Banksters' PR campaign is not working....

Hat tip to Washington's Blog, which last week highlighted former British prime minister Tony Blair whining:

We must not start thinking that society will be better off “if we hang 20 bankers at the end of the street” ….

Yeah, just 20 is not nearly enough. 20,000? Now, that would make a dent in the problem.


Blair is now  employed as a senior adviser to JP Morgan Chase and Swiss reinsurance giant Zurich RE. So it's quite interesting what he has to say. Viz:

Mr Blair cautions against letting that anger lead to regulations that could reverse Lady Thatcher’s work to reduce government involvement in free markets.

He says: “Don’t take 30 years of liberalisation, beginning under Mrs Thatcher, and say this is what caused the financial crisis.” 

Yeah, right. What the money gnomes say we shouldn't do, is exactly what we should do!

There are lots of great links in a few snippets from Washington's Blog:

Economics professor Randall Wray writes today:
Thieves … took over the whole economy and the political system lock, stock, and barrel. They didn’t just blow up finance, they oversaw the swiftest transfer of wealth to the very top the world has ever seen. They screwed workers out of their jobs, they screwed homeowners out of their houses, they screwed retirees out of their pensions, and they screwed municipalities out of their revenues and assets.

Financiers are forcing schools, parks, pools, fire departments, senior citizen centers, and libraries to shut down. They are forcing national governments to auction off their cultural heritage to the highest bidder. Everything must go in firesales at prices rigged by twenty-something traders at the biggest and most corrupt institutions the world has ever known.

Economics professor Michael Hudson agrees … saying that the banks are trying to make us all serfs.

Top economists say that fraud caused the Great Depression and the current financial crisis, and that the economy will never recover until fraud is prosecuted.

Leading experts say that fraud is not only widespread, it is actually the business model adopted by the giant banks. See this, this, this, this, this and this.

Indeed, the big banks – with the help of the government  – have basically become criminal enterprises.   And yet the Bush and Obama administrations have made it official policy not to prosecute fraud.

This seems a very good time to remind people of the recent report by James Henry of the Tax Justice Network, “The Price of Offshore Revisited” in which he estimates that these criminal banksters now control  somewhere between $21 and $32 trillion in “offshore” tax havens. Naked Capitalism has the link to some interviews of Henry, here.