Stick em up. Nobody move. This is an overdraft fee!

Stick em' up or as robbers used to say in Detroit, Check it in. However, this “Jacker” is no armed hood with a heater (gun) stuck in your face; it’s your friendly Bank supposedly upholding its fiduciary responsibility via robbing you through overdraft charges and fees to increase profitability on the institution. Yeah...right!

Yes, I got jacked and that is why I am writing this Op-Ed. The other day I went online to review my checking balances and transactions and discovered over 200 dollars in overdraft charges. I honestly felt the same way that I did in the past when I came home and discovered my residence or property had been broken into and items stolen. I felt violated. I felt very angry and I felt the emotion of vengeance. I wanted to get even…but how and against whom?

Needless to say I immediately picked up the phone and called the 24 hour 1-800 number. I spoke with a rep who told me that since I had overdrafts on 3 other occasions, during the year, that they could not and would not excuse this one. So I went to my initiating branch the first business day of the week to speak with a manager. The manager again told me that he could not dismiss the charges due to past history of overcharges. I eventually told them that I will stand in front of their bank with a picket sign if they did not reverse those charges and I was serious. Eventually he agreed to take off 4 of the 7 overdraft charge transactions providing that I sign up for overdraft protection, which I did reluctantly.

Of course, people reading this will immediately say that I was irresponsible and that I did make the mistakes and knew the rules when I signed up to put my money in the institution. That’s not my beef. My beef is that the punishment does not fit the crime. It’s like having sped, getting caught and instead of getting a citation; I have to do prison time. I had 7 transactions (born from my use of debit cards for all my purchases) that totaled to less than 20 dollars overdrawn. Some for movie rental from McDonalds Red Boxes, were for 1 dollar each. For each of those transactions that I did not have funds to cover, I was charged 34 dollars. There is no cost justification for that, other than profiteering. It’s all electronic algorithms doing the work and it does not functionally cost any more to process if your account is overdrawn.

Ok, I hear all you conservative by the book defenders of the system dissenting at my attack of the system you love so dearly. Well, the kicker is that I have thousands of dollars in savings at the same bank. I purposely keep a small amount in checking because of fear that someone will get my card information (because I use it so much) and practice identity theft, emptying out my checking balance. I did not want overdraft protection because they could then tap into even more of my funds via my savings. Consequently, sometimes I don’t reconcile my balances in time, given that debit card transactions do not always manifest in real time (immediate). Therefore, given the thousands of dollars in my checking, how can the bank rationalize that it cost them anything? They did not have to loan me some of their money or someone else’s money, because my deposits in their bank could fully cover it….and then some.

The bank’s rationale was that I did not give them permission to take money from my Savings in the event that my checking account was overdrawn. Well, I also did not give them permission to charge me 34 dollars for each transaction in the red, but that did not stop them ( well...maybe I did when I signed up for the checking account, but thats not the point). Then they tell me that overdraft protection from my savings will cost me, not the 34 dollar per transaction without it, but 5 dollar per transaction of an overdrawn checking account. What the hell? How do they justify that cost? You mean to tell me that it cost them 5 dollars for the nanosecond it takes for the computer algorithm to branch to a different section of code where it will debit my savings and credit my checking to cover the overdraft? It absolutely does not. It’s simply a pretext to exploit customer’s mistakes into increased profits for the bank. What does that sound like to you? It sounds to me like the street thugs who charge you protection fees from their own thuggish behavior. Either you pay us protection money or some of our other thugs are going to come and rob you blind.

Of course the banks depend on customers savings deposits to boost the amount of money they can lend to other customers at a profit through fractional banking. They probably don't like those funds being tapped into from overdrawn checking accounts because they theoretically are using those deposits to earn interest income. Thus, the feel they must penalize people from making the account more transactional in nature, thus, threating their interest income. I am no dummy in regards to how all this works either.....its still robbery.

When you add all these things up, its just robbery pure and simple, given the constraint on their traditional nefarious acts of usury. The way the system works now is that profitability is linked to people’s mistakes and errors. The system has found away to increase profits by egregiously penalizing people who make mistakes. If you have a low interest credit card at 5%, then make one late payment or your credit situation changes with another creditor, they then rape you with a 300% increase in your interest rate. If you are a person with poor credit, instead of not giving you a loan because you fall into bad risk, they charge you two or three times the average rate of interest. Of course, if a person has a poor history of repayment or income to debt ratio, making their payments much higher is not going to increase the probability that they will repay it. You even have the insurance industry rationalizing charging higher premiums, based not upon accidents or claims, but credit reports. The more mistakes you made with your credit, the higher your insurance premiums. Of, course; there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other ways capitalism is becoming a predatory practice, not limited to what I mentioned.

Capitalism has become like the jungle, with predators watching for signs of weakness or injury in the herds of prey to pounce on and devourer for nourishment. Profiteers hover like vultures or sharks when they smell blood waiting to pick apart and digest anyone who slips up or becomes vulnerable and in need. The profiteers then swoop down upon the prey under the auspicious of being concerned and looking out for the preys needs and interest. The prey, often time with a lack of choices or knowledge of choices and in need, becomes credulous and hence victimized.