BANKING: DEATH BY COMPUTER : RESURRECTION BY CREDIT UNION My family has been in

BANKING: DEATH BY COMPUTER : RESURRECTION BY CREDIT UNION

My family has been in banking for generations. It is a very good business. For most of history, you could talk to a banker. A banker was like your accountant, lawyer, or priest: he gave you advice and counsel and worked with you. They were reasonably educated people with decision making authority.

The advent of computers made it possible, and competitive to centralize banking, turn to statistics that measured and compared statistics about what you did WITHOUT the advice and help of a banker to learn about money, interest and credit, instead of PROVIDING you with the advice about what to do with money, interest and credit.

This created a lot of asymmetry of knowledge in the population. People got more ignorant and became statistical objects rather than members of a portfolio of relationships that banks built.

Starting in the 1970’s when the USA instituted the petro-dollar, or using the US Dollar as the world currency for buying oil, the USA has been issuing cheap credit both home and abroad.

The impact on banking has been that the government is essentially insuring increasingly ignorant consumers with cheap credit, who increasingly get unconsciously into debt, and increasingly into default, rather than building knowledgeable consumers of credit and producers of interest.

community banks, and in particular, credit unions, are more than just a ‘nice thing’ for consumers. They can rebuild our society by removing the asymmetry of knowledge that lets banks prey upon ignorant consumers and sell them into predatory debt.

Community credit unions are how all consumer credit should be done, even if we have to legislate it. Because big banks are just part of the government. They are part of the century long credit scam that has made us all slaves.

Why are we slaves? How do you become a US Citizen? You get a driver’s license, a credit card, a loan for a car, and a loan for a house, and now you are controlled by credit, not by moral code, not by cultural norms, not by laws, but by credit. You are a credit slave. And that might not be bad if it works. But for an absurd number of people, they fail at the card, or the car or the house and become indentured servants. SO it is not so much that those of us who succeed do. It’s that we are advocates for a system that creates a permanent and dependent underclass.

Credit is citizenship and the lack of it makes you a serf.

And only community banks can provide advice and counsel. We force people into schools so that they don’t become ‘scoundrels’ that we must support through charity. Why is it that we use credit to create a lower class of people ostracized from the system purely out of ignorance? Why is it that we put almost ten percent of our people into prison for minor drug charges, and therefore guarantee they are dependent upon the rest of us to support them, and if not, lead lives of dependence and crime?

Now I understand that very few ordinary people can tell whether what I’m explaining here is more or less true than any other explanation that they’ve heard. And all I can do is hope that it makes more sense than some conspiracy theory does.

We may have the best of intentions. But the road to poverty is very often paved with the best intentions. And the road to social fragmentation has been, with certainty, paved with good, but foolish intentions.