Bank of America, the company that has stylistically distorted the image of the American flag in their logo to avoid violating U.S. flag code prohibiting the use of the American flag for commercial promotion, is proving to be shamelessly dishonest.
Last week, Bank of America announced a pilot program in the Los Angeles area offering credit cards without the usual Social Security documentation or any other proof of citizenship. Proponents of the move claim that credit cards transcend national boundaries and critics point out that U.S. banks are backed by the government in the form of deposit insurance and are therefore subject to government oversight.
Some say the program amounts to government endorsement of illegal immigration, and see it as selective enforcement of our nation’s laws by the U.S. Department of Justice. In any case, Bank of America is clearly soliciting new customers from Los Angeles’ large illegal immigrant population.
And that’s where the dishonesty comes in. Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal this week in which he denies that the bank is targeting illegals, “Bank of America does not deliberately market financial products and services to illegal immigrants from any country.”
Forget the bank’s brand new marketing slogan, “Bank of Opportunity.” Ignore the fact that the bank chose Los Angeles, a city with a huge Hispanic population, to test the program or the fact that all legal U.S. citizens who earn an income must be registered with Social Security. Instead, let’s revisit the words of Lewis’ colleagues just a week ago.
According to an article that appeared in the Reno Gazette-Journal, Bank of America officials directly involved in the program told quite a different story last week than CEO Lewis is trying to sell the public this week.
“Company executives say that the initiative isn’t about politics, but rather about meeting the needs of an untapped group of potential customers. ‘These people are coming here for quality of life, and they deserve somebody to give them a chance to achieve that quality of life,’ says Brian Tuite, the bank’s director of Latin America card operations and one of the architects of the program.” And, “‘If we don’t disproportionately grow in the Hispanic (market) … we aren’t going to grow as a bank,’ says Liam McGee, Bank of America’s consumer and small-business banking chief.”
The truth is that the “Opportunity” Bank of America is referring to is really just the opportunity the bank sees to exploit an enormous segment of the population that other banks have yet to exploit. Banks make huge usurious profits from high interest credit cards which raises the question, is Bank of America helping illegal immigrants or hurting them?