55 On Respect for Customers - Banks vs. Credit Unions.

Blog 55  Customer Respect

A complaint has reached us that your friendly old blogster is prejudiced against corporations and especially against banking corporations. 

Yes, but don’t take that personally if you are employed by a bank. Remember that a corporation is not a human being - even though it has a lot of the legal privileges of a human being. A corp is still just a helpless creature which must hire nice human beings, like you, to tend to its needs. Of course,, unlike you, it is legally exempt from being put in jail. (Its owners. too, though human beings like you, in most countries cannot be jailed for anything their corp does either.)  

Hmmmnnn. Perhaps that could be changed, but only for the controlling shareholders, I would recommend.

But this blog wants to report two little human scenes which may, or may not, be relevant to this topic. 

Story 1.  Kitchen table. Wife calls her husband. “Can you explain to me what this means?”  

(I came in after they both had spent “hours” with pencil, paper,  and calculator trying to figure it out.  What they were puzzling about was this section of a quarterly report on a pension fund held by their friendly old bank.) 

                          This Period    This Year    Since Account Opening*

I Opening value     20.897.68    21,394.34               0.00  

I

I   You added                  0.00             0.00       35,568.13

I    

I    You withdrew        364.78      1,094,32       24,632.04

I

I Amount Invested =-364.78  =-1,094.32       23,632.04

I———————————————————————————                                  I Change in Value          100.33         331.21         9,697.14

I

I Closing Value       20,633.23   20,633.23       20,633.23

I ________________________________________

* This chart shows the changes in the market value of your account, and also reflects all cash and securities added, withdrawn and transferred into or out of your account for the specified time period.

I pass it on for more accomplished bookkeepers. To them it will be patently clear what, for example, the symbol “=-“ means. We think we finally got that one, but it didn’t clarify anything else. 

So, just skip this story and get on to:

Story 2 This is a personal experience.

I was doing some business in a credit union branch. There was a lady, well-dressed and smiling, who singled out members coming away from the tellers and asked for their response to the recently revised monthly statement format.

When she asked, me I said, “Well, it seems to me that the Credit Union is getting more like a bank.”

She seemed a little taken aback by that. Pressed, I explained that bank statements are designed for the employees to understand. I might have added “not for the customers”. I explained that the “pre-improvement” version of the Credit Union statement identified each of my several accounts with a number and an account name (Savings Checking, Guaranteed Interest, etc) The new one just had seven-digit numbers for each. Easy for the employees to learn..

Skip ahead about three months on this story, when a  further redesign of the statements came out. It included the name of each account!

Now, I ask you, would you ever get that response from your own friendly old bank IF you were ever actually ASKED to comment on a re-design?  The new statements, of course, would be accompanied with multiple assurances that the new design was “easier,” “clearer,” “more convenient for our customers." ("So there. We, of course, know better than you what’s easy, clear and convenient for you.")

New Series Blog 2-54 Man vs Corp

Blog 2-54  Man vs Corp 



"The plundering classes don't care where their money comes from, so long as it keeps coming - in larger armored cars.
Prof. Lucius D. Landseer.

The directors' first thought when corporate earnings sag is, "How can we reduce wage costs?"
B. J. Chopinhandra  (corporate director)

So "every CEO's dream: a fully automated corporation with no human employees (well, except himself)." (Herself?)
Cogs Blog, Series 2-54 

From an Optimist, or a Pessimist?

Optimistic or Pessimistic Idea?

We were taken by part of a recent TV interview. Haven't been able to identify the interviewee. But here's his idea.

The world is getting to be a better place, "because for the first time inn human history, more people are dying from the effects of obesity than are dying of starvation."



Still on furlough, but couldn't resist that one. It bears thinking on.

Blog 53 Essentials on Banks.

Blog 53  Essentials on Banks

Point 5   Finally. Glass-Steagall deserves a note. What's Glass-Steagall? A set of regulations governing the banking industry, passed in the Great Depression.  Key point: it prevented banks from engaging in investment business, insurance business and stock brokerage business. Thus were the "four pillars" of the financial system kept separate. Good idea still, eight decades later. But bank lobbying has destroyed those regulations So banks can invest their depositors' money and their own debt-created incomes wherever they see the greatest profit . If that comes from bankrupting their brokerage or insurance businesses, they have the freedom to do it Ask what happens if an insurance company goes under, or what happens if, say, a bank's paper assets fail and drag the retail customers' savings down with it. It happened in 1930 and in Cyprus in 2013. (Just Google "bail-in").

If you don't know history, you are doomed to repeat it.

