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.

The Dead Birds of The Big Green Building Where I Work

(note: this was originally posted on my FB)

I work in a big green building made of glass. 

It’s quite lovely.So sleek and shiny and reflective of the greenery that surrounds it, a very attractive building.

Unfortunately for some creatures that attraction can be fatal.Some of the innocent creatures of this earth realize too late that the beautiful blue sky and leafy trees are a façade. 

They find themselves slamming into an icy wall of death, unable to see through the welcoming façade to the truth.

The true color of the place, a green, while appropriate, not so much a green of life and vibrancy. A different kind of green altogether.

Things are not always what they 

seem.

Unfortunately, for some creatures, this can fatal.

It is ON!

Bank Protests in Kansas City

Bank of America Fires It's One Employee With A Conscience

Thank You, Jackie Ramos

Evidence that "Moral Banking" is an Oxymoron: Why I Got Fired

Transcript from the Video:

"My name is Jackie Ramos, and I would like to tell everyone a story. I am a former employee at Bank of America in Georgia. I worked in the customer assistance department from May 1st to November 23rd, 2009. And by the way, "customer assistance" is a euphemism for "the collections department."

Every day I came to work and did just as I was supposed to: I collected. In fact, I was one of the top performers of my department, even outdoing those who were more tenured than I was. But something was wrong. There was something inherently evil about my job.

I'm not sure if Bank of America knows this, but we are in a recession, and most of us, we are hurting.

Day in and day out, I was told to charge people who had already fallen behind in their credit card bills an additional $15 just to make a payment with me. As I was told by my manager, it was a convenience fee. I was told to deny refunding as many late and over the limit fees as I could. There was even one month I was given a verbal warning about the amount of fees that I refunded, because as I was told so many times, Bank of America is a corporation, and they are for profit.

There is something we have in my department called a Fix Pay. Essentially it is a program that turns your balance into an installment loan. It stops all fees on the account, and it also closes your account. In order to get a Fix Pay, though, you have to qualify by answering a rather irrelevant set of questions, like how much you spend on groceries and how much your cellphone bill is. Day in day out I had to deny countless people who needed the program but didn't qualify. Too often I would have to give them the spiel about, "I can't accept you [into the program] because your disposable income is too negative," and then they would just sit there on the phone and say, "Well, if I could afford to pay my bill, why would I need a program?"

I will never forget one card holder. A 24-year-old woman with a child, just found out she had cancer, she lost her mom and her husband all in the same week. Of course she had a very limited income. She had to quit her job. But she still respected Bank of America enough to try to pay off her $6,000 debt. But she just needed help. She sobbed on the phone telling me she couldn't afford the 30 percent interest that we had her--sorry, 29.99 percent interest--that we had her account on. She couldn't afford the $39 late fee, the $39 over the limit fee. She told me that we were her first credit card when she turned 18, we were her only credit card, and that she was a loyal customer, and given the time to be on this earth a little while longer she would have always remained a loyal customer. I couldn't put her on the program, she didn't have enough income.

According to BOA she doesn't have enough income to be put on the program, but she can however keep paying the high interest rate on the account, and fees, because at the end of the day it is her account, she did rack up the debt, and she was late, so she did deserve that 29.99 percent interest rate that she had, and it wasn't up to Bank of America to help her figure out how to get this debt paid off. It was up to her.

There's a joke in my department: upstairs they sell you the credit, downstairs we collect on it. Too often I heard stories about how senior citizens and college students were specifically targeted, so Bank of America could continue to make money off of them. I had one elderly lady who was legally blind. Every month she sent them the incorrect amount because she couldn't see. Her 3 percent APR after 3 times being late went to 29.99 percent. She actually told me that one of the associates told her she needs to look at her statements more clearly.

After all, who better to target than the young and the old. Don't deny for a second that there are systematic practices put in place to keep America in debt.

