7 killed in Iraq today. 71 this month. They weren't in financial services.

Wow, Kevin- viva la revolucion.

Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

For a while I had high hopes for Eliot Spitzer.

A mere tithe? We can -- nay, we must! -- do better than that.

Shoot every 10th one? Would that void the deal? Think of the fees.

Hi,

What? You're only want to shoot every tenth one and then leave us with 90% of the problem? What's the matter, are you suffering from the national bullet shortage as a result of the Iraq War too?

Have a nice day!

Antti

Great, Kevin: pour encourager les autres, so to speak.

So... why not the other nine. It's not like any of them are innocent?

Great, Kevin: pour encourager les autres, so to speak.

Good heavens! What would Richard Schickel say?

Wow. This is a pretty convincing indicator of some kind of political mood shift.

There would most assuredly be no shortage of people volunteering as shooters. Heck, millions of people would pay for the privilege.

Decimation is too good for CEOs Mr. Drum.

I favor 100% defenestration, preferably from Burj Dubai.

Find out which congresscritters support such vermin the most - not always Republicans.

And not just ridiculous hidden fees. According to Consumer Reports 19% of gift cards go unused by recipients. That adds up to nearly $5 billion in "gifts" to national retailers by consumers during 2006. The NY Times reported that in 2005 Best Buy earned $43 million in profit just from unused gift cards; Limited Brands $30 million. I am personally fond of the image of consumers borrowing against the equity in their homes to give what will be unused gift cards to friends and family for the holidays. Well, as they say, it's the thought that counts.

The origin of the word decimate: every tenth man was executed when a Roman Legion mutinied. i think the financial "services" industry could use at least a decimation.

I see this as the "Roveification" of the financial services world. Like Karl Rove has done to politics, financial services in the U.S. has become like piracy - where the objective is to pile up as much power and loot as you can and the hell with who gets hurt. The only faith in the the Almighty these serpents have is in the God of the Almight Dollar. Click here for a revealing look at the "faith" the Christian right has.

Kevin, I love your work, but please avoid saying things like this that make liberals seem too extreme. I wouldn't be surprised to see this highlihgted on Fox or some other right-wing rag.

Interesting that you don't choose to cover corruption (e.g., backdated options) in the tech industry. Why not shoot 1 out of every 10 execs (and their flacks) in that industry?

If you start the shooting with Corzine and Rubin, I won't mind.

Nothing like advocating murder as a means of encouraging rational political discourse. This blog has just jumped the shark for me.

There are times when I think it might be a good idea to line up the CEOs of every financial services company in America and shoot every tenth one of them.

Eh, I'd rather see us do that with Congress.

I wouldn't shoot them outright. I'd give them the choice between the bullet and giving away every dime they have, thus being forced to live on social security and medicaid. Hey, if it's good enough for their victims, it's good enough for them.

What's really spooky is that one of the biggest growth "industries" in the US is the financial services sector. Well, if we are going to just shuffle paper and trust lots of offshore information mining telemarketing "firms" to keep the economy afloat we are in for a bigtime correction. Has the prize just descended to vampire bats that have the best anesthetic to keep us unaware of the fangs that have been inserted to withdraw their share? It is the new global Social Darwinism. We encouraged and let that Genie out of the Bottle and now we see that it is nothing but Locusts.

Why, heavens be Kevin, don't you know that back dating options is so very much worse and venal than stealing the life savings of a 92 year old WWII medaled veteran?

Try reading the freakin' link, sean.

And bullets are much needed in Baghdad - So throw them in tumbrels for a little hair cut and neck shave. And, how about every other one. However, if you do need bullets and a weapon, Walter E Wallis might lend us his Garand and clips.

On the pour encourager les autres note, how about plus ça change....

When wasn't the financial services industry robbing everyone. Credit cards have always been close to the top (and worse with the new bankruptcy laws), trailer home financing, share trading, savings and loans scandal, on and on; I'd include the massive retirement benefit rip-off with failed corps and their continuous mis- and under-funding of same.

Show me a CEO who suffered finacially for leading a major corporation into bankrupcy. I mean SUFFERED. Like having to return past earnings, not collect $20 million instead of $100 million.

The USA has a long tradition of ripping off Joe (and Josephine) Public with Congress -- or should it be Coingress -- watching and wringing its hands at appropriately publicized moments.

I'd say that all finacial services are in need of serious reform but we are bent on a course of WalMart (and others) having its own bank. Heaven forfend!

It really is capitalism gone mad.

Good Lord Kevin....how....Republican sounding of you and I'm sure the NRA is out there defending your right to do as well.

Shootin's too good for 'em.

But all the light handed work is done with a pen, so the perpetrators still get to wear their flag lapel pins to church.

Attaboy, Kevin - now you're sounding like a true Christian (Version 2007, US release).

This is not a good plan. Prior to this lineup, each of these CEOs will divert his company's resources into hiring an extensive team of consultants. If you're able to figure out how to keep your client out of that tenth position in line- to give him that edge, a lower probability than 10% that he'll be there- your skills will become very sought after and corporations will be showering money on you.

So a lot of people are going to be seriously looking into how to defeat this.

On the day of the actual decimation, the Revolution's firing squad will end up facing a long row of pro tempore CEOs, recruited minutes before from homeless shelters.

Decimating corrupt crony capitalists may be our last best hope to save the planet yet who made this harder to do?
The statist friends of Kevin Drum stopped the pentagon release of the PAM plan that could have allowed for voluntary and anonymous netbased decimation of anti-social elements. The clear superiority of this plan over all existing (fascist) statist means is as staggering as the statist stupidity of those democratic party imbeciles who stopped it. Say something Drum you political putz.

That NYTimes article made me cry. I spent the last several years of my life, caring for my dying mother. She had lost her ability to speak so she couldn't accept calls from telemarketers (a minor mercy) but she was totally addicted to sweepstakes scams. As she became more and more ill and unable to go outside to the mailbox on her own I had to go get the mail for her. Every day I would go out to the mailbox, and stop by the side of the house to dump all the incoming scams in the garbage can. And when I handed her the mail, she would look at me with tearful eyes, upon discovering there were no sweepstakes to play.
Once in a while my sisters would come over, see the mailman coming, and bring in the mail without me having a chance to go through it. And my mom would gleefully go through all the sweepstakes scams and frauds. I had to pretend to deliver her outgoing sweepstakes applications, even though they went in the trash. Then the next day when my sisters weren't around, I'd go through the mail and she'd be crestfallen when there were no sweepstakes. All my sisters were doing was making it more difficult for me to manage the problem, since they were making it obvious I was intercepting her mail.
I finally had to go through several bitter arguments with my sisters about how they were not doing her any favors by going behind my back and giving her the mail, unfiltered. They argued that the sweepstakes scams gave her something to do, it was harmless. I disagreed. She was constantly short on cash, being scammed so frequently that she was almost unable to afford her medical treatment, it took me a long time to convince my sisters that this was a serious problem. They decided to intervene and took control of her finances, that was not how I would have handled it, if it was my choice. That was probably the final blow that crushed her spirit, having control of her money taken away.
Well my Mom died a couple of years ago now, and somehow I continue to get sweepstakes frauds and scams by mail, at MY address, in her name. For months after she died, I kept getting stupid Publisher's Clearinghouse "collectable" dolls that she somehow got tricked into buying ($30/month for 1 doll per month that was cheap $5 Chinese-manufactured crap) but once I informed them that they'd not be getting paid for them because SHE WAS DEAD, they finally stopped sending them. One of the longer, more persistent battles was with Citibank, they reactivated one of her credit cards 6 months after she died and the cards were cancelled, they charged her an "annual credit report protection fee" that she'd gotten scammed into. The $29 fee ballooned into hundreds of dollars of interest and penalties, because we could not get them to cancel the card AGAIN. It took months of battling with Citibank, sending death certificates and (now invalid) powers of attorney forms, it finally was resolved by a threatening letter from my attorney reminding them that nobody can enter into a contract with a dead person, so the post mortem debts were invalid and trying to collect them was illegal.
Oh but the scams still keep coming, I moved to a new address, but I still get more junk mail for HER than I get real mail for ME. I get stuff like "Support Our Wounded Veterans by entering this sweepstakes" and "You May Already Be A Winner Of The Reader's Digest Sweepstakes" and probably the worst, "Remember 9/11, Support Our Local Chiefs of Police." She must have gotten on every sucker list in the world. And every time I get one of those sweepstakes in her name, bitter tears well up in my eyes, thinking of all those times I withheld my mom's mail for her own good, how when I handed her the "clean" mail she would look at me accusingly, unable to speak. Damn those scammers all to hell, I will probably go to my grave, still tortured by those assholes, who have MY address and HER name on their sucker list, stuffing my mailbox with reminders of how they tried to steal the pennies off my dead mother's eyes.

