commonsense at common-sense.org Tue, 29 Jul 2003 14:17:02 -0500
> Consider This...
> BANK OF AMERICA'S RACISM
> Did you know that in North Carolina and a few other states, it's
> legal for banks to charge certain customers special fees, even if
> it's clear that these fees are racially discriminatory?
> That's what Bank of America has been doing in North Carolina for
> more than a year.
> Bank of America charges a flat $5 fee for customers in some states
> who want to cash checks drawn on Bank of America accounts. The fee
> only applies to checks drawn on business accounts.
> It's annoying that any bank would charge people money to cash a
> check drawn on an account at the same bank. But what's downright
> outrageous about this policy is that it is implicitly directed at
> minority customers.
> Bank of America doesn't charge this $5 fee everywhere; it only
> applies in Arizona, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina,
> South Carolina, and Texas.
> Take a look at that list of states again: the states where this fee
> is charged average more than 21% Latino populations, while the
> states where Bank of America does business that do not have the fee
> average 15%. It gets a lot worse when you leave out California,
> which has strong consumer protection laws and would never tolerate
> such a fee--then the average is less than 7% Latino population in
> states where the fee is not charged.
> Bank of America has no argument to defend this racist policy. The
> fee doesn't recoup costs in any fair way, because personal checks
> are at least as expensive to handle as business checks, yet personal
> checks are not affected. The policy cannot be seen as a reasonable
> fraud deterrent either, when Bank of America already joins many
> other area banks in the humiliating policy of fingerprinting
> customers who don't have accounts with them.
> And don't think that Bank of America does this because it has to in
> order to "stay competitive." Bank of America has charged this fee
> since May 2002, and not one other major bank in North Carolina has
> followed suit. Not one. Bank of America doesn't need the money
> either--they've reported huge profits for each of the last several
> quarters, often in billions of dollars per quarter.