financial

I’m not blaming anyone for not knowing this. After all it does require you having lived in a different industrialized country than our own to be able to experience this. I’m not writing this out of bias, nor because I believe in an international bankers conspiracy. I just want people to see what it could be like if Banks actually operated on the basis of serving their customers rather than bending us over a saw horse and ramming a broom stick up our behind with every opportunity that presents itself.

Let me back up for one moment though and let’s establish some common ground here. What does everyone think a Bank is for? Out of my point of view it serves two purposes. The first purpose is that the money is safe and that of course is great because I don’t have to fear people breaking into my house to get at the sock filled with money underneath my mattress. The other thing they offer in return for having your money is interest. The interest is negligible on regular checking accounts, but it exists.

Let me start out by talking about checks and check cashing and how it’s setup to screw us as much as possible, as often as possible.

The fact that employers even still use “pay checks” I find completely ridiculous. the reason being that the amount of time customers have to invest to get the actual cash is just ridiculous. Not enough that you have to work 40+ hours, deal with a commute - you’re also supposed to go to the Bank and cash this check? What drives me personally up the wall even more is this: Let’s say I go to my bank and I hand them a check. The check is made out to me and it’s coming from a business. If I don’t specifically tell the teller that I want the check cached first and then deposited, she will do the contrary and just deposit the check into my account. The result is, I have no cash in my account from my paycheck. As a matter of fact, if I do this sometime in the afternoon, I might not get the cash until Monday or Tuesday. Now what do you think? Is my money just laying in the backroom waiting to put into my account, or do you instead think that the bank might actually be using my money as I’m waiting for it to “clear” - we all know that the reality is that they were using the money in a great pool to gain interest. You may say what’s the big deal? The big deal here is that every time frame that they have my cash, they can make money with it and considering I get heavily fined for every cent that goes over my limit, I really don’t see why i should give them my money to work with.

Now, having read this cluster fuck of a situation let me tell you how it works in the “old” europe. The money gets paid directly into your account. There is no delay, there’s no check cashing, no waiting for funds to clear, nothing.

Let’s say you want to pay a business for an invoice. In the US people write checks. These checks then have to get cashed, and you have to wait on the clearing of the funds. That in return means the person writing the check has to make sure they have the funds in the account until the check is cleared.

Again, let me tell you how it works in other countries so you can see how much you’re getting screwed.

In other countries you go to the bank, fill out a transfer form to the recipient and within a few hours the money has been transferred and the transaction is complete. That’s it! No waiting on checks to clear, no waiting for several days to make sure the payment was successful. No waiting on anything really as the banking system there updates quite quickly.

Today my brother went to the Bank to transfer money from his Washington Mutual Account here in Florida to an account of a family member in NY state. As I described above, this process should really only take a few moments. Instead, this is what he had to go through.

He went to the bank, and the teller wasn’t even qualified to do a bank transfer which I find interesting in itself. Then he had to sit down and wait to be seen by one of the slightly more qualified bank representatives. Following that, he had to fill out various paper work, they had to call the bank in NY to get the routing number and of course it cost him money. The whole ordeal took about half an hour.

I’m sure I’m not that only one that’s realizing this - except for the politicians of course since they don’t have to worry about their paycheck. As a matter of fact they’re not tied to any performance quotas, nor do they do piece work though they do like to pass this type of legislation to keep others from doing what they’re doing, which is slacking.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=ggBk3xI5km4[/youtube]

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=GGiU658aSIw&feature=related[/youtube]

