I want my five dollars

So I have a five dollar bill that has a little less than 1/3rd of it missing due to age. My bank should take it and give me a new one. This isn't mutilated currency, which I'll come to in a minute, it's just torn and considered easy to verify that it is legal tender.

In fact, I could just go out and spend it if I was of the mind to. No less than three banks, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and CITI Bank refused to complete this simple task. This is basic banking, but I shouldn't be surprised. When I needed to verify the amount of money we needed to have in our account at B of A I walked into the bank and simply asked. Surprisingly no one could tell, in fact no one could actually tell me what sort of checking account we had because every two or three years they change the names of all the types of accounts and apparently don't keep a list.

So if you have been banking at B of A for more than 3 years they will have problems verifying the particulars of your account aside from how much money is in there. Also, since being a bank teller is technically in the service sector they churn through people nearly as fast as retail, which has a 400% turn over rate, no one, supervisors included, had been there for more than a year or two. As a customer this is supremely frustrating.

So now I'm writing to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing who take mangled currency and replace it so that they can do what my bank and the Federal Reserve should do which is take this old piece of crap bill and replace it with a crisp new one. Mangled currency is money that is less than half gone, or otherwise unverifiable due to explosion or fire. They say that my bill is still legal tender, not mangled, and that my bank and the Federal Reserve are full of shit and should take the bill.

Why am I so worked up about this? It's just one more example of just how fucked we are in the US. How much work we have to do as citizens in order to get our government back and recover all that has been fettered away.

This is the price of being too afraid to get into the street and take back what is ours. If you think that Obama, Clinton or Pelosi are at all interested in fixing things you'd be wrong. They're just as corrupt as the rest and it's not getting better. So while we're all afraid of a McCain presidency I would posit that voting for the Democrats is at best a stop gap measure.

I'm a registered Democrat, but not for long. Now I'm a Green. They represent what I need and to my mind what we all need and that is to focus on the basics that we all need that are horribly broken.