                                                                                                 
"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born of sin. The Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits [money], and with a flick of a pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this world would be a happier and better world to live in. But if you wish to remain 

slaves of the Bankers and pay for the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits." Sir Josiah Stamp, President of the Bank of England  in the 1920's.

How do the banks create money [deposits] in 2017 ?

Blog 15, Part 1 explains it, but be prepared. It is so simple, it is hard to believe.

Addendum: Point 6

 I have just read, and must recommend, a piece on the Trump perception of international trade, and the actual numbers. It is on a blog, Reports from the Economic Front written by Professor Emeritus of Economics, Martin Hart-Landsberg. It is quoted in  full in Economic Reform (ER), Vol 29, No. 1  Jan-Feb, 2017. Here's a sample.

Re: Apple iPhone4

In a widely cited study researchers found that Apple created most of the product's value through its product-design, software and marketing operations, most of which happen in the United States. Apple ended up keeping 58% of the iPhone's sale price. The gross profits of Korean companies LG and Samsung, which provided the phone's display and memory chips, captured another 5%. Less than 2% went to pay for Chinese labor.

Oh, yes, and the whole $250 for the phone was counted into the figures for US imports from China. So, where's the beef, Mr President?

Just a small sample of this rich article.

Que sera, sera,  unless somebody steps up to unmask and divert it.

Hope to be back in about three months.

Yer friendly old CogsBlogster.

                       MONEY

                              

                                                                             POWER

The law of money: "Money goes where money is."

See you in the comics.

Blog 52 Five Points Looking Back, and Forward -- Make it Six

Blog 52 Five Points Looking Back, and Forward - Make it Six 

Point 1   Mr. Putin is not a communist.

If your knee jerked with denial of that, it's time you got with history.

During the "Cold War" (roughly 1947-1987), Western CAPITALISTS  felt threatened by MARXIST IDEAS. Best illustration, Cuba.  Note we say IDEAS. not a military threat. US bombing squadrons could have  pulverized* the whole island in a matter of minutes. What was troubling was that IDEAS, flitting from a successful communist state nearby, could flit into the minds of ordinary American democrats. What ideas? Oh, ideas the ruling folk considered obsolete, like democracy, liberty, equality,- you know - what the World War II soldiers fought for. Those ideas were actually the root ideas of early communism. So the propaganda** was turned up, and a generation of decent common folk were trained at their mothers' knees that "communism" was a fatal disease for all, rich and poor, and particularly the middle class. And therefore Cuba must by boycotted.  *pulverized means "reduced to dust. Look up the origin of propaganda in your own  dictionary.

But Russia, today, is not a communist country. That went out with Josef Stalin, who was praised/condemned as a dictator, and took communism down with him.

"Communism" - that's another interesting word: the "com" .is Latin for "with" or "together" The "uni" means "one". Flip forward to 1776, when the national slogan of the newly united states claimed to be e pluribus unum, "out of many, one"" (Actually, the many were just 13, but now, with a pluribus of 50, it is struggling to be united again.) Sad?

Point 2   A word to Canadians.check out carefully what your government is covering up with its bafflegab about a Canada Infrastructure Bank. It is NOT about repairing the infrastructure deficit across the country - putting Canadians to work rebuilding bridges, canals, city subways, water treatment and sewage plants,  and provincial power plants and electricity grids. And using  Canadian materials.  Nope, not that. That would be a good policy. The BIG scheme seems to be to persuade the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and the big Ontario Teachers Pension Board to invest their PUBLIC SAVINGS in grand, impressive new projects which may or may not be needed and may or may not be profitable, but will be built by the biggest construction companies in the world - WHICH ARE CERTAINLY  NOT GOING TO BE CANADIAN. Let's try that again: Canada Pension Plan and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan money will buy into new airports, toll highways, electricity plants, high speed railways, large scale office towers to house government agencies, or, maybe,  a large harbour and tourist hotel in Nunavut***These projects may or may not be profitable. But heck, it's only the people's money being spent.
***Nunavut is a frosty Canadian territory on the Arctic Ocean.

Incidentally, a NAFTA clause prohibits Canada from making any stipulations that the projects be built by Canadian firms or employ Canadian workers, or use Canadian materials. President Trump will not be permitted to tinker with that clause. So sad, Canada. 

But you can get out of NAFTA totally by merely giving six months notice! Really. 
(See Nelson, Chapter 3 or The Cogs Blog 51 for more detail.)

