[Corp. Watch] End the Corporate Occupation! Change Your Bank

[Corporation Watch]

Customers Can Show Banks That the Time for Greed Is Over

When the financial crisis caused some of Britain's banks to seek a
government bail-out, taxpayers may have expected the industry to
change its habit of rewarding staff with excessive salaries and bonuses

By Ken Burnett

(Guardian [UK], Feb. 18) -- It's an unfair world, as everyone knows. It's always been that way. But you don't have to rub people's noses in it.

	Last year, along with most British people, that's what my wife Marie and I felt when we read about the excessive rewards for failure shelled out by Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) to CEO Sir Fred Goodwin. 

	RBS had been our bank for more than 35 years. It was the pride of Scotland, and one of the most successful companies in the world. Sir Fred and his colleagues all but destroyed it. So, why would RBS pay him off so generously to leave?

	Only because they were about to pay themselves even more. In a world with so many wrongs, the scandal of fat cats helping themselves just because they can, because they sit upon piles of our money ... well, it just seemed to us one wrong too many.

	Especially since the public had been obliged to put in its tax money to save RBS and other banks. Why would they expect not to have to totally change their ways, to re-pay this supreme demonstration of our good faith? Why would the government let them continue to siphon off fat pay-outs, as if nothing had happened?

	It's hard for ordinary people to effectively protest at an outrage of this scale. We wrote to our day-to-day contacts at RBS -- people we like and respect -- and told them enough is enough. We were going to change our bank.

	Marie and I used to be big customers for RBS, with a $15+ million company with my name on it, but that was sold in 1999 and later broken up. We still have seven accounts, including a small publishing business, a foundation, and our personal accounts. But even together, it's still small potatoes. Why would RBS care if we left?

	Yet they appeared to, and sent two directors to see us. One of them seemed a nice young man. He sat nervously on the edge of his seat, embarrassed by his bank's behavior and eager to convince us of the sincerity of their change.

	He gave us a long press release from RBS chief executive officer Stephen Hester, overflowing with promises and protestations of good intentions. It sounded great, though we weren't entirely convinced.

	But the benefit of doubt is an easy thing to give. So we said, 'OK, you have one year: show us. If you mend your ways, we'll say so, publicly. But if you don't, we'll change our bank, equally publicly.'

	So the Change Your Bank (www.changeyourbank.info) campaign was born. The idea is that we gather other like-minded folk and together put pressure on all banks to mend their ways. If they can't convince us, then we change our bank. You can too. Change Your Bank will show you how, and where to do it.

	It's not a movement, though. It hasn't taken off -- yet. It's waiting: for you.

	Recently I re-contacted the bright young regional director who a few months earlier had seemed so determined that we should want to stick with his bank. He told me his PR colleagues had concluded that the Change Your Bank campaign posed no threat to RBS. In other words, RBS is invulnerable and can do what it likes.

	Unfair? We don't know the half of it.

	Once the Royal Mail was our friend. Not any more. Once the railways were owned by all of us. Now they cost us more than twice as much to travel on, but are owned privately -- and taxpayer funds are enriching a few already very rich managers.

	That's the way things are run now. In America the CEO of JP Morgan is getting a $17.6 million bonus for 2009, the year of the bail-out. The CEO of Goldman Sachs gets $9 million. President Obama seems paralyzed. Who really controls their country?

	Is it the same here? We know it is. And it's insanity, whichever way you look at it, beyond comprehension and justification.

	How would anyone explain it to an 11-year-old child with a social conscience? He or she could only conclude that it's unrestrained corruption, allowed to run free by complicit leaders -- despite the irrefutable evidence that unfairness on such a scale destroys the fabric of our society.

	So, in the coming election, we shouldn't elect anyone who won't swear -- on the lives of their children -- to change things.

	The bankers say that if we try to restrict their extortion, they'll leave. But what about the surgeons, the architects, and the air traffic controllers? What about the teachers, doctors, and nurses? Surely some of them are also worth more than a $1 million salary, if more than 10,000 bankers are?

	Of course they aren't. It's smoke and mirrors. Institutionalized robbery by the powerful of the acquiescent. We say let them go. Good riddance. They can't leave soon enough. This country will be very much better without them.

	It's always been an unfair world. The paradigm of the rich getting richer as the poor get poorer has been with us at least since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. After 12 years of Tony Blair and now Gordon Brown, it's more unfair now, not less. This will continue unless we, the public, stop it.

	On February 13, The Daily Mail ran on its front page the indignant story of 10,000 bankers about to scoop up salaries of more than $1.5 million each. Lord Myners called it 'grotesque', and people say, 'They just don't get it, these bankers'. But the trouble is, they do. They really do.

	In other countries, excessive plundering by a powerful, uncaring elite creates conditions ripe for revolution or military coup. In Britain we shake our heads, have a cup of tea, proclaim it a jolly bad show and bang off a letter to the Guardian.

	The people who control these things have seen and recognized our impotence. They think there's absolutely nothing that we can do about it, except whinge. But you can Change Your Bank. We all can. For all they've promised, RBS haven't changed. So my wife and I will now change our bank, for sure.

	Please join us, to show these smug, self-serving money-manipulators just how wrong they are.