If you know any documentary producers or have any other fundraising ideas, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. karneyhatch@gmail.com or 818-585-5838

Tao of the Palouse

The banking industry is sending out mixed signals at the moment.  Just last month, several large banks including Bank of America and Chase were trying to convince people to stay with overdraft “protection” ahead of the rule change that goes into affect this summer that will make it so consumers have to opt in rather than having to ask to opt out of these evil programs.

And yes, I do mean evil.  I think Bank of America’s move, yesterday, March 9, 2010, proves that they’re admitting that this program was evil as well: in the biggest single move since I started “Overdrawn!” almost four years ago, B of A said that it is ending overdraft fees on debit cards!

Now there are a gang of consumer advocates nationwide who are holding their breath to see what’s next on two big questions: First, how will the banks replace this income?  I’m hoping that they go back to the old method of charging everyone $5 or so to have a checking account - this is the most democratic way of assuring that everyone from low income consumers to wealthier folks all pay the same amount.

Second, will the other big banks follow suit?  I don’t see how other big players like Chase and Wells Fargo can ignore this, so it seems likely that checking accounts are in for some major re-working in the next few months.  Again, I just hope that paying for them ends up being more equitably distributed between all consumers, rather than having the bulk of them being paid for by lower-income account holders.

Naturally I thought, why not do this in California?  So I called the State Treasurer’s office in Sacramento and talked for over an hour with Mark Hariri, Director of Cash Management, to get a handle on the situation.  As it turns out, about 80% of the State of California’s money is also handled by Bank of America.

Which is odd, because the two largest pension funds in the state, CalPERS and CalSTRS, representing public employees and teachers, respectively, filed to be the lead plaintiffs in  shareholder lawsuits against B of A in March of 2009.

They’d better get in line.  According to this article in Slate’s The Big Money site, there are currently over 5,000 federal cases that name B of A as a party.

The Securities and Exchange Commission seems to think that California’s pension funds have a case.  Just a few weeks ago the SEC filed its own case against B of A, “charging it with failing to disclose extraordinary losses at Merrill Lynch & Co before shareholders voted on a merger of the companies”, - Reuters.

Also last November, the capital’s own Sacramento Municipal Utility District sued B of A, along with Chase and UBS and forty four other firms, in a price fixing and kickback scheme.

I could go on.

The point is, why is the State of California banking with these guys while their two largest pension funds, a public utility, and numerous citizens of the state are suing them?  Why not take that business away from B of A and put it where it belongs, in banks and credit unions that are based in California?

According to Mr. Hariri, the doors are open to any bank that wants to join the State’s Centralized Treasury System, the members of which (except Chase, which joined last fall) are listed on the Treasurer’s website.  Many banks look into it, Hariri says, but then change their minds when they see they can’t compete with the bigger banks’ low rates and fees.  You read that right.  These low rates and fees are worthwhile when you consider California’s huge float and it’s multi-trillion dollar economy.

Of course the smaller banks can’t match these fees because of the massive economies of scale that Bank of America can bring to bear.  So just as Wal-Mart drives local businesses out of business wherever they open up shop, B of A is keeping these smaller banks from getting their share of the pie by throwing their weight around.

To all this I say, wouldn’t it be worth it to pay a few extra cents per check if that money is going to a local bank or credit union, rather than to B of A?

I’m hoping to find a legislator in Sacramento who agrees with me.

A woman on Facebook , Carol Merrill, said it best: when you switch to a little bank, it’s like going to Cheers.  Everybody knows your name.

Click here to check out the Move Your Money website, and don’t forget to watch the excellent video on their front page.

“We appreciate that the Fed chose to implement the strongest overdraft reform rule it was considering, namely requiring banks and credit unions to ask new and existing customers before charging overdraft fees on debit card transactions. But this improvement is undermined by the Fed’s failure to propose or enact necessary safeguards against a host of unfair practices.”

