RE: Australia's Banking Royal Commission is a farce. Too big to face justice
Right on the money! (pun intended). In my opinion, the best way to beat the banks is to avoid using them as much as possible. Let's hear it for crypto and credit unions!
In the UK we used to have a very strong building society sector. The main difference between a bank and a building society is that banks are mostly privately owned, by shareholders (or nationally owned, and controlled by those politicians who used to be bankers), while building societies are mutually-owned - in other words, owned by the very people who invest in them.
During the 1990s, most building societies were changed into banks as a series of "carpet-baggers" forced through votes on the issue, and most of the investors short-sightedly voted for these institutions to become banks, tempted by the bonus of a cash windfall. Now there are very few building societies remaining, with hardly any of those in Scotland, where I live. So most people take their mortgage out with a bank.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I actually think that the recession of 2008 was constructed to put people even further under the control of the banksters. I certainly didn't think that was the case at the time, and I became very interested in economics, genuinely looking for ways that we could get out of the financial mess, following popular economists on Twitter and joining in online discussions on the subject.
Then I started to realise that what seemed like the most sensible ways to get the economy moving again were not actually being followed. And I also found out about crypto!
I think the whole recession thing backfired and that instead of making people more enslaved to the banks, it made most people more suspicious of them.
Oh, and Royal Commissions usually serve the purpose of preventing any further investigations into the issue and keeping the most important stuff out of the public domain.
I think one of the largest problems is the people, most of us aren't informed, don't care to be informed even when information is available, then even if we are informed of major crimes our apathy and lack of empathy prevent any real outrage.
Unless it affects us we don't care if they charged dead people, or funded drug runners and terrorists and the banks no we are lazy and that chances are we won't take the time to leave them even if we think they did wrong.
It also get suspicious when you realize that Australia's big four banks are near majority-owned by another big 4 43-48% of each of our big 4 is owned by hsbc, national nominies, citigroup, and bloody JP morgan
I think of it like when big car companies make product recalls, for example, they don't do it when they know that their product is unsafe and killing people they only do it when the potential costs of legal action exceed sales value, the banks will continue bad behavior as long as the value is greater than the cost and until we can jail bankers there is no real cost.
It's a disgusting situation, and you're right, it is apathy. I think the recession jolted a lot of people out of their apathy, but maybe not enough.