Bank of America Cancels its $5 a Month Debit Card Fee

NEW YORK—Bank of America Corp. is scrapping its plan to charge a $5 monthly fee for making debit card purchases after an uproar and threatened exodus by customers.

The about-face comes as customers petitioned the bank, and mobilized to close their accounts and take their business elsewhere. The outcry had already prompted other major banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo amp; Co. , to cancel tests of similar debit card fees last week. SunTrust Banks and Regions Financial Corp. followed suit on Monday.

Anne Pace, a spokeswoman for Bank of America, declined to say whether the company experienced a spike in account closures since announcing plans for the debit card fee in September.

But in a statement Tuesday, Bank of America’s co-Chief Operating Officer David Darnell said the decision was based on customer feedback. “Our customers’ voices are most important to us. As a result, we are not currently charging the fee and will not be moving forward with any additional plans to do so,” he said..

Pace added that a “changing competitive marketplace” also played a role.

The retreat by the banking industry on debit fees comes amid growing public anger over higher bank fees. “When I heard about the fee, it was the last straw for me,” said Molly Katchpole, a 22-year-old nanny who started the online petition urging Bank of America to drop the debit fee. “I’m living paycheck to paycheck and one more fee was just too much.”

Katchpole said it was exciting that customers were able to sway a big corporation to rethink its decision. But she already closed her account a few weeks ago and said the bank’s decision won’t win her back. She plans to stay with her new community bank in Washington, D.C.

Other customers may be more forgiving.

Diane Abela, a 38-year-old Manhattan resident, said she had been waiting to see if Bank of America would back down on its plan before closing her account.

“I had a feeling if there was big outcry, they wouldn’t go through with it,” said Abela, who is unemployed. She said she would’ve canceled her account if the bank had followed through.

“I’m unemployed and $5 makes a big difference,” she said. “When you’re working on a budget every week, it’s the last thing you need.”

Unlike Chase and Wells Fargo, Bank of America’s announcement that it would start charging customers a monthly debit card fee had come without any testing in the marketplace.

Instead, the decision to roll out the fee early next year was based on internal surveys with customers. Pace declined to detail the nature of those surveys but said that in the past couple of weeks, “customer sentiment changed.”

The banking industry’s retreat from a debit card fee doesn’t mean customers aren’t seeing higher fees elsewhere, however.

This past spring, for example, Bank of America raised the monthly fee on its basic checking account to $12, from $8.95.

The Charlotte, N.C.-based bank is also testing a new menu of checking accounts with monthly fees ranging from $6 to $25 in Arizona, Georgia and Massachusetts. Pace said the pilot program is seeing “good results” and that the bank plans to move ahead with its rollout sometime next year. Other, smaller fees may be nicking away at customer accounts as well. In September, the bank instituted a $5 fee to replace debit cards, with overnight rush delivery costing $20. Both services had previously been free. The unwelcome changes for consumers aren’t limited to Bank of America.

Chase this year also doubled the fee on its basic checking account to $12 a month. But the bank says it will end a test in Georgia of a basic checking account that charged a $15 monthly fee.

And like many other banks, Wells Fargo ended its debit rewards program earlier this year after doing away with its free checking accounts with no strings attached late last year.

The wave of fee hikes comes as the industry adjusts to new regulations.

In particular, banks in the past year have blamed their fee hikes on a new federal regulation championed by Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois. The law, which went into effect last month, caps the amount banks can charge merchants whenever customers swipe their debit cards.

JPMorgan has said it would lose $300 million each quarter as a result of the regulation; Wells Fargo said it would lose $250 million a quarter.

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matt taibbi says wall street isn’t winning. It’s cheating

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/3.0/swf/cnn_416x234_embed.swf?context=embed&videoId=business/2011/10/22/ym-cain-taibbi-occupy-wall-street.cnn

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The Beatles–Video of The Fool on the Hill from 1967

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Naomi Wolf Writes that there is a World War Going On: The People Represented by Occupy Wall Street Versus the Corporatacracy

America’s politicians, it seems, have had their fill of democracy. Across the country, police, acting under orders from local officials, are breaking up protest encampments set up by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement – sometimes with shocking and utterly gratuitous violence.

In the worst incident so far, hundreds of police, dressed in riot gear, surrounded Occupy Oakland’s encampment and fired rubber bullets (which can be fatal), flash grenades and tear-gas canisters – with some officers taking aim directly at demonstrators. The Occupy Oakland Twitter feed read like a report from Cairo’s Tahrir Square: “they are surrounding us”; “hundreds and hundreds of police”; “there are armoured vehicles and Hummers”. There were 170 arrests.

My own recent arrest, while obeying the terms of a permit and standing peacefully on a street in lower Manhattan, brought the reality of this crackdown close to home. America is waking up to what was built while it slept: Private companies have hired away its police (JPMorgan Chase gave $4.6m to the New York City Police Foundation); the federal Department of Homeland Security has given small municipal police forces military-grade weapons systems; citizens’ rights to freedom of speech and assembly have been stealthily undermined by opaque permit requirements.

Suddenly, the United States looks like the rest of the furious, protesting, not-completely-free world. Indeed, most commentators have not fully grasped that a world war is occurring. But it is unlike any previous war in human history: for the first time, people around the world are not identifying and organising themselves along national or religious lines, but rather in terms of a global consciousness and demands for a peaceful life, a sustainable future, economic justice and basic democracy. Their enemy is a global “corporatocracy” that has purchased governments and legislatures, created its own armed enforcers, engaged in systemic economic fraud, and plundered treasuries and ecosystems.

