Don't Bank On It

When I was in grade school the local bank gave us folding cardboard dime holders or bank cards in which you were encouraged to save up one hundred dimes for ten bucks, the minimum deposit at the bank. I never made it to fifty. I was no different than the government schooling me at the time. I bought the same things: guns, tanks, planes and bridges in a more modest form. Always had public works going. The bank was educating us in saving and thrift or they just couldn’t get their hands in our pockets soon enough. The government guaranteed your deposit and the FBI had killed all the bank robbers. When I got a paper route I quickly filled one up and opened an account. I would get a statement every year showing my accrued interest. I never put another dime in that bank. By the time I was paid in checks and needed an account charges had been introduced and my one hundred plus dimes were gone. My original nest egg was bank charged into oblivion.

I have since calculated that the bank has turned my ten bucks into a billion dollars. My ten dollars became the seed money on which they leveraged a hundred dollar loan for a used car. Once the car was paid off they took that hundred and leveraged a loan for a thousand dollars for new car. That paid off they leveraged the ten fold for another ten fold loan for a crummy house. Then for the good house, the big house, the mansion, the hotel culminating in a privately owned prison, the cash cow of American real estate.

Prisons will not slow down with the economy. They will thrive. Even more than they do now. All the other assets that grew out of the loans are crap now. Now the prison is the castle on the hill. Banks and prisons both have bars. We keep money prisoner but it still controls us or out of controls us which brings us to the present situation. Since no one knows what is going on we are all experts.

Almost everyone I know owes some bank-student loans, mortgages, credit cards and the quiet grip of an empty dime card. The money’s here behind our thick walls. We won’t show it to you but we have wide lapels and pinstripes and fat cigars to smoke in our big car. You can trust us. We might even be called trust. Don’t go to a savings and loan. They’re uninsured pirates posting bail for squatters and calling it homeownership. I listened to all this and watched the neighborhood bank that provided the dime card eaten by a citywide bank which was eaten by the statewide bank which was eaten by a regional bank helping it to become a national bank. I thought eventually there would be just one bank, The Bank. And I thought The Bank would own the government. Instead the government owns the banks. I guess we won.

Don Arrup
Satire1