In a recent grassroots campaign, Association for Mature American Citizens (AMAC) members sent over 91,700 messages to top executives at JPMorgan Chase, calling upon the megabank to put an end to its troubling trend of infringing on Americans’ constitutionally protected rights.
AMAC’s campaign began in April as a response to Chase’s attacks on the free speech rights of fossil fuel companies and arms manufacturers. Specifically, AMAC sought to warn the bank to stop de-banking or denying services to these customers based on their beliefs.
AMAC also pointed to the de-banking of the National Committee for Religious Freedom (NCRF), headed by former ambassador Sam Brownback’s religious liberty non-profit, describing the incident as reflective of Chase’s lack of respect for rights to free speech and religious liberty.
Working with the Free Enterprise Project, the campaign also cited Chase’s low score on the Viewpoint Diversity Score Business Index, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to measure corporate respect for religious and ideological diversity in the market, workplace, and public square.
AMAC’s campaign aimed at three goals: engage JP Morgan Chase leadership, raise customer awareness of the bank’s apparent infringements on civil rights, and encourage the company to improve its score by participating in the survey portion of the Business Index. The group pointed to previous corporate advocacy successes – at Bud Light and Walt Disney – as examples of the real-world changes that occur when customers stand up to corporations that take controversial positions on hotly contested issues.
The campaign reaches its culmination at the same time as polling shows that nearly 60 percent of Americans think companies should resist activist pressure to take controversial stands on hot-button cultural issues. That figure climbed eight percentage points in the last year, as consumers punished Bud Light, Disney, and Target for their highly divisive marketing campaigns.