Something Wicked This Way Comes

Sometimes, it's just a little too far. Sometimes you have to stop, raise your fists in the air and scream, "ENOUGH! STOP ALREADY!" Yesterday was one such day, and although one would have thought it would be Glenn Beck's "I Have A Scheme" speech to put me over the edge, that merely primed me for my 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore"! moment.  You see, as I was going about my daily business, I happened upon THIS free local publication:

 What the HELL??? OUR town? YOUR town maybe. I just can't even say how weary and sick I am over this non-stop assault on common-sense and a semblance, just a semblance, of intelligence and thoughtfulness. NO MORE, dammit!  So, as I'm thumbing through the damn thing, I am struck by the huge amount of local advertising in it. Did these people READ this before they bought their undoubtedly dirt cheap advertising? God, I hope not. As the day wore on, I could not get this off of mind. So, I decided to launch a one-woman boycott. Undoubtedly, I look like a freak, some kind of gadlfy harpy. Maybe I AM a gadly harpy. So be it. There comes a time when enough is enough. So...I sent the following email to as many of the advertisers that I could, that is, those that had an easily obtained email address. (Because, really, I just couldn't believe that people read this and still bought advertising in it):

To Whom it May Concern;

I am disappointed to see that you are advertising in the hate rag that goes by the innocuous name 'Our Town'.  Are you aware of the type of vitriol this dubious publication prints? I have attached a copy of the front page of the most recent edition. I suspect, that you were not aware of the content of their publication when you agreed to advertise in it, undoubtedly with incredibly low fees. I will be watching closely for the next edition and am afraid to say that if your establishment continues to advertise in it, I can then only assume that you share the publisher's distasteful views.  Sadly, this will cause me to take my business elsewhere as well as encourage all family, friends and associates to do the same.

Thank you for your attention to this matter,

Sincerely,
Maria

I don't know, maybe that's a little too strongly worded.   So, I did get one immediate response:

date    
Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 5:52 PM
subject
Re: Our Town
mailed-by srs.bis.na.blackberry.com
 
Who are you ??

Fair enough. So, I replied:


I'm a citizen of Morris County who's sick and tired of all this crazy inflammatory rhetoric and I guess I've just had it. I accidentally picked this up at a local store today and I sure as hell don't want people thinking our communities welcome this kind of crap. This is a publication that originates out of Pennsylvania NOT Morris County.

Thanks for asking,

Maria


Oh, shit, I am a crank! Aaaah, well.  So, this morning, I have this response, from Charlotte's Web, a restaurant and caterer in Dover:

date    Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 10:37 PM
subject    Charlottes web
mailed-by    aol.com

The magazine you mention is a FRANCISE ! the people who run this very popular magazine are very nice and and have no agendathey only want to  but want to make a living.  I think some of their jokes are funny  but I also feel they have the right to publish what they want. You know that  freedom of speech thing and all.   Thank you for comments. Stephanie @ Charlottes @ Web


Wait...jokes...funny???  Like this one: 

And, for what it's worth, a good amount of the jokes in this thing are at the expense of the Irish or Catholics...what is this, 1937?

Sigh....Here we go....(and btw, please note my restraint on grammar, spelling, and the question of their 'agenda'...I mean, PUHlease...)

date    Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 5:42 AM
subject    Re: Charlottes web
mailed-by    gmail.com
  
Thank you for your reply.

Freedom of speech is a guarantee of the Constitution of the United States, not a birthright.  This is a lesson, btw, learned in 12 years of Catholic school-anyone who's experienced that knows, while the government cannot squelch freedom of speech, private individuals or institutions have no such obligation.

So, they do have a guaranteed right to publish whatever they have. I do not have an obligation to support that publication nor the entities that underwrite it. However, if I choose to NOT support those entities without explaining to them WHY I am not doing so, that's kind of pointless. Thus my previous email.

That being said, I appreciate your taking the time to respond.
Thank you,

Maria

So....there you have it. It will be interesting to see what, if any, the other responses look like. And, if you'd like to join in at home, here is a partial list of the companies I contacted:

Charlottes Web

Happie Time Pool

IHSS services (see first response, this is an in home health services provider, btw)

Region Oil

Merry Heart

Pediatric Dental Associates of Randolph

The Arrangement Salon Day Spa

N. J Hear

Karl's Appliance

Feel free to contact them. No, really. Because I fear that it is taken for granted that the majority of folk in Morris County agrees with this kind of crap. At the very least, it's apparent that the spokesperson for Charlottes Web doesn't give a rat's ass how they appear to their customers. How do they not know I am not Corporate entity? As a matter of fact, my employer has utilized this company for catering events in the past. It would require very little effort on my part to gather enough of my co-workers to approach the individual in charge of hiring the caterers and convince them to no longer use them. Except they already dropped them because of quality concerns. 

Anyway, I welcome all to join my Quixotic endeavor and if you do, please let me know any results. I will continue to post responses if/when I receive them. 

Peace Out, my brothers and Sisters!

 

Banks Siding Against the Customer in Fraud Cases-new article by Naomi Wolf

Banks Siding Against the Customer in Fraud Cases

by Naomi Wolf

Like most consumers, I had always assumed that banks and customers are united in wanting to curtail bank fraud. Unfortunately, I have learned that in fact bank fraud is a big and profitable business -- for the banks themselves; and that changes in electronic banking, combined with the power of lobbyists to sustain the status quo that is stacked against ordinary account holders, mean that if consumers' accounts are corrupted, they can face systemic stonewalling by the banks themselves -- and have little recourse.

In 2005 I started to notice irregularities in a checking account I held with WaMu; but the irregularities were ambiguous. I sought at various times over the course of the next two years to go over all my statements -- but had trouble getting all my records from both online banking and from my branch itself. A busy working parent, I was certainly not as proactive as I should have been -- and, like many consumers of bank services, since we had family accounts and two mortgages at WaMu for many years, and had good relationships with our local branch, I also made the mistake of trusting the bank.

I noticed eventually that checkbooks were missing from my home, and finally my accountant got enough of the records to see an unmistakable pattern of fraud, and called my attention to it. I filed a police report and alerted WaMu to the fraud. For months thereafter, as you can see in the lawsuit that attorney David Fish and I have filed against J P Morgan Chase, now owner of WaMu, that is up on TheSmokingGun.com, I complied with what the WaMu bank officials directed me to do -- which was to leave the accounts open so they could investigate, they said, the fraud. If the fraud is reported within six months of confirmation of fraud, it is liable for the loss.

Then the same officials who had directed me to keep the accounts open, disappeared -- systematically, for just over six months. When I sought to talk to the fraud department, I still could not get records -- including my own missing bank statements -- even to see the full extent of my losses. The bank officials who had directed me to keep my accounts open were unavailable at the branch -- over the course of many attempts to speak with them. The police at the Sixth Precinct needed to see the missing documents, but even they could not force WaMu to hand over their -- my -- records. (WaMu's own internal emails cite a $300,000 figure for my loss from fraud -- I still did not have enough of my records to identify the loss. It is illegal, by the way, to withhold from an account holder his or her own records).

At eight months after the fraud discovery was confirmed -- eight months of trying to communicate with officials and a fraud department who were oddly unavailable or unresponsive -- I received a form letter from the WaMu Fraud Department advising me that according to the regulations, I had had a six month window for taking action; and (since WaMu had played out the clock for eight months) the letter asserted that I had waited 'too long' and my case was closed.

Inadvertently, subsequent to that, a WaMu bank official handed me the wrong file -- wrong from his point of view; illuminating from mine, and from any consumer's. It contained emails, some of which you can see at TheSmokingGun.com, from WaMu bank officials to one another -- and including emails from and to their counsel, PR department and and the fraud department -- that take as given that stonewalling a client with a fraud claim on the bank is standard practice; and yet one freaked-out bank official in the emails warns his colleagues that if their mechanisms in this regard became known, their practices would be all over the newspapers.

I was stunned by what seemed from the emails to be a systemic practice. Why would a bank want to perpetuate bank fraud rather than fight it?

As I researched the issue and spoke to other consumer bank account holders whose accounts had been corrupted by fraud, and to consumer advocates, I learned how systemic experiences such as mine -- and worse experiences -- are becoming. I heard from consumers across the country from all walks of life who had also been misdirected by their banks, or told that for various technical reasons their corrupted accounts could not be closed, and then faced difficulty reaching fraud departments or officials once the fraud was confirmed.

As Geoff Kischuck, an actuary in California whose business account was corrupted by fraud, and who then had to go daily to Bank of America for four months before he could successfully close the account, explained, there is a great deal of profit being made by banks with this situation. 'The shift from paper checks clearing physically, to electronic bank transactions, benefits the banking industry immensely,' he notes. The reason? It generates interest on the 'float time' that is still reckoned by the time that paper takes physically to clear, even while the electronic transaction is instantaneous; so it is in the interest of the banking industry to have as much electronic banking as possible. But electronic banking is much easier to hack -- and identity theft and bank fraud have skyrocketed accordingly; but the bank benefits a second time with every case of bank fraud and identity theft -- because of the immense fees -- overdraft fees, bad check fees, that can amount to hundreds or even thousands of dollars with each corrupted account -- racked up by the corrupted accounts. The longer it takes to close the corrupted account, the more difficult it is for the customer to have accountability with the bank's fraud department -- the more revenue for the bank. The bank freezes your ability to address the roblem -- but continues to charge you fees for the corrupted account. `Because of the fees that get drained out of an account, banks actually profit from bank fraud,' explains Kischuk.' Multiply this by the number of times across the country a consumer account faces identity theft or bank fraud -- and you see a mini-industry.

Customers assume that banking regulation and Congressional oversight means that if they find fraud on their checking accounts, there is accountability -- which is not in fact the case; strong bank lobbyists translate into weak protections for consumers and, as you can see from the emails, the bank's reasonable assumption that most customers in this situation will not be able to hold them accountable. And indeed, since legal action is time-consuming and expensive, most defrauded bank customers do eventually give up and go away.

I am certainly shocked by my own experience -- but even more disturbed after learning that such things and even worse have happened and continue to happen to people from all walks of life -- immigrants, retirees, people on disability -- who have experienced loss of savings, retirement accounts, college fees, mortgage payments and so on through bank fraud -- and who do all the things their banks direct them to do, only to find they have no actual recourse. They do not understand -- as I did not -- that a bank's fraud investigation department is actually likely fraudulently representing itself as the customer's, rather than solely the bank's, advocate. Banks such as WaMu -- and now Chase, which bought WaMu -- expect such people to simply go away. They -- and we -- should, rather, reach out to our elected representatives for wholesale reform -- and put each and every such case online, so consumers can see the worst offenders for themselves, and, with the power of the internet and their own consumer choices, protect themselves and demand accountability.

Your request is being processed... Wells Fargo Overdraft Lawsuit: Bank Ordered To Pay $203 MILLION In Fees Over 'Unfair' Charges

Your request is being processed... Wells Fargo Overdraft Lawsuit: Bank Ordered To Pay $203 MILLION In Fees Over 'Unfair' Charges