Hit DEBIT NOT CREDIT to screw Wall Street BACK (and it will help REAL businesses)

Our elected representatives in Washington seem congenitally unable to punish and neuter Wall Street for the economic terrorism they have visited upon the United States and the entire world with their various scams and trade deals that are decimating the middle class, so we are left to do it for ourselves.

One way to screw them is to stop doing business with national banks and move to community banks or better yet a CREDIT UNION.

NPR revealed another way to castrate these bastards when they talked about the difference between the fees for credit versus debit and who profits from each.

The bottom line is credit charges to merchants are much higher, usually a flat fee plus a percentage, whereas debits are just a flat fee. And credit card companies twists the knife in the businesses by having higher set fees for cheaper purchases. How much does it cost businesses? One merchant interviewed said:

"On the cost of a $5 purchase item, we lose a dollar of that sale."

While this directly hurts businesses, it's not hard to figure out that this extra cost will be past will be passed on to customers.

Two companies control 80% of all credit card business, which is why they can charge such extortionate rates. And those fees go to them. While debit charges travel through the same networks, they don't pay nearly as much to those monopolies.

There are two ways you can use this knowledge to screw the Wall Street assholes who are screwing us:

• Obviously, hit the DEBIT button instead of credit every time you have a choice. If enough people did this, it would help businesses as much as any tax cut (without cutting tax revenues we could use for schools, health care, and taking care of our veterans maimed in our now endless wars).

• A little less obvious is telling business people to let customers know that hitting debit saves them money and that savings could be passed on to customers. One woman called into the NPR show and said when clerks ask her "debit or credit," she asks them what they prefer and they say they don't care.

Couldn't small business people figure out a nice way to tell their customers that they accept credit but prefer debit?

I imagine the credit card companies have a clause in the fine print that says merchants can't give a discount for choosing debit, but they could figure out some creative ways to reward them.

The best thing about hitting the DEBIT button is it helps the REAL businesses that provide products and services while hurting the Ponzi schemes of sociopathic trust fund babies on Wall Street who have never made or done anything of value in their whole lives.

If the law cannot or will not reach into their gated community and private compounds, we can--not by climbing over their walls but simply by cutting off the flow of our money that keeps them alive and that they use as the club to beat us.

Now if we could just convince their servants to leave them, they would die of starvation and infection from their unwiped asses.

NOTE: The NPR story had more details like how buying gas can lead to overdraft fees even if your bank account isn't overdrawn. Here's a TRANSCRIPT and the AUDIO.

VIDEO: stick figure explain why banks screw you & credit unions don't

Click pic to see flick

The best way to get even with banks is to stop doing business with them. This is explains why credit unions are a better alternative in under two minutes.

Bankerspank.com has some good links on this including how to find a credit union:

creditunion.coop (look for LOCATE A CREDIT UNION in the left sidebar)

international woccu.org

We could probably eliminate a lot of our problems with corporate crime if we fed this model and starved the corporate one.

Previous post on credit unions.

Screw bankers BACK: switch to a credit union

Banks are owned by stockholders like any corporation, so if it can make money by screwing its customers, it will--and DOES with ridiculous overdraft charges, late fees, scam mortgages, and reduced in-person service.

Credit unions are owned by their member-customers and employees, so taking care of customers is taking care of owners.

We can't seem to stop the government from writing blank check after blank check to the banks that immediately squirrel them away in the Caymen Islands, but we can get even with banks by taking our money OUT of them and switching to a credit union.

Frankly, if we were serious about saving American jobs at the car companies (or any other industry decimated by outsourcing and executive self-dealing), we would switch them to the credit union business model instead of the dictatorship of incompetent, spoiled trust fund babies of the corporate model.

If you already think that's a good idea, bankerspank.com put together some funny video parodies of the Mac vs. Pc commercials on banks vs. credit unions you can send to your friends to convince them:

You could help them out by searching for their videos on youtube with ''bank vs credit union'' and viewing and voting for them there too.

Then spread it around.

All videos at their website: