All my life I’ve hated them all. I’ve tried them all. I hate all banks. I hate bloody bankers. I hate banking with banks. Even though I used to be a bleeding banker myself, but that it seems was another lifetime ago. And you’d hardly believe it.

Safe as houses we used to say back then. Your money that was. My first job after leaving school was with one of the big four banks in the City of London.

They called themselves Midland Bank International Division at that time. These days, they are better known as HSBC; one of the largest banking and financial services organisations in the world. With over 9,500 offices in 85 countries, they are part of the global banking network of financial institutions falling prey to the so called “credit crunch,” You know, “toxic debt” syndrome.

If I had known what I know now, I might have stayed there these past twenty-odd years. At Midland Bank back in the day, we were jokingly known for lending money to anyone who could prove that they didn’t need it. How times have changed! Now greedy global banking networks hungry for increased profits and market share offer huge home loans and dodgy under-regulated derivatives to practically anyone. They take insufficient security on peoples’ homes based on the false assumption that property prices will always spiral out of control (and beyond the reach of most ordinary hard-working citizens).

Clearly, short-sightedness and irresponsible lending practices, to say the least. But still bankers get paid massive bonuses, anyway. And why worry about threats to the economy, jobs and other people’s livelihoods when your croonies in power will bail you out at the slightest sign of gremlins in the system you’ve treated? Once again, it’s another win-win situation for the rich folks.

Where I come from, lining your pockets with other people’s cash is the quickest way to get yourself banged up by police under maximum security. Yet George Bush and his money-hungry goons – not satisfied with the billions they’ve reaped from the war in Iraq – are now fleecing ordinary US taxpayers of $700 billion on their way out of the White House by instilling another bout of fear and confusion not just among the American people but right across the world. For as the popular saying goes, when America sneezes, the rest of us catch a cold. How can this be? Are we all so blindly naive and stupid?

This “rescue package” will not make it any less likely that American citizens will not lose their homes. This “bailout” will not reduce the price of gasoline globally or offer universal health care to those who may suddenly fall ill and cannot afford to work or meet their medical bills. What the buying up of Wall Street’s toxic debts will do is ensure that there is no correlation between greed, risk and reward; and that privately owned banks and bankers bear no consequence for their own irresponsible actions.

In other words, the rich get richer while the rest of us foot the bill.

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