119 Banks Have Failed This Year
Banks are failing still, unless they are really big. The 119th US bank has failed this year. Horizon Bank is the 23rd bank to go belly up in Florida alone.

Most of the "too big to fail" banks would have fallen during the Great Recession if not for federal bailouts. Yet, the banksters, their bought politicians, and their bought pundits keep saying that government regulation would be bad and that middle class Americans aren't smart enough to have any say in how the banks in this country are run. Obviously, the banksters have no idea how to run stable banks and have little interest in even trying to do so.

Making fraudulent, predatory loans and then bundling them up in fraudulent instruments of financial speculation were common practices throughout the banking sector. Investments by legitimate businesses are still having trouble getting credit while the same banksters that blew their banks up and got huge bailouts are making unearned bonuses and excessive paychecks their main priorities.

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Citigroup Creates Jobs in China, Not US
From the Ed Shultz Show:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The American people bailed out Citigroup, yet they are not creating jobs here. They are just creating jobs in China. America is getting redlined by these banksters, while China gets investment financed by the US Treasury.

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More Bankster Fees From Bank of America and Wachovia
From McClatchy 9/3/10:

No more waived fees for using another bank's ATM. Higher monthly account charges. Fees for paper statements with images of canceled checks.

These are some of the changes coming to customers of Bank of America and Wachovia.

Bank of America will start telling customers next week that it's adjusting fees as part of an effort to standardize its practices nationwide. Wachovia has been making its own changes, the latest wrinkle from the Wells Fargo merger.

What the banksters don't tell you is that checking accounts are loans that we make to the banks at little or no interest in return for getting services, services which they often are now charging us for. This is a ripoff.

It gets worse. People using ATMs actually save the banksters money over human tellers. That's right. The banksters are charging people to do something that saves them money. Even if ATM usage didn't save the banks money and were merely a new service, the fees would be astronomically marked up. Sen. Tom Harkin has estimated that each ATM transaction costs banks $0.36 which is in line with other estimates I've read in recent years. Yet, fees these days generally range from $2-3.

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Meg Whitman Was On Goldman Sachs' Board of Directors
EBay isn't the only incredibly evil corporation that Meg Whitman has been involved with. She also was on the Board of Directors of the nefarious Goldman Sachs.



Level the Playing Field did a great video about this subject.

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Rahm Emanuel Was a Bankster
The Chicago Tribune ran a slideshow of "Ten Things You Didn't Know About Rahm Emanuel." One of them was particularly disturbing.

In three years after he left the Clinton administration, Emanuel made $16 million in investment banking, including at least $320,000 after he was appointed by President Bill Clinton to a 14-month stint on the board of mortgage giant Freddie Mac. The Tribune sought minutes of Freddie Mac's meetings from Emanuel's tenure, but the Obama administration denied the request, saying it was "commercial information" exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

This helps to explain why the Obama Administration has shown so much favoritism towards the banksters.

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Teabagger "Movement" Benefits Banksters, Not the Followers
In a brilliant Alternet piece, "5 Ways the Tea Party Agenda Screws Tea Party Supporters," Adel M Stan discusses how the political agenda being fed the teabaggers goes against their interests. One of them involves the banksters.

5. Opposition to Wall Street Reform and Financial Reform. Perhaps the most confounding aspect of the Tea Party agenda is its opposition to reform of Wall Street and banks. Even as Tea Party leaders and activists rail against the bailouts of U.S. automakers, and the minimal assistance offered homeowners with underwater mortgages, Tea Party leaders and those who follow them voice hostility toward any and all measures that would demand increased accountability from purveyors of financial instruments or the credit-card industry, like those contained in the financial reform bill passed by Congress in July (a bill that liberal critics regard as rather toothless).

In her speech to Tea Party supporters at the RightOnline conference, Michele Bachmann described the recently passed financial reform bill as nothing more than a punitive measure against Wall Street, when the real culprit in the nation's financial woes was the Housing and Community Redevelopment Act passed in 1977. Another particular object of scorn by the Tea Party set is the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection created by the bill.

Although the teabagger scam was originally developed by lobbyists and PR people for the HMOs and health insurers, it has gotten plenty of money from other wealthy interests. You can bet that the banksters are funding some of the teabagging, using money they got from the very same bailouts that the teabaggers hate.

Although the "financial reform" legislation was only a tiny step in the correct direction of real financial reform, fanatical opposition to it by the drooling knucklewalkers is a highly effective tool to be exploited by the banksters to create more pressure to avoid real reform.