When I moved to this country in 1999 gas prices were at about $1.30 - for me, who was used to $6-8.00 /gal I thought that was a joke and I said at the time, there’s a lot of leeway here for the government in terms of pricing and taxes. In europe, in particular Germany, most of the money people spend at the pump is for taxes - the large part of the cost beyond the raw cost of oil goes towards taxes for infrastructures, etc. In this country however it seems slightly different. Since we’re a country that doesn’t believe too greatly in taxes, we instead have a system that gives oil companies the leeway for profit - instead of leaving some margin for the government. So instead of having a dollar per gallon go to environmental protection, the reconstruction of roads, repairs of bridges, it all goes to the oil companies. The truly amazing part is that the executives of the major Oil companies actually went to congress to tell them why they can’t stop subsidizing the oil industry due to the high exploration costs. Tell ya what - it costs me money to get to my job too and I’m not seeing any government grants flying my way paying for it - those are costs I have to absorb and the same should of course be the case for the oil companies, especially in the light of historical profits. A British newspaper goes as far as calling the profits obscene and I have to admit that I agree completely.

Now things are so bad that truckers are going on strike. When I came to this country I learned an expression which is “If you bought it, a trucker brought it”. If that’s true, I’d say it’s safe to say we’re in some deep shit. Not counting the fact that we’re at war that nobody wants to talk about, not mentioning the fact that our health care system is worse than that of Cuba, now we will soon all notice the change in this country. To me something very drastic has to happen, because the way things are going it seems the government is just going to ruin this country and then leave to Dubai to join Dick Cheney at his new corporate headquarter.

What’s very interesting is that those people who have the audacity of questioning other people’s patriotism, see no problem in taking the tax revenue of a company and moving it away. Behind closed doors the business men all know - patriotism is just a word that they can sell to the American people. While the common man/woman busts his/her ass to get by, the big companies are enjoying all the tax loop holes and incentives they can, maximizing their profit and stripping themselves from more and more pesty costs such as health care and other benefits.

Once again I have to say, I came to this country in 1999 and since then I can safely say that things have downhill at an extremely sharp angle. To all the people that aren’t paying attention to what the crooks in Washington are doing to us, I hope you will realize when you can’t afford to drive your SUV anymore, when you can’t take your kids to the make belief world called Disney World anymore and when all the luxuries you’ve come so accustomed to are gone, maybe then you will get up and raise your fist and say you’ve had enough.

Until then, I’ll be here.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=gDXd26hV59M[/youtube]

Before I lay into this topic let me say I barely know Williams. I didn’t grow up in this country and for the years I’ve been here I don’t waste my time with talk shows like his and others so I’m not 100% in the know when it comes to his repertoire. What I did find on the net about him was that he handed it to Fox news as shown in this video and for that alone he should be my hero, but he really isn’t.

If you look throughout my blog you’ll find various articles that I’ve written where I decry the current situation of the banking system in this country. This old google video depicts exactly the disaster we’re steering towards and although it’s a tad long (over 3 hours) this video is a must watch.

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936[/googlevideo]

We’re at war and if the wimps that call themselves democrats want to keep us from getting into a war with Iran they better grow some balls quickly. I’m reading more and more articles on the internet from various credible sources such as Scott Ritter that the situation is dire. Just yesterday I read an article on alternet.org about Daniel Ellsberg who was instrumental in the release of the pentagon papers. There was actually a movie about this in 2003 with the same title. The movie shows how Ellsberg was at first a staunch supporter of the war but when it became clear to him that many of the facts about the Vietnam War were being kept from the American public, he leaked the pentagon papers to the press and it was made public what a mess this war really was.

CEO’s get severance packages that are larger than most people earn in their life time and our President who has failed on just about anything you can imagine gets standing ovations. Honestly, I don’t know what time zone George W. Bush is living in but it sure felt like he was pretending to be somewhere 3-4 years ago. As if he still had time to see his ‘vision’ come true, he talked about the dangers we face as a country and how congress had to pass the laws he suggested.

It’s so sickening to watch the amount of misinformation that people base their opinions on. The perfect example of this is the current discussion that’s been started or let’s say continued by Michael Moore’s recent movie ‘Sicko‘. To begin with I can’t even grasp why people have a problem with universal healthcare. Is it really so hard to live with the assurance that if you’re sick you can go to the doctor without having to worry about whether you have an insurance card on you?