Point 3 About money. Remember that most of the world's money is not created by governments anymore (including your money - think credit card, checking, and other electronic transfer methods) You don't use cash much anymore, do you? No, you use credit, created and loaned to you at interest and transferred for your convenience with "modest fees". 
Interest rates and fees can be made to fall or rise (Actually, current interest rates have nowhere to fall. So, likely, its UP she goes!) And soon you won't be able to use cash to avoid interest payments. Cash has one foot in the grave if Mr. Modi (India) and the Scandinavian countries' efforts spread as planned.

This suppression of cash is a crock of deceptions. The argument, relentlessly repeated, is that it will enable governments to track and apprehend criminals and tax-evaders. But the big criminals and  big tax-evaders no longer use cash to hide their money. They already know how to use banks and digital money to get away with it. It's only peasants who will suffer. But don't worry, unless you are, or may become, a peasant.

Point 4 Cui bono? Who benefits?  That's always the first thing to ask when a change to the monetary or political system is being touted. Who benefits?

Well, will this 800 word blog never end? Sure. Will you sign back in tomorrow for Blog 52b, with Points 5 and 6 and a farewell salute --and a thought-provoking cartoon?. 
Yep! A cartoon.

Blog 51 Beyond Banksters. Further Final Notes and Quotes

Blog 51 Beyond Banksters. Further Final Notes and Quotes

 From Chapter 3  A 21st Century Trojan Horse**

"CPPIB {Canada Pension Plan Investment Board} director, Michael Goldberg, is also a director of ... Resources Works, which (according to its website) promotes "fact-based dialogue on responsible resource development in British Columbia."

Now that's what we like to hear:
   "fact-based"  (no lies, no propaganda, no "alternative facts.")
   "dialogue"     (that is, both sides heard from.)
   "responsible" (means "publicly answerable").

But, to quote Nelson again:

"Critics say Resource Works is a collection of PR flaks working especially for the oil and gas industry.
 "Resource Works is currently promoting the export of Site-C* dam-generated electricity for tar sands development in Alberta, enabling (as their website puts it) 'The expansion of the oil sands powered by clean energy to avoid  climate change.'" (My italics).

Wow! Sounds great!  The expansion of the oil sands powered by clean energy to avoid climate change.

     "Dam-generated!  That's hydro. Next to solar and wind,  that's the cleanest.
      "Clean energy."  Yep, that's what we're all after.
      "Avoid climate change." The ultimate grand global goal.

Three cheers for Michael Goldberg and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board!. 

But, Michael, isn't the tar/oil sands one of the most polluting carbon sources in the world?

No, no, no, Not if you use clean hydro power to produce it.

Oh? So it's only when the oil is refined from the tar and is actually burnt into the atmosphere that it pollutes! OK, I think I am getting it. Since this oil may be imported into the United States with President Trump's pipeline, and since it is going to be refined and burnt there or be refined there and be sold and burnt somewhere else in the world, it will avoid, (not just diminish), but totally avoid  climate change!  


Well, what a great global relief that will be!

And Canada totally exonerated! And on your good advice, Mr. Goldberg, they may also invest their people's major pension fund money into some great infrastructure projects. Thanks.


Or is this just the pissiest piece of PR bafflegab you've ever heard?

But we are getting used to that now, after the election, in what is being called "the post-truth age."

But here's hope: John Milton, a great English spokesman for freedom of speech, said:

"Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter. (Areopagitica 1664.)

And - a briefer version from my old grandmother's lexicon of proverbs: The truth will out.

Vive Truth!
It just that some days it takes a Joyce Nelson or, here, your faithful blogger to "out" it from corporate BS.
BS? You know what BS means.

Which reminds me: your faithful blogger was going to retire The Cogs Blog for a spell (Other calls), but the deconstruction of one more passage presented by Nelson is too good to leave you without.. So Blog 52 will be farewell for a spell till we all meet again. My, that sounds like a line from a musical I think I 'll write,

*Site C is a dam site for hydro-electric power development on the Yukon River in north-eastern British Columbia.

** You know the Trojan horse. It's huge, it sounds hollow inside. But you wheel it into your town like a great prize, anyway. Overnight the armed soldiers hidden inside sneak out and burn down your town. So sad.
Sometimes it doesn't look like a hollow horse, but like a gigantic infrastructure expenditure - built with borrowed money.

Blog 50 More on Beyond Banksters

Blog 50 Beyond Banksters; Resisting the New Feudalism, (cont. 2)

Two quotations from the book.