I'm not doing this video because I'm bitter. I'm not doing this video because I hate [my old boss]. I still have a lot of respect for him. Out of all the interviews I had in my life, I will never forget the one I had with him. He told me the most interesting interview question he's ever been asked is, "What keeps you up at night?"

Before I got that job, that question didn't really make sense to me. Who asks that in an interview, I thought? But now that I've been in that department for a while, it makes sense, it does seem normal. All the people that I've had to deny [repayment] programs to--they kept me up at night. All the people that I've pissed off with a $15 "convenience fee"--they kept me up at night. All the people who were dying, lost a child, husband, mom, dad, all the people who lost their jobs and sat on the phone sobbing to me that if we just gave them a little bit of help, they could make ends meet--they kept me up at night. All the angry cardholders who told me the reason why Bank of America is the corporation that it is, is off the hard work of them and their tax dollars--they kept me up at night.

So... I stopped denying people. I helped people get on programs that they didn't necessarily qualify for, but who definitely needed the help. Every day I was told three things:

• do the right thing for the customer;
• think of yourself as a customer;
• and do the right thing for the company.

I figured if I placed more cardholders on programs at affordable rates, then maybe they could afford their light bill, or even enjoy a trip with their child to the movies. If the account was affordable for the card holder, it wouldn't charge off. I mean, that seems as simple as 1 and 1 being 2. But my company didn't think so.

At the end of the day I would love to have a company that thought of me as more than just a dollar bill. I would love to have a company just be more humanitarian, and think of me as a person instead of a profit.

But the three things I was told to think about every day in my interactions with cardholders didn't matter. In fact, only one of them did. "Do what is right for the company." Again, Bank of America is for profit. They would rather charge 30 percent interest anyway, than give hard working Americans like me and you a lower interest rate and work with us instead of against us.

So, [my boss] fired me. He told me I can't put people on programs who don't deserve it. During our meeting, he asked me if what I did was right. I looked him dead in the eye and I said, "Absolutely." I know he was expecting me to maybe say no or to apologize, but there's no apology. There's no way I could look myself in the mirror every day and justify not helping someone when I had the power to do it.

Given the opportunity to do it again, I wouldn't change a thing. He actually looked at me, he told me that he understood why I did what I did, he said I had a really big heart. But at the end of the day, it was policy, and he had to let me go. He told me my manager would escort me to the security desk and that all my stuff would be there.

And he was right. All my stuff was there in two boxes, all my awards, all the pictures of my son, even a plate of food that I had on my desk. [My manager] packed all my belongings, including the plate of food, and threw it in the box. The food got all over my shoes and awards, even the picture of my son. After all, Bank of America? They're just a corporation. They're not concerned with their employees' well-being or clearly even their cardholders.

There's a saying in my department that you are as good as your last payment. No truer words could have been spoken.

I'm not necessarily sad about losing my job. I felt like I took a stand and I did what was morally correct. I have a wonderful support system, I have a college degree, and I consider myself personable, so I'm sure I'll land back on my feet. In fact, as my manager was escorting me outside she told me that if I needed a reference, she would highly recommend me to everyone. I received nothing but accolades while I was at Bank of America. Even while I was getting fired my boss told me that out of anyone she's ever met I've had the highest morals and biggest heart she's ever seen, and that means more to me than my job.

At the end of the day, I don't have anything keeping me up at night. I did the right thing in God's eyes and I'm sure that He'll bless me. But [boss], can you say the same?”

More on the Awesome Jackie Ramos:

