RT: French Revolution against Banks?

French bankers have a nervous morning ahead. They are waiting to see whether a campaign calling on depositors to withdraw all their money will really catch on.

The campaign  has been organized by a former French football star against what he calls the “corrupt and criminal” financial system.

The crime: a massive financial crisis with entire countries going belly-up and governments being forced to impose austerity measures. The culprit: public sentiment points to banks and the people that run them.

”These are predatory monstrosities made up of weapons of mass financial destruction whose sole purpose is to kill themselves and others,” says Max Keiser – economist and the host of RT's Keiser Report. “They’re suicide bankers, they’re predatory bankers, they’re financial terrorists and therefore they need to be eliminated.”

For those who agree, the question is how?

”Nowadays, what does it mean to be on the street? What does it mean to demonstrate?” Eric Cantona, a former football player questions. “This isn’t the way anymore. The three million people with their placards on the street, they should go to the bank, withdraw their money from the banks and these ones collapse. A real revolution.”

No stranger to heeding a call to arms, especially coming from a football superstar, the French wasted no time. Online groups were formed urging people to participate in a coordinated worldwide bank run on December 7, the number of Cantona’s lucky shirt.

Alex Janet is one of tens of thousands who pledged to join the campaign: “We’re, sort of, fed up with them controlling all the wealth, and we could say 'stop using us.' We need to show that we can have a certain impact. That we’re not just cattle they can mess around with and can do anything with.”

”Trends are born, they grow, they mature, they reach old age and they die. This one is just being born,” the founder of The Trends Research Institute, Gerald Cenete, explains.

We believe it’s going to have a lot of strength considering the outrage people worldwide have against the bankers.


However, could mass withdrawals really cause the collapse of the entire banking system, as some economists argue – a system the public needs?


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Huffington Post: EU CAPS Bank Bonuses

AOIFE WHITE | 07/ 7/10 10:50 AM | AP

BRUSSELS — European Union lawmakers have voted overwhelmingly to cap bankers' short-term cash bonuses from next year. European leaders hope other parts of the world will follow.

Members of the European Parliament voted 625-28 in favor of the new rules which will become final when they are approved by EU finance ministers next week.

From 2011, bankers will only be able to get part of their yearly bonuses in cash upfront. The other 70 percent will be held back and paid out if the company performs well.

The caps come after a European outcry over payments to executives of banks that received huge state bailouts during the financial crisis. Some say bonuses encouraged bankers to take massive risks at the expense of the long-term future of their businesses.

Michel Barnier, the EU's financial services commissioner, said the new rules sent a strong message that "there will be no return to business as usual."

"Banks will need to change radically their practices and the mentality that have led in many cases to excessive risk-taking and contributed to the financial crisis," he said.

Starting next January, cash bonuses will be capped at 30 percent of the total bonus and 20 percent for "particularly large" bonuses. The measure leaves it to individual governments to determine what "particularly large" means in their economies.

While some European countries including Britain have already imposed limits on banker bonuses, the new rules set minimum caps for all 27 members of the EU. French and German governments have also effectively set caps by pressing banks to agree to limit executive pay.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the U.S. Federal Reserve, in an in-depth analysis released last month, found that many U.S. banks' compensation practices were deficient in curbing excessive risk-taking.

The Fed – and other major banking regulators – under a newly adopted plan can veto pay policies that cause too much risk-taking by executives, traders, loan officers and other key employees.

"We found that many banks had not modified their practices from what they were before the crisis," Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told a House panel last month. He said:

The structure of the compensation practices needs to change so that there's not an incentive to take excessive risks, you know, packages where the trader gets all the upside and none of the downside. That's the kind of thing we're trying to get rid of.

The measure also limits "exceptional pension payments" to avoid the kind of bloated severance packages for disgraced departing executives that have caused public uproar around Europe.

Douglas Elliott, a fellow at the Washington DC-based Brookings Institution and former JP Morgan investment banker, says he doesn't think the new rules will force bankers to quit Europe.

Associated Press writers Jeannine Aversa in Washington and Rafael Mesquita in Paris contributed to this story.

see the rest of the story at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/07/eu-caps-bank-bonuses-comp_n_637600.html

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Make the big banks pay back the TARP money

Rightardia is pleased that the federal government will tax the big banks that it gave TARP money to. The US went through a similar debacle with Savings and Laon (S&L) industry in the 1980s and the 1990s. The US government should be able to loan money in emergencies, but should also excpect to be paid back.

We also noted that while a record number of foreclosures that have been occurring, bankers are trying to change the law in Florida to that foreclosures do not have to go though a court review. This would allow the banks to boot someone from their home in ninety days usi8ng a non-judicial procedure.

Here is a list of innocents the bankers aim to help: neighbors annoyed by abandoned houses next door; condo associations pursuing dues from properties in legal limbo; cities grappling with urban blight; and judges overloaded with thousands of foreclosure cases. Who are these Republicans kidding?

"We don't want the property. We're not into the property management business," said a banking represetnative. "We want to get a property out of the courts and sold to a productive Florida family.''

The conservative definiton of a productive Florida family is one that is affluent.

We wonder if Republican Governor Charlie Crist will have the balls to veto this regressive banking legislation.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis

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Huff TV: Arianna Explains Move Your Money To CNN's Rick Sanchez

Arianna Huffington spoke to Rick Sanchez on CNN Thursday afternoon to urge Americans to withdraw their money from big bailed out banks and move it into local community banks.

Visit moveyourmoney.info to learn more about the project, and find a well-ranked community bank near you. Huffington explains all of the banks listed on moveyourmoney.info have A and B ratings and the same FDIC protections the big banks have.

Theses large banks have little compassion for the average American. While the US government was bailing out the five big banks too big to fail, the bank CEOS were meeting with the former head of Home Depot, Bernie Marcus, to develop strategy to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act which gives workers some rights.

Rightardia is very partial to credit unions. They were not beset with a financial scandal like the Saving and Loans (S&L) have had.

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-tv/arianna-explains-move-you_b_408768.html

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