Chase, the largest bank in the United States, and CVS pharmacy, the globalized behemoth, have been trying for more than a year to obtain permission to move into downtown Sebastopol, a semi-rural Northern California town of fewer than 8,000 residents.

Showing fierce resistance, and armed with little more than good will, many here are fighting the two mighty corporations in a David versus Goliath struggle that many communities across the country might recognize. And it is one that we intend to win.

The City Council, Planning Commission and Design Review Board (DRB) have all rejected the Chase/CVS effort to develop a drive-through mall in one of the busiest intersections in town. One citizens group, Committee for Small Town Sebastopol, has sued the project on environmental grounds. Occupy Sebastopol has announced a peaceful rally for Thursday, May 24, at its large tent on the plaza, followed by a march to where Chase/CVS wants to relocate.

JPMorgan/Chase’s recent loss of more than $3 billion in derivatives further threatens the powerful bank’s chances. The next DRB meeting on this development is May 30. The City Council meets May 29. Activists plan to speak at both.

Let us try a metaphor: Would you let a convicted sexual predator of young children build a house next door to an elementary school, even if its design met all the code requirements? Or would you consider the potential harm to the community and reject the proposal on ethical and moral grounds?

What if a bank had been convicted numerous times of predatory banking practices? Would you let that bank move downtown? Or would you insist that they stay on the outskirts of town? These are questions that Sebastopol, and many towns like it, faces.

Chase and CVS have each paid billions of dollars in fines for their many illegal activities - violations that are considered customary business expenses to white-collar criminal elements of the banking/pharmaceutical ruling class. Yet even then, Sebastopol’s downtown is at risk of profiteering and polluting by the country’s largest bank and one of its largest pharmacies.

By developing a vacant automobile dealer’s site at the busiest corner in town, they would increase traffic and draw more money from local citizens out of the county and into the hands of the global 1%. Occupy Sebastopol and various community groups, like GoLocal, claim that it is time to reverse globalization and trumpet re-localization.

The Justice Department recently launched a criminal investigation into JPMorgan/Chase’s trading loss of over $3 billion through its continuing casino-capitalism gambling with derivatives. With some $2.5 trillion in total assets, JPMorgan/Chase owns roughly 20% of the U.S. economy, according to MIT professor Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

As the refrain goes, the bank “is too big to fail,” Johnson said in an interview with Bill Moyers published last week.

Even the corporate media has raised alarming questions about Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Our local daily, The Press Democrat, until recently owned by the New York Times, described Dimon as part of “Wall Street royalty” and noted in an editorial that the CEO is experiencing “some poetic justice.”

“How the mighty have fallen” captions a May 21 Newsweek photo of Dimon, linking him to Jon Corzine of MF Global and Kweku Adoboli of UBS. Which other members of the 1% may be soon to fall?

Even after the announcement of the bank’s staggering losses, shareholders confirmed Dimon’s $24 million dollar annual pay package.

“Huge banks have been using their enormous wealth for years to buy off politicians and regulators,” said Moyers. “Chase just had to pay almost three quarters of a billion dollars in settlements and surrendered fees to settle one case alone, that of bribery and corruption in Alabama. It’s also paid billions to settle other cases of perjury, forgery, fraud and sale of unregistered securities.”

To repeat: Is that the kind of predatory operation one would want to anchor in their lovely downtown where people gather? In addition to being private property, downtowns are part of the commons: constructed by taxpayers with plazas, walkways and other places where people gather without having their pockets picked by corporations.

Coincidentally, Dimon is also close friends with Sandy Weill, Citigroup’s retired CEO who recently faced a huge dust-up of his own in this region, when droves turned out at Sonoma State University's graduation ceremonies to protest the so-called "honorary degree" bestowed on Weill for his $12 million donation toward a new luxurious music center at the school.

Dimon is described by Robert Scheer as being “like his mentor Weill, who ran Citigroup into derivative trading hell.”

"Dimon was in cahoots with his mentor, Sandy Weill, in engineering a series of mergers and acquisitions that would have violated the Glass-Steagall law,” which Weill himself worked hard to dismantle, Scheer continues, making “the too-big-to-fail” banks legal.

SSU faculty, students, alumni, community members and activists from Occupy Petaluma, Occupy Santa Rosa and Occupy Sebastopol engaged in a successful “Shame on SSU” direct action at the school’s May 12 graduation, where crowds turned their backs to shun Weill as he received his "degree."

Chase’s partner in this incursion, CVS, is another globalized mega-corporation with a history of abuses.

A settlement was recently reached by 44 California District Attorneys and city attorneys, forcing CVS to pay $13.75 million in civil penalties because the company “violated California laws for safe storage, handling and disposal of sharps waste, pharmaceutical and pharmacy waste, photo waste containing silver, and hazardous waste generated from spills and customer return of hazardous products.”

If the company is hurting people and the environment through its customary practices elsewhere, why should it be expected to act differently once it moves downtown into the commons?

The “hefty fine” imposed on CVS, according to Sebastopol’s Eric Snyder in a letter to the weekly Sonoma West editor, “exposes an arrogant corporate culture that considers paying fines for laws broken simply a cost of doing business.”

“I researched CVS and after reading hundreds of pages of court documents and articles, decided to no longer shop there. CVS is merciless,” Snyder wrote, citing that the company has been forced to pay hundreds of millions in fines while its executives have been charged with bribery, conspiracy and fraud. CVS paid $75 million, the largest penalty ever paid under the Controlled Substances Act, in 2010. Other locals have already established a boycott of CVS.

The point is this: big businesses like Chase and CVS are threats to local businesses. In a further commentary published in Sonoma West, Sebastopol resident Bill Shortridge detailed the losses that would be faced by local hardware, art supply stores, and others due to a new Chase/CVS conglomerate stuck in the heart of our town.

And let's not even mention the many families that have had their homes foreclosed as a result of Chase’s immoral lending practices, and who have been evicted from those homes. It is an understatement to say that these two corporations have worsened and destroyed many lives.

The response? “Let’s ban chain stores downtown and promote incentives so local businesses can flourish,” Shortridge concluded in his piece. Other Sonoma County cities have such bans, and there's no reason why we cannot as well.