The Almighty Power | The American Spectator

I am now 80 years old. Let’s not kid ourselves: That’s OLD. I have a number of observations about life, and I will share them with you nice people gradually.

The one I want to talk about today is one of the simplest ones. Financial insecurity is not just a bad thing. It’s a terrifyingly bad thing. This comes to mind because a few months ago, because of a series of awful calamities, mostly wild misconduct by a bank and an insurance company and some lawyers, I was just about out of money. (RELATED: Moving on From Financial Trauma)

I still had some valuable assets, especially real property in Beverly Hills and Malibu. But converting real estate to cash is not easily done. (RELATED: Insights From a Big Spender)

I soon found a simply wonderful woman named Dina Brown, who was able to go through my wife’s and my art collection — wonderful Lichtensteins and Warhols — and give us cash money almost immediately for them. The moment that I got the call from my bank telling me that the wire from the art dealer had arrived was probably the single happiest moment of my adult life.

Now, I face another similar crisis. It might seem that I could easily get out of the issue, but I can’t. Again, I will. But it’s scaring me a lot.

A further reinforcement about this problem came when a man I will call M. kindly referred me to a doctor I needed for my stomach. I noticed that his voice sounded not just tense, but nuclear-powered tense.

“What’s the matter ?” I asked. “I’m broke,” he said.

“I know the feeling,” I said.

“No, you don’t,” he said. “I have nothing. Absolutely nothing. I have anxiety like nothing you can imagine,” he added.

But I could imagine it. One of the main reasons I can imagine it (but not the only reason) is that I had a number of small accounts at Chase Bank. That’s a huge bank, one of the biggest banks on earth. Two of the accounts were hacked over and over again. Every time I asked the bank to reimburse me and fix the problem, they did nothing. The total loss for my wife and me would be very roughly 40K.

The attitude of the people I talked to was usually terribly unhelpful.

Recently, I was shown a list of transactions that had drained my accounts.

Several of them were in Nicosia, Cyprus. Others were in cities and towns in the USA that I had never been to.

I wrote to Mr. Jamie Dimon, billionaire head of Chase. I reminded him that I knew him from my days as a columnist for a very large newspaper. Nothing helped.

This is a bad thing. Basically, Chase has countenanced theft against an 80-year-old man. I needed that money.

Friends, I speak up for capitalism, as you well know. But money is extremely vital, especially for us old folks.

It would not be amiss for the government to help. Financial terror is a terrible thing.

READ MORE from Ben Stein:

Return to Gunskirchen Lager and Col. Denman

No Sense Quarreling

John Coyne, RIP