Thank you for everything you do.

-Charles

Charles Chamberlain, Political Director
Democracy for America