Bankers Bane

I mean a bane to us. Here is the latest from those wonderful folks who helped bring on the greatest recession in personal memory.

J.P. Morgan Chase said Friday it will pay $27 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the bank of overcharging members of the military for their mortgages and prompted a federal investigation, a congressional hearing as well as public outrage.

In the suit, Marine Corps Capt. Jonathon Rowles charged that the bank refused to lower the interest rate on his mortgage, as required under a federal law, after he was activated for duty. When Rowles refused to pay the higher rate, the bank called his home up to three times a day and threatened to foreclose, according to the suit, which was filed in July.

All of which is against Federal law. Chase probably thought they were jsut helping the war effort I suppose.

bonuses all around, if not a governorship somewhere

Bankers: A Modest Proposal

Matt Yglesias quotes a US Embassy spokesperson with a brilliant solution to the banking problem, which seems to have been caused by too many bankers who were neither wise nor honest:

“Beyond education and culture, in the field of economy and services, it’s worth noting that representatives of U.S. banks, JP Morgan and Citibank and others came to Baghdad on January 28th, participated in an international banking conference that explored correspondent banking relations that would deepen commercial ties between Iraq and the international community, business community.”

Yes. Downtown Baghdad. Seems about perfect to me.


Maire, please note: this proposal has nothing to do with Ireland

Sententiae sets the pace...

.... well, sort of. But I have noticed a number of times in the last year that a day or two after I have put up a post of a funny picture or an interesting article, Andrew Sullivan posts the same picture or article!

So, here is my post dated 16 July about a development of national import.

And here is Sullivan's blog posting on the same article, on 20 July!

Coincidence?

Budweiser Beer .... R.I. P.

Excuse me while I wipe the remains of that huge crocodile tear I shed off my keyboard....

... OK. .. Budweiser has been bought up by InBev, a Belgian company. Ha. Belgium, for you geographically challenged Americans is just a bit to the north of France. You can tell when you get there from France because the people speak better French.

I suppose I should be sorry to lose such an American icon, but I just can't. During its career Bud and its masters crushed dozens of regional breweries on its march to the seas. As Edward McClelland puts it in his Salon.com article,

Imagine the Budweiser Clydesdale team on a cross-country rampage, with a decrepit, tipsy August A. Busch Jr. strapped to the lead horse, wearing a bright red St. Louis Cardinals cowboy hat. Starting on the West Coast, platter-hoofed horses trample a can of Blitz-Weinhard, spewing suds all over the streets of Portland, Ore. Moving south to San Francisco, they stamp on bottles of Lucky Lager. In their hometown of St. Louis, they crash through the wall of a Griesedieck* Bros. brewery, rolling hundreds of barrels into the Mississippi. They're seen next in Cincinnati, kicking a Hudepohl taster to death. The Clydesdales' tour of destruction ends in Brooklyn, N.Y., where Busch orders them to urinate in a vat of Piels, cackling that no one will be able to tell the difference.

Alright - so it's a bit much, but he makes a good point. And tells quite a bit about the history of beer in America.

As for me, I've never gotten over moving away from St Paul: no more Pigs Eye Beer for me. Well, we'll always have Busch Gardens.

*btw, does anyone else remember the Poppa Joe Griesedieck (pronounced just the way to produce maximum giggles) radio commercials? Or the National Bohemian fox singing 'brewed on the shores ... of the Chesapeake Bay!


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How to make money in Medical Insurance

First thing you do is write a lot of policies and collect a lot of money. Then if any of the policy holders get sick enough to require large payments, encourage your agents to find flaws in the original policy and dump them. Any little flaw.

This is a time honored business practice among the dishonest: sell a product or service and then don't deliver it.

After all, if you are caught, all you have to do is provide the service that has already been paid for. There was no extra cost, no punishment, and in a certain number of cases, the customer was dead anyway.

Until now.

You have to read the whole article to see just how sleazy Health Net, the insurance company, was in this case. Then think about something else the article implies: this is standard practice.