“Too Big To Fail” Banks Get Bailout, Gave Customers The Shaft

Chalk One Up for the Working Man

By Donald V. Watkins
©Copyrighted and Published (via Facebook) on December 18, 2016
Used with permission

On Thursday, I tried a case for a close friend on mine in the Jefferson County, Alabama District Court in Bessemer, Alabama. My friend is a hard working Bessemer resident and family man whose world was turned upside down when Citibank sold his credit card account to San Diego-based junk debt buyer, Midland Funding, LLC. He is one of millions of bank credit card customers each year whose accounts are bundled in loan pools and then sold to junk debt buyers without the customer’s knowledge.

Midland Funding is one of several mega junk debt buyers in America. This group of financial sharks buys unsecured bank debt for pennies on a dollar and then strong arms debtors who miss one or more of their monthly payments. Midland is part of a multi-billion industry of shady financial predators.

In my friend’s case, Citibank sold his account to Midland Funding. The balance on the account was $6,800. My friend paid his credit card monthly on a regular basis, but had an unexpected hiccup in his monthly cash flow a couple of years after he opened the account. As a result he failed to make a couple of his payments on time. When this occurred Citibank sold my friend’s account to Midland, and Midland eventually sued my friend. This is how my friend became my client.

Remember, Citibank had a similar hiccup during the Great Recession of 2008. The bank requested and received a total of $181.6 billion in federal bailout assistance to keep from collapsing. In fact, Citibank led the banking industry’s “welfare queens” by receiving more financial bailout assistance than any big bank in the U.S.

Citibank’s “Thank You” to the taxpayers like my client, whose tax dollars made the financial bailout possible for these big banks, was the low-down act of selling his credit card account to a shark like Midland Funding. The big banks were quick to take taxpayer-sponsored financial assistance, but slow to give taxpayers similar financial assