WHY DO WE NEED THESE BANKS AGAIN?

WAMU is becoming Chase, and I’m reaping all rewards.

Go back with me a few months. Before Bush and company left office for good, lets say summer 08. The largest banks in the world are failing. They’re done. It’s over. Mass Hysteria time. When one toppled, it caused a rippling effect, pulling all the other predators with it. Lenders became debtors as all their debtors went belly up themselves. People were tossed from their worthless mansions. Things looked bleak. Kind of like they look right this minute.

Until the Government stepped in, pulled tight the reins of capitalism and said, “No More.” No more failing banks and homeless taxpayers. Well, no more failing banks. Then they gave the banks a bunch of money. Our money. One of those banks was JP Morgan Chase.

Now, I have been banking diligently with Washington Mutual, who for some reason have gone all KFC on me and reverted to WAMU, ever since I moved in next door to one. It was much closer than the B of A I used to go to, and certainly more convenient than Wachovia (walk over ya?) Bank.

Cut to Chase getting all that money again. They get billions, as do most of those institutions. Then they admit that they’re not going to start lending again with it. No no, that would restart the economy. And you guessed it, there’s a couple things Chase wants to buy real cheap before the economy starts up again. How about WAMU, and that Bear Stearns too? Yea, that looks good. Wow, you guys bought some pretty big banks there. What do you think CEO, are we good to start the economy yet?

“I would not assume that we are done on the acquisition side just because of the Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns mergers. I think there are going to be some great opportunities for us to grow in this environment, and I think we have an opportunity to use that $25 billion in that way and obviously depending on whether recession turns into depression or what happens in the future, you know, we have that as a backstop.” (actual executive quote)

Holy shit. They don’t even care anymore. They’re just fine telling us where to stick it. Too big to fail=DO NOT FUCK with us.

So back to me. I moved to Portland six months back. It has been hard. This was not the best time for a move to an economic quagmire of a community with double digit unemployment. I am still with WAMU, but every time I go in or online to bank, they’re warning us of this impending shift to the Dark Side.

WAMU is becoming Chase.

“I don’t want that to happen,” I always thought to myself going in. “That sounds bad.” Well kids it is bad. Really bad.

I guess I’m just frustrated that in these times, the largest institutions are getting our money in the form of bailouts, but still screwing us. I deposited a check right before going out of town. That check, apparently, bounced. The woman told me on the phone that she was not “allowed” to look at the check and could not tell me why it had been returned, with a $12 fee. I love that, a fee of $12 to not deposit a check. Nice.

So I kept using my debit card out of town, thinking I had all this money in the account. The card always ran, and I had no worries.Why keep checking on my account if I’m so rich?

See, I have what they call OVERDRAFT PROTECTION. This means that any purchase I make will be protected from an overdraft fee, as long as I deposit the money to cover that overdraft by the end of the day. If I am overdrawn the next morning, my last  purchase gets hit with a $33 fee. So I am protected from overdraft for exactly 24 hours. That’s a really shitty protection plan. 24 hours? Who am I, Keifer Sutherland?

What? It’s a joke people.

Come to find out, I have now racked up over two hundred dollars in overdraft fees because of this one mistake in my accounting. And the woman on the phone took off one, one, overdraft fee “as a courtesy.” How can I ever thank her enough?

To sum it up. I think it’s fucking terrible that our money is going directly to banks who have no intention of using it to the benefit of our country. They are using it for selfish reasons (re: buying more companies, STILL outsourcing jobs, and those famous fucking bonuses) and we, the citizens of this country and customers of these banks are suffering. Really suffering. But when I make a banking mistake and don’t check my account every day, they take $200 from me. And that’s not considered a crime. In fact, its a service, a courtesy.

Chase is a joke, I’m going to go to a community credit union somewhere who’ll treat me like a human being.

And to all of you rich-as fuck executives:

You’re still going to die someday.

And nobody likes you.