Banks are at it Again

After all the bad press around the 2008 financial crisis, one would think the banks would be careful with their public image. Yet high bonuses, failure to reign in their risky behavior, strong lobbying to ensure they are not regulated, an attempt to charge people every time they use their debit cards and a push against any progressive tax reform have shown the true stripes of both commercial and investment banks. And now there’s yet another PR campaign they are running from – gouging welfare recipients.

In California in 2012 alone, big banks took more than $19 million from poor families on welfare by charging exorbitant fees to withdraw funds from EBT cards (Daily Kos). That essentially means that banks are not only making profits on our poorest families – often young, single mothers with barely enough money to feed their families – but they are taking our tax dollars at the same time. Banks essentially run the world, as access to credit is at the center of capitalism and both doing business and living from day to day. Yet, though it may be idealizing of the past, there appeared to be some ethics involved in the business in the past that has been replaced by a blind allegiance to profits at any cost. This doesn’t seem that different from the way the world works today, but it does make you wonder how far corporate America is willing to go in its endless search for dollars, euros and any other currency they can get their hands on.