[lbo-talk] Fwd: Racist Bank of America

Tom Roche Tom_Roche at pobox.com
Tue Jul 29 12:50:27 PDT 2003


http://www.common-sense.org/

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.



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