The grand thieves are com’n for ya granny’s pension: How the bank‘s new“bail-ins” are just another form of legalised theft.

By E.F Nicholson

Everyday, I seem to come across some story that just leaves me flabbergasted at what utterly shameless cunts our ruling class really are. It’s not just the shit they do, it’s how brazen, arrogant and unapologetic they are about it, be it Ian Duncan Smith wanting terminally ill people to lose their benefits if they don’t do the work experience, or some guy going to jail for not mowing his lawn, there are varying degrees of “shaftings” happening all around us.

“Bail in,” the banking term for “that’s mine, thank you.”

The latest instalment of “bend over, you’re about to be fisted” happened at the G20 in Brisbane in December 2014. The short version of what they agreed to put into law is:

“The next time a big bank makes a bad bet, they will come for the money you have deposited with them, pension funds or whatever they can get their greedy hands on to pay off the bookie they owe.”

The nature of how these international agreements are written up is deliberately complicated and difficult to fully understand to ensure there is never really too much public scrutiny, and to make the journalists’ working for Rupert Murdoch brains feel hurty. Though full of financial jargon and bank-tech speak, the brazen con job is all there once you take a look. Ellen Brown breaks it down as follows:

Russell Napier, writing in ZeroHedge, called it “the day money died.” In any case, it may have been the day deposits died as money. Unlike coins and paper bills, which cannot be written down or given a “haircut,” says Napier, deposits are now “just part of commercial banks’ capital structure.” That means they can be “bailed in” or confiscated to save the megabanks from derivative bets gone wrong.

Rather than reining in the massive and risky derivatives casino, the new rules prioritize the payment of banks’ derivatives obligations to each other, ahead of everyone else. That includes not only depositors, public and private, but the pension funds that are the target market for the latest bail-in play, called “bail-inable” bonds.

“Bail in” has been sold as avoiding future government bailouts and eliminating too big to fail (TBTF). But it actually institutionalizes TBTF, since the big banks are kept in business by expropriating the funds of their creditors. Rather than having their assets sold off and closing their doors, as happens to lesser bankrupt businesses in a capitalist economy, “zombie” banks are to be kept alive and open for business at all costs – and the costs are again to be to borne by us.

What’s yours is only sort of yours, but what’s theirs is 100% theirs and also some of yours.

It’s like a storage warehouse calling you up one day and letting you know the CEO had a bad run at the horses over the weekend, and to fund his betting spree he borrowed some money from Shylock and now needs to pay it back. To do so means they will be confiscating 20% of the value of whatever you have stored, be it gold bullion or your collection of Smurf dolls. Also, you can’t get in and take stuff away before we do, as we have changed all the locks. Even though you never agreed to that when you placed your stuff in storage, a new law means they are entitled to do what they are doing, so if you try to stop them from stealing from you, it will be you, not them, who will go to jail. What you assumed was yours, the valuables that you worked your life away to save and put away for safe keeping, isn’t, in fact, yours; it’s now theirs. Of course, yours is theirs when they owe money, but when they make windfall profits, theirs is solely theirs.

Brace yourself, this will definitely hurt you way more than it will hurt us…

With these new measures formally in place, we have a concrete example of how established power legitimatises and legalises theft, and then criminalises any form of protest or resistance to that very process. We should rightfully assume these laws are put into effect not as a precaution, but to establish a supposed “lawful framework” to ensure it’s all legit when this grand larceny takes place. This measure, in and of itself, isn’t just disturbing, it’s also what it points to regarding what’s up for grabs. Even though now the despots under GBP 85,000 are meant to be government-protected, what’s to say this isn’t what they will be going after next? Why stop there? If they are happy to steal from your Grandma’s pension fund, what can’t they feel entitled to? It’s just like how the unlawful indefinite detention of “enemy combatants” housed at Guantanamo Bay under G.W. Bush became just the foot in the door for due process to go down the toilet for everyone else under Obama.

If you make it, you can’t break it…

Additionally disturbing is the fact that this has gone virtually unreported in the mainstream media. If we need any further evidence of how pathetic, useless and destructive mainstream media is, then stories like these just highlight that point, as once again they fail to report what matters, and instead just validate their role as instruments of distraction and misinformation.

By signing this agreement, enforced by an unelected and undemocratic body that represents bank interests (and also has a head office shaped like a Nazi jackboot), we have our governments bring into law something that solely benefits the interest of the few, to the cost of the many. Sadly and cynically, it’s hard not to think, “Well, what’s new?” Our ruling class worked out a long time ago that the money isn’t in crime, it’s in making crime legal:

• The crime of invading “wherever” and murdering “whoever” and calling it “fighting terrorism”
• The crime of spying on innocent civilians and eroding all civil liberties, and calling it “national security”
• The crime of stealing wealth and earnings from whoever you choose and calling it “banking reform”
• The crime of upholding vast systems of structural violence and inequality and calling it “globalisation”
• The crime of ensuring our planet becomes uninhabitable and calling it “economic growth”

Shocking and immoral crimes appear not to be crimes if you write the laws, police the rules, and control how information about those rules is disseminated. Howard Zimm sums it up aptly:

Civil disobedience. . . is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.

My only hope is, in their arrogant blindness, they will just push too hard, for too long and there will eventually be a push back from those who have been oppressed, exploited and silenced that will bring the much-needed justice, balance and compassion that seems so absent in today’s world. Here’s hoping.