The big banking industry has shown once again that it will say and do almost anything to maintain its oligopoly over the nation's payment system and continue to charge hidden and usurious swipe fees to American retailers.

First, Frank Keating, president and CEO of the American Bankers Association (and former governor of Oklahoma), wrote an op-ed piece in the Chicago Sun-Times late last year attacking the recently enacted curbs on debit card transaction fees. He compared the new rules — which barely make a dent in retailers' overall transaction costs — as a "price-fixing" scheme that hurts consumers.

According to Keating, "Bank customers are now paying for services they previously enjoyed free. Free checking is becoming harder to find and debit rewards programs have become a thing of the past. These are real consequences as banks of all sizes continue to adjust to government-imposed losses in revenue."

Of course, no one is putting a gun to the bankers' heads, forcing them to rip off consumers directly through higher fees and fewer rewards programs because they can no longer rip them off as much indirectly through the hidden fees that add to retailers' cost of doing business.

Shortly thereafter, the Electronic Payments Coalition (EPC), the paid mouthpiece of the banks and payment card networks, issued the findings of a new report that purportedly shows that retailers are not passing along the meager savings they have accrued from debit card reform.

The EPC said its "report" shows that at 21 retail locations it studied, prices on a limited assortment of items were the same or higher than they were before debit card fee reform went into effect — leading the EPC to state, based on such flimsy evidence, that "at least 76 percent of retailers included in the research have not passed promised savings to consumers."

What a crock. The EPC report is misleading and shows a deliberate lack of understanding of how retailing works. "The report isn't worth the paper it is written on," said NACS Senior Vice President of Government Relations Lyle Beckwith, who has faced off against the bankers' lies for the past several years.

Among the deceits in the report:

• The smattering of products at just 21 stores hardly comprise any kind of representative market basket of goods. And, there's no proof that any of those stores' overall prices went up.
  
  
• There's no analysis of the actual swipe fees these retailers paid. In fact, because the new regulations increase fees on small transactions, they may have paid higher swipe fees than they paid prior to the reform.
  
  
• The prices are examined in a vacuum with no examination of changes in other business costs.

"I'm sure it's not an accident that items that have seen wholesale prices skyrocket, like peanut butter, were included in the market basket," Beckwith rightly pointed out. And, a "swipe fee research project without any information on swipe fees is not a swipe fee research project. It's not any kind of research project."

So, let's call this report what it really is: just another propaganda piece from the powerful banking lobby desperate to cling to undeserved riches. As for Keating, how about giving some of the hundreds of millions of dollars in profits that the banks accrued from swipe fees back to the taxpayers who bailed them out during the financial crisis. Don't hold your breath for that to happen.

For comments, please contact Don Longo, Editor-in-Chief, at (201) 855-7606 or dlongo@stagnitomedia.com.