Month: July 2012

Big banks have been caught in a massive scam to rig global interest rates, ripping off millions of people on their mortgages, student loans and more! We’d go to jail for this, but Barclays bank has only been fined, and just a fraction of their profits! Outrage is mounting — this is our chance to finally turn the tide of the banks’ reign over our democracies.
The EU finance regulator, Michel Barnier is standing up to the powerful bank lobby and championing reform that would put bankers behind bars for fraud like this. If the EU goes first, accountability could quickly spread across the globe. But the banks are lobbying hard against it, and we need a massive surge of people power to drive these reforms through.
If we can get 1 million people to stand with Barnier in the next 3 days, it will give him momentum to face down the banking lobby and push governments to bring reform. Click below to sign, and our growing numbers will be represented by adding mock bankers to a jail right in front of the EU Parliament:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/bankers_behind_bars_f/?bWcBaab&v=15942
The full scale of the scandal is still unknown, but what we know is breathtaking: “Several” unnamed major banks were involved, and the rigging of the LIBOR interest rate, the rate on which many of the world’s interest rates are based, affected the value of literally hundreds of trillions of dollars in investments. Barclays alone has admitted to committing this fraud “hundreds” of times.
For too long, our governments have been cowed by powerful banks who threatened to move elsewhere if challenged. For too long, banks have manipulated our market economies, tilting the playing field in their favour, and engaging in reckless risk-taking, secure in the knowledge that they could force governments to hand them our taxpayer money when they got into trouble.
The system is rigged, and that’s a crime. It’s time to put the criminals behind bars for it. It starts in Europe — let’s make it happen: