Windmills Worth Tilting Against

The Huffington Post has launched a campaign designed to use public pressure (in the absence of any significant government interest in the issue) to hold the banking sector accountable for the pain it inflicted on the world over the past 12 months--and more importantly, to make it less likely that the industry will be able to benefit from inflicting such pain again in the future.

The liberal website has quite correctly focused in on the "too big to fail" problem, which more or less guarantees that the banking industry can make hugely profitable bets with your money during good times, secure in the knowledge that those bets will be covered by the federal government if things go bad.

You might think there's not much that individuals can be done to prevent this process repeating itself (especially since Congress seems quite happy to encourage it), and I suspect you're right. Still, the HuffPo campaign, which encourages people to move their accounts from the big four banks to smaller community institutions, will be an interesting test of the ability to organize a mass protest on the Internet.

"The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster," says Ariana Huffington. The response, which Huffington says is "populism at its best":

"If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it's meant to be."

I'm skeptical that anyone can mobilize enough people to take this kind of action. Changing banks is a pain in the ass. And I also suspect that if the campaign did succeed, the big banks would simply buy up the community institutions.

Nevertheless, good luck. I think the HuffPo is tilting at windmills, but these are windmills worth tilting against.