Banks as public enemy

Perhaps you laugh at that.

Listen. Decades ago, people dressed in their best dark clothes to go to the bank. Big banks were cavernous and hushed and sported stone pillars in front – they still do – projecting a kind of oceanic permanence.

But that’s changed. These days banks shriek their wares competitively from street billboards, and most business is plastic. These days half-dressed customers in flop sandals push in the bank, shove around and sometimes curse the tellers through the bullet-proof barrier, I’ve seen it.

From earlier times as national institutions banks have lost their granite mystique. In the last few decades they have mutated: drive thru, and chic, and neighborhood, and one day a week, where I bank, the tellers wear blue jeans. Tellers were once dour, life-time employees, but now every time I go in, the tellers are a different set of fresh-faced credit card hustlers.

But banks haven’t finished changing.  All powerful, they once protected our money, but now people are wondering how to protect their money from the banks. They seem to loot every deposit we make with their myriad charges. As I stood on line the other day, an older man next to me complained about the thick plexiglass at the counter, it made it difficult to understand the cashier. Nobody trusts anybody these days, I smiled. I shrugged, the thick barriers were actually installed to protect us customers from them; he didn’t smile and clenched his paperwork tight.

Distrust. But this is an era where great and bright trusted institutions suddenly invert, and what have we now, but shadow and half-lit suspicion. The Catholic church, once resplendent with its spired cathedrals inspiring another kind of oceanic feeling, also once protector, now better known for its cruelty, incidents of child rape in the news.

Look, I didn’t mean to pick on the church. It’s everywhere. This is the age of big institutions not being what they used to. Like the military, it used to be everybody was proud of our people in uniform, but now there’s sex abuse in the ranks, unprecedented suicides and over half of homeless men are veterans. And government is another institution, I suppose. Which is supposed to represent the public. In which there was once a dignified senate, and respect, and which is now corrupt. And you can’t opt out, you have to have a government.

You have to have a government and you have to have a bank.

But banks haven’t finished. The banks have inverted. They inverted so far they would have failed, but for us, last year. We taxpayers had to pony up hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out these banks because they were collapsing – gambled on some risky loans and investments of their own and lost. In some cases they turned around and used the bailout money to splash bonuses on their own executives. Parties.

And now, another round of payouts is expected. And Congress will find the payout money again. Even as Congress says it can’t find the money to provide healthcare for ordinary Americans, who are the public. Investment banks at this writing are furiously lobbying Congress to push back new regulations on derivatives and credit default swaps, and they know they will win. Those coiffed gentlemen want to play the very gambles again that helped drop us all into this economic mess. And they will do it again. Because they own Congress. And thus you are entitled to feel violated.

And this is not for the common good.

So the same banks we bailed out, turn around and foreclose on us. Make it harder to declare bankruptcy. Turn collection agents on us, hike our interest rates, raise fees for our overdrafts, in other words extort us. And their CEOs are reported still flying corporate jets to personal vacation spots.

And then in the bank, they peer at us through those bullet-proof barriers as though we were the enemy.

We, the public.