It's my money.

• Author: Durst, Will
• Position: Off the Map - Viewpoint essay

Ah. The holiday season. Caroling with friends. Catching the first snowflake on your tongue. Stashing the last Butterball turkey in your shopping cart. Brand new calendars just a few weeks off. Food, family, football. We'll get back to the most glorious time of the year a bit later, but first a few words about the initial decision by major banks to charge customers a monthly fee to use debit cards for routine purchases. And those few words are: "You Greedy Ravenous Money-Grubbing Avaricious Pigs."

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How much money do you have to make? I mean, I get it. You are not nonprofit organizations. Few of us are. Advertently. Your appointed task is to find new ways to make much more moolah. Same here. You just happen to be a whole lot better at it than the rest of us. And with the bucks to rewrite the rules, the skids get greased in your favor. Good for you. Bur do you really need all the money? Every single dime? Really?

What were your profits last year? Like a bazilliondy dollars? Shouldn't that be enough? How much IS enough? Stockholders don't require double-digit returns every quarter, do they?

I know it's incredibly foolish to expect even a modicum of humility from you after causing the worst financial crisis in eighty years, but wouldn't it be wiser to leave behind a couple of bucks for the rest of us? You know, so we can do business with you. Commerce. Otherwise you'll have all the capital, no customers, and be forced to restrict all your interactions to other banks, and trust me, you're not going to like that.

Or is that the ultimate goal? To gather together all the money in the world, becoming little more than money museums? Then we pony up pretty colored stones just to look at the money we no longer have. And you know what happens then. You make it your mission to control the world's supply of pretty colored stones. Go ahead. We'll switch to smooth pointy sticks.

And you complain that the Occupy Wall Streeters...