Banks

This is the second in a two-part article on the debt burden America’s students face. Read Part 1 here.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Bitcoin users across Australia are reporting that their accounts have been abruptly frozen by the country’s “Big Four” banks. Some users complain that the banks are describing their Bitcoin activities as a "security risk". [...]

The other day I was in a shopping mall looking for an ATM to get some cash. There was no ATM. A week ago, there was still a branch office of a local bank – no more, gone. A Starbucks will replace the space left empty by the bank. I asked around – there will be no more cash automats in this mall – and this pattern is repeated over and over throughout Switzerland and throughout western Europe. Cash machines gradually but ever so faster disappear, not only from shopping malls, also from street corners. Will Switzerland become the first country fully running on digital money?

We are living in times of increased global economic injustice, suspicion against the establishment and a political terrain that is being redrawn to such an extent that few analysts really understand what is happening. Rarely have we seen such political mobility and possibility for change. But the ruling political consensus in Europe and the western world seems unyielding: “There is no alternative”.
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This is going to be an exercise in redefining fascism after meeting with socialists on the hundredth anniversary of the great revolution. In the early 1900s, the Italians who invented the term Fascism also described it as estato corporativo, meaning: the corporate state.

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
— Benito Mussolini

Then you have that great liberal, giver over of social goods from the rich, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who once described fascism as

Crushing regulations are driving small banks to sell out to the megabanks, a consolidation process that appears to be intentional. Publicly-owned banks can help avoid that trend and keep credit flowing in local economies.
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If you haven’t already, you should check out the article by The New Yorker, “How Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., Avoided a Criminal Indictment.” To be brief, the Trump family was under investigation in 2012 by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office for misleading potential buyers about their Trump SoHo property.

During his visit to hurricane-stricken Puerto Rico, President Donald Trump shocked the bond market when he told Geraldo Rivera of Fox News that he was going to wipe out the island’s bond debt. He said on October 3rd:

You know they owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street. We’re gonna have to wipe that out. That’s gonna have to be — you know, you can say goodbye to that. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is, you can wave good-bye to that.

All it takes for a society to express fear, paranoia, confusion, and a sort of mad country (riffing on mad cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy) mental disease is a toxic brew of narcissism, propaganda, amnesia, planned and perceived obsolescence and a transnational economic barbarism against the collective masses, and we end up here:

The following is the transcript from my speech: Shifting US-Japan Geo-Politics, Banking Landscape and Financial Regulations in the Trump Era. It was given on July 11, 2017 at the Canon Institute for Global Studies in Tokyo, Japan: