Imagine you go into a bank to cash a check and are arrested for fraud, placed in a cell and chained to a wall for hours and denied a phone call or the medication you need for survival. This happened to Sharon Henry in San Francisco. Ms. Henry's plight is an example of how banks have distorted law in America and how it affects citizens, real live citizens, on every level of daily life. What we need to do is amend existing corporate law eliminating personhood for corporations and eliminate the Limited Liability Corporation.
Ms. Henry (See San Francisco Chronicle article http://blog.sfgate.com/...). What is interesting is that Ms. Henry is a San Mateo County prosecutor and knows the law, but the banks have so crafted the fraud laws that they control how the idea of fraud is defined and applied in practice. Not only did Ms. Henry's suit against Bank of America, where the incident occurred fail on the lower court level but a federal appeals court could not provide her with any relief. Her suit was found baseless as the law as drafted protects the banks in such cases as they behavior is defined as "freedom of speech." When Ms. Henry tried to cash a check written to her by her partner at a BofA branch the bank employees misinterpreted the account owner's name and she was arrested for fraud. Not only does the law allow the bank to make such mistakes without any redress, but the bank is protected by the law from any consequences of their mistake as extensions of their freedom of speech. No due process is allowed to citizens in dealing with banks, Ms. Henry, given the interpretation of the courts, had no right to be told there was a problem and no right to call the person who wrote the check to clarify the issue. The court also made her pay BofA's court costs of $50,000!
In my recent book, The Anthropology of the Credit Crisis: Magical Thinking, Irrationality and the Role of Inequality (available on Kindle or paperback: http://www.amazon.com/...), I address the history of this process and the extent to which the banks have eroded citizen rights. In an article on the Social Science Research Network,
The Theory of Banking: Why Banks Exist and Why We Fear Them (http://papers.ssrn.com/...) I detail the dilemma we face with banks and the ideology of banking.