The Motherfucker Awards
CAN COMEDY BE A TOOL FOR ACTIVISM?
“I literally flew halfway across the country just so I could say motherfucker on stage,” Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi said as he presented a Motherfucker Award to JPMorgan Chase bank for their outstanding efforts financing dirty energy.
Comedians Natasha Leggero and Moshe Kasher accepted the award, claiming that their names were Jonathan and Jaquelyn Chase, the fictitious sibling heirs to JPMorgan Chase.
“We aren’t just brother and sister,” Kasher said, “We also fuck.”“That’s right, we’re in an incestuous romantic relationship,” Leggero followed. “If we don’t finance dirty energy, then we don’t feel horny, and if we don’t feel horny, our love story ends here. So unless you’re somehow anti-incest, you’ll have to agree that we need to finance tar sands pipelines.”
The premise of the Motherfucker Awards is corporate accountability through comedy. Investigative journalists present awards to corporations responsible for fucking Mother Earth, and comedians accept the awards on behalf of the corporations, bragging about their “achievements.” A live audience is dressed to the nines, but rather than scream and shout, as they would at a typical environmental protest, at the MOFAS, they laugh.
JPMorgan Chase won the Air category, “for efforts to make our atmosphere more visible.” The bank’s volume of finance for fossil fuels between 2016-2018 is a shocking 29% higher than the second placed bank, Wells Fargo.
In addition to financing pipelines that supercharge pollution, the bank also commits every possible type of financial fraud. In a series of articles that Taibbi wrote for Rolling Stone, he detailed how the bank, at its peak, was paying one out of every three dollars it earned in regulatory fines.
Where you put your money is one of the most leveraged individual actions you can take. When you deposit your money into a bank, it doesn’t stay there. Through a process called fractional reserve lending, a bank can legally lend out around nine times as much cash as it has on deposit (in some cases it’s much higher.) The bank then leverages your money to make those loans, which can be used to finance a local bakery down the street or an oil pipeline in Alberta. Some banks have ethical standards for projects that they will finance, while JPMorgan Chase is the only bank financing all four key tar sands expansion companies. Banks rely on your money to make these loans, and that when you move your money to a more responsible bank, you can simultaneously stop financing the problem and start financing the solution, all in one move. In 2009 I gave a TEDx Talk about this leveraged form of activism.
Although the financial sector impacts our lives more than nearly any other issue, the stories rarely get airtime. Think about how deeply the 2008 financial crash shook you and your family. In one year, as much as 40 percent of the world’s wealth was annihilated. Personally, my 90-year-old grandfather lost his life savings and had to return to work at Ben Lomand supermarket after being retired for nearly 20 years. Since that global financial disaster, no American bankers have served jail time. On the contrary, executives at the biggest banks, including JPMorgan Chase, received bonuses to the tune of $32 billion.
One way to pierce through the noise is to use satire. The aim of the MOFAS is to bridge the worlds of comedy and investigative journalism to deliver a humorous take on systemic problems like underregulated banking, the spread of private prisons, and the death of campaign finance reform.
JPMorgan Chase still hasn’t replied to our emails requesting an address so we can ship their award to them, but we’re hoping to hear back soon.
Check out the whole show at motherfuckerawards.com
