For more than a decade, Reverend Billy, along with his Church of Stop Shopping, has preached fiery sermons against recreational consumerism — and more recently, against climate disaster. You can often find them greeting the crush of shoppers at Macy’s in New York City on Black Friday. That may not be the case this year. That is because in September, Rev. Billy was arrested after staging a 15-minute musical protest at a JPMorgan Chase bank in Manhattan to highlight the bank’s environmental record and the extinction of a Central American golden toad. He now faces a year in prison for misdemeanor charges of riot in the second degree, menacing in the third degree, unlawful assembly and two counts of disorderly conduct.
Reverend Billy talking:
It was a different action for us. Going back across the years, all of our performances inside banks, UBS, Deutsche Bank, World Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Bank of America, and many Chase Banks, this one was unusual in that we, on purpose, chose an uptown Manhattan bank that we knew to be frequented by people from Wall Street wealthy people. It’s called a wealth management bank. It had a design where the escalator shot up to the third floor so our 14 singing toad actors could go right into the center of what we call white people land where all of these people were having hushed conversations about their stock portfolios.
The golden toad was driven into extinction 30 years ago in Central America in the mountains. Cloud forest ponds were its habitat. It is a beautiful, a luminescent forest creature called the allelujah toad toad by the indigenous people there. And the United Nations and — there is a consensus among natural scientist that this is one of the first prominent species to be killed by climate change.
Christiana Figueres, Head of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, is from Costa Rica. She recently told KQED the disappearance of the Golden toad from Costa Rica had a lasting impression on her. She said, “I was about 12 or 13 and my parents took me to a rainforest in Costa Rica where there was an endemic golden frog that was a beautiful species. By the time I was married and had children, the species of frog had disappeared because of the increasing temperatures [caused by climate change]. The fact that I have seen the disappearance of a species in my lifetime has left me marked. I now realize the planet I’m leaving to my children is visibly diminished from the planet I inherited.”
I am hoping that there is a way that we can be marked by the extinction of the world, the extinction wave is real and the financing of the extinction wave by people who profit from it is real. But, don’t — we are so consumerized. Something is wrong with us, we don’t have any fight or flight. We’re not responding. The natural scientists have a consensus, they are telling us we are in grave danger. When other life dies, we die as well. I think we are taught by, I don’t know, the Industrial Revolution, enlightenment, capitalism, we are taught that the human species can exist alone, but Dr. E.O. Wilson, kind of the leader of the extinction experts in the world, a biology teacher up at Harvard, they all say, that, that is not possible. If the biosphere becomes damaged on a certain level, we suffer damage, too.
Our research has it that JPMorgan chase is the top financier of climate change in the world. Its investments put more CO2 and nitrous oxide and methane into the atmosphere than any other single investor. Of course they are traditionally a fossil fuel bank. They come to us from standard oil. There’ve also been a fossil fuel bank. The trouble is they continue to be. But, now like all the corporations, pour hundreds of millions of dollars into green-washing advertising and we are led to believe that they have a neutral carbon footprint and we’re subject to their propaganda.
This year Rainforest Action Network, the Sierra Club, Bank Track, released their fourth annual coal report card which evaluates the largest U.S. banks and their financing coal, the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. The report found “U.S. banks financed a combined $20.8 billion for the worst-of-the-worst companies in the coal industry in 2012. Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase had the most exposure to coal among the U.S. banks in 2012, financing $3 billion, $2.75 billion, and $2.17 billion respectively in loan and underwriting transactions with companies that engage in mountaintop removal, coal mining or electrical utilities that are expanding or extending the lives of their coal-fired power plant fleets.” The report gave JPMorgan a D+ for policies on mountain top removal, and a D for financing of coal-fired power plants.
I just want to ask, this thing that we share here at this table, the people in the studio audience, the people watching us right now, we share this amazing, unexplained thing called life. I just want to pray to life. Lifelluja. May we respect the life in others. May we respect life in the species, the plants, the animals that we share this beautiful planet with, may we respect the lives of the workers who are serving us with this strange convenience, these products that we are addicted to, this Black Friday weekend. We can’t afford to force life into an other category anymore. We’re all life together. Earthelluja.
– source democracynow.org
Reverend Billy, (Bill Talen), activist and performance artist. He was arrested in September after staging a 15-minute musical protest at a Chase Bank in Manhattan, and faces a year in prison for misdemeanor charges of riot in the second degree, menacing in the third degree, unlawful assembly and two counts of disorderly conduct. He and The Stop Shopping Choir are performing at Joe’s Pub here in New York every Sunday through December 22. Rev. Billy is also featured in the film, “What Would Jesus Buy?” and the book of the same name. His most recent book is, “The End Of The World.”