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Citibank’s Crazy Business Model
A screenshot of the current homepage of Citibank in Germany (Via EuroIntelligence).
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The bank offers consumer-credit up to €50,000 starting at 3.99% effective yearly interest rate. In the lower right corner, Citibank offers 5.15% interest on 12 month fixed deposits.
Citibank is borrowing at 5.15% and lending at 3.99%? That will certainly generate some great turnover, but why is that supposed to be a sane business model?
Because of income tax on interest it would likely not be profitable for me to borrow from Citibank and deposit the borrowed money with them. But how does this work from Citibank’s perspective?
If you think there is not a strand that weaves through what I am about what I just posted above #16 and the following you are wrong. I do not mean that with malice, snark nor arrogance. The issues we deal w/here at MOA are a tapestry. It is military pedagogy that creates division, particularism, compartmentalization. It isn’t well known, but, many MOA’s may get it.
Since the seventies the CIA has incrementally taken over our universities, a proxy war on the left, (perhaps, Malooga would add to the discussion of the annihilation of the left in America) each decade it has subjugated and herded liberal education into a ideological blind alley, step by nefarious step it has frog marched us into it’s synthetic mimesis and paraphasia, and we are nearly reaching their simulacrum plantation. The vast majority of the herd is in the pen. They are ready to slam the gates shut to The Panopticon, after first strike.
I have said numerous times that what is going on is not merely a war, but a two front war, the one abroad, and one in the homeland (to use their term).
An ideological war. Proprietary Captitalism.
MOA has done an excellent job of mapping the war over there, w/ Bernhard’s and others, for example, Alamet’s excellent analysis of the M.E., b reals, Africom, Tangerine’s and Debs is Dead’s, South pacific, Monolycus American expat coverage of the Asia realm, Tantalus’s, ralphieboy’s, askod UK/Expat perspective, remembereringgiap’s always thoughtful and historic knowledge of the beast and passionate discourse and many, many others, fine thoughts, ideals and commentary.
However, MOA has been slack in it’s examination of the war being waged on the “American people” (outside of the economic subjugation). The war on the very fabric of it’s government, perhaps, with good reason. With out leaving anyone out, apologies in advance if I do, and I will only because of my ignorance of the many American citizens whom post here, I know of anna missed, annie, beq, Malooga, are citizens of America, but not clear on whom else is. But I digress. I, from the beginning, have tried to report, cover, what have you, the story from within the beast, as the aforementioned have too. So I can only speak for myself, when I say, I have failed. The light in the belly is growing weaker. They, the rulers, have nearly won the war of the homeland. They have destroyed America (the ideal) from within, collectively we have been every bit as traumatized as other victims, not so much physically as psychically. The Great American experiment, the social contract is over.
How will he tell the people?
The Flexible Floor Doctrine: ( Nuclear Thermal Monarchy)
Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, speaks on the U.S. Constitution in relation to war and the social contract. This is the third lecture of a four-part series.
This four-part lecture series curated by Sam Haselby, Visiting Professor, and co-sponsored by the Leonard and Louise Riggio Writing and Democracy Program, the New School Writing Program, and Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts aims to deepen public understanding and raise critical awareness of this charter document of the United States by bringing three of the country’s leading scholars of law, history, and literature and one of America’s outstanding human rights activists to address the topic of the Constitution in Crisis
Run time: 1:11:27 Regardless of her monotone voice and numerous verbal faux pas here, Elaine Scarry is a known for her interpretive daring and interesting erudite philosophy. She has for decades scrutinized torture as an instrument of state-sanctioned policy, a preoccupation that grew out of her 1985 monograph The Body in Pain. She knows what she speaks of wrt collective trauma of humankind. It would be wise to mind-walk with her.
Put on yer thinking caps fellers…
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 29 2008 7:08 utc | 17
@Uncle $cam – #17
I’m only an occasional participant in the discussion here, but I am an American in the UnitedStatesian sense. As a child, I learned about the dream/fantasy/ideal of a self-governing Republic of citizens, and found it inspiring. I had already learned the Pledge of Allegiance before “under God” was shoehorned into it. (I am Hillary Clinton’s age, in other words.)
I’m a generation younger than Kurt Vonnegut, but I read most of what he wrote, some of it multiple times. Some people love Vonnegut because he’s so cynical – but I love him because he’s so idealistic. KV, upon whom be peace, was very pessimistic at the end – he said that the America his generation dreamed of, that would live up to its high ideals, that came through the Depression and defeated Fascism in World War II –
http://tinyurl.com/ywjcdl
– that dream of a humane and reasonable nation can NEVER come true, because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But maybe Kurt was wrong – I hope so. And certainly part of what may make him wrong is the fact that all things come into being, wax, wane, and fade away – and America’s power over the rest of the human race is fading. The tremendous power to bribe and threaten others never translated into the power to make whole nations obey, because the power to destroy is not the same as the power to control. The ruling class of the MICFiC*, with their personal experience of disemploying anyone insufficiently deferential or profitable, cannot understand this, unfortunately.
*MICFiC – Military Industrial Financial Corporate Media Complex – a conspiracy to use, abuse, and confuse the people, to “milk, shear, and slaughter the sheeple”, figuratively speaking – except the slaughter is literal.
I would distinguish the corruption of the Ruling Class from the corruption of the populace. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and that’s just too much work. The Founders had read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and knew how Rome had gone from Republic to Empire. If the Dream of America is as dead as Vonnegut thought, it is due not only to the corruption of the rulers, but to the corruption of the ruled. Not only are they woefully ignorant, too many are willfully so. And the Dream of America – the enlightenment ideal of informed citizens participating in “government of, by, and for the people” – is dead because the people are dreaming The American Dream – comfortable, easy, OK, big TV screens to watch soap operas and sports contests on, cheap gas to drive our cars, etc.
Civic virtue’s decline has happened many times, so we cannot lay all the blame at the feet of the mass-media hypnotized consumer society.
But maybe The Dream of America has always been an illusion. It is sort of discouraging to realize that from the beginning the economic basis of the colony of Virginia, Mother of Presidents, was exporting an addictive and deadly drug – tobacco – and that New Englanders owed much of their prosperity to the slave trade which supplied an essential factor of production to the Southern Planters. And of course the history of Manifest Destiny is of one of genocide of the original inhabitants (although their southern cousins are reclaiming the country to some extent – they speak Spanish now, but their faces are Mayan, not Iberian.)
Something good may happen soon – maybe next week, maybe next June. The last words in Howard Zinn’s cartoon History of American Empire (which I will give a copy of to my niece as she turns 12 next month) are adapted from his September 2004 article “The Optimism of uncertainty.”
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
http://tinyurl.com/6nw6qx
Posted by: mistah charley, ph.d. | Oct 29 2008 18:46 utc | 21
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