Letter to the Bank Manager #91 (cheap fishing nets—another plastic hell)

My Dear Friend,

With the start of a New Year, we, on a personal level, begin a new era. As I have repeatedly insisted, I’ve made great effort to remain polite at all times and have struggled in my attempts to not yield to the baser aspects of my nature during my dealings with you, the financial sector, the banks, the money people. You are a money person—that must make you feel good—better than being—as 99% of us apparently are—un-monied people. The speed with which the un-moneying is taking place is terrifying and yet it continues to behoove you to act as if everything is just fine. Optimism is now a euphemism for don’t look and don’t see, and it is a euphemism you insist on resorting to every day on the radio, the internet, wherever experts are making utterances about the state of the economy.

I no longer feel the need to throw my full weight at the machine as, thankfully, there are many of us now watching and recording the falsities and untruths as they unfold. You cannot pick up a paper or listen to the radio without hearing the innate contradictions built into the system. When it come to understanding how foreclosures happen, what the nature of debt is, how financial instruments are built...well we are getting as good at this as you and we are watching.

I am going to be concentrating my efforts this year into writing many more letters to you, letters I might actually put in the mail. My goodness! It isn’t as if the Post office couldn’t do with any help we might offer! Besides if I don’t send them I cannot complain about your failure to respond can I? That this has only just occurred to me after posting these missives on an obscure blog for the past—four years is it?—is another matter. I never said I was more intelligent than you. I simply have more heart. The gaping hole in yours is what I shall focus on and perhaps, to end on an upbeat note, an optimistic note, we might together fix your problem and thereby fix the problems of the majority, the 99%, which is basically everyone I know. We lie floundering in the bottom of your boat, trying to breathe as you throw out your cheap, easily replaced nets (ever indifferent to the environment) to make room for more fish. We are no longer small fry though. The plastic not only piles up on the bottom of the ocean, and on beaches everywhere. It also gathers in draws or gets shredded in those wonderful shredders that will destroy credit cards in a blissful second. We have discovered we can breathe on land, give voice to our grievances, avoid your temptations and even quash fees that you might be tempted to impose. This is great news. We’ll come en masse into your banks, and we’ll show you where you went wrong, and we will help cure you of your failure to feel and will teach you to grapple with scruples, and fix our own problems in the process! Simple right?

Yours you’ll never know how sincerely,



Art O’Connor