You don’t need to be a financial wizard to know that corruption is alive and well inside the global finance sector. On a daily basis we are bombarded with mainstream news headlines confirming exactly that – the corruption rumors swirling about the European Union (EU) and the escalating Greek financial crisis being a case in point.
We explore these themes in our new release book INTERNATIONAL BANKSTER$: The Global Banking Elite Exposed and the Case for Restructuring Capitalism.
An excerpt from the book follows:
Banks and bankers, of course, are at the very apex of the finance sector. So let’s take a closer look at banking in the 21st Century.
Surprisingly, some of the most perceptive insights into today’s banking system and the problems that pervade it are to be found within alternative media. It turns out there’s a number of former bankers and money men (and women) to be found within the ranks of the citizen journos, or lay journalists, who ‘man’ these alternative media sites.
One of the best summaries of corruption of the banking system, in our opinion, is to be found on the appropriately named TheAlternativeMedia.com site. On that site, one Mitchell Cagle writes:
“Banks for decades have been the central source of where we save, manage and deposit our money. Many people do not know what actually goes on when your money is deposited. The bank uses your money to invest then gives you a fraction of what they make in interest. Sometimes that interest can actually end up being nothing due to the “fees” they actually charge that are excessive and fraudulent in most cases.
“Lately, banks have increased these fees some 54% resulting in profits of 34 billion dollars per year. It becomes increasing(ly) difficult to balance a checkbook anymore because of these “hidden fees”. If you have a savings account, you are also being ripped off with monthly fees just for having the privilege”.
Cagle lists the following as “examples of how we are being ‘feed’ to death by the banks:
“Banks engage in abusive practices that maximize overdraft fee revenue. The most common triggers of these fees are small debit card transactions that could easily be denied for NO fee.
“They charge exorbitant fees that bear NO relationship to the cost of covering an overdraft.
“They charge excessive numbers of overdraft fees over the course of a day, month or year.
“Automatically enrol customers in the most expensive overdraft protection possible.
“Monthly fees from nine dollars to thirty dollars for checking and savings accounts that used to be FREE.
“They push customers to use debit cards because it cost them LESS to process but GOUGE retailers and customers because of the monopoly setup of the payment system”.
But of course hidden fees are minor tools, or strategies, compared to other tricks of the trade employed by banksters.
A sea of never-ending debt
For a more ‘qualified’ insight into the money system, money markets and banking, you can’t go past Ellen Brown’s bestseller Web of Debt. An attorney, Ms Brown is founder of America’s Public Banking Institute. She’s also a harsh critic of what she describes as the money system.
Web of Debt’s blurb reads:
“Our money system is not what we have been led to believe. The creation of money has been “privatized,” or taken over by private money lenders. Thomas Jefferson called them ‘bold and bankrupt adventurers just pretending to have money.’ Except for coins, all of our money is now created as loans advanced by private banking institutions — including the privately-owned Federal Reserve. Banks create the principal but not the interest to service their loans. To find the interest, new loans must continually be taken out, expanding the money supply, inflating prices — and robbing you of the value of your money.
“Not only is virtually the entire money supply created privately by banks, but a mere handful of very big banks is responsible for a massive investment scheme known as ‘derivatives,’ which now tallies in at hundreds of trillions of dollars. The banking system has been contrived so that these big banks always get bailed out by the taxpayers from their risky ventures, but the scheme has reached its mathematical limits. There isn’t enough money in the entire global economy to bail out the banks from a massive derivatives default today”.
Even if Ms Brown is only partially right in that assessment, it still means there is a massive monetary predicament looming.
“The bankers and financiers are badly overplaying their hands, again, and people are starting to catch on to the scam. Real wealth is tangible things produced with tangible effort. Loans made out of thin-air ‘money’ require no effort and are entirely ephemeral. But if those loans are used to acquire real ownership of real assets, then something has been exchanged for nothing and one party is getting screwed.” –Chris Martenson
You have been reading an excerpt from INTERNATIONAL BANKSTER$. (To be continued).
This book is available exclusively via Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/INTERNATIONAL-BANKSTER-Restructuring-Capitalism-Underground-ebook/dp/B015QN5RTY/
*************************************
Morcan Books & Films 