Banks Charging "Service" Fees - FOR WHAT?!? A Real-Time Customer Service Nightmare

This post started out of frustration when I was on hold with Chase because of a monthly charge that appeared on my statement. It's from an outfit I used to get a credit card when I first moved to California. I cancelled the account years ago, had tried to find them previously, but could only find evidence of a class action lawsuit against them, gave Chase this info previously in person. Then I found the actual outfit online, called them, told them to stop dinging my account for $5 a month but don't trust them to comply, so I called Chase, told them I wanted to make sure no payments of $5 were against my account in the future. They told me there would be a $34 fee for that! For what?!?  We bailed them out and they want to charge me a $34 fee to stop a fraudulent charge that I've reported to them previously? Does somebody need to carve something with a chisel? I demanded to talk to the "telephone banker's" supervisor, and I got cut off, went to a recorded customer satisfaction survey! These bastards wonder why people are in the streets! I'm CLOSING this account, and letting them know why.

Update - I just called back, went to the same "telephone bankers" as before. Of course they're in INDIA - I just called back, got what sounded like the same call center, who asked me for the same information I gave the first time, so I just said no, I want to talk to someone in AMERICA, now I'm on hold again. If I get cut off, I'm going to go ballistic.

Update - The one in India transferred me to one in the Philippines! Who has now put me on hold again to transfer me to a senior customer service representative in America - how did we ever let things get this this eff'ed up? WHY am I talking to people thousands of miles away? Because this idiot bank can pay them 8 cents a day. How many of them do these $34 "service" fees buy?

Update - got the American - who is trying to tell me that there is a $34 fee for that "service." What "service," I said - pushing a button? Stopping a fraudulent charge that I had alerted them to previously? Told him that I was blogging every last bit of this as it happened. The American's name is Ben Saucier.

Update - his supervisor is in a meeting. Said he is sorry that I'm upset about the "economy!"

Update - went ballistic. Service my ass. Closing account.

Related articles

• Banks take swipe at debit-card users with fee (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• 'Occupy' protests go global, riding wave of economic frustration (csmonitor.com)
• Five Horrible Customer Service Experiences (socyberty.com)
• Americans seethe as banks hit them with new fees (business.financialpost.com)
• The new normal: Higher bank fees are here to stay (seattlepi.com)

Who's To Blame?

There’s a lot of trumped up indignation going around out there from people like Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor about “blaming others.”  Tsk tsk, we mustn't blame others. “Where I’m most concerned, is we have elected leaders in this town who frankly are joining in an effort to blame others rather than focusing on the policies that have brought about the current situation,” Cantor said of the anti-Wall Street protests. Who put those policies into place, Eric? People like you! The policies that have brought about this situation; deregulation of the financial industry, lowering the top marginal tax rate to the lowest rate since the Great Depression while shifting to tax burden down away from income and onto payroll (that’s where most of us live) resulting in the consolidation of wealth and consequently political power in fewer and fewer hands at the top. Those policies were sold to the American people as means to strengthen the economy, to create jobs, and now 99% of us are raising the point that these policies have NOT worked as advertised, and we‘d like our money back. Tax cuts for the rich have obviously not created any jobs! Deregulation of the financial industry has obviously not strengthened our economy. Are we “blaming others?” Hell yeah! We’re blaming the people - of both political parties - who have supported these policies. They’ve had 30 years to prove their value, and they’ve proved to be a colossal failure - for 99% of us, that is. For 1% of us, they’ve worked out just fine, thank you very much, and since that 1% holds the vast majority of wealth, they also hold the vast majority of access to political power, so the situation is maintained. Any ordinary working person who defends this situation has a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome. Sometimes you just can’t help but blame other people. In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, European Americans went to Africa in big ships, and brought people back in chains, sold them on auction blocks, and forced them to do hard manual labor without pay. I suppose that saying so is “blaming” somebody. Well, I’m sorry, but there were not two equal and opposing sides in that argument. One side had a great deal of consolidated wealth and political power in the situation and the other side had none. There have been numerous cases throughout history, going back at least as far and even much farther back to the time when the ancestors of those very same European Americans were held in very similar conditions of forced servitude throughout Europe. Going back to Pharaoh in the Bible, and back before that. Sometimes somebody is to blame, and now we’re finding ourselves in a situation where 99% of us are coming in a distant second in terms of power, in terms of self-determination, to 1% of us who think that it is their birthright to control the destiny of our country, the destiny of the lives of the rest of us. Well, it isn’t. Don’t think I’m making a direct comparison of the circumstances of 99% of us in 2011 to the circumstances of people living in slavery in the 1800’s - I’m not. Things are desperate, but not that desperate - at least not yet. But what I am saying is that when the majority of wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a small group of people, who diligently limit access to that wealth and power to the majority of their fellows, then a major imbalance is created, an imbalance that will be addressed, don’t think it won’t - and  you had better believe that the people who are maintaining the imbalance for their own personal benefit are most definitely to blame, and now they‘re getting nervous, because the other 99% of us have had just about enough of the situation, and we’re calling them out.

Related articles

• Cantor Sees Growing, Warranted Frustration After 'Mobs' Remark (businessweek.com)
• David Axelrod: GOP Doesn't Understand Wall Street Protests (huffingtonpost.com)
• Alan Greenspan And The Un-American Mob (duanegraham.wordpress.com)

Down with evil corporations?