JCP&L...AT IT AGAIN

ORIGINAL BILLING

REBILL

UPDATE:

received a call yesterday from JCP&L rep who seemed to think the latest billing was an actual read. However...the bill reads "estimate...re-bill". Looking through all the bills from the past year (except the last re-billing in April which is no longer available ??) the ones that were estimates say estimate and the ones that were actual readings say reading. So....I was confused. Out of what I assume to be frustration, the rep offered to come out personally and read my meter. I asked if she could then stop in and discuss it with me. So....we are on for Wed. Stay tuned!!!....Some of you may recall a few months back when Jersey Central Power and Light overestimated my bill by 82%. Well...here they go again. I received a bill about two weeks ago for $146.53. The average fees for my last three months of usage amount to $62.94. That's a whopping 132% above my average actual use of electricity. Now, believe it or not I do not enjoy continually making complaints to the governing boards of various public service providers. I find it boring and dull and I HATE numbers. Figuring out percentages and fractions is what I get PAID to do-not what I do for fun. So...I first called the utility hoping this could solve the problem. I requested that an actual person be sent and actually (actually in this sense being the direct opposite of virtually) read my meter. The customer service representative assured me it would be done, and, when as an aside I asked WHY, this time, an estimate was made to begin with, she told me that it was probably because so many meter readers are on vacation. Apparently JCP&L has never heard of staffing software...any of you poor slobs out there that have ever asked for a day off and been told 'there is no time available', well, you know what I'm talking about.

So, I'm thinking, "Great. Case closed." No need to bother the Board of Public Utilities this time.
Hmmph. Not so fast, Ria. I get an email this morning with a 'new' bill, a re-bill to be precise which, like the first bill is AN ESTIMATE!! In the amount of $111.35. Ok, so they are going in the right direction but that is STILL 77% MORE than the average of my last three months of usage combined. Nice try. So...even though I COULD have been reading my Sunday Times, I filed yet another complaint with the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities...(see below-short and sweet).

REMEMBER FOLKS! READ YOUR BILLS CAREFULLY! You may be getting overbilled. And if so and you live in NJ, here is a handy link to the on-line complaint form at NJ BPU.

And here is a sample (mine), complaint letter:

I continue to have a problem with JCP&L overbilling me based on their estimates of my service usage, Most recently I was billed fee of $146.35 for the billing period of June 4th through July 6th based on their estimate. In the previous month to this billing, my usage amounted to a total fee of $69.27. The month previous to that, $65.52. Those bills were based on actual usage. I called the utility and requested that they do an actual reading. Today I received an email billing me $111.35 which was AGAIN, based on an estimate of usage. This is listed as a 'rebill', indicating that in response to my request for an actual reading, they simply re-estimated my usage. I don't understand this and I don't find it acceptable. It creates suspicions about the ethics of their billing practice and makes me question why it is so often that the company relies on estimates for billing. I live in public housing and the meter reader always has clear access to the meters. Thank you for your assistance.

JCP&L: Showing their true colors

JCP&L denies full pension to former employee's widow

by Karin Price Mueller/The Star-Ledger

Monday April 06, 2009, 9:00 PM

How much is 17 hours of your life worth? It's a question widow Brenda Slutter has been wrestling with for years.

Her husband, Ron Slutter, worked for Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L) for nearly 36 years. He died of cancer at age 58. Knowing his death was imminent, Ron made arrangements to retire, a move that would allow his wife to receive the largest possible company pension benefit after his death. He was told by JCP&L, his widow said, that his official retirement date had to be on the first of the month -- but died 17 hours and 40 minutes before the paperwork was finalized.

Bruce Winter/Express TimesBrenda Slutter, widow of Ron Slutter, who is being denied full pension benefits by Jersey Central Power and Light because her husband died shortly before the paperwork was finalized.

Thanks to a tangle of bureaucratic rigidity, legal fine print and the timing of her husband's death, Brenda, 59, receives only half the pension benefit her husband meant for her to receive.

"If January only had 30 days, he would have made it," Brenda said.

BUREAUCRATS AND TECHNICALITIES
Ron Slutter was a popular guy at JCP&L, working up the ladder until he was in charge of teams that buried underground cables. His personnel file is decorated with letters thanking him for exceptional service. He had 165 unused sick days on the books when he died.

"He was a good employee," Brenda said. "The day I took him to the hospital, he didn't want to go unless he could get in touch with his foreman to let him know he'd be out."

