Crooks, “legal” crooks at banks, and guillotines. Maybe it’s time to set ‘em up at the mall for bankers.

Enough has been said about the crooks at AIG who took taxpayer money that was meant to get the economy restarted and instead distributed it as bonuses for themselves. I’m not going there again today, except to say it’s time to set up guillotines at the mall.

Instead, I want to call your attention today to a danger I haven’t seen getting much attention elsewhere. It turns out that when you purchase a bank CD, your interest money isn’t safe.

Warning: A strange bank can
seize your high-interest CD
and pay you next to no interest

If bank where you bought the CD fails, and another bank purchases its assets, the new bank can, under certain circumstances, grab your money until the CD expires, but pay you virtually no interest.

It happened to me while I was on vacation in Southeast Asia. While I was out of the country, a letter dated February 25th arrived from Fidelity, my broker, saying I once owned a CD purchased through them at the “former” National Bank of Commerce. Unfortunately, the National Bank of Commerce had gone belly-up.

No problem because my deposit was FDIC insured, right?

Wrong!

FDIC turns out to be
the bank’s friend, not yours

Republic Bank of Chicago acquired the deposits of the National Bank of Commerce, including my CD. I could yank my money out, but only if I did so by March 5th. Well, on March 5th I was sightseeing in Viet Nam, a hell of a long distance from my mail box.

Under FDIC “guidelines” that was tough luck — tough luck for me and tough luck for other depositors like me.

E-mail? That’s for spam,
not urgent business.

Had Fidelity sent me an e-mail about this on February 25th, while I was still here, I might have been able to do something. Nah! Fidelity uses e-mail to spam me up the whazoo with financial planning offers and other promotions. But when it comes to something urgent, they send it down to the mailroom for sl-o-w processing and snail mail shipment.

But I digress. Republic Bank of Chicago cut my rate from roughly 3.2 percent to a quarter of a percent — in other words, they’re paying virtually nothing to use my money. And now, because I was out of the country when they announced a ten day window for bailing out of the CD, I can’t bail out any more. I have to leave my money there at for a quarter of a percent interest rate that I never agreed to until the CD expires more than a year from now.

In other words, the bank has a right to enforce your CD obligations or enforce "substantial pentalties", while ignoring the bank obligations that led you to buy a CD in the first place. Heads they win, tails you lose.

And all this is legal according to FDIC “guidelines.”

Morality? Ethics? Don’t make me laugh.

Remember what they did to
the greedy person who said,
“Let them eat cake!”

There’s a greedy bank Chairman at Republic Bank of Chicago named Aristotle Halikias who decided to rip off the innocent CD depositors at another bank by paying them a quarter of a percent more than zilch. Halikias is another example of the banks declaring, “Let them eat cake.”

When they set up guillotines in public places for the likes of the AIG executive staff and Board of Directors, and for greedy deposit grabbers like Halikias, please let me know. I want to be in the front row of the crowd to watch the heads bounce. I’ve been to Chicago and I think the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive would be a great location for the scaffold. Or perhaps you can suggest a better one?

Incidentally, I photographed guillotine in the picture at the “Hanoi Hilton” in Hanoi where John McCain once was imprisoned. I had hoped to use my first post back from vacation to tell you more about that. But no, with bankers on the rampage once more, the Hanoi Hilton will have to wait.

That’s because instead of guillotines in a former French prison in Hanoi, we need them here to discourage bankers from grabbing their depositors’ money and taxpayer funds to enrich themselves.

Where is Mme. Defarge now that we need her?

P.S. Okay, Mme. Defarge, you can put down your knitting needles. Or at least for now you can. The bank, prodded by the "best efforts" of my stock brokers, relented and sent back my deposit, although not the rather more substantial interest I thought I had been earning between mid-January and the time the bank, via the broker, got around to notifying me that they had, umm, revised the terms of the CD. 

The birdbrains who are pecking America to death. Part 2.

Back in May, before the election heated up, I posted a piece called “Pecked to death by birdbrains.” I was railing against the U.S. Post Office. That was nothing compared to what’s going on today.

Now I have to rail against my fellow citizens — a nation overwhelmingly of birdbrains about to pigeon step in single file off a cliff.

As I write this, the stock market is failing. Our savings institutions are trembling on the brink of collapse. The newspapers are beginning to write stories about potential runs on banks, something that hasn’t happened since the Great Depression of 1929, which threw our nation into ten years of abject poverty.

Right now, Americans are still dying in Iraq, while the Taliban is regaining territory in Afghanistan, and Iran may be futzing around with a nuclear bomb.

And how are Americans reacting to this? According to the polls, we’re drifting from favoring Obama to favoring the know-nothing McCain-Palin ticket. Which essentially means four more years of mindless Bush policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

We’re talking, folks, about two people who know zilch about what affects stock prices, less than zilch about banking, and squat about how to deal with the mess we’re in today.

Denial of on-the-record facts

John McCain recently denied he said he didn’t know much about economics. If he truthfully believes his denial, he’s also suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. Here, Senator McCain, is the truth:

Actually, the quote came from a 2005 piece by Stephen Moore, in which McCain said: “I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics that I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.”

McCain also said this, per a December 2007 Boston Globe article: "The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should. I’ve got Greenspan’s book.”

He’s “got” a book? One book, by one at least partially discredited economist? And on that, assuming he ever reads it, he’s going to base policies that could help the United States survive hard times or drown in a sea of red ink? He's going to get an economic education when he gets around to it, and meanwhile sink the rest of us if he gets an F? Or even a C minus?

What McCain, Palin and Bush are for is “less government.” Except, it was “less government” — the elimination, for example, of the Glass-Steagall Act — that sent the banks and brokerage firms of America reeling toward a round of disaster that hasn’t been equaled since, but may be equaled again shortly.

The U.S. Government lacks the money to pay off all the FDIC-insured bank accounts that will become worthless along with the banks that hold those deposits. Yet John McCain, who may or may not have gotten around to reading one not-entirely-trustworthy book on economics, wants to cut taxes as a cure all for everything from low housing prices, to collapsing banks, to failing brokerage houses, to troubled automobile companies to — well, to warts, for all I know.

But wait, there’s more!
Like starting a nuclear war!

Georgia invades South Ossetia. So Russia invades Georgia. And suddenly, we’ve got Bush-McCain-Pallin responding to this near-nuclear situation by pouring gasoline on the fire and encouraging NATO membership for Georgia. This would require us to invade Russia. And you know what that means in terms of nuclear war.

Kaboom!

McCain-Pallin agree with Bush that we should surround the Russians with NATO nuclear missiles, right in the countries that border them. When the Russians tried the same trick in Cuba back in 1962, we wouldn’t stand for it. The event was called the “Cuban Missile Crisis” remember? We nearly risked World War III to get the Russians out of a neighboring country. Why should the Russians stand for it when we wouldn’t?

We’re heading for a meltdown — financial, international, diplomatic, nuclear. When it comes, most of the people reading this won’t be alive long enough to get past the next sentence.

But America “feels good” about the McCain-Palin continuation of the Bush program of national suicidal idiocy.

P.T. Barnum and the
North American Birdbrain

P.T. Barnum, the father not only of the three-ring circus but also of the theatrical con job once said that, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

But today’s North American Birdbrain exceeds anything even P.T. Con-em could have imagined.

The one thing I don’t have to worry about is this: When your bank collapses and your city explodes, you won’t come running to me. The reason?

Both of us will be nothing but a small, radioactive cinder.