Following on from yesterday’s story about Goldman Sachs as the root of all evil, today we get the information that:

Nine banks that received government aid money paid out bonuses of nearly $33 billion last year — including more than $1 million apiece to nearly 5,000 employees — despite huge losses that plunged the U.S. into economic turmoil. … The nine firms in the report had combined 2008 losses of nearly $100 billion.

(Source: WSJ)

And if you think things are going to change, don’t be deluded. Here’s what the Obama White House had to say:

"The president continues to believe that the American people don’t begrudge people making money for what they do as long as…we’re not basically incentivizing wild risk-taking that somebody else picks up the tab for," said White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs.

What happened to Obama’s feigned outrage last year before the election? It’s all gone, baby. It disappeared to the same place as his promises about Gitmo, prison camps, climate change and health care.

If the NBA has a salary cap, why can’t American corporations? One of the key problems with capitalism is the open-ended nature of the upside. It breeds unlimited greed. Surely we can combine the good aspects of capitalism – eg incentives for creativity and effort – but restrict the upsides? I know we have tiered taxation, which effectively acts as a way of channeling some of that upside back into the system, but it doesn’t stop companies and individuals trying to bleed the economy for as much money as they can get their hands on, despite the negative consequences.

It still seems to me that we need another system, one that limits the greed but retains the incentives. 

Rolling Stone magazine has a Hunteresque story about Goldman Sachs:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Interesting… 2 weeks ago I started a big campaign to get people to vent their anger about banks via Twitter and what story did News.com run today?

"Bank Customers Deposit Their Anger On The Internet".

Of course, News.com didn’t mention my stories. Coincidence?

I just got off the phone after a very annoying phone call with a Three "customer support" person.

The guy was just rude, obnoxious and uninformed.

I’ve had a 3G card from 3 for the last 18 months and never used it. But I’ve paid my $29 a month – so they have done very well out of me.

When I did try to use it a couple of days ago – because my TPG account has been capped for a couple of days – the throughput on the card was terrible, I’m talking single digits. I rang 3 support and was told their network is overloaded in my area (inner suburb of Brisbane) and that it might take a month to resolve.

So I rang them back today and asked them today to cancel my account – and was told there would be an $80 charge! When I explained they are not providing me with the service I signed up for, the guy on the phone had the temerity to try to tell me that it is MY FAULT because I recently moved house!! And that just because they agreed to give me coverage in one location, didn’t mean they provided access across 100% of the country!

I explained that I’m not in Alice Springs – I’m in an inner suburb of Brisbane where they normally DO provide access but they haven’t provisioned their network sufficiently.

But he just kept talking over me, not listening at all. I had to raise my voice for him to even stop talking for a second to let me finish my sentence.

Eventually he went and "spoke to a supervisor" and agreed to cut my cancellation charges in half. I said that I refused to pay them a cent more and asked to speak directly to a supervisor. He said someone would call me – WITHIN 48 HOURS.

It takes 48 hours to get someone to call me back?

What kind of operation are they running?

Network is down.

48 hours to get a call center supervisor to call me back.

Pathetic.

They have made $522 bucks out of me on this card and provided ZERO SERVICE.

UPDATE: The original audio for this show had a problem (overlapping tracks) so I’ve re-uploaded it here.

We hate banks. (see my recent poll) It’s true. You know it. I know it. The only people who don’t seem to know it are the banks themselves. Although, I suspect they DO know it – they just don’t care. They’ve had an effective oligopoly for so long they think they can just say and do whatever they want and we’ll just sit here and take it.

Well I’m not taking it anymore. I’m going to do a series of shows exploring why we hate banks so much and what the alternatives are. We have a voice. Let’s use it to change things.

Today on the show I interview three people – Jen Storey from Online Banking Review, Mike Jarocki from Credit Card Finder, and Owen Davies, Group Manager, Corporate Affairs, Bendigo Bank, the bank that Aussies seem to actually like a bit.

Show sponsor:

Bill Moyers sits down with William K. Black, the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. Black offers his analysis of what went wrong and his critique of the bailout.

I love the term they are using for bankers who deliberately defraud society – “banksters”. Black says the entire financial system is one big ponzi scheme, making Bernie Madoff looking like an amateur and fall guy for the larger crime which involved the entire financial system and governments who allowed them to go unregulated.

Watch.

Just a few things that have caught my attention this morning:

1. Ron Paul refuses to endorse McCain and instead tells his supporters to vote for a third-party candidate. I love this quote from him:

“It might diminish my credibility,” said Paul (when asked to endorse McCain). “I don’t like the idea of getting 2 or 3 million people angry at me.”

2. Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman gets arrested outside the Republican National Convention for doing nothing.

You have to watch the video and read the story. It’s horrifying.

3. British American Tobacco targets kids with their advertising.

BAT claim they don’t want children to smoke, but then get “caught in Malawi, Mauritius and Nigeria using marketing tactics that are well-known to appeal to youth: advertising and selling single cigarettes, and sponsoring non-age-restricted, product-branded musical entertainment.”

I’ve got a bunch of great interviews in the can ready to release to you, including a chat with the music critic who introduced Kurt Cobain to Courtney Love and a representative from the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights who told me American should nuke Iran. Apparently they don’t have any rights. And tonight I’m interviewing Robert M Price, a theologian and biblical scholar who agrees with me that Jesus probably didn’t exist. So stay tuned!

From the “Just-Cuz-We-Say-We’re-Going-To-Do-Something-Doesn’t-Mean-We-Will” department:

The Center for Science in the Public Interest points out that ExxonMobil has just announced “for the second consecutive year” that it is cutting funding to groups which promote skepticism about global warming. The groups that are supposedly being cut off include the Capital Research Center, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, and the Institute for Energy Research. However, CSPI points out, “Each group continued to receive Exxon funding in 2007 after the company’s first announcement that it would discontinue the payments. Exxon did not immediately return calls seeking comment on how serious it was in following through on its plans.”

(Source: Integrity in Science Watch, June 2, 2008 via PRWatch.org)

It’s easy to companies to make a big splash, put out some advertising, put out a press release, but how often do they actually follow through? And who holds them responsible when they don’t? Perhaps we need more people like Stephen Mayne, who buy shares in these companies, and then rock up to their Annual General Meeting with a video camera to ask the hard questions.