Anyone switching to a credit union with what's going on?

[o.pwuaioc]

There's a huge difference between caring for someone personally and ensuring a fair system of justice so that everyone including you won't get screwed by others. Letting the banks off the hook is just like letting murderers off the hook - why care about whom a murderer kills? But if we allow everyone to murder, then you might be a victim one day. If we allow all banks to screw over everyone, then one day you might be the victim. Caring about them personally is nice but not necessary.

But by all means, continue to think that you'll breeze through this life with no problems. If ever someone who cares not for his fellow man is treated unfairly, I might just point to these posts and ask why we should care if they didn't bother.

[J T]

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
-Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

I understand that we all feel the strongest emotional connection with those we personally know and love. But you have to see that no one of us is born with any more or less of a right to his or her life, freedom, or pursuit of happiness than any other.

I care most about my people and you care most about yours. Fine. We are both free to live our lives as we see fit and find happiness however we choose, but your freedom to do that ends where my nose begins (and vice versa). When I say we're all on this rock together and we're all connected, I'm not talking about some simplistic hippy dippy belief that we all "have each others backs". I am aware that we each have our own desires, agendas, beliefs, and a million other things that we don't all share collectively. What we do have in common though is that I'm here, you're here, and neither of us (nor any of the other 6 billion people on the planet) chose to be here. So we shouldn't assume any of us have any real claim to any of this life more than any other man.

We will bump elbows. We will disagree. But there is a basic unwritten, and often unspoken, social contract that we are all better off together than separated. So we damn well better get along and we need to treat each other as basic equals to do that. This puts us in a strange position where we all have to play nice for the greater societal good that benefits each individual, and we also have to be vigilant all day and sleep with one eye open to make sure that no one of us breaks that social contract and exploits the societal system to take more than what he has coming to him. This is why we have laws, and regulations, and police.

The banks broke the social contract. I'm not sure of all of the technical laws that the big banks have or haven't broken, but they have clearly broken that basic social contract. They cheated all of us for their own gain. They stopped caring about the every man, and they only cared for themselves. I understand that a bank is a business and businesses need to profit or they perish. But Bank of America, and Citigroup, and Chase are all clearly overstepping their bounds of simply making a profit when they do something like give out a bunch of sub-prime mortgage loans, lump those loans together into CDOs with essentially fraudulent AAA ratings, trade the CDOs on the market while also betting against them with credit default swaps to insure themselves against the subprime loans defaulting, then spiral this out of control until the entire economy collapses, foreclose a ton of homes, then tell America that they need to be bailed out to the tune of $700 billion dollars or the world as we all know it will fall apart, then take that tax payer funded bailout money and squander it on executive bonuses and unnecessary luxuries while even the legit uses of the money hardly do jack to create new jobs and fix the economy, and then after all that they have the unmitigated gall to actually complain about the taxes they are being asked to pay for being greedy bastards, so they just pass that new cost on to customers in the form of ATM checking fees that didn't exist before this point.

They took WAY MORE than their fair share of the pie and now they need to understand that they bit off more than they can chew because the 99% is mad as hell and they ain't gonna take it any more.

That's why you should care about what the banks do. And that's why you should care about people that aren't part of your immediate circle of friends. Society needs to work as a whole and we have to care enough about each individual's basic rights in order to do that. The banks don't care about others, and now the greed of the few is crippling the many. They are robbing us blind and it's so complicated that few people even understand what's going on. The reason Occupy Wall Street is being criticized for not having a clear message is because this is fucking complicated. You can't just sum it up in a chant and march down the street. But the basics of this cut deep into the moral fabric that holds our society together.

[Inazuma]

*excellent post*

I read your whole post and completely agree. It's very nice to have someone like you on this forum.

[o.pwuaioc]

^ Seconded. Agreed wholeheartedly.

[Flake]

*snip about banks breaking a social contract*

Dude, I admire the vigor. You don't have all the facts. You are making the same mistake that the so-called 99% are rushing into: An over simplification of the problem.

tl;dr version: Bank failures and corporate greed is a symptom. The problem is over-consumerism, globalization, and automation of tasks leading to the decline of jobs.

First of all, let's dismiss this notion that banks are the root of all evil. Your account with whatever bank is FDIC insured. So the banks didn't take your money and gamble it away. Even if they had, they had no real reason not to since the FDIC stamp of protection essentially encourages banks to get involved in risky investments and lending.

Consumerism and Automation are to blame here. What the banks have done is simply react as best they could to changes in supply and demand. We have two generations who grew up with this expectation of skipping to the final boss and owning a McMansion of their own the moment they finished college. Oh, and these generations have also assumed that they were entitled to college and oh-don't-worry-about-the-cost, it'll be fine. Or the nicest clothes. Biggest weddings. Whatever. Two generations that have largely incurred massive debt before the game even got started.

When you have a shit ton of people who all want the same thing (college and outstanding housing) what do you think happens? Prices go up. And since people for some odd reason are incapable of thinking of their financial futures and willingly incur these debts what do you expect the market to do? It reacts. Houses get flipped. College gets more expensive. Credit is given out as freely as it is sought after. What were the banks to do? Say 'no' to making money?

At the same time, corporate America has found the easiest ways to make money are to sell product and reduce workers. Selling product is easy. Reducing workers takes some consideration. Manufacturing jobs were the first to be sent out of the country because government regulations had made it so that those jobs literally couldn't be offered to an American if the company in question wanted to make any money. In the 50's and 60's these jobs went to Japan. Right now they are in China. Pretty soon they'll be in India.

Automation is the other way to kill jobs. Why hire a call center in America when you can rent the services of one in Dubai and use a simple automated switchboard to re-route all your calls? Why hire assembly workers when a machine will suffice? Proprietary diagnostic tools make it so that fewer mechanics are needed to service modern cars. The list goes on.

You can blame banks if you want. You can blame corporate greed if you want. Good luck solving problems if you refuse to look at the whole picture. This is a systemic failure in the way of life that the world chose about 40 years ago.

[Hatta]

Hold on Popo. I answered your question. Perjury is the law that was broken. It's a felony. Thousands of bankers committed felony perjury, to make money. That's racketeering. Do you think they should go to jail for their crimes or not?

From your selfish perspective, are you better off when bankers can commit crimes with impunity?

[Hatta]

You can blame banks if you want. You can blame corporate greed if you want. Good luck solving problems if you refuse to look at the whole picture. This is a systemic failure in the way of life that the world chose about 40 years ago.

I think everyone would agree that banks are just one head of the hydra that is eating our country. That's why it's so hard for them to focus on one simple message.

I'm not sure I agree with your specific points though. For instance, automation increases efficiency. That's an unequivocal good. If we can't distribute the benefits of automation equitably, that's a problem with our economic system, not the automation.

Excessive consumerism is also a problem, but I don't see how that necessarily leads to a widening gap between rich and poor. It's easy to see how policies like trickle-down economics would do so however.

[Flake]

Automation reduces a workforce - hence fewer jobs. Like with anything, moderation is key. A little automation increases efficiency for the existing workers. A LOT of automation reduces the need for those workers. How is a person to participate in our economic system if they have no opportunity to find work?

Hence automation is not an unequivocal good.

And of course consumerism enriches the wealthy. The wealthy have the means of production - who else is going to make money? Again, moderation is the key. A little consumerism creates jobs and keeps money moving around.

[Erik_Twice]

Luddism was passé two centuries ago guys.

[MrPopo]

Hold on Popo. I answered your question. Perjury is the law that was broken. It's a felony. Thousands of bankers committed felony perjury, to make money. That's racketeering. Do you think they should go to jail for their crimes or not?

Yes, they should. Are you sure it's perjury, though? Perjury very specifically deals with judicial proceedings. Lying to your customers is not perjury.