By Patrick Hedlund
DNAinfo News Editor
MANHATTAN — Talk about a dirty protest.
A group of activists placed a pile of mud in the lobby of a Chase Bank branch in the East Village to demonstrate against the company’s alleged involvement in out-of-state mining activities.
Anti-consumerist “performance preacher” Reverend Billy, a former mayoral candidate for the Green Party, gathered with members of his gospel choir for the ceremonial-style event, which saw activists dump dirt inside the bank’s ATM vestibule at the corner of East 10th Street and Second Ave.
Rev. Billy, real name Bill Talen, charged JPMorgan Chase with financing 80 percent of the mountaintop mining “that is killing Appalachia,” according to his Web site. Talen recently returned from a trip to a West Virginia coal-mining region, bringing with him some of the displaced dirt to build mini-mountains at Chase branches across the city.
The controversial practice of “mountaintop removal mining,” which occurs frequently in the Appalachian Mountains, involves removing entire portions of mountaintops and ridges to access the underlying coal.
The bank has been accused of funding six of the top eight companies responsible for mountaintop mining in the country.
“That’s dirt from a strip-mining operation in Appalachia, children,” Talen said, using his trademark megaphone, on the sidewalk outside the bank after activists packed the mud into a foot-and-a-half-tall heap inside the lobby, singing “Chase is gonna bring back the mountain."
“It was financed by JPMorgan Chase, but we took it back here. And we’re going to have mountains appearing in lobbies all over this city and all over this nation. This is the beginning of a movement… .”
The activists also left a letter for JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on top of the pile.
Talen has also accused the bank financing empty buildings during a time of rising homelessness across the city.
“I wanted to show that urban poverty and rural poverty should not be separated, not if the same bank ‘warehouses’ our city buildings and also finances strip-mining over valleys of small towns of defenseless citizens,” he wrote on his Web site. “But none of this is on the market, and its invisibility attacks activists as much anyone else.”
Despite a photo of police officers surveying the scene, the NYPD had no record of the incident or any charges related to the action.