1   Chapter 3.   A 21st Century Trojan Horse, p33.
 (Toronto), 

"Globe & Mail columnist Konrad Yakabuski urged 'sober second thought' about infrastructure spending, citing examples in Spain, Greece and Japan (seduced by low borrowing rates from private lenders) where massive spending has created 'money pit' infrastructure that nobody uses. Yakabuski noted, 'If government spending on superlatively smooth highways, sleek subways and far-reaching fast trains was the ticket to success, Japan, Spain, and Greece would lead the global economy. Instead, infrastructure spending has been a major source of their debt-induced woes' "

Our Comment to Canadians.
So is Canada paying attention to what their Prime Minister, Mr. Trudeau, and his Finance Minister, Mr. Morneau, are planning to do with their touted infrastructure plans? Mr. Morneau's day job is a principal in Morneau Chapell, which bills itself as a "pension investment adviser" and offers services such as "managing employee absence and disability strategically." (Website quoted.)

So what does a company get for its fees paid to Morneau-Chapell for that "strategy"? Would it prevent or increase "debt-induced woes" if applied to Canada? Be alert, Canadians. You can read more in Beyond Banksters...


2  Chapter 16 "Lessons from Iceland" p.133.

"John Perkins' 2004 best-seller, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, had demonstrated in devasting detail how consultants like himself had coerced Third World governments during the late 1960's and early 1970's to take on huge loans from the World Bank, the IMF and other lending agencies in order to build vast infrastructure projects. The money went directly to US engineering and construction firms, like Bechtel and Halliburton, Stone & Webster, Brown & Root, and other contracting, consulting and engineering firms, who profited immensely from such projects. Once a country had been saddled with massive foreign debt, it could by manipulated and further coerced into working on behalf of the multinationals. It could also be financially ruined by that debt.

"That is what happened to Iceland on October 6, 2008, when its banks collapsed and the country went belly up. Perkins said that there was every indication that Iceland had been 'targeted by economic hit men.' He even publicly called Iceland 'an experiment in the process of how do we hit developed countries?' "

Our Comment

But Iceland hit back. If you read no other chapter in the Nelson book, you will find Chapter 16 a rewarding snapshot of a whole global scenario.

For a much more extensive and detailed review, read ER, the journal of C.O.M.E.R (Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform) for Nov-Dec 2016,  http//comer.org/archives/2016. Reviewer Ed Finn also found that the only way to review this book was by quoting it.

Blog 49 Nelson Raises the Flag - Fight Feudalism

 Blog 49  Nelson Raises the Flag - 
           Fight Feudalism

 POWER

MONEY

Elbow note (That's something between a foot-note and a head-note, with little relevance to either.)

Just heard a policy statement on NAFTA from the President. Not clear, of course, but as we predicted in Blog 48, what he is after is to strengthen the investor protection powers of that treaty.

But on to Blog 49

Breathes there a man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

  "This is my own, my native land!

Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned, 

As home his footsteps he hath turned.

  From wandering on a foreign strand!

If such there be, go, mark him well...

The wretch, concentred all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust from which he sprung,

Unwept, unhonoured and unsung!

                   

(Thank you, Sir Walter Scott, 1805)

How do you feel about that two centuries-old sentiment about your country/nation/state/city? If it touches you, you might be interested to read Joyce Nelson's latest book,, Beyond Banksters. Resisting the New Feudalism. It is a small, 146-page book of well-researched content and - professors, please note - very readable style.

I will, however, give you two or three blogs-worth of comment on Nelson's revelations on the global feudalism project.

First, the objective: is to reduce the whole global population to two classes: Rulers (very few and very rich), and Peasants (multitudes, as long as they last, and poor). The Lords will own everything - total privatiztion - and employ only as many peasants as they need. (Cogs Blog comment: I take this view from the term "feudalism" in Nelson's title. You may review Blog 44, if you need to.)  With technological changes, like robotics and the "universe of things", not many peasants will be needed.

Secondly,  How is it to be done? Well, the "Banksters" will do it.

First, by taking from the national states their power to create money. That stage is close to completion. Most of the money with which the world's population now transacts their business is not government money, but money created by private banks, and created as debt.

The second operation  is the crippling of the national states with perpetually unpayable debt. That is achieved by infiltrating national governments and buying, bullying or bamboozling them into turning their "democratic" election promises into neo-feudalist policies, such as selling off state assets cheap to happy investors and replacing public services with profitable private ones. I also predict a large upswing in interest rates, as in the late 1980's. (Review Blog 25 on Nation X)

Finally,the abolition of all public services which are not profit-making - such as free public schools, free healthcare, public pensions, railways and highways with too little traffic, public broadcasting. And social spending generally.  Then abolishing the regulations that protect public assets, such as water, forests, mineral deposits, postal delivery to remote settlements, post office banks, and so on, and, finally, prohibiting any reversion of these to public ownership. (That's what these so-called "trade" treaties are really about. Nelson lays it all out in panoramic simplicity.)

