All Bankers Are Evil

The Transaction Fee Suck-off
I like pointing out that Goldman Sachs is the devil's investment bank but that is unfair to all the other major banking institutions.

Consider the Haiti earthquake disaster. Of the parasites sucking money away from the relief effort the most egregious are the credit card banks. Three percent of every cash donation is going to feed the profit sheets of American Express, Visa, and MasterCard. To put it in terms of blood, for every 100 Haitians who could be saved by the relief effort, three will die to fatten the bankers.

Remembering Woodie Guthrie
Many years ago I heard an old, scratchy recording of Woodie's radio show. He was telling a story about a banker. I can't find a transcript so here is my rendition.

It was the Depression that was a banker in Oklahoma noted for his cruelty. While all bankers are cruel, this man was exceptionally so. He had one glass eye. Nobody knows how he lost his eye but folks thereabouts surmised it had been part of a transaction he had had with the Devil. Anyway, this banker liked to toy with his debtors like a cat does with a mouse. When he went out to foreclose on a farm he would offer the farmer one more month, at interest, if he guessed which was the banker's glass eye and which was the real eye.

One day the banker played this game with an old farmer out past Dill City. The farmer looked at the banker for quite a spell and then confidently said that the right eye was glass and the left real.

"Well," said the banker, "you are right, old man. Almost no one guesses right. Did someone tell you?"

"No one told me," the farmer said. "I just looked at your eyes. One was dead and cold and heartless. The other had the smallest, slightly, faintest reflection of humanity and the milk of human kindness. I knew that eye had to be made of glass. Your real eye was the one that was cold and heartless."