Around the world, peaceful protesters are being demonised for being disruptive. But democracy is disruptive. Martin Luther King, Jr argued that peaceful disruption of “business as usual” is healthy, because it exposes buried injustice, which can then be addressed. Protesters ideally should dedicate themselves to disciplined, nonviolent disruption in this spirit – especially disruption of traffic. This serves to keep provocateurs at bay, while highlighting the unjust militarisation of the police response.
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Moreover, protest movements do not succeed in hours or days; they typically involve sitting down or “occupying” areas for the long hauls. That is one reason why protesters should raise their own money and hire their own lawyers. The corporatocracy is terrified that citizens will reclaim the rule of law. In every country, protesters should field an army of attorneys.

Protesters should also make their own media, rather than relying on mainstream outlets to cover them. They should blog, tweet, write editorials and press releases, as well as log and document cases of police abuse (and the abusers).

There are, unfortunately, many documented cases of violent provocateurs infiltrating demonstrations in places like Toronto, Pittsburgh, London and Athens – people whom one Greek described to me as “known unknowns”. Provocateurs, too, need to be photographed and logged, which is why it is important not to cover one’s face while protesting.

Protesters in democracies should create email lists locally, combine the lists nationally and start registering voters. They should tell their representatives how many voters they have registered in each district – and they should organise to oust politicians who are brutal or repressive. And they should support those – as in Albany, New York, for instance, where police and the local prosecutor refused to crack down on protesters – who respect the rights to free speech and assembly.

Many protesters insist in remaining leaderless, which is a mistake. A leader does not have to sit atop a hierarchy: A leader can be a simple representative. Protesters should elect representatives for a finite “term”, just like in any democracy, and train them to talk to the press and to negotiate with politicians.

Protests should model the kind of civil society that their participants want to create. In lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, for example, there is a library and a kitchen; food is donated; kids are invited to sleep over; and teach-ins are organised. Musicians should bring instruments, and the atmosphere should be joyful and positive. Protesters should clean up after themselves. The idea is to build a new city within the corrupt city, and to show that it reflects the majority of society, not a marginal, destructive fringe.

After all, what is most profound about these protest movements is not their demands, but rather the nascent infrastructure of a common humanity. For decades, citizens have been told to keep their heads down – whether in a consumerist fantasy world or in poverty and drudgery – and leave leadership to the elites. Protest is transformative precisely because people emerge, encounter one another face-to-face, and, in re-learning the habits of freedom, build new institutions, relationships and organisations.

None of that cannot happen in an atmosphere of political and police violence against peaceful democratic protesters. As Bertolt Brecht famously asked, following the East German Communists’ brutal crackdown on protesting workers in June 1953, “Would it not be easier … for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” Across the United States, and in too many other countries, supposedly democratic leaders seem to be taking Brecht’s ironic question all too seriously.

Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

A version of this article previously appeared on Project Syndicate.

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Al Jeezera Exposes the Koch Brothers–See the Video Here

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One dead in Occupy Oklahoma, Nine Arrested in Occupy Portland

In what was an otherwise calm night across the country, one Occupy Oklahoma City protester was found dead and nine Occupy Portland protesters were arrested.

In a press advisory Monday, Occupy Oklahoma City organizers expressed their sadness at the passing of a homeless protester who went by the name “Street Poet.”

“The Poet was found dead in his tent at Kerr Park earlier this afternoon by other participants,” they wrote. “Police and emergency personnel were immediately contacted. Occupy OKC is withholding information concerning The Poet’s identity pending notification of his family by authorities.”

Oklahoma City police Capt. Dexter Nelson said that although the man appeared to be in his 20s, the death was not suspicious.

In a video posted to Facebook, Street Poet explained that he had been “traveling the road on foot doing poetry” since his dad kicked him out at the age of 16 or 17. Another video posted to Google Plus shows the man performing poetry.

“I’ll tell you right now, unless you crawl under that bridge and huddle up against the wall, take off them busted-ass shoes then you don’t know what I’ve been through or where I’ve been,” he said. “Knowing tomorrow, I’ll be in the same place again, drying my tears in the wind. You save me from my pain, but you don’t even know what pain is.”

Early Tuesday morning, police cleared an encampment of Occupy Portland protesters from Terry Schrunk Plaza. Nine protesters who refused to leave will face federal charges.

Officers with helmets and nightsticks surrounded the plaza to make sure protesters didn’t return as the camp was dismantled.

Protesters shouted “The whole world is watching” and “”The tents will go back” as they looked on.

“It definitely got a little tense, maybe heated,” Portland police spokesman Lt. Robert King told The Oregonian.

Other protest sites around the country were largely quiet.

The roommate of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen, who was wounded during clashes with police in Oakland, said the former Marine “seems to be doing well” after a hospital visit yesterday. Keith Shannon told The Associated Press that Olsen still can’t speak but doctors expected him to make a full recovery. He is still suffering from a fractured skull caused by a police projectile.

Occupy Wall Street protester Felix Rivera-Pitre, who was videotaped being hit by New York Police Deputy Inspector Johnny Cardona, met with the District Attorney yesterday in hopes that assault charges will be filed.

“Had it been any regular white guy, instead of any angry white shirt, had committed that attack, that person at best would be able to plead out to assault,” attorney Ron Kuby said after meeting with the DA. “Three years’ probation and some serious court-ordered anger manager.”

Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings is still refusing to push law enforcement to arrest peaceful protesters camped out across from City Hall.

“If people don’t like it, they can vote me out,” Jennings said on his Talk 1300 radio show. “That’s the way it goes.”

Watch this video of Street Poet, uploaded Oct. 31, 2011.

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