Banksters, Banking Gangsters

There has been a vast amount of propaganda directed at FIFA this year for corruption, said by the Americans to amounts to $150 million. Yet the media do not extend the same degree of opprobrium to the financial institutions that a few years ago walked off with the contents of the Exchequer and continue to purloin money from ordinary people in manifest acts of criminality. For example, British bank HSBC was caught running tax evasion, money-laundering for drug cartels and other illicit schemes estimated at $180 billion--more than a thousand-fold the level of criminality alleged at FIFA.

Wall Street banks, like JP Morgan, systematically rigged gold price markets a shady bid to shield the US dollar value, affecting the price of basic commodities and livelihoods for billions of people worldwide, and estimated to be of the order of trillions of dollars—a thousand thousand-fold the FIFA fraud.

These banks, with Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Credit Agricole among many others, all promoted the toxic financial derivatives that made their executives multimillionaires but which led to the global financial and economic meltdown in 2008, and the robbing of the world national treasuries. Millions of lives have ruined from unemployment and the collapse of pensions and savings funds to feed the greed of the banking and financial executives and the ensuing austerity imposed on the public to pay for the financial catastrophe, deliberately and recklessly engineered by the major banks, hedge funds and other capitalist investment agencies.

The meltdown of financial markets in 2008-2009 was the result of institutionalised fraud and financial manipulation. The ‘bank bailouts’ were implemented on the instruction of Wall Street, leading to the largest transfer of money wealth in recorded history, while simultaneously creating an unsurmountable public debt.

Michel Chossudovsky, The Global Economic Crisis

Generations of children to come will be forced to pay for the trillions of dollars of debt created by the banks. Thousands of people have already died from the austerity governments imposed on their public to pay for the massive corporate fraud, tax evasion, fixing and embezzlement that has occurred.

Yet not one board member or executive from the major banks involved has been charged, let alone prosecuted or imprisoned, and the baks have rewarded their political puppets, Barack Obama and David Cameron by donating cash to help to re-elect them.

Source, Finian Cunningham, Strategic Culture Foundation

Necessity Makes People Entrepreneurial, but Where is the Start Up Cash?

There are two main incentives for entrepreneurship:

1. opportunity—a perceived business opportunity
2. necessity—a need to get more income due to job loss or pay cuts.

Examining data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey and matching that data with locations across the USA, researchers from the University of Missouri Truman School of Public Affairs found that from 2007-2010, the amount of necessity entrepreneurship rose from 16 to 28 percent of total entrepreneurship in the US. So the number of Americans engaging in entrepreneurship has risen significantly, even though the country was entering a depression similar to that of the 1930s. Thomas Johnson, a professor in the MU Truman School of Public Affairs, and co-author of the study, said:

From economic stress, great ideas are born. Many large, profitable businesses have been created due to entrepreneurship during economic downturns. Hopefully that will be the case for this period as well.

Maria Figueroa-Armijos, whose doctoral work comprised the study, agrees:

We’ve seen similar trends occur in past economically slow periods that have led to economic booms. The doldrums in the 1980s led to increased entrepreneurship and the economic growth in the 1990s.

So the trend has potential positives but they can only come to fruition when this increase of necessity driven entrepreneurship is matched by increased support of the entrepreneurs:

Currently, there is much more economic support for opportunity entrepreneurs than for people starting their own businesses out of necessity. With the rise of necessity entrepreneurs during the recession there is obviously a need for more help from lenders and policy makers. These necessity entrepreneurs could create jobs and economic growth for long-term economic prosperity.

Banks at present are hanging on to our money because they can in some magical way make more money by keeping it for dodgy trading than lending it to businesses as they used to. Naked Capitalism reports from the Telegraph that Professor Tim Congdon of International Monetary Research said US bank loans have fallen at an annual pace of almost 14pc in the three months to August—from $7,147bn to $6,886bn.