anon, sorry for your loss, but I know what you mean.

Right now, if I take out my personal and bill mail, I'd guess that 90% is credit card, mortgage/refinancing/2nd mortgage, credit card re-financing, window and siding, etc.

I don't remember getting sweepstake mail here in MN, but in NY??!! Maybe we have laws against it.

You know, it strikes me that, when we have a problem, we report this stuff to the better business bureau not the police. Why? So they get a second, third and fourth chance?

Stealing had been legalized in America. The further you go up the ladder in terms of power and influence, the worse the level of theft..personal or corporate. The health insurance industry, stealing from the sick and dying, is the very bottom of the barrel. I live in a developing country where it is illegal to steal, but it is done as a matter of corruption. The result is identical...I wonder how this can be stopped anywhere. I really wonder. Maybe global warming will be our revolution? The rules of law aren't working at all. The people aren't rising no matter what happens to them. I just can't imagine what it will take to stop this.

"Kevin, I love your work, but please avoid saying things like this that make liberals seem too extreme. I wouldn't be surprised to see this highlihgted on Fox or some other right-wing rag."

They will probably squeeze it in somewhere between Coulter calling for liberals to be killed and Hannity saying we hate America. They will make us 'seem' extreme no matter what we say.

Man, alot fools on here don't understand satire.

I got on one of those do not mail lists, and it actually stopped the constant preapproved credit card offers, which was about 1/3 of my junk mail.

Why can't we have a junk mail law like we have for spamming and for telemarketers? I'd rather delete and extra 50 emails a day than throw away all that unopened junk mail. What a waste of resources. Obviously our mailing rates are not high enough. I don't care if they subsidize our first class mailing rates either. I would gladly pay 2 or 3 times as much for a stamp if I didn't have to deal with the junk mail. My trash is about 50% junk mail.

As for the decimation process. Why stop at CEOs and 10%? But there's the problem. Once you get started killing all the people who really, really deserve to die, when do you stop? There are just too many of them.

I think that the gift card scams can end if we do a rebranding of greenbacks as "universal gift cards." We just need to make them in designer patterns, maybe with some cute puppies on them.

The whole thing is a bizarre trend driven by the fact that we think it is tacky to give people cash as gifts. I'm not sure what the difference is between a gift card and an envelope that Tony Soprano would give as a gift.

Include health insurance executives and shoot every third one, and I'll get behind your notion.

There's hope for Karl Marx yet.

christine and bGrS,

I knew I was forgetting something when I wrote. Yeah. Health care. What a rip. And I've written here at length a few times. Exactly the same. At corporate and government level.

Eff the lot of them. Same Coingress support.

Why is it the effing women who really think about the people?

Eff the effing men!

[BGRS, why I usually get it backwards is that I am a Briton. Red means left, blue right. We all knew that. Red star. Red scare! Red menace! Red October. Anyone want to explain to me why the right claimed RED as their color? Every other country I can think of the reds are on the left, more liberal part of the country.

At the same time, anyone want to explain to me why anyone wants to be on the less liberal, more restrictive side. May be seeking libertarianism through authoritarianism? That's a stretch.

Like if everybody votes in an election that would be a bad thing. That's the discombobulation this present government is on.

