Street theater? Maybe. Effective? Who knows? A group of clergy collected at the Park Avenue headquarters of JPMorgan Chase on Thursday in New York City, where they closed accounts at the bank as part of a campaign to push JPMorgan Chase to change its foreclosure policies and take action on the broader national plight of homeowners on the brink.
But they didn’t stop there. Rev. Allan Ramirez of the Brookville Reformed Church, in Brookville, N.Y., performed an exorcism, seeking to banish "the demons of selfishness, avarice and greed."
The Huffington Post reported that the exorcism was part of a campaign organized by New York Communities for Change, a group made up of elected officials, clergy and unions trying to change the way JPMorgan Chase handles foreclosures. The group was formerly the New York chapter of ACORN.
Ramirez was joined at the protest by other clergy members, among them Bishop Orlando Findlayter and Minister Patricia Malcolm of Churches United to Save and Heal, a coalition of more than 100 Brooklyn churches.
"JPMorgan Chase needs to be exorcised from the demons of selfishness, avarice and greed,” Ramirez said in a statement about the exorcism. “The people who bailed them out when they brought us to the brink of a world economic collapse are the very people whose mortgages they are foreclosing and throwing out on the streets into homelessness."