There has been nothing like this in the USA since the 1930s. The rapid destruction of money balances is madness.

The MU study also found an increase in entrepreneurship among African Americans, and it is certain that upper middle class white bankers will be even more reluctant to lend to descendents of their former slaves than they are to some redneck tea party goer.

Figueroa-Armijos also found that rural entrepreneurship levels have not decreased during the recession, despite previous research showing that rural areas lack the necessary resources for successful entrepreneurism:

These findings offer policy makers an opportunity to permanently increase entrepreneurial involvement of historically under represented groups. Considering the decline of rural populations, rural development strategies must be re-examined. Increased support for “necessity driven” self-employment not only offers a way of improving the incomes of rural residents, but also provides an opportunity to create more overall entrepreneurial activity following the recession.

The federal administration gave the banks trillions of US tax dollars to stop them from failing, so it is time it introduced legally binding obligations for banks to do what entrepreneurial bankers originally conceived them for—to lend money deposited with them to embryonic businesses at interest to get money in circulation again, and not kept for the banksters’ own nefarious purposes. To encourage them, the Fed ought to tax every wired deal—a Robin Hood tax set at a level to make it more profitable for the Banksters to lend money rather than trade it. Naturally, the redneck tea party goer will get what little money is going because he would not want to receive any such “socialist” money. The capitalist banksters like such ironies, and will take every opportunity to kick sand in the faces of those who could do with a little help.

Tax the Rich Every Last Penny Until the Money Banks Stole is Replaced

Too many people believe the political and media propaganda that we have overspent and we must cut back.

Keep reminding them that the banks overspent, thinking mortgage collateral—houses—would rise in value to cover it—in fact, on the assumption that housing prices would rise indefinitely. They spent money they didn’t have, giving themselves massive bonuses for doing it, then, when the housing market collapsed, they told governments, governments!, they were too big to fail, and told governments, supposedly our governments, they had to give them £$trillions from national treasuries—our money collected as taxes—to replace the money the inept bankers had lost on junk mortgages and junk bonds. What did we have to do with it?

We have already paid the banks—the money they were given was not the government’s money, it was our money, entrusted by us to governments for nation wide social use—yet these governments, supposedly our governments are making us pay again, through enforced austerity measures that have nothing to do with us overspending. Tell them to stuff their austerity measures that hit everyone except the super rich, and to get every penny back from the rich leeches who do nothing and deserve nothing of ours.

The Upper Classes are More Dishonest—Official!

A series of studies conducted by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Toronto in Canada and reported by the NSF reveal something the well off may not want to hear. Those who are relatively high in social class are more likely to engage in unethical behavior. Lead researcher Paul Piff of UC Berkeley said:

Our studies suggest that more positive attitudes toward greed and the pursuit of self-interest among upper class individuals, in part, drive their tendencies toward increased unethical behavior.

Relative to the lower class, the upper class are more likely to break the law while driving, more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies, more likely to take valued goods from others, more likely to lie in a negotiation, more likely to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize and more likely to endorse unethical behavior at work.

Piff explained:

The relative privilege and security enjoyed by upper class individuals give rise to independence from others and a prioritization of the self and one’s own welfare over the welfare of others—what we call greed. This is likely to cause someone to be more inclined to break the rules in his or her favor, or to perceive themselves as, in a sense, being “above the law”.

They therefore become more likely to committing unethical behavior.

Procedures

Piff and colleagues conducted seven survey, experimental and naturalistic studies to determine which social class is more likely to behave in unethical ways—to engage in behaviors that have important consequences for society such as cheating, deception or breaking the law.

In two naturalistic field studies that examined unethical behavior on the road, researchers were surprised by the differences between upper and lower class people, finding upper class drivers were significantly more likely to pursue their own self-interests and break the law while driving than were lower-class drivers. In these studies, the researchers defined social class by an observable cultural symbol of social class—namely, their car. Drivers of higher-end automobiles were four times more likely to cut off other vehicles before waiting their turn at a busy, four way intersection with stop signs on all sides. In addition, they found upper class drivers were significantly more likely to drive through a crosswalk without yielding to a waiting pedestrian.

