Financial Farce

A few weeks ago on Bill Moyers’ Journal he had as guests two correspondents from Mother Jones. He gave them an entire hour. The net of what they had to say was that, although at some point in the near future it might appear that legislation making a serious attempt at putting an end to the out of control nature of our banking system - including its periodic need to collect on its socialized risk positions - might be promulgated, anything that might appear will be a sham.

The reason for that fact, these two men said, complete with pretty detailed and compelling documentation, is the fact that it matters not which legislative branch one considers, which of the two parties one submits to scrutiny, or specifically which name of our elected representatives one might examine, one overarching fact controls what happens: if you are talking about anything to do with the financial system, that system owns the governmental apparatus intended to regulate it. That system also owns the human components of that governmental apparatus, lock, stock and barrel.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when today, the first day of the new law protecting all of us from the credit card industry, I heard on NPR that that new law is again, just a sham. Various obviously unacceptable practices - having been exposed over time in much the same way as the practices of the food industry were exposed several generations ago - have been made illegal. Even the fully owned minions of the Banks ultimately couldn’t stand up to the pressure and scrutiny that 24% interest and bank-induced penalty charges brought to bear upon them from the electorate.

But wait, I thought I heard someone say. The Industry, the financial industry cries, can’t sustain itself without those charges.

Where one might want to interpret that as the fact that the banks had a predatorily faulty business model, they assert that they have been unfairly singled out and denied their just and due pounds of flesh. And they are already way ahead of us.

NPR told me this morning to be on the lookout for a wave of new, capricious and most likely unannounced fees, much like the airlines various new fees.

Look for higher annual fees. Look for fees for inactivity. Look for fees for minimum acceptable usage (from the banks’ point of view). Look for fees for higher than acceptable usage (from the banks’ point of view). Look for fees for having been in a foreign country and not using your credit card. Look for fees, for sure, for having been in a foreign country and having used your credit card. Look for fees for having visited an airline web site that sells tickets for travel to foreign countries. Look for surcharge fees predicated on the fact that you have in a given time period (one calculated by a new variable time usage algorithm) accumulated an excess number (from the banks’ point of view) fees.

And there is no law against any of this, and there won’t be until the din from all of us who live in the mudsill of our society begin to make the lives of our “elected” (or is it “elect”) representatives uncomfortable enough to perpetrate another sham.

And so it goes.