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We’re Calling You Out, JPMorgan Chase
Last week I learned that JPMorgan Chase donated $500,000 to the Southern Poverty Law Center and I was disgusted. I’ve been writing for weeks that we need to speak out against foolish and dangerous Leftist activities. Well, my husband and I have accounts at Chase, and I had to speak up. I doubt that the following letter will have an impact, but if we don’t take a stand in our own lives, we have no reason to complain about the state of the United States. Here is what I wrote:
Dear Mr. Dimon,
I was extremely disappointed to learn that Chase, where we have been banking for over ten years, has decided to donate $500,000 to the Southern Poverty Law Center. There are several reasons for my concern, as described in an op-ed piece by Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal. That essay may be found here:
Your decision indicates to me the following:
- J.P. Morgan Chase is prepared to finance a far-left organization that bases its list of “hate groups” on political hatred of those on the conservative Right. Either you did not do your homework on this group before your donation, or your company has no problem demonstrating your support of Leftist politics.
- The SPLC has created a list of 917 organizations without any supporting data for labelling them hate groups.
- Their list includes the Family Research Council, the Center for Security Policy, and the Center for Immigration Studies, all mainstream organizations.
I don’t expect Chase to support conservative organizations, but I do expect you to at least support non-partisan organizations. There are many non-profit organizations that would benefit from your generosity.
As a result, my husband and I are asking you to rescind your donation to SPLC. If that doesn’t happen within 30 days, we will move our accounts to a different financial institution. If you would like to discuss this matter further, you may reach us at —
For those of you reading this OP, feel free to lift any part of this letter and use it in your own emails to those organizations that need to hear from you.
Have any of you taken similar steps?
Published in Politics
I had a Twitter exchange today with people who really believe that there is a vast “white supremacist edifice” with direct connections all over Washington. Invariably they cite the utterly silly “non-partisan” SPLC maps and lists as their source and a CBS News article citing that crap.
Any criticism of SPLC is an implicit defense of Trump and therefore disallowed and perhaps a hate crime.
It’s almost like having a North Korean pen pal.
We belong to the mutual admiration society. Can you hear the music?
It probably does seem like a good strategy, OB. If the man cares about more than dinner parties, though, and actually has some principles, I hope he’d re-think his strategies. There are principled executives out there, too.
Would it be more effective to send this letter to your local banker? That would be a very direct, consequential piece of feedback. I only hope that Wells Fargo stays out of this since my banker seems to be quite good. It would be enormously difficult to pull the plug on that. Why don’t companies stay out of these things? No matter what they do, the alienate a huge percentage of their customers? Is there really an upside?
I used to be a lobbyist. I sometimes brokered what were essentially protection payoffs from corporate clients to their activist group enemies and/0r to the campaign coffers of loathesome pols. All legal. Was protecting businesses and the livelihood of employees and stockholders less principled than quixotic but principled opposition to bad legislation?
Politics is always dirty but Jim Wright, Tony Coellho and George Mitchell explicitly turned Congress into an extortion racket. Obama used the DOJ to shake down CEOs to give money to leftist groups.
The GOP is less than pure but far, far nicer to their enemies than is the Left. The GOP Congress could choke the life out of the entire leftist infrastructure in one fiscal year but they are too afraid to try.
Good idea. Add that to sending emails to your representatives in the Senate and the House. We need to fight fire with fire. Susan has it right! We’ve been complacent for far too long.
You minimize the horror of what JPM has done here. Was that your intention? “Oh gee everyone is bad you’re wasting your time and effort and why don’t you just fuhgeddaboudit…” I boycott Coke to this day because of their “don’t bother learning English” commercial during the Super Bowl years ago. That doesn’t mean a thing concerning what JPM did and I hope you didn’t mean it that way.
Dismayed, I said with the intent to point out the commonness of the horror.
I would think about making a similar move, though it is more difficult in my case- a business account.
I agree with Jamie in most instances involving retail. But SPLC is particularly bad… and, the way I see it, if there is an easy alternative, I’m happy to stop giving my business to companies that beg me to leave.
I think if you list all the charitable contributions of every major company you’re bound to find something you object to.
I do business with a business because of business. What they do with their profits is their business, not mine. And how I run my business is my business.
If they were contributing to an organization that was directly involved with the immediate murder of other people, or me, then I might re-evaluate that claim.
I do have exceptions to that rule. Ben & Jerry’s is a communist company and I’ve never tasted their ice cream knowingly. As such, I don’t miss them and there are plenty of other choices. In other words, if it’s convenient and they are odious enough, I’ll avoid a company.
But my business runs on Chase banking. I could switch, but the alternatives are likely donating to causes just as bad, and I really can’t be bothered to worry about whatever they are doing with their profits. My vote works as well as their employees’ at the ballot box.
This is exactly the same reason we struggle in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite our overwhelming military superiority.
The people of Iraq, for instance, knew that we would give them money, and if they didn’t do what we wanted them to do we would still give them money. The terrorists would snatch a family out of their home, call everyone in the neighborhood over and chop that family into pieces with large knives. Tell me, who would you be more inclined to obey?
The GOP is worthless because they wage politics the same way they wage war. They act like a pathetic suitor giving a floozy candy and gifts while she ignores him and dances with the bad boys.
But what if enough people quitting them made them re-evaluate those decisions? What if it was some little Commie clerk in the office who set up that donation and they didn’t check it out first? I mean, the name sounds like something meaningful, with the word “Poverty” right in it. Who doesn’t want to eradicate Poverty, right? But if enough people wrote angry letters and took their Business (or threatened to take their Business) elsewhere, maybe they’d take a closer look at the groups they support. I consider myself knowledgeable, but I didn’t know about their enemies list until now.
