I have a confession. I am a thief. I steal and, you know what, I’m not going to stop. I steal from banks because that’s where the money is.

I am not robbing the innocent. Banks steal from their customers, namely you. They call it making an honest profit. But banks use your wealth against you. Banks take the wealth from working families and they don’t lend that money back into the communities from where it came. That is called redlining. I call it robbery.

What do banks do with your wealth? Banks pull resources out of American industries where we work and open new modern plants in poor countries. Banks prefer countries where there are puppet military dictators who are willing to sell out their own people to American multinational corporations financed with your hard-earned money. They send your wealth overseas to these corporations that rob the resources of other working people, people like you.

Here in America banks are consolidating their power. Bank of America, which was started in San Francisco by Italian immigrants as an answer to anti-immigrant sentiments of the time, is now headquartered in North Carolina and has bought up large Eastern banks. Wells Fargo financed the union-busting law firm in a Pittsburg, California steel strike. San Francisco-based Bank of the West finances Threemile Canyon Farms for $101 million where the owner refuses to hire woman saying, “I don’t want women at the farm—they are only good for the bed.” That’s the way banks and their finance partners talk about your mother, wife and daughter. The United Farm Workers union has a case against Threemile Canyon Farms for sex discrimination.

Banks tell their investors to “look for the union label and run the other way.” Don’t invest in companies with unions, don’t invest in countries with democracy, but open up a bank on every corner to suck up the wealth of working families to send offshore. So you see, banks are stealing from you.

When banks and savings and loans failed in the 1980s, who picked up the tab? You did. They did not fund their insurance agency sufficiently to cover their billions in loses due to their criminal lending practices. This bank failure turned out to be the biggest “transfer of wealth” (robbery) of the middle class to bail out the banking class in the history of the United States. Banks made out like bandits. As Woody Guthrie noted in his famous song about the notorious bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd “some rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen.”

For these and many other reasons I rob banks of their most essential assets—their customers. In the last five years I admit to playing my part in taking thousands of customers from banks and making them members and owners of their own financial institution. Now they control their own profits and those profits are kept in their community. They are invested in your homes, cars and education loans and earn a much higher rate of return. There are no risky loans to foreign dictators or union-busting firms or multinational corporations closing your plant and moving it to some dictatorship, putting you on welfare and making your fellow workers pay for it while the bank hides from the tax man on some tax-free island.

So what is this member-owned financial institution that now thousands of your fellow workers have discovered? Simple. It’s your Credit Union. Join it and you can be the getaway driver in my continuing bank robbery.

Now if you don’t mind banks making a profit off your sweat, then don’t come down and join your credit union. If, on the other hand, you’re tired of being mistreated and abused, then the credit union is for you. Let the credit union show you how you can make a profit off your own money for a change.

To join your local ILWU credit union, just ask at your local union or go online to www.creditunion.coop/cu_locator. There are nine ILWU credit unions up and down the Pacific Coast, so it’s easy to find the one for you. Whether you’re up in Hoquiam, Wash. or down in San Pedro, Calif., come home to your family, the family of the ILWU Credit Unions.

—Lewis Wright
ILWU Local 63 retired