September 7, 2009, here on slacktivist: Same to you buddy
Last year, U.S. banks collected about $36 billion in overdraft protection fees. This year, they expect to transfer about $38.5 billion out of customers’ accounts in the form of such fees.
$38.5 billion. $105 million every day. $4.4 million every hour. $73,250 every minute. More than $1,200 a second. Transferred directly from the poor to the rich.
$38.5 billion.
I keep repeating that figure because I can’t quite manage to grasp it. The public, obviously, can’t grasp it either. Open your window and inhale — smell any torches or smoke from the barricades? Turn on CNBC, Are bankers using fake names and requiring their faces to be distorted? No? Then the public still doesn’t yet appreciate the meaning of this figure.
$38.5 billion taken directly out of people’s bank accounts.
$38,500,000,000.
I’m not suggesting that everyone who works at a bank that extracts these billions from customers through an overdraft protection scheme is, necessarily, a Bad Person due to working there. And I’m perfectly willing to allow them the chance to defend themselves. I am, in fact, eager to hear their explanation — to hear them describe the actions they’ve taken to protest this policy and the reasons why such actions have, thus far, not succeeded. My point here is only that such a defense, such an explanation, is required of them if they want to continue interacting on polite terms with the rest of us — if they want to drink in our bars or attend our churches or walk down our streets without parents clutching small children by the hand and dragging them aside and saying, “Come over here, honey, we don’t want to go near the banker.”
That, at a minimum, is what $38.5 billion a year means.
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