In 1998, Ron was diagnosed with asbestosis, an incurable lung condition caused by long-term exposure to asbestos. (In medical reports, his doctors said they believe it was contracted after asbestos exposure on the job, and the Slutters filed a worker's compensation claim in 2000. That case has not yet been resolved; JCP&L declined comment, citing employee confidentiality concerns.)

Ron worked through his illness until late 2005, when he was diagnosed with colon, stomach, spleen and pancreatic cancer, which his medical reports indicate commonly follow asbestosis.

By January 2006, knowing he was dying, Ron took steps to maximize the pension he accrued during his 35-plus year career with JCP&L, his wife said.

He knew if he died as an active employee, Brenda would receive only a 50 percent payment option on his pension -- a loss of more than $7,200 a year. So on Jan. 24, 2006, he informed his benefits department he wanted to retire immediately.

A portrait of Ron and Brenda Slutter.

The Slutters were told Ron's official retirement date would have to wait until Feb. 1 because the company processes retirement dates only on the first of the month.

Ron completed all the necessary paperwork from his hospital bed, electing a pension payout option -- known as the 100 percent spousal option -- that would continue to pay 100 percent of his pension to his wife for her lifetime.

Ron died at 6:20 a.m. on Jan. 31, 17 hours and 40 minutes before his official retirement date and 54 days after his cancer diagnosis.

As Brenda grappled with the death of her husband of 36 years, she thought her financial future was secure. But then JCP&L gave her unexpected news: because Ron died as an active employee, his retirement was never official. Therefore, his wife was due only a 50 percent benefit rather than the 100 percent pension payout she would have received had Ron held out a few more hours.

Three years later, Brenda Slutter is still fighting. She's talked to the benefits department, sent letters to JCP&L executives, tried going through her husband's union and submitted appeals to the company's Retirement Board -- to no avail. She's now retained an attorney.

"I'm not trying to sue them for anything. I just want what my husband wanted for me," Brenda Slutter said.

Brenda was already retired when Ron died, but to make ends meet she takes occasional cleaning jobs. She hasn't been able to tap into her retirement savings without facing penalties because she's not yet 59 1/2.

"They said to me, 'Well, we gave you his full life insurance,' because if my husband had retired, the company would have only given me $30,000 of his $98,000 life insurance," Brenda Slutter said. "Mind you I paid the policy premiums. They did me no favor."

Bamboozled contacted JCP&L to talk about the case, but the company wouldn't discuss any particulars.

"We respect the privacy of all of our employees and do not publicly discuss or disclose any personal information," said Ronald Morano, spokesman for First Energy, the parent company of JCP&L. "We work diligently to ensure that our employees and their families understand their benefits and the options available to them."

THE LEGAL SIDE OF THINGS
JCP&L isn't legally bound to pay Brenda Slutter the full benefit, but it could choose to work around the letter of the law because Ron's intent was clear.

"Look aside the technicalities of the law," said Edward Cohen, the attorney for JCP&L's labor unions, including Local 327 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, to which Ron Slutter belonged. "The company knew in reality that he wanted her to have the 100 percent benefit."

Ron Slutter filed all the right forms. He just didn't live long enough.

If JCP&L didn't want to let the pension law slide, it could have assigned Ron an earlier retirement date. Even today, nothing but company policy is stopping JCP&L from making that date change retroactively.

"The reality is there's no one who would complain if they gave her the pension," Cohen said. "Can they say they're not supposed to do that? Yes. But who's going to complain? Nobody."

After investigating Brenda Slutter's story, Ron Slutter's work and benefit history with JCP&L and the 17 hours, Bamboozled asked the company to once again reconsider Brenda Slutter's pension payout.

"That's a discussion between the company and the family," said Morano, the JCP&L spokesman.

Brenda Slutter isn't surprised by the company's response, and she's not giving up her fight.

"This is not how you reward someone for doing an excellent service for your company," she said. "I guess First Energy needs half of my husband's pension more than I do"

Yeah, just like they needed my electricity payments in advance.

