IT’s a tale as old as time… well, as old as banks have been around anyway.
A person of (so far anyway) pure heart battles a beast more heinous than any other: the banks.
Bernie is the hero in this tale, as he’s the only one so far who is willing to crush the big banks into smaller ones. He’s the only one who hopes to revive the Glass-Steagall Act- at one point this act had prevented investment bankers and commercial bankers from mingling, in a dance which would have passed your savings from one arm of the bank to the other far-shadier-and-more-likely-to-lose-it-all arm. 
In 2000, the five biggest banks only held 25% of all of the US’s banking assets. This share has almost doubled to 45% since the financial crisis “required” that they be bailed out. Ironically, they are even bigger and more hideous than they were back in the “too-big-to-fail” days.
They KNOW they’ll be bailed out too, and so they are free to speculate in any new ponzi scheme they so desire… with YOUR money of course, and if they lose it all they’ll be bailed out with YOUR money as well.
The guarantee that the federal government gives them in this regard is estimated to be worth 80 BILLION big ones a year. That’s a lot of stolen loot even BEFORE they start on their speculative wiles.
I don’t need to remind you that just three years back in 2012, just a short period since they’d gotten bailed out, JP Morgan Chase decided to bet the house on credit default swaps (CDS) tied to corporate debt, and when they lost 6.2 billion dollars on that bet they decided to lie about losing the cash by inflating the value of the portfolio.
Just may of this year, the biggest price-fixing ring in recent history was busted; the largest banks had manipulated the ginormous 5.3 trillion dollar per day currency exchange market in order to make greater profits- and this sort of market manipulation allows them to “predict” and thus “bet” on some of those “unexpected” swings you see, putting the money of small-time traders and everyday people into their coffers. It was a “brazen display of collusion,” according to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
“If you aint cheating, you aint trying,” one trader at Barclays wrote in an online chat room where prosecutors say the price-fixing scheme was hatched.
Basically, these scams have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that bankers and prosecutors alike can agree on ONE thing: that banks lie, cheat and steal.
Worse than that is the fact that politicians often leave office… and walk right into one on Wall Street; this allows bankers to keep lying and cheating, while expecting low to no repercussions. This is why nobody was even indicted for the 2008 crash, or the May currency market manipulation… Instead, a simple fine is all that is exacted- basically a tithe of stolen money taken first from the People and then from the bankers.
The only politician currently promising to make changes radical enough to reverse all of this is Bernie Sanders, forget the posturing and pretense that Hillary puts up, acting like she’s one of the common people, as well as her already-tepid promises of reforming Wall Street– and remember that she has deep ties with Wall Street... and corporations… and practically every evil scumbag…
Sources:Common Dreams, NY Times, Forbes, WSJ, Washington Times, Business Insider, Investopedia
This Article (Bernie And The Beast: One Man Against The Banks) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author(CoNN) and AnonHQ.com.