In another laboratory study, the upper classes were more likely to cheat to improve their chances of winning a cash prize. Piff and colleagues first measured social class using the MacArthur scale of subjective socioeconomic status, where participants rank themselves on a 10-rung ladder relative to others in society in terms of their wealth, education and the prestige of their jobs. Participants then played a “game of chance” in which a computer presented them “randomly” with one side of a six-sided die on five separate rolls. Participants were told higher rolls would increase their chances of winning a cash prize, and were asked to report their total score at the end of the game. In fact, die rolls were predetermined to sum up to 12. The extent to which participants reported a total exceeding 12 was a direct measure of their cheating. The researchers concluded greed was a “robust determinant of unethical behavior”.

Plato and Aristotle deemed greed to be at the root of personal immorality, arguing that greed drives desires for material gain at the expense of ethical standards.

Due to their more favorable beliefs about greed, upper class people are more willing to deceive and cheat others for personal gain.

Study 4 sought to provide experimental evidence that the experience of higher social class has a causal effect on unethical decision-making and behavior. It was the only study in which researchers manipulated participants into temporarily feeling either higher or lower in social class rank to test whether these feelings actually caused people to behave more or less unethically.

At the end of the study, the experimenter presented participants with a jar of individually wrapped candies, ostensibly for children in a nearby laboratory, but informed them that they could take some if they wanted. This task served as a measure of unethical behavior because taking candy would reduce the amount that would otherwise be given to children. People in this study, who were made to feel higher in social class rank, took approximately two times as much candy from children than did people who were made to feel lower in social class rank. Piff concluded:

Across all seven studies, the general pattern we find is that as a person’s social class increases, his or her tendency to behave unethically also increases.

Join the Protests against the Greedy Bankers and their Rich Clients

Politicians, most recently European ones, tell us the bankers know best, and so we are wise to let them be in charge of defaulting economies like Greece and Italy. No democratic elections have been held to let the voters pick a new government but technocrats are bringing in total banking domination, as the world’s real economies go down the tubes. So much for the democracy that our banking paid politicians go to wars so frequently in the name of.

Now bankers lent money to weak economies in the first place, so, in the logic of capitalism, bankers made bad investments, and when those weak nations default on their debts, the bankers ought to carry the can. Instead they are given control of the defaulting countries—with the cover propaganda echoing through our ever so fair and democratic media that the countries are bankrupt—so that they must impose austerity, squeeze the people, sack government employees, thereby increasing government costs and decreasing tax income, with the outcome that the banks can lend more to the blighted nation to incur more returns for the banks! It is insane for everyone except bankers and their clients, the über rich class.

At one time, pre-Reagan and Thatcher, if banks took undue risk, they were penalized by the system, but, since Reagan and Thatcher set the greed ball rolling, the more risk bankers take the greater the rewards they get, being bailed out at the cost of empty treasuries when necessary rather than letting the duds and cowboys go bankrupt, and to jail.

Interest rates are zero or fractional per cent so the money is not fed back to customers as a reward for keeping their assets safe, as they used to be, and banks were intended to do. While the banks pay negligible percent, they are lending the money, everyone put in their care, to defaulting countries at exhorbitant interest rates, effectively directly extracting the difference in interest earned from the people working in that country into the banker’s coffers. With bank deposits yielding almost nothing, and inflation growing, the banks are effectively robbing the accounts of their customers. Such blatant larceny and theft has not been seen since the Nazis stole from Jews and opponents in Germany in the 30s.

Yet these gangsters, banksters, bandits are being put in charge of our destinies to preserve the fortunes of the 1 percent of very wealthy people. Join the protests against them. Your own rights are rapidly disappearing. Defend them!