ROLE REVERSAL

Breaking News! Illinois Factory Workers Screwed By Their Employers!! Wait, wait....no, that's not the story. The story is...Illinois Factory Workers Screwed By Their Employers are Supported By the Government! What???? Obama hasn't taken office yet...but already a major shift seems to be occurring in the psyche of the nation's leaders.



In a classic "We're Mad As Hell and We're Not Going To Take it Anymore!" move, a group of factory workers, given three days notice out the blue about the impending demise of their workplace AND told they wouldn't be paid earned vacation hours, took action. They refused to leave work and utilizing a classic civil disobedience maneuver, occupied the windows manufacturing plant. FIGHT ON, BROTHERS!!


But, in my jaded view, the even more amazing aspect of this protest is that the government of the State of Illinois quickly took up the side of the workers, suspending all State business with its bank, the Bank of America, and readying a complaint through the Dept. of Labor.


If one fails to grasp the significance of the government's taking the moral high road on behalf of the blighted worker, these three words should freshen your memory: Air. Traffic. Controllers. Remember? In 1981, when 12,000 Air Traffic Controllers went on strike, the government....FIRED. THEM. ALL. A move which arguably led to this day, having created an environment where owners are comfortable pitting themselves against workers and in their pursuit of the almighty dollar, plan to discard them with nary a consequence to their business.

Could this be a sign of a seismic shift in the national moral standards...or maybe I should say, an unprecedented move to actually build a national moral standard in relation to workers' rights? One can only.....hope. Read on, my friends:

December 9, 2008

Illinois Threatens Bank Over Sit-In

By MONICA DAVEY

CHICAGO — As workers at a window-making plant here prepared to spend a fourth night in the factory they had been told to leave for good, union leaders, bankers and company owners met into the night on Monday but the meetings ended without bringing about an end to the workers’ peaceful but increasingly tense occupation of the plant.

The layoff of 250 workers last week at Republic Windows and Doors on the North Side with only three days’ warning and without pay the workers say is owed to them had, by Monday, drawn the attention of nearly every politician with a connection to this city, numerous union and workers’ rights groups and scores of ordinary people, who arrived at the plant offering families toys, food and money.

Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, who met with the workers Monday morning, said the State of Illinois was suspending its business with the Bank of America, Republic Windows’ lenders, and that the Illinois Department of Labor was poised to file a complaint over the plant closing if need be. Political leaders on the Chicago City Council and in Cook County threatened similar actions. Representative Luis V. Gutierrez said he was encouraging the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice to investigate. “Families are already struggling to keep afloat,” Mr. Blagojevich said.

Workers here say they blame the operators of Republic Windows and Doors, a manufacturing company that was founded in 1965, for giving them just three days’ notice before closing last Friday, with no earlier hints to the employees that orders for vinyl windows and sliding doors had fallen off.

Late Monday, the company released a statement that indicated that it had known since at least mid-October that it intended to close the factory by January. The statement suggested that it had gone back and forth with Bank of America for more than a month, but that the bank had rejected several of its “wind down” plans as well as the company’s request for financing to pay workers’ owed vacation.

The statement also revealed that the family of Richard Gillman, once a minority shareholder who in 2006 and 2007 bought out Republic, last month formed a new window business — Echo Windows LLC. All along, workers here said they feared the owners were shutting down to reopen a cheaper operation somewhere else. A trade publication reported last week that Echo had recently bought a window manufacturing plant in Red Oak, Iowa. No one from Republic could be reached for comment.

“It is looking like reopening is exactly what happened,” said Tara Taffera, the editor and publisher of the publication, Door and Window Manufacturing magazine.

The company’s statement said it had been placed, “in the impossible position of not having the ability to further reduce fixed costs, coupled with severe constrictions in the capital debt markets and an unwillingness of the current debt holder to continue funding the operations.”

The workers here also blamed Bank of America for preventing the owners from paying its workers for already-earned vacation time and severance. Workers here said the owners told them last week that Bank of America had cut off the company’s credit line and would not allow payments.

As part of government bailout efforts for the struggling banking industry, Bank of America has received $15 billion, and is expected to receive an additional $10 billion. That fact left many workers here seething.

“Taxpayers would like to see that bailout money go toward saving jobs, not saving C.E.O.’s,” said Leah Fried, an organizer for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. “This is outrageous.”

Officials said negotiations would resume Tuesday.

Bank of America issued a statement late Monday stating that the company, not the bank, had the ability to choose whether to honor what it owed workers.

“We agree with the statements of public officials that Republic Windows and Doors should do all it can to honor its obligations to its employees and minimize the impact of failure on those employees,” the statement said.

“When a company faces such a dire situation, its lender is not empowered to direct the company’s management how to manage its affairs and what obligations should be paid,” it went on. “Such decisions belong to the management and owners of the company.”

Federal law from the late 1980s requires employers to give workers 60 days’ notice (or 60 days of pay) in cases of plant closings or large layoffs. Still, that federal law, known as the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN, provides exceptions in cases when a “faltering company” is actively seeking capital to save itself and has reason to believe announcing a possible closing might prevent it from getting that capital or in “unforeseeable business circumstances,” like unexpected conditions outside an employer’s control.

How This Thing Works

Just a short little article- I did not write-while I work (gotta shore myself up here for the coming long winter)....and work on my own (essay that is). This is a pretty excellent list of paragraphs and reading it just really...well, it saddened me. Because it's just so damn true.

"How racism works:

Consider the following:

• What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
• What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?
  
• What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said "I do" to?
  
• What if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after she no longer measured up to his standards?
• What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicted to pain killers, but acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
  
• What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
  
• What if Obama were a member of the "Keating 5"?
  
• What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the
election numbers would be as close as they are?
This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes
positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities
in another when there is a color difference.
— Kelvin LaFond, Fort Worth

Really, this is something I think everyone should keep in mind while they follow the election.

NY TIMES WEIGHS IN ON POSTVILLE-Take TWO

August 1, 2008

Editorial

'The Jungle,' Again

A story from the upside-down world of immigration and labor:

A slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, develops an ugly reputation for abusing animals and workers. Reports of dirty, dangerous conditions at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant accumulate for years, told by workers, union organizers, immigrant advocates and government investigators. A videotape by an animal-rights group shows workers pulling the windpipes out of living cows. A woman with a deformed hand tells a reporter of cutting meat for 12 hours a day, six days a week, for wages that labor experts call the lowest in the industry. This year, federal investigators amass evidence of rampant illegal hiring at the plant, which has been called "a kosher 'Jungle.' "

The conditions at the Agriprocessors plant cry out for the cautious and deliberative application of justice.

In May, the government swoops in and arrests ... the workers, hundreds of them, for having false identity papers. The raid's catch is so huge that the detainees are bused from little Postville to the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds in Waterloo. The defendants, mostly immigrants from Guatemala, are not charged with the usual administrative violations, but with "aggravated identity theft," a serious crime.

They are offered a deal: They can admit their guilt to lesser charges, waive their rights, including the right to a hearing before an immigration judge, spend five months in prison, then be deported. Or, they can spend six months or more in jail without bail while awaiting a trial date, face a minimum two-year prison sentence and be deported anyway.

Nearly 300 people agree to the five months, after being hustled through mass hearings, with one lawyer for 17 people, each having about 30 minutes of consultation per client. The plea deal is a brutal legal vise, but the immigrants accept it as the quickest way back to their spouses and children, hundreds of whom are cowering in a Catholic church, afraid to leave and not knowing how they will survive. The workers are scattered to federal lockups around the country. Many families still do not know where they are. The plant's owners walk freely.

This is enforcement run amok. As Julia Preston reported in The Times, the once-silent workers of Agriprocessors now tell of a host of abusive practices, of rampant injuries and of exhausted children as young as 13 wielding knives on the killing floor. A young man said in an affidavit that he started at 16, in 17-hour shifts, six days a week. "I was very sad, and I felt like I was a slave."

