So much news from the bankster front, and of course, so much hinges on it! Think of the old world order financial system as the circulatory system of civilization. Capillary action is all but gone. The main veins and arteries are fatty, sclerotic, sluggish, clotted, stuck! And hardly any blood flows to the heart.
Here’s a good one, a (most likely, grudging) nudge in the direction of justice for all. But “lucky”? Call them lucky? I’d say they’re entitled. I notice, when I googled this idea, that the news has been around since early March.
• rumormillnews: Bank of America to Slash Mortgage Principals for 200,000 Lucky Customers
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Here’s the same story, with more context: the “occupied” shareholder meeting. (And see yesterday’s pointings, and those of the day before). This from endlessly courageous, intrepid, and consistently even-tempered Amy Goodman. How I admire her!
• commondreams.org: Holding Bank of America to Account
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Matt Taibbi slashes into the prevailing economic doctrine of how to get out of the mess that the 1% made for the rest of us and makes us pay for, not just with our tax dollars, but with slashing basic human services to those who now desperately need them. (And love his use of language to butt-kick those who most deserve it! Whoops! “Butt-kick,” a word I have never, ever used; suddenly, there it is, coming out of my fingertips! Thanks, Matt Taibbi, for sparking this growing edge in me.)
“But if pain’s coming, it can’t just be regular people who pay. Bankers have to find new ways of making money that don’t just involve betting the hot table and taking out instant billion-dollar profits. They have to go back to building real businesses and being content with gradual returns over time. If there’s going to be austerity, it has to be for everybody.”
• rollingstone.com: Austerity Can’t Be Just for Regular People
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Yesterday’s Pointings pointed to a whistleblower for a South African bank. Here’s a new one of the HSBC bank. A very interesting account of how the shell game is played.
“Money comes in daily, thousands of dollars, always in even amounts,” he noted. “You look at a statement and it says ‘transfer,’ but where did it go? There’s no account number or tracking number that documents where the transaction went.”
Cruz contended that HSBC was running what amounted to a “shell game.”
“So many of these businesses are conducted out of a person’s home,” he commented. “I would walk into these homes. There’s a couch, there’s a chair, a desk – but the house is empty, a couple of Mercedes sitting out front, but where is the business? It’s only online transactions of money in and money out.”
What he says reminds me of last summer’s report of a tiny Wyoming house in Cheyenne that was used to be the front for thousands of shell-game corporations.
• the2012scenario.com: Whistleblower John Cruz: HSBC is a “Criminal Enterprise”. Laundered Billions. Amex and Paypal Involved.
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Oooo. And what does this mean. Who benefits? Follow the money. What’s the political angle? What are the Chinese holding over the heads of . . . of who? Why hasn’t this been done before? Why now? No doubt there’s a mind-boggling back story here somewhere.
• americankabuki: Three Chinese Banks Expanding in the U.S.
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And finally, this. If you’ve never read her book The Fountainhead, you might do that. I did, during my first marriage, to a student architect at Harvard in the ’60s, just before all hell broke loose on campuses. He and his fellow students loved her philosophy of rampant individualism, just as they were training to design buildings that were monuments to themselves. That was a long time ago. Now “sustainable architecture” programs are becoming commonplace.
• rumormillnews (from the guardian): A Manifesto for Psychopaths —Ayn Rand’s Ideas Have Become the Marxism of the New Right
