Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.

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Dan Casey

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Jed Yatzor, 47, is a big, burly, plain-speaking construction superintendent who lives in Northwest Roanoke off Peters Creek Road.

Solely for the purposes of this column, we'll consider him "the little guy," one who is fighting back at what he considers the predatory practices of bailed-out big banks whose bigwigs are raking in bonuses.

Yatzor is in no danger of losing his home, or his truck, or of filing for bankruptcy. He says he's always paid his bills on time, that he pays higher than the minimum payment for revolving credit, and that he's worked hard to earn a solid credit rating.

Despite all of that, he says Bank of America earlier this year dropped his Visa card limit and bumped his interest rate from 9.9 percent to 17.24 percent. And that is Yatzor's beef.

A couple of months ago, he struck back with a double-sided, hand-painted billboard he fashioned from construction scrap.

In small capital letters at the top it says, "In my opinion," and in larger capital letters below, it continues: "Bank of America are crooks."

At first, Yatzor mounted the sign in the bed of his Ford F250 pickup. The rolling broadside went with him everywhere he went.

He especially delighted in driving it past the Bank of America branch at Crossroads Mall.

"Oh yes, we've seen him," a worker at the branch told me last week.

Nicole Nastacie, a Bank of America spokeswoman, said: "We respect the rights of individuals to express their opinions."

Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Jed Yatzor sits on his trailer that he's equipped with a hand-painted sign expressing his frustration with Bank of America. He says the bank lowered his credit limit and raised his interest rate by more than 7 percent. He tows the mounted sign on trips and gets responses from honks to thumbs ups.

In April, the bank notified a small portion of its customers of a rate increase, she said. That included customers like Yatzor whose interest rate was below 10 percent, "which was significantly less than our cost to do business in the current market." They had the option of keeping the old rate provided they didn't add new charges. Yatzor says that's what he's doing, but he's angry nonetheless.

Yatzor drove the sign to Pennsylvania and back on a visit to his brother's.

"I got honks and cheers all the way," he said. "My brother said someone took a picture and put it on the Internet, but he hasn't sent me the link yet."

Then his construction company bosses got a little uncomfortable about it. "We don't know who's going to be financing our next job," he said they told him, in asking him to take the sign off his truck. (Yatzor declined to give me the company's name.)

So he mounted it on a trailer and pulled it around town whenever he wasn't going to work.

"I've had people pull up at stoplights and want to know what Bank of America did to piss me off," Yatzor said. "I've had a whole lot of people."

Now it's become a roadside attraction on out-of-the-way Barns Avenue Northwest. It caused a minor traffic jam during a big party some neighbors threw recently, he said. "People were stopping to take pictures."

Next-door neighbor Cynthia Draper doesn't mind the fuss she said Bank of America raised her credit card interest rate from 9.9 to more than 17 percent, too.

Though Yatzor's anger is directed at Bank of America, it's similar to lots of angst directed at banks that you hear out there lately.

As the economy plunged into recession last year, the credit bubble burst, folks who'd been laid off became credit card deadbeats and defaults ballooned.

Yatzor says the banks never should have issued credit cards to many of those people in the first place.

As bank profits plunged, the handful of huge banks that control most of the nation's credit cards decided to squeeze their good customers the folks who were still making payments.

So they jacked up interest rates, late and over-the-limit fees for folks like Yatzor. Citibank did the same to me. In some cases they lowered the credit limits.

We're paying for the irresponsibility of deadbeats and the folks who made bad decisions in extending them credit.

Is that fair? Yatzor says no way.

"It's highway robbery that they can get away with this," he says. "It's the same thing as me going to Florida after a hurricane and selling bottles of water for $5 each. I would be charged with profiteering.

"The banks are profiteering off the backs of us, and we go and bail them out, and they go and pay multimillion bonuses to the inept geniuses who got them in trouble to begin with."

You've got to admit the guy has a point.

Yatzor said his only regret about the sign is that passers-by can't see it at night.

"If I had any money, I'd buy some solar lights and train them on it," he said.

I suggested that he could buy them with his Bank of America card.

"That way, they'd be loaning you money you're using to criticize them," I noted.

Yatzor laughed.

"I would but I've already shredded the card!"

And, if you don't have the discipline to pay off your cards every month, that may be the best solution.

Dan Casey's column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.