But that receipt might not mention the fee at all, in which case you wouldn\u2019t learn about it until you got your monthly bank statement in the mail (there was no \u201conline\u201d yet, for most people), or until those hidden fees bumped your balance into the red, sending you into the cascading hell of overdraft charges followed by overdraft charges on those charges.<\/p>\n Congress addressed this by amending the law regulating ATMs to require full disclosure of any such fees prior to the transaction. This disclosure requirement was a Good Thing.<\/p>\n Granted, it was a rather modest<\/em> Good Thing. The change in the law didn\u2019t set any caps or limits on such fees \u2014 so you might still be charged $2 or $4 for access to $20 of your own money, skimming a percentage that would make a loan shark blush. And while the change might help you to avoid overdraft hell, it did nothing else to limit banks\u2019 ability to continue stealing the $30 billion<\/em> or so they transfer from working people to themselves through that racket every year. But still, it was a small but positive step.<\/p>\n It was also an eminently capitalist<\/em> step. It was a market-driven measure designed to allow free markets to function more efficiently by ensuring that consumers were informed about the costs of these transactions. Such information, the theory says, gives consumers a choice, empowering the invisible hand of competition. In practice, of course, such information might only tell consumers that they had<\/em> no choice \u2014 that their only options for accessing their own money all charged such fees, and that even if they decided to walk all over town looking for a cheaper ATM they might never find one (I often did, and then usually didn\u2019t). But over time, the theory said, the information would create the demand<\/em> for other options, and that demand would eventually create a supply to meet it. In some places, that happened, sort of. In other places it didn\u2019t. (Those other places, quite often, were less-white<\/em> neighborhoods, because America.)<\/p>\n It would be churlish, though, to blame this positive piece of legislation for not transforming the entire world. What it did accomplish was limited and modest, but that limited and modest accomplishment was unambiguously positive.<\/p>\n Back when President Bill Clinton was signing laws like this one, the word that came to be used for such modest-but-positive measures was \u201cClintonian.\u201d Bill Clinton had a good instinct for politics as the art of the possible \u2014 for identifying small positive steps like this and making them happen. Such things might not be revolutionary<\/em>, but they\u00a0resulted in\u00a0tangible improvements in the daily life of millions of Americans. It\u2019s a really big country, after all, and even minor\u00a0reforms could, on a national scale, add up to substantial increases in fairness and the general welfare.<\/p>\n But while this law requiring disclosure of ATM fees was certainly Clintonian in its effect, and it was signed into law by Bill Clinton, we shouldn\u2019t give him all the credit for getting it passed. A lot of the impetus for that law came from Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, who worked\u00a0hard to get the bill through the House of Representatives.<\/p>\n Sanders caucused with the House Democrats but he was officially an Independent who, famously, preferred to identify as a \u201csocialist.\u201d (Hence the Vermont joke, dating back to his time as mayor there, of referring to the state\u2019s largest city* as the \u201cPeople\u2019s Republic of Burlington.\u201d)<\/p>\n Sanders\u2019 role in this legislation is why I remember it, and why I wound up referring to it, often, throughout the 1990s.<\/p>\n At the time, I was working\u00a0for Ron Sider at Evangelicals for Social Action. Ron is best known as the author of a terrific book called Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger<\/em><\/a>. That\u00a0book seemed to get a lot of people very angry \u2014 particularly those who might qualify as its titular Rich Christians. And a lot of those angry people responded angrily by hurling the harshest, nastiest word they could think of: socialist<\/em>.<\/p>\n This was silly and dumb, of course. Ron wasn\u2019t a socialist, he was a Mennonite<\/em>. The core of his book was a call\u00a0for voluntary<\/em>, private, personal generosity \u2014 what he called a \u201cgraduated tithe.\u201d It was, essentially, a plea to \u201clive simply that others may simply live.\u201d He wanted readers to decide on a standard of living that seemed, to them, to be enough<\/em>, and then to commit voluntarily to give a bit more of their more-than-enough to help the many millions of people who have less-than-enough.<\/p>\n But still, whenever I went out as a representative of ESA, this \u201csocialist\u201d thing was something I\u2019d have to deal with. For many in the white evangelical world we were trying to reach, the only thing they\u2019d heard about ESA and Ron Sider was that word. So I\u2019d have to point out, as in the paragraph above, that Ron\u2019s call for deeper voluntary personal generosity was not, in fact, anything at all like socialism. And\u00a0sometimes, to help\u00a0people get past that, I would talk about the law requiring disclosure of ATM fees.<\/p>\n People knew about this law because they\u2019d seen it in action every time they used an ATM. That law, I pointed out, was passed thanks to the only member of Congress who refers to himself as a socialist. Here in America, in the 1990s, I would say, this is what \u201csocialism\u201d has come to mean: The very modest claim that banks should be required to inform you that they\u2019re about to charge you two bucks for the privilege of access to your own money. This Red Menace doesn\u2019t try to stop those banks from charging you what amounts to 10 or 20 percent for a $20 withdrawal, it just requires them to tell you about it<\/em> beforehand. So, I said, half-joking, if that\u2019s what \u201csocialism\u201d means these days, then I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s really something you need to be afraid of.<\/p>\n Anyway, even though I used the modest scope\u00a0of that law as a kind of punchline for years, it was still, as I said above, a Good Thing. Rep. Sanders deserves real credit for pushing for it and President Clinton deserves real credit for signing it.<\/p>\n It took a couple more decades before we\u2019d see legislation that even began to tackle the more substantial matter of the way ATMs and ATM fees fuel the overdraft racket that transfers tens of billions of dollars<\/em> every year away from the working class and into the pockets of the banksters. That didn\u2019t happen until Dodd-Frank was\u00a0signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010.<\/p>\n Dodd-Frank is a big, sprawling mess of an omnibus law<\/a>, and whether it does enough or goes far enough to restrain the \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d banks and to prevent a repeat of the Great Recession is still a matter of debate. (It probably does not.) But apart from that aspect of the law, Dodd-Frank also includes a bunch of other, more modest measures \u2014 the kinds of things we used to describe as Clintonian. My favorite of those is the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau<\/a>, which is awesome<\/em>.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t suppose the CFPB qualifies as revolutionary either, but it\u2019s changing your life, for the better, in dozens of modest little ways. Quite often, it works through the same modest mechanism of disclosure discussed above.\u00a0Disclosure and opt-in measures haven\u2019t halted the banksters\u2019 annual theft of billions of dollars through the overdraft racket, but the amount of that annual wealth-transfer is, for the first time, going down instead of increasing. And the CFPB has had even more success going after payday lenders and the shadow-banking industry that fleeces the unbanked poorest of the poor even worse than Wall Street treats those of us who can afford a checking account. Whether or not the general public views Richard Cordray as a \u201crevolutionary,\u201d the banksters sure do<\/a>.<\/p>\n I realize that all the good that the CFPB is doing is still not enough. There\u2019s more to do and more that must be done. Much more. But I wouldn\u2019t want to lose the tangible progress CFPB has made and is making. \u201cAll Cris Carter does is catch touchdown passes,\u201d former Philadelphia Eagles coach Buddy Ryan said before sending the receiver off to a hall-of-fame career in Minnesota. I know what Ryan meant, but still, it turns out that actually catching<\/em> those touchdown passes is kind of important.<\/p>\n \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013<\/p>\n![\"RC1977\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2016\/02\/RC1977-194x300.jpg\")
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