I don’t care. There are enough first order problems without me chasing after second order problems. Politicians giving my money to Planned Parenthood, or Acorn or the like is a problem to fight over. A business donating money to SPLC, as odious as they are, is a symptom of our culture. We need to win the culture war, we need to take back societal norms and stop the insanity of the social justice warriors and their attempts to eradicate freedom of speech. We need to change the terms of debate.
Pressuring a business might be part of that change, but I think it’s not. They are the symptom, not the cause, they won’t be the catalyst for change.
Exactly what I was thinking. Lots of small local banks, credit unions, etc. Same services, for the most part.
You’re missing out. Ben and Jerry’s is good ice cream.
The big banks are at the heart of crony capitalism and the administrative state. The financial regulatory framework is designed by them and their lawyers. They, and by they I mean professional managers not their owners, are on both sides of every transaction in our economy, they earn the upside of risk and pass the downside to stockholders, tax payers and depositors. This is true of other financial institutions and when things go wrong and people get angry we pass more regulation the details of which they fill out. It is the most important sector to deregulate. Almost all of the regulatory framework could be replaced with a much higher capital requirement that meant every loan made included stockholder equity, and the elimination of corporate profits taxes and treatment of profits as income of the holder of record. The purpose of both is to cause big stockholder and depositors to pay attention and since those charitable contributions come from stockholders money, they will end them. We could also require stockholder voting on corporate charitable contributions just like we should require membership voting for labor unions to do the same. It’s not the managers’ money. Corporate contributions to charity give senior managers power and and since big government and centralization serve their personal interests they tend to be liberal. Becoming super wealthy moves them in that direction as well.
Yuh. When I was in law school we learned that a business corporation has one raisin d’etre and only one: to make money for its shareholders. Whatever money the corps make is, as you say, not their money. I know corporate charitable giving is a widespread practice–but it should not be. Pay the shareholders, and let them decide where they want to bestow charity.
Of course, there still are certain restrictions, and a pesky matter of fiduciary responsibility, and even those chafed so much that a whole new entity was born, like those orcs being manufactured at Isengard: the “benefit corporation”. 33 states and D.C. now provide for them.
B-corp entities exist primarily for some social charitable or ideological purpose, and do not have to consider the shareholders’ profit when they make investment decisions. If they can “do well by doing good” , that’s a bonus, but investors (if you can call them that) and shareholders know they’re probably going to lose their money, so they can’t sue the board of directors when they do. (Oh, and–it just gets better!– the savvy shareholders get to keep the disadvantages of the traditional business corp, like double taxation of corporate income!)
Niw that we have developed this alternate entity, I propose that old-fashioned, avowedly for-profit corporations get back to working for their shareholders’ and investors’ profit. Leave the charitable giving to the B-corps: people who buy a piece of such entities know, up front, what they’re getting into and what causes they’re supporting.
Ben and Jerry’s is a subsidiary of Unilever. They still support some left-Green causes, but they’re mostly about the profit margins nowadays.
Related story:
https://pjmedia.com/faith/2017/08/28/muslim-reformer-joins-christians-in-suing-far-left-terror-linked-organization-for-hate-defamation/
You and I finally agree on something. I’ve never bought it, but my dad’s wife loves Chunky Monkey and so she serves it up frequently. We’ve told her about Ben and Jerry but she likes what she likes, and so I get to chow down on it without the guilt of supporting Communists.
But is it better than our beloved Blue Bell? Oh hell no. That’s why I don’t buy Ben and Jerry. There are plenty of other great brands.
If, in some alternate universe, this issue was reversed right/left, the left-Susan Quinn would not be closing her own account. Rather, she would be organizing a menacing picket of Dimon’s children’s (children’s) schools, and a very loud campaign demanding that others close their accounts. A campaign that governments and corporates would be only too pleased to give in to, loudly signalling their virtue (or hoping not to be the next target).
It is probably not deeply immoral not to close your accounts with JPM at this point. But make no mistake: banks and the SPLC are important force-multipliers for the left in their ascendancy in the culture wars – or, rather, in their ruthless exploitation of their almost complete victory in the culture wars by affecting the lives and livelihoods of those who commit wrongthink. Now is the time to delegitimize the SPLC. Forcing JPM to back off on supporting anti-liberty forces so blatantly would be a good thing, too. All power to SQ.
Over at PJ Media: read and weep, or donate.
B&J is overrated and overpriced. Their ice cream isn’t terrible, but it also isn’t worth the extra bucks.
That’s some of their narrative and is probably still true where stockholders dominate the board. I think but can’t demonstrate that corporate culture was changed when personal rates were over 90% and and corporate profits rates 70%. That gave investors a giant 3 cents on a dollar of profits. So naturally managers switched to cash flow and capital gains. Which at those after tax rates managers salaries were almost zero, as was capital equipment, and conglomeration, even market share at low returns all served managers interests. Stockholders looking for capital gains, moved toward diversification and stopped following management so closely. This drove a wedge between stockholders and managers, which, by the way, was a policy goal of the Italian fascists. Perhaps here as well. I think a zero corporate profits tax rate and treating both capital gains and corporate profits as the income of the holder of record if possible could change the culture back.
Ford v. Dodge… seminal case.
But it gives a lot of flexibility to companies sued by shareholders, so any attempt is likely to be fruitless.
Watch the interview by Maher. If you don’t think you will be able to stomach it, do, at least, watch from about the 16 minute mark.
I think she’ll say no due to lack of interest.
You are right, UC. I will send a copy of the email to the branch manager, letting him know I sent it to the CEO. Thanks.
As a matter of fact didn’t I say “you go girl!” to you? ;-) Or was that some other heroic lady.
Now that is an interesting point, Skyler. I’ll have to mull this one over.