My last day at Washington ACORN

July 15, 2004

For 11 weeks I have been working in Seattle for an organization called ACORN. For the last half of these 11 weeks I have been working on a financial justice campaign around a subgroup of the big American bank, Wells Fargo, called Wells Fargo Financial. This corporate lender has been accused of doing many evil things. The practices that the campaign on Wells Fargo Financial are trying to stop include:

• bait and switch tactics where one loan is offered with one set of attributes, only to be changed once the customer is lured in.
• huge pre-payment penalties that prevent people from getting out of their bad loan and into a better loan. (AKA, they get punished for paying back the money they owe early.)
• Fees that are more than 3% of the loan.
• Interest above 9%.
• Lying about credit scores.
• Not having full disclosure of the terms on a loan.
• Taking various fees for what seems to be no reason.
• Purposely shifting staff to different locations to make it difficult for lenders to track down their loan representative once the deal is finalized.
• Giving loans to people who cannot afford them.

This should be enough to piss people off, and indeed, it is! This week we have held to one meeting for victims to come out and tell their story. At that meeting several events were planned around a Wells Fargo campaign. One was for two days later -- that is today.

Today's rally went well. Unfortunately, there were no media there. Nonetheless, thanks to flyering and one reverberating loud-speaker we managed to inform hundreds of people about the campaign around Wells Fargo Financial. The rally started out with us going into the branch and requesting that the manager fax a letter to corporate headquarters. They refused to. The manager then proceeded to kick us out of the branch, close the branch, lock the door, shut the curtains and to call the police. The police soon arrived and kicked us off Wells Fargo Financial property. This was fine, and probably even worse for Wells Fargo Financial since it sent us onto the sidewalk along the busy street where we could inform even more people. The police acted for the most part fairly -- although their response seemed to be overdone. For our crowd of 20 which included several children, the local police department sent out 4 squad cars, 1 unmarked car and even one SWAT team member.

After the action, I cleaned my desk in the ACORN office and prepared to party the night away with my coworkers. They were really awesome to work with -- I would say that they were the best part of being in Seattle for me. While in Seattle I had somehow earned the name D-Train and at the party my coworkers presented me with an awesome shirt with a D on it that symbolized a train station, and underneath it were the words "From Chilliwack to Seattle." The night went on until the wee hours of the early morning with good beer, good friends, and good food.

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