By Anonymous
What do you do if the economy has left you out in the cold and your bank doesn't want to help? It's a question a lot of Americans are facing right now and some of them are dealing with it better than others.
A few weeks ago a customer in a local Bank of America branch near where this story was written gave a poignant commentary to how seriously Main Street is now being impacted by the crisis of high finance that has gripped the mortgage and credit markets. Imagine yourself standing in line behind a regular customer, a familiar face, who was depositing a check. After filling out the deposit ticket and handing the check over, the teller returns with a receipt giving almost a zero balance: almost his entire deposit had been vaporized by overdraft fees, which had accrued only because he was dutifully paying his bills with what little money he had, while waiting for receivables. A construction worker, self-employed, hit hard by the downturn in the economy and struggling to keep his family afloat in a town not so far from me, this scenario actually unfolded right before my eyes. His account was in arrears by no more than a few days, because of checks he had written simply to survive and pay his bills. His bank -- Bank of America -- not only allowed the overdrafts to clear, they hit him with a $35 fee for each and every one of them, wiping out an entire week's worth of income that went straight into Bank of America's coffers to help pay for its awful choices in other areas of their business.
This guy, a new member of the working poor in America, standing in line to finally make a deposit and bring his balance back up, was told by a teller that after the overdraft fees were deducted, only $100 was left; and that was all he had to support his family for the next week. Trying to negotiate with the teller was futile: there was no waiving the fees in whole or part.
Then he snapped, and started loudly threatening people in the bank. He told people he was going to shoot them in a rising crescendo of grief and frustration. He was led away in handcuffs. Bank of America is a company that was giving credit cards to illegal immigrants in 2007 http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2007/02/bank_of_america.html and has pulled its funding from the Boy Scouts of America http://sistertoldjah.com/archives/2006/05/17/bank-of-america-pulls-boy-scout-funding/ but now -- because it is teetering on the brink like so many other banks up to their necks in the subprime mortgage and credit crises, it will not consider waiving its exorbitant overdraft fees -- even for longstanding, actual American customers who find themselves caught in the vise of America's recent financial crisis. And even if they have families to support, and even if they are doing their utmost to pay their bills, tread water, and maintain a shred of their dignity.
Bank of America's enormously poor business decisions shouldn't allow them to wreck other people's lives with impunity, particularly when one of their corporate decisions until the bottom fell out was to give credit to illegal aliens. Maybe they should start giving a little grace to some of America's actual citizens.
A second point of contention is calling these fees exorbitant. Everyone is given a copy of the fees disclosure when they sign up with the bank. They are the terms of the contract in good and bad times. It is highly dishonest to go complaining about them after you have problems instead of when you had the money in the account to make an impact.
Fighting for conservatism one day at a time.