I don't know where this came from originally, but it's making the rounds and it makes a point that's worth addressing. I don't like it when people either do not understand, oversimplify or intentionally misconstrue a point, and I really hate to hear what a particular group of people thinks from somebody who really doesn't have a clue what they actually think.
Corporations are not "evil." The point is NOT to destroy corporations, to destroy corporate America. We all do business with them every day. We work for them, and some of the most humble small business owners among us are even incorporated ourselves. I'm doing business with a search engine and an internet service provider right now, and so are you if you're reading this. A corporation is simply a business entity, an organizational construct with certain privileges and regulations, morally neutral.

The point IS that corporate money, in unlimited amounts, unregulated and undisclosed, is spilling into OUR political system, buying it's own legislation, campaigns and candidates - and as citizens we do not have the time, money or organizational ability to counter it should we care to, and that's the agenda - to override our ability to control our own government. Unregulated corporate money dumped into our political system makes our government accountable to entities other than the American people. It enables those entities to write their own legislation, deregulate themselves, create massive tax loopholes for themselves, send our jobs overseas to boost their profits at our expense. It buys legislation that is not in our best interests, for workers, for the environment, for our our infrastructure and our overall well being as a country, and it can buy up massive amounts of media to persuade us into thinking that's a good thing. Despite an absurd Supreme Court ruling to the contrary, corporations are NOT people. They do not eat, sleep, shit, or have the insurance that they've been paying for yanked if they come down with cancer, and they don't die. But they have been given all the rights of actual flesh and blood persons - and more even, since you and I do not have the option of making money here in the US but then claiming at tax time that we're actually headquartered in another country since we have a post office box there in order to get out of paying American taxes. THAT is the whole point, and when people have it presented to them in that way, they tend to get it.  

I do not think this is a liberal or conservative issue - this is an American issue. We have a situation where politicians - all of them - are forced to spend more time fund raising than they do working for US. It's a broken system, and the single biggest problem with that system is corporate money buying it's way with OUR government. It's impossible the way the system is currently constructed for any politician to unilaterally pull out of it. The politicians of BOTH parties know this - they would rather not have to spend their time fund raising. Whether or not you agree with a given congressperson, senator or president, most of them entered public life to do something they believed in - not because of all the great fund raising dinners they would get to attend. BUT - and this is a big BUT - conservative politicians have on several occasions thwarted attempts by Democrats to institute disclosure, and otherwise regulate and limit corporate contributions to campaigns and candidates. Why? Because Republicans will almost always uphold corporate interests over the interests of citizens, even, and especially, when those interests are at odds, and Democrats will, more often than not, attempt to uphold the interests of the citizens over the interest of corporations. And corporate America knows this, which is why, though they contribute to both parties, they contribute to Republicans far more heavily. 

This is not about getting rid of corporations - this is about keeping them in their place, regulating them, limiting their impact upon our government, making government accountable to US, representing our interests. This is about becoming aware that corporate power has gotten too big for it's britches. Our founding fathers feared the rise of unchecked corporate power, were aware of the ability of corporate influence to corrupt the new republic. The Boston Tea Party was not only a rebellion against the British Crown, but against overreach by a corporation in collusion with the Crown - the Dutch East India Company. The fear of unchecked corporate power led the founders to institute corporate charters, which had to be renewed every two years, and could be revoked for poor corporate citizenship. Throughout our nation's history, we've gone through periods of nearly no regulation leading to serious abuses upon workers and even the economic collapse of the Great Depression, to the decades of the mid 20th century when some of the tightest corporate regulations coincided with the most prosperous decades of this nation. As those regulations have been dismantled over the course of the last 30 years, in the name of strengthening the economy and creating jobs, the economy has gone into the toilet and unemployment has soared. The wealth gap in this nation - the gap between the incomes of the lowest paid workers and the highest paid executives - has exploded to a degree that is destabilizing to our democracy, the wealth and political power in this country has not only become concentrated into fewer hands, but has trickled up from us instead of down to us, and then flown straight out of this country (to offshore tax havens, as jobs sent overseas) as a result. How can any working, tax paying American citizen of any political persuasion argue against the need to put corporate power back in it's place, to make our politicians accountable to and afraid of US again, instead of whispering behind closed doors with corporate lobbyists about what it will take to get us to swallow whatever it is they feel like serving up?

Related articles

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Welcome to American Fervor!

My name is K Taylor Allerton, and this the  first post in my new blog, American Fervor. What is American Fervor? It's an exploration of the pertinent points that never seem to get made in modern American political discourse. It's about everything that never seems to be mentioned when one side puts on the red vest and one side puts on the blue for yet another round of our never ending national game of dodge ball.
As I write this, the crowds occupying various cities around our nation are growing, demanding change in a broken system. Those who disparage them liken them to hippies in the 60's, intending to either underestimate their impact or sound an alarm against their potential, while those who support the action nevertheless seem to focus on the lack of focus without seeming to realize that the collection of grievances being expressed are not separate issues but simply different serpents sprouting from the head of the same gorgon: our government is bought and sold, and has ceased to be concerned with or accountable to the citizens it is intended to represent. My intention with American Fervor is to provide information, discussion, perspective that will enable Americans to think about issues in ways not fed to them by the narrow parameters of our media, to become aware of what is going on around us, which is necessary if we are to do anything about it.
Respect and actually making pertinent points, instead of simply trying to score points, is essential for participation. With that in mind, I invite you to participate. Thank you.