Striking Back Against The Banks In Portland

The following communique was submitted anonymously to It’s Going Down and we reprint it below. 

The communique reads:

In solidarity with our comrades in Philadelphia and in solidarity with all our comrades battling the State, we have started off 2018 with the same guerrilla tactics perfected throughout 2017.

We are no longer willing to wait for the some great spark to cause the Revolution, nor can we afford to wait as our mental health depreciates with each new bit of bad news about our dying planet and all these warring nations fighting over blood and oil. Instead, we will turn every little act into an act of rebellion and refuse to submit to the State any longer.

Tonight we borrowed from our comrades in Philly and went out to jam up some bank ATMs. One could not find a better representative of the capitalist machine we seek to dismantle than the very cog which keeps the whole thing afloat, for without banks the State would have no way of determining “value” and stacking debt onto the backs of the impoverished while enriching the lucky few ad nauseam. 

We attempted first to lodge rectangles of non-corrugated cardboard into the slots on the ATMs, but found that the machines wouldn’t accept our counterfeits. In a split second decision, we ransacked the closest big box grocery store for all the Visa gift cards we could stuff into our pockets. We cut off about a third of these, so as to make them that much harder to fish out of the machines, and processed to gallivant across Portland jamming every machine we came across. In total we managed to wreck almost 20 ATMs, although we shall have to see how long it takes the banks to repair them. This tactic could and should be implemented all winter long, and could even likely be performed in broad daylight without catching so much as a second look. In truth, humans are so programmed not to notice things anymore that even the cops that passed us by periodically didn’t so much as slow down or look over while passing. 

In summary, cardboard works if you really work it but gift cards are easy to steal (since they must be loaded by the clerk before using, anybody who noticed probably thought we were the dumbest shoplifter ever), they easily slip into the machine, and nobody questions a person walking up to an ATM with a card in hand. We felt like the action was a huge success and we will definitely be adding it to our playbook. While our actions will not make the State crumble tomorrow, they allow us a bit of sanity and self-confidence which has been stolen from us. They remind us that the State is not as all knowing or all powerful as it would like you to believe. Most importantly, these low risk actions help us form stronger bonds with each other for when the actions we must take are no longer low risk and the consequences may be dire.

Solidarity and Respect