So many contradictions! Congratulations!

notthere - if you look at an electoral map from the 70's, Democrats were red here, too. If it wasn't three am I would go fetch a link...

Thanks BGRS, and goodnight, but when did that change. Anyone?

Might be significant.

Notthere: You can Google this and probably get more detail, but the basics are that the US networks used to switch colors between the two parties every four years until the 2000 debacle, when red/Republican and Blue/Democrat was repeated so many times that the designations were permanently burned into the American vernacular.

Thank you for highlighting the NY times article on how telemarketers target the elderly and sell their personal information to thieves. I was so outraged when I read that article in my local newspaper yesterday and was hoping one or more of the major bloggers would write about it.

There is a diary at Daily Kos with additional information and links about Wachovia Bank and InfoUSA, the two enablers in the sad case of the 92 year old man who had his life's savings stolen by these crooks.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/5/20/173126/128

If you are registered at Dailykos, go read that diary and then "recommend" it so that it stays on the front page!

Well, this is what you get when you elect people who don't believe in government regulation....and entire industry that for the most part is unregulated.

Now that we've had a Democratic Congress for almost six months, I keep on wondering when Pelosi is going to bring some legislation to the floor regulating the financial services industry.

How about two simple laws:

1) You cannot mail people credit card solicitations unless they have specifically requested it.

2) You cannot charge an interest rate more than 10% above prime.

The result would be that a lot more people would not be able to get credit, but in my opinion that would be a good thing, since most of them shouldn't be getting credit in the first place.

Also, this to some extent speaks to the deplorable state on financial education in this country. Many people graduate high school without having either the math skills or financial knowledge to make good financial decisions. Classes in personal finance should be added to HS graduation requirements.

The foundation for this legalized theft was laid during the first Reagan administration and his much hailed deregulation. All the warnings of the Silent generation nay sayers who had grown up hearing the horror stories of the bank holidays were very much pooh-poohed at the time and for over a decade afterward.

It'd be funny if it wasn't so tragic.

Since we're quoting poetry and lyrics this morning, how about this from Don Henley's "If Dirt Were Dollars":

You can arm yourself, alarm yourself
But there’s nowhere you can run
Cause a man with a briefcase
Can steal more money
Than a man with a gun

So, where is the outrage over at CNN and FAUX?

Videos of the elderly woman being struck again and again in the entry way and the elderly vet being attacked viciously in Detroit, have run and run on these channels - And rightfully so. However, how were those two vicious attacks by thugs any different from the smooth talking con men and their approving CEOs?

Predators all. Perhaps we could use the Predator Drones from the Middle East to take them out.

Gift cards are one of the biggest rip-offs around, particularly gift cards with expiration dates. Once a card expires, your money's gone.

Why people want to give credit card companies, banks and retailers un-compensated use of their money baffles me.

From Consumer Reports, December 2006:

When we discovered that consumers were sitting on as much as $972 million in unused gift cards, we knew we'd cause a stir. And judging from these reactions, we certainly did. One thing we didn't expect, however, was the answer to the gift card glut suggested by Wisconsin legislator Fred Kessler. Citing our data, the Milwaukee Democrat has proposed an expiration date on gift cards of one year after their issue date, after which 80 percent of the unused value would go to the state, with the remaining 20 percent going to retailers to cover administrative expenses. Kessler's proposal is a new spin on escheatment laws, which allow states to recover unclaimed assets — including unused balances left on gift cards — after a set period of time. A number of states already have similar laws on the books. Iowa and Indiana, for example, take 60 percent of the balance left on expired gift cards, with the remainder going to the card issuer. While we have no doubt that Kessler feels he's helping his state, we still think the best solution is for consumers to choose only those cards that have no expiration date, purchasing fees or dormancy fees. And if state legislators want to help out, we'd encourage them to follow the examples of California, Connecticut and Montana, all of which have laws that ban expiration dates on gift cards. The card is yours forever — or at least until you lose it at the bottom of the sock drawer or the retailer goes out of business.

"...How about two simple laws:

1) You cannot mail people credit card solicitations unless they have specifically requested it.

