Chicago        Just when you think there’s nothing else that they can do, you stumble on yet some new way that the moneychangers have come up with to pick the pocketbooks of the biscuit cookers.  From reading a piece in the Wall Street Journal (which I gather may become a Murdock tabloid soon), it seems that poor seniors who have their social security checks paid directly to their accounts can still end up with too much month and too little money.

    Despite all of the regulations and laws that prevent anyone from being able to dun or garnish a social security check, it seems that one bank after another — and many of these were huge institutions — randomly allow various collectors and companies to access individual accounts, which flatly means that they allow the rules to be circumvented and poor seniors to be ripped and stripped of every cent for some bill or another.  The excuses they offered were so terribly lame it hurt to read them.  Once institution after another simply said in essence, “hey, we don’t know what money is in the account!?!”  Huh?  So they just take the money from the account and don’t even bother to pretend that they are in the customer service business.  

    Old school banks (like the Whitney for example, where we keep our money) require a court order before someone can crack your account.  These new school banks — and they are very big — just let any Joe and Smoo bill collector, from the utility to whomever, suck all the money out of the account.

    One story after another focused on seniors who were stuck like chuck without a dime.

    There are rules against this.  Why can’t they be enforced?  

    This sounds like a good campaign to me!