11/6/09 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Karney Hatch, karneyhatch@gmail. com

“Overdrawn!” Screening on Capitol Hill

Ralph Nader to head panel of experts at Q & A

WASHINGTON, D.C. - - “Overdrawn!”, a documentary on predatory lending focused on overdraft fees, will screen in the Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2220, at 5:30 PM on November 19. The film will be introduced by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), whose Overdraft Protection Act in the House was recently given new momentum by the introduction of similar legislation in the Senate sponsored by Senators Dodd, Schumer, Brown and Reed. A question and answer period with a panel of experts will follow the film, featuring Ralph Nader, Ed Mzierwinski of USPIRG, and Lauren Saunders of the National Consumer Law Center.

“Overdrawn!” follows director Karney Hatch as he tries to get to the bottom of the overdraft fee racket. The film features interviews with Ralph Nader, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Eric Halperin from the Center for Responsible Lending, a loan shark, and a former VP from Bank of America. The documentary also examines the larger questions of corporate domination of government and society with author and filmmaker Joel Bakan (“The Corporation”). In addition, the film explores the consumer revolt raging against the banks in Britain, including an interview with Mike Dailly, 2007 Scottish Solicitor of the Year, who is one of the primary leaders of the fight against the banks. The film’s happy ending is Hatch having his overdraft fees refunded by Wells Fargo after taking the bank to small claims court.

Word has been spreading about “Overdrawn!” since its first screening in Portland in 2007. In March of 2008 a condensed version of the film ran on Current TV, the cable channel co-owned by Al Gore, under the title “How to Beat the Bank”. In May of that year, Carolyn Bigda wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune, and in June of 2008 NPR’s All Things Considered discussed the film during a piece on bank fees. Film Threat said in their review that “the documentary sets itself apart from most of its peers by actually offering solutions rather than just exposing problems.”

An hour long “educational cut” of the film is being distributed to universities and libraries by Filmaker’s Library in New York under the title “Rip Off: Banks Exploiting Consumers”; distribution is still being sought for “Overdrawn!” itself, though DVDs are for sale on Amazon.com.

The trailer for the film is available on the website: www.overdrawnmovie.net

Happy Birthday to me!

I’m definitely going to score one of her T-shirts as well.

Americans For Fairness in Lending is a group working for financial justice across the lending landscape, from Tax Refund Anticipation Loans to mortgages (and of course overdraft fees).  I encourage everyone to sign up and maybe send a  few pesos their way.  Once you’ve registered with them, go ahead and write to your congressperson to encourage them to implement the Credit Card Act a few months earlier.  They say it best here.

Michael Moore’s latest, “Capitalism: A Love Story”, is his most ambitious film to date and establishes him firmly as our nation’s class clown. It demonstrates once again why his films play better at the multiplex than they do in academia: they’re entertainment, not serious critiques. It’s not that he doesn’t do his homework, it’s just that the homework that he does do is much too selective, which makes it easy for his opponents to make stick the ‘liberal hack’ label that they keep handy for whenever one of his films is released.

In “Capitalism”, Moore does a fine job of showing when and how the United States took turns for the worse both politically and economically, by weakening the unions and changing the way the rich are taxed and by allowing our political system to be overrun by corporate influence. But then he wanders into class clown territory, reaching the facile conclusion that capitalism is evil and socialism is good, pointing to Germany and Japan as examples of socialist utopias.

The problem is that most of those who sit a few rows back from the class clown realize that neither pure capitalism nor pure socialism is the best way to run a society - the solution that works for all of the most successful democracies in the world is a well-balanced mix of the two. Go ask England, go ask France, go ask the much-lauded Norway. All of these, and Japan too, are capitalist to their core, but with strong moderating doses of socialism thrown in, in just the places that more socialist programs are needed here in the States: health care, the tax code, the social contract. To paint the world in black and white, evil vs. good terms is to make the class clown’s choice to get a quick laugh or a quick tear at the expense of intellectual rigor.

Mr. Moore veers into sadly laughable territory at the end of his film, when he makes an earnest, straightforward call for revolution. If he had done as much homework on revolutions as he did on FDR and the history of organized labor, he might have saved himself the embarrassment that I believe such a fruitless call will ultimately cause him.

Historically, as any college history textbook will tell you, revolutions occur when the economic pain to which the lower classes have become accustomed begins to haunt the middle class. Mr. Moore would have us believe that this is happening and that a backlash has begun, with his inspiring stories of resistance by a foreclosed upon and evicted family in Miami and a group of factory workers in Chicago. The fact is that conditions are not nearly bad enough amongst most of the middle-class people in this country for a revolution of any sort, economic or political, to have a chance of taking hold. Even lower middle class people in the United States today are enormously wealthy from a global historical perspective; they have cars, houses, more than enough food, and far too many distractions (television, games, etc - the masses’ latter-day opiates) to be bothered with anything resembling revolt. The growing ranks of the unemployed, for the most part, even have unemployment insurance, something unheard of in, say, France in 1789 or Russia in 1917.

What’s more, the very fact that Mr. Moore can make an open call for revolution and still walk the streets as a free man shows that, for all its many faults, our government is not even in the same category as Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany, where such statements already would have earned him a prison cell or a shallow grave and his film a place on the bonfire rather than in theaters across the country.

But what if, as he hopes, thousands or even millions of people follow the examples shown in the film and become squatters in their own homes or hold sit-ins in their factories to demand better treatment? This could in fact lead to real reform. Millions of squatters could force concrete reforms of predatory mortgages and even of the banking industry as a whole. Millions of factory workers demanding better conditions or the implementation of FDRs Second Bill of Rights could bring back stronger unions and lead ultimately to a new political climate in which we could align our socialism/capitalism mix with the more successful democracies of Europe. Of course I want this to happen, with every fiber of my progressive being. But do I think that it will? No, not while the middle class is busy playing Wii and watching television while gorging themselves on factory farmed McFood.

And that Mr. Moore can make such a call to his middle class audience in the multiplex which has just paid ten dollars for a movie ticket and another ten dollars for a small popcorn and a bottled water or soda, shows his naivete - nobody with enough disposable income to be sitting in the theater to receive this message, mid-recession, no less, can be seriously expected to go home and rattle the door of their economic cage loudly enough for anyone to notice.

All of this notwithstanding, class clown of the most powerful nation on Earth is not such a terrible position to hold, especially when the corrupt politicians, the straight-A students who should have the real power, are nothing more than teacher’s pets. Of course the teachers in this analogy, the real owners of power, are the corporate plutocrats that Moore correctly identifies.  It’s not his evidence that’s flawed - few deliver it better than he - it’s his conclusion and accompanying call to action.

The day may come when things get bad enough for real change in this country, but that time has not yet arrived. Many of us are mad as hell, but we’re going to take it for a long time to come, because the middle class is not starving, homeless or being imprisoned en masse. If you want proof that we’re not yet ready for such change, look no further than the man who should have been awarded a trademark on the word by using it so often, Mr. Obama. He certainly talked the talk during the campaign, but as Moore points out, he then appointed an industry insider, Tim Geithner (who had previously turned down a chance to run Citigroup) as his Secretary of the Treasury, aligning himself firmly with the status quo, which has only been confirmed during the health care debate.

As Moore frequently points out, the central irony of his career is that the very corporate megaliths that he targets for his attacks support the distribution and advertising of his films. The irony of this latest film, if he’s to be believed, is that he really thinks he’s delivering a Trojan horse with the power to initiate the overthrow of the system through that corporate-owned distribution network. Unfortunately for Mr. Moore, class clowns don’t start revolutions, members of the intellegentsia do. Robespierre, Lenin, Jefferson, Adams - academic intellectuals all.