2) You cannot charge an interest rate more than 10% above prime.

The result would be that a lot more people would not be able to get credit, but in my opinion that would be a good thing, since most of them shouldn't be getting credit in the first place..."
Posted by: mfw13 on May 21, 2007 at 9:03 AM

I would go for that. I've been shredding credit card apps for nearly a *decade* now without even reading them. Well, the other day I got one and thought I would just check it out-"default APR 37.5%". WTF? Uh, didn't we used to have *usury laws* in this country? What happened?

Yeesh, way to elevate the discourse. How about just making that shit illegal and putting them in (the bad kind of) prison?

nl,

Excellent point - Why should these white collar guys do easy time at some white collar resort? Throw them in with the two attackers I wrote of above.

And as to "usury laws", sort like that classic Simpson's episode of trying to buy a pony. Many out there, including Homer Simpson, simply do not understand usury laws and the banking industry buying off legislators in order to bypass them.

What discourse?
Kevin parodies a real far-left lefty, and this constitutes a discourse?
Puh-lease.
Give me a call when Congress is in conference working over the particulars of how to nationalize 50% of all defense and resource corporations.
Then, I'll consider the possibility that we've actually achieved a "discourse".

There are times when I think it might be a good idea to line up the CEOs of every financial services company in America and shoot every tenth one of them.

Sensible regulation of the industry would be a better way to rein in abuse, otherwise, the really bad offenders will also be the ones most successful in corruptly influencing the order of the line so that your attempt to set an example will just end up eliminating their competition.

"So, where is the outrage over at CNN and FAUX?"

But this doesn't involve a Democratic supporting celebrity or academic saying nasty things about Commander Guy, and so it isn't newsworthy.

And Al Gore is fat.

1 in 10? Bullets? As bad as these stories are, they aren't the half of it. Not only are these bankers stealing from good, Christian Americans, they are raping them, corrupting their genes.

If you hunt around on the internet, you can find plans for a gas chamber-oven combo that is far more efficient than shooting and can be a final solution to this problem that threatens to undermine our society even as we're poised to rule the world.

A little harsh, eh Kevin?

There are times when I think it might be a good idea to line up the CEOs of every financial services company in America and shoot every tenth one of them.

You need to commiserate with Thomas Sowell, who occasionally feels the need for a national dictatorship.

Someone didnt sleep well last night. Anniversary hangover, perhaps? 20 years in a real jail, a permanent license revocation, & a $5 million fine would send a message.

Just put 'em all in the pillory, and let whoever wants to, come along and slap them. Good, healthy outdoor fun for the whole family!

>There are times when I think it might be a good idea to line up the CEOs of every financial services company in America and shoot every tenth one of them. Just on principle.

Seems like a good idea. But why stop at CEO's? How about those board members that vote to give all those CEO's what they want.

As for the Romans executing every 10th soldier, it wasn't just for mutiny. A soldier showing cowardness could trigger the punishment for the whole company as well.

How about leaving every tenth one standing, instead?

Not that I'm harboring any suspicions, mind you!

It's more like *certainties*.

Damn it, Ridinghood beat me to it -- and in French -- but to encourage the others indeed.

You need to actual read the Times story online about ripping off the elderly where they have the actual phone calls to the old folks that you can listen to. My God, shooting would be too good for these people. Hang them up and hit them like pinatas with baseball bats.

There are no "usury" laws as such. All the credit card companies are based in Delaware, because states are allowed to export their interest rate caps. Delaware has no caps, so companies based there can charge whatever the market will bear. Many court cases have supported this.

Off in loony land now, I see. I guess the right wing wackos don't have a monopoly on crazy, violent rhetoric.

There are no "usury" laws as such. All the credit card companies are based in Delaware, because states are allowed to export their interest rate caps. Delaware has no caps, so companies based there can charge whatever the market will bear. Many court cases have supported this.
Posted by: Matt on May 21, 2007 at 10:13 PM

Well, maybe bloggers and the internets ought to make a little more hay about that fact? What about checking into Delaware's legislators and who's on the take here? That might be enlightening.