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Saturday, January 28, 2006

Bank On It

Bellaciao has a very interesting article up, on some contingency planning by the gubmint:

A family member from Irvine, CA (who’s a branch manager at Bank of America) told us two weeks ago that her bank held a "workshop" where the last two days were dedicated to discussing their bank’s new security measures. During these last two days, the workshop included members from the Homeland Security Office who instructed them on how to field calls from customers and what they are to tell them in the event of a national disaster. She said they were told how only agents from Homeland Security (during such an event) would be in charge of opening safe deposit boxes and determining what items would be given to bank customers.

At this point they were told that no weapons, cash, gold, or silver will be allowed to leave the bank - only various paperwork will be given to its owners. After discussing the matter with them at length, she and the other employees were then told not to discuss the subject with anyone.

The family member has since given her notice to quit the bank.

I found the news alarming and decided to find out more myself. On a trip to my bank here in Houston, I remarked to a young bank employee (who’s new there), "well I guess you’ve been told all that stuff by the manager and the Homeland Security about what to tell your customers" - and to my amazement, the young woman came right out and said yes she’d been through all that, then whispered to me across the counter, "but we’re not supposed to talk about - I could lose my job."


Fortunately for me, I keep all my money in coffee cans buried out in the backyard, but I figgered y'all might wanna know about this one. Remember, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean someone's not really out to get you....

1 comment:

Heywood J. said...

Yep, it's all about creating and maintaining a state of dependency and control. Used to be something that normal folks like us might scoff at, figuring it to be the exclusive realm of the 55-gallon-drums-of-rolled-oats-in-the-concrete-bunker crowd. After New Orleans, not so much. We'll never know exactly what Blackwater did to get the situation "under control" there post-Katrina. Why? Because we're children. We're not allowed to know.

How ya doin', by the way? Drop a line at virtual cracker barrel some time.