A Cheery Holiday Message from Bankster: Death Eaters on Wall Street

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.prwatch.org/node/9831


Today’s Wall Street Journal has a stunning exposé on a publicly-traded company called Life Partners Holdings. Are you ready for this? Life Partners creeps around asking the unemployed, the elderly and the sick (especially people with HIV/AIDS) to sell them their life insurance policies for cash. Then they bundle these policies into securities and sell them to vultures -- oh, I am sorry, “investors.” Then the “investors” sit around and wait for people to die -- the sooner the better for the purchasers of these death bonds. The future of this industry “looks bright,” chirps National Underwriters.

Reminds you a little of those Death Eaters in Harry Potter, doesn’t it?

Of course the “life settlements industry” would not be possible with out the financing and backing of big Wall Street banks, the triple-A rating from Wall Street credit agencies and, of course, the quality work of the “big four” accounting firms. The recently-indicted Ernst and Young cooks the books for Life Partners.

Last year BanksterUSA targeted Goldman Sachs’ financing of this emerging industry. This year, Goldman shut down Longmore Capital, its death bonds subsidiary, and withdrew from the market.

Congratulations. You made it happen.

more at the link --

[martymar64]

1. I was just thinking . . .

Some of these individual banksters are getting enormously wealthy.

Some enterprising folks might be able to form a growth industry in kidnapping banksters and stockbrokers and other Richie Rich types for ransom.

Just sayin . . .

[Hannah Bell]

2. lots of people die when social supports are cut = good businessbet

[WillyT]

3. K & R !!!

:kick:

[Hannah Bell]

4. The Dialectic of Fear

The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula. <*> The monster and the vampire are born together one night in 1816 in the drawing room of the Villa Chapuis near Geneva, out of a society game among friends to while away a rainy summer.

Born in the full spate of the industrial revolution, they rise again together in the critical years at the end of the nineteenth century under the names of Hyde and Dracula.

In the twentieth century they conquer the cinema: after the First World War, in German Expressionism; after the 1929 crisis, with the big rko productions in America; then in 1956–57, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, directed by Terence Fisher, again, triumphantly, incarnate this twin-faced nightmare.

Frankenstein and Dracula lead parallel lives.

They are indivisible, because complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and capital: ‘the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.’

That ‘must’, which for Marx is a scientific prediction of the future (and the guarantee of a future reordering of society), is a forewarning of the end for nineteenth-century bourgeois culture.

http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2197

[earthboundmisfit]

5. Turn about

A group of unemployed, elderly and sick place small - yet meaningful - bets on when the individuals at the top of the "life settlements industry," (and their financiers too) each meet their ends. Make it publicly known, and when they scream "Foul!", the poor, elderly and sick can ask, "what's the difference?"

[socialist_n_TN]

7. Yep. Pretty good idea, IMO. Maybe bet one of ...........

your UEC checks. And maybe expand the game out to ALL capitalists or at least all the ones at the top of the capitalist food chain. VERY good idea.

[SoCalDem]

6. link

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x49335