[politics] Small Steps?

Lately I've been trying to only care about politics where there is some action that I can personally take, even if its effect is negligible.  

Cell Phones

First of all, all the major carriers are assholes.  We all know this.  Cue:  https://ting.com/ -- what may be an honest company.  Unfortunately they don't support my phone, which I just paid full price to replace after dropping it.  I'm going to keep my eye on them and switch if I can though.

They seem pretty awesome--they offer, simply, X minutes, Y texts, and Z bits of data per month for W dollars.  This is all I want from my fucking carrier!  This is what a carrier is supposed to do.  Carriers should be letting us buy minutes, texts and bits.  Carriers should not be arranging monopolies, locking us in, price gouging us and destroying the internet.

So, go Ting.  Sincerely, future customer.  I hope.


Banks

I have been trying to shift more of my banking business to credit unions, who are known for not gambling drunkenly with our investments, and for being such a threat to evil banks that anti-competitive legislation has been written to sabotage them.  However, because of said sabotage, those credit unions may never be able to take on the banks.  What if, though, we all simply shifted our efforts into just boycotting the "too big to fail" assholes.  This legislation will probably be sniped by lobbysists--but would it be that hard to at least not do business with these banks?

1. J.P. Morgan Chase
2. Bank of America
3. Citigroup
4. Wells Fargo
5. Goldman Sachs
6. Morgan Stanley

I have accounts with some of them.  I think I am going to slowly migrate all of my bank accounts, investment accounts and credit cards to anyone who is not owned by them.

Assuming this is feasible, that means that ordinary citizens could just vote with our money by moving accounts, and bypass a government that is currently unable to do anything.  The biggest weakness I see here is getting enough people to do it.  I feel like if the right amount of people had ever cared about the natural problems that arise with for-profit banking, everyone would already be with credit unions.

I have accounts all over the fucking place (long story) so I will start looking up who owns all of those places, and seeing if I can move them elsewhere.  I'll let you know of my progress if I get around to it.