Bank of America Cries Poverty……

Whew! That was a mouthful for a title, but it’s the truth!!!

Bank of America needs to trim its own mega fat and uncontrolled atmospheric costs before it charges customers more and more to do their daily business.

Bank of America takes months and months to set up home closings and then more months to send checks to sellers who just sold their homes. I have a friend whose family sold its home 6 months ago and just received their check.

I sent a request to Bank of America to send me six check registers, a simple request I thought, but first customer service sent only two registers, then another two after I complained and then finally the last of them after complaining five times that the company cannot even perform the simplest requests.

And then the big stuff…

 Forbes recently had an article about Bank of America spending millions for the retirement and severance packages of previous executives:

“Bank of America revealed Friday that it forked over $6 million to Sallie Krawcheck, former head of its powerful wealth management arm.

In an SEC filing today, BofA said it awarded Krawcheck a severance package that includes one year of her salary, $850,000, and a one-time, supplemental lump sum payment of $5,150,000.”

Bank of America is a financial institution poster child for what is wrong with our economy. Once upon a time in America big businesses governed themselves intelligently. They made their profits but they also enabled American citizens to take part in the successes, e.g., providing lots of jobs and good lives.

These days, big business like Bank of America have gotten too big and far too greedy without giving back any stability to the U.S. community.

And THAT is why we no longer can support complete deregulation of businesses in this nation. It is why we need a fairer Fair Trade Agreement with our overseas constituent nations and why we need to stop screwing ourselves into the ground by borrowing more credit from foreign sources and we must stop outsourcing American jobs to cheaper, but NOT better qualified, overseas personnel.

It is why we need new anti-campaign contributing laws that prohibit large contributions, gifts and perks by wealthy special interests to our elected and appointed officials.

Peter Stern, of Driftwood, Texas, writes on political issues, is a former Director of Information Services in private industry and government, a university professor, public school administrator and teacher, a disabled Vietnam veteran, and holds three post-graduate degrees.