She supports this overview with examples of government policies, names and dates of individuals involved in the transition, and by connecting the dots on lots of illustrative events, from aborting public interest lawsuits to shutting down the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. Ever wonder how that well informed, well-targeted movement disappeared so suddenly and completely? She names the banksters who managed the crackdown.

Enough. More details coming up in Blog 50

Blog 48 What Will Trump NAFTA ?

The new President has vilified NAFTA and threatened to scrap the treaty. He can do that easily by giving just six months' notice to the other two signatories.

But he won't. For all he says, the United States, through its corporations, has profited handsomely from twenty years of NAFTA. For one thing, in the first five years of the treaty, Canada alone had hundreds of  Canadian companies bought up by American investors. They weren't naive. The expected return in repatriated profits in those days was 15%!

Some one must have explained that to the Presidential candidate during the election, because partway along he switched from "scrap" to "renegotiate". 

Let me tell you what part of the treaty he will be advised, pressed, or commanded to renegotiate. It will not be about trade in goods of any kind.

It will be the duration of the treaty. He will press to increase the locked-in term from six months to, say, twenty or thirty years, like former Canadian Prime Minister Harper's China treaty (31 years!) The aim will be to secure those investor protection clauses. for as long as possible 

These so-called "trade" treaties over time always benefit the larger country, not the smaller one. And benefit corporations rather than workers. No matter what "trade" rhetoric is bandied about, the main objective will be to seal in those Chapter 11 investor protection rights. Want to bet I'm wrong?

Here's a cartoon from the early days of NAFTA. (Can't credit it. Just found it loose in a file). Today is seems even more relevant than it did then.

Blog 47 Here's to an Enlightening Year

Hello, 2017! May you be an enlightening year.

We sure need enlightenment in a world of commercial advertising, political spin-doctoring, and economic bafflegab. So here are two quotations from two impressive thinkers, that are worth repeating.

No.1    "The ideas of economists and political philosophers when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back...  It is ideas, not vested interest, which are dangerous for good or evil." John Maynard Keynes

Cogs Blog comments/highlights/translations

  -  Experts (past and present) can be right or wrong.

  -  Current self-styled "practical" men (and women, Mrs. Thatcher), without knowing they are doing it, mindlessly spout beliefs derived from some past expert or thinker who might or might not have been right. Or I would add, may have been right then but are wrong, now.

  -  So we need to be alert to ideas,and to call out the propaganda with which the current rulers (Keynes's "vested interests") try to bamboozle us.

  -  Ideas, however may be either good or evil (Example of an evil one: what we need is one world government. Wrong, because the best and most inclusive and compassionate form of government is democracy, which, I would argue, works best in small human communities, and is next to impossible in large ones. (Think Russia, China, the United States. So, ask, who are the "we" who are pushing that evil idea? And why?

No. 2   "Competing in the world marketplace: the strategic view that countries are in competition with each other in the same way that companies are; the long stagnation of middle-class standards of living is attributed to a failure to compete effectively.

What's wrong with this? Like the claim that globalization changes everything, it seems to economists to combine a conceptual confusion with an apparent lack of knowledge about the data.

At a conceptual level, the most basic point about trade is that it is a process of exchange. Any country is both a seller and a buyer on world markets, and market forces will guarantee that over the long run, sales (exports) and purchases (imports) are roughly equal. And the purpose of international trade, the reason why it is useful, is to import, not to export.That is, what a country gains from trade is the ability to import what it wants. Exports are not an objective in and of themselves. The need to export is a burden that a country must bear because its import suppliers are crass enough to demand payment. So the whole idea that "competitiveness" is crucial, or even that it means anything, is usually rejected by economists."

Paul Krugman: Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense...

Cogs Blog comments/highlights/translations

 -  Exports are not the essential aim of trade. The only reason exports are useful to trade is to pay for imports. 

 -  Competitiveness, however is part of American DNA. It has been educated into the American consciousness and highlighted in American history. And, though perhaps a bad idea, it has been exported all over the world. Maybe it was a good idea in 1800, but in the world of 2017 we should clearly be thinking more about its opposite: - cooperation.

Well, that's a not-so-little introduction to a recent book I have just read: Beyond Banksters: Resisting the New Feudalism* Joyce Nelson, It's a dynamite book, to be mined at next posting.

*Feudalism. You might want to re-visit Blog 44.

Hello, 2017. Are you there?