Suck it, B of A!

I just got Bank of America to refund seventy dollars in overdraft charges, after only three phone calls (though one of those was to PayPal. Every single customer service representative with whom I spoke was just fantastic; specifically a woman named Taylor, the PayPal worker. Not only did she explain exactly how account transfers between bank and PayPal accounts work, she also emailed me a letter to forward to my bank, requesting that the fees I was charged be waived. It was glorious.

Fortunately, it was much easier than that. I was refunded with barely any effort on my part, and judging by the speed of the transaction, barely any on the part(s?) of the workers in question. Now, however, I'm just angry at B of A's whole overdraft system. If they can refund me so easily, why even charge in the first place? It just seems like they're testing how much they can get away with, and if someone makes a phone call like I did, they're like a 4-year-old caught with a hand in the cookie jar.

I've been talking with people all day about Officer Mehserle's conviction for shooting and killing an unarmed man at a BART station in January 09. To make it clear, I am angry about how easily he got off, and think it's worth further investigation, but I just can't stand behind rioting. Since I don't feel like typing this all over again, I'm going to copy/paste some comments I made on Facebook:

"Well, now that conviction will never be reconsidered, because that would be giving in to rioters, which (in the brains of officials) validates rioting. They don't want to do that. I feel like protest/petition would be more effective, but now it's unlikely. Sad, sad, sad."

"By the way, the people who are going to suffer from those lootings aren't the higher-ups in the corporations. It's the workers being paid minimum wage who will have to clean up the messes, or worse, be without work during reconstruction. Businesses have money (or fake money like credit cards) to take care of destruction like this. It doesn't come out of the CEO's pocket."

I would also like to add that many of the businesses which were ransacked were franchises, which means they are privately owned. So the responsibility is really deferred from the wealth of these companies.

Blah blah blah. Anyway, some of the responses have made me really angry. It just seems like people who are saying things like "disband the BART police!" have the wrong idea about the whole thing. I don't see how that would be effective. I'm sure there are many events during which the BART police were effective, but no one would ever talk about them, because that's their job. This is a case of an individual man doing something that was not supported by the police force. His sentence was not severe enough, and I hope that it gets changed, but I wish folks wouldn't turn on a whole organization because of an individual. That is one manner in which a widespread prejudice sparks, and for some reason, when it concerns cops, prejudice has become acceptable.

That being said, fuck that Officer Mehserle jerk-off, and his ending of Oscar Grant's life.