Instead of receiving merciful treatment as defendants who also are victims, the workers have been branded as the kind of predator who steals identities to empty bank accounts. Accounts from Postville suggest that that's not remotely what they were. "Most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security number was or what purpose it served," said Erik Camayd-Freixas, a Spanish-language interpreter for many of the workers. "This worker simply had the papers filled out for him at the plant, since he could not read or write Spanish, let alone English."

The harsh prosecution at Postville is an odd and cruel shift for the Bush administration, which for years had voiced compassion for exploited workers and insisted that immigration had to be fixed comprehensively or not at all.

Now it has abandoned mercy and proportionality. It has devised new and harsher traps, as in Postville, to prosecute the weak and the poor. It has increased the fear and desperation of workers who are irresistible to bottom-feeding businesses precisely because they are fearful and desperate. By treating illegal low-wage workers as a de facto criminal class, the government is trying to inflate the menace they pose to a level that justifies its rabid efforts to capture and punish them. That is a fraudulent exercise, and a national disgrace.

FIGHTING BACK

July 28, 2008

Iowa Rally Protests Raid and Conditions at Plant

By JULIA PRESTON

POSTVILLE, Iowa — About 1,000 people, including Hispanic immigrants, Catholic clergy members, rabbis and activists, marched through the center of this farm town on Sunday and held a rally at the entrance to a kosher meatpacking plant that was raided in May by immigration authorities.

The march was called to protest working conditions in the plant, owned by Agriprocessors Inc., and to call for Congressional legislation to give legal status to illegal immigrants. The four rabbis, from Minnesota and Wisconsin, attended the march to publicize proposals to revise kosher food certification to include standards of corporate ethics and treatment of workers.

The march drew a counterprotest by about 150 people, organized by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which opposes illegal immigrants and proposals to give them legal status.

At one point, tension surged as the two sides shouted slogans at each other through bullhorns from opposite sidewalks of the main street of this town with a population of about 2,200. The marchers said, “Stop the raids!” Protesters across the street responded, “Illegals go home!”

No incidents of disorder were reported by the police.

The debate over kosher standards has intensified since the May 12 raid at the plant, in which 389 illegal immigrants, the majority from Guatemala, were detained. Reports by many of those workers of widespread labor violations in the plant have been prominent news in the Jewish media, provoking discussion of whether Jews should buy meat and poultry products made there.

Agriprocessors, owned and operated by Aaron Rubashkin and his family, is the largest kosher plant in the United States. Its products, sold as Aaron’s Best and Rubashkin’s, among others, dominate the nation’s market for kosher meat and poultry.

The plant had been cited for state and federal labor violations before the raid, including inadequate worker safety protections and unpaid overtime. Since the raid, immigrants under 18, the legal age in Iowa for working on a meatpacking floor, have said they worked long hours at Agriprocessors, often at night.

Agriprocessors’ beef and poultry are killed and packaged using procedures specified by strict Jewish dietary laws, and are certified by rabbis who are recognized authorities on kosher food.

In 2006, after reports in The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, of harsh working conditions at Agriprocessors, a commission of inquiry organized by Conservative Jewish leaders criticized the plant’s operations and called for more safety training and increased inspections by state labor officials.

A member of that commission, Rabbi Morris Allen of Mendota Heights, Minn., proposed a new system of kosher certification that would include consideration of working conditions in plants where the food is produced.

Rabbi Harold Kravitz, from the Adath Jeshurun synagogue in Minnetonka, Minn., said on Sunday that the health and safety issues raised by the commission did not appear to have been addressed. Speaking to the rally on a dusty driveway in front of the plant, Rabbi Kravitz said that Jewish laws governing the kosher processing of animals should not be separated from Jewish ethical principles.

“Proper business conduct and treatment of workers also are important Jewish values,” Rabbi Kravitz said.

