While we are not going to relish in the financial pain of individual stockholders of of CitiGroup shares, which fell below $1 earlier today, we cannot help but note how thoroughly disgusting the behavior of that institution has been for decades. We are presently reading Kevin Phillips's "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of Capitalism." Phillips, the architect of Nixon's loathsome Southern Strategy has, in later years, become rather melancholy about the trajectory of the country he is going to leave his grandson (The book is dedicated: "To William Russell Phillips, our new grandson"). Phillips has repudiated the Southern Strategy he helped engineer which elected Republicans who, he asserts, are mostly to blame -- especially the Bush family -- for our present mess.
The book is a smouldering hot indictment against the scumbag bankers and the financialization (at the cost of American manufacturing) that got us into this goddam economic mess, creating imaginary wealth, stronomical debt and a crumbling middle class. Phillips writes of CitiGroup:
"... (E)ven before Congress had repealed Glass-Steagall, the Fed had on its own supposed authority approved a merger between CitiGroup and Travellers, a leading insurance company. In 1999, Congress, passed and President Clinton enthusiastically signed the Financial Services Modernization Act, which reallowed the mergers that had been prohibited six decades earlier and also established a new category of financial holding companies (FHCs).
"That CitiGroup was the symbol and principal beneficiary of this statute was a travesty itself. During the 1920s, its parent, National City Bank, had been the prime promoter of banks also getting into the securities and speculation business. Discredited in 1933, it became the principal poster child for Glass-Steagall's original enactment. In 2008 The Wall Street Journal updated that 'while other banks can claim to be the victim of the current panic, Citi is at least a three time loser. The same directors were at the helm in 2005 when the Fed suspended Citi's ability to make acquisitions because of the bank's failure to adhere to regulatory and ethical standards. Citi also needed resuscitation after the sovereign debt disaster of the 1980s, and it required an orchestrated private rescue in the 1990s.' Indeed, the Journal omitted two episodes for which Citi had been fined several years back -- pioneering off-the-books gambits for Enron and instituting an 'account sweeping program' that automatically removed positive balances (a twice paid billing) ..from credit card customers accounts. True connoisseurs can keep up with grassroots opinion by Googling 'shittybank' -- no further description necessary."
None indeed. Hereafter let CitiGroup be called "ShittyGroup."
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