He and several Jewish community activists met on Sunday morning here with Chaim Abrahams, a top manager of the plant. Aaron Goldsmith, a Postville resident who participated in the meeting, said Mr. Abrahams reported that about 360 of the arrested workers had received all payments that they were owed and that Agriprocessors was making weekly deliveries of food to about 30 immigrant families in Postville.

Although Agriprocessors executives have largely avoided speaking to the news media, Getzel Rubashkin, 24, a grandson of Aaron Rubashkin, emerged from the plant and approached the rally.

“There’s no argument here,” said Getzel Rubashkin, who said he works in the plant but was not a representative of Agriprocessors and was speaking for himself. Agriprocessors managers, he said, “treat their workers well and they pay their workers well and there is no other policy.”

“The company is not on the other side of any of these people,” he said, referring to the immigrants lined up behind banners across the street from the plant.

Getzel Rubashkin said a large number of illegal immigrants had been hired because they presented identity documents that he called convincing forgeries.

“The high number of illegal people who were working here is more a testimony to the quality of their deceit, of their papers,” Getzel Rubashkin said. He said the company did not criticize immigration authorities for the raid.

“Obviously some of the people here were presenting false documents,” Getzel Rubashkin said. “Immigration authorities somehow picked it up and they did what they are supposed to do, they came and picked them up. God bless them for it.”

On Postville’s main street, the protesters opposing the immigrants’ march praised Iowa federal prosecutors, who convicted 297 illegal immigrant workers from the plant, most on criminal document fraud charges.

“It’s a felony when you take someone’s identity, and we think that needs to be out there when you talk about the supposed injustices against undocumented workers,” said Susan Tully of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an organizer of the counterprotest.

Like the marchers, the protesters were also angry at Agriprocessors managers. To date, the only managers arrested were two floor supervisors, on immigration harboring charges.

“It’s cheap labor, that’s what they’re getting away with,” said Ruthie Hendrycks, 48, of a group called Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform. “I want to see these employers that hired children and illegal aliens do serious jail time.”

What is Driving Up Electricity Prices???? (advertisement tucked in obscure page of the newspaper)

"WHY has the energy supply cost gone up so much??"
OF COURSE....how silly of me, it's the fault of China and India!! The gall of them, thinking they have the right to suck up all of that energy to develop their economies-energy that rightfully should be going to the good ol' Red, White and Blue ...(them countries is full of small brown foreigners, dontcha know!)

Course it wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that the total combined compensation for PSE&G's top five executives comes to just a smidge under TWENTY FOUR MILLION DOLLARS!!!!!

$24,000,000

That's right, while I'm entertaining an excruciating inner debate as to whether or not I can afford having the oven on all day to bake a (free) ham these mofos are bringing in 744 times my salary!!! 'Course that don't have nuthin' to do with my electricity bills rising nigh on 300% in 5 years (60% a year, folks!)

Nope, it's all them uppity brown folks' fault. Wait, oh yeah and them left-winger green radical granola freaks!!

"Making electricity cleaner also adds costs"

Damn commie liberals!! They're probably in cahoots w/ them foreigner chinks....oh, let's not forget, Corzine, one of them commie liberal democrat leaders!! They're always somewhere behind the scenes in these travesties of the natural order.

dudes.....

How 'bout this? How 'bout when you're 'debating action to combat climate change' and 'factoring in the cost of different alternatives on electric prices'...hows 'bout bringing the CEO compensation to the table. Eh? I mean, really what in TARNATION do you need $13,000,000 a year (the top JCP&L CEO salary) for?? WHAT???

One more little bit of money saving advice: save yourselves some effort and dump the PR campaign...do you think anybody is reading these little ads (other than obsessed angry freaks like myself?) . I could have undoubtedly covered three months of electricity bills with the cost of that ad.


Pleeeease....why must you add insult to the injury.

(and some news..)
unsolicted lightbulbs
Seeking lower energy costs not worth it?
(I've actually looked into this...you almost have to have an MBA to figure it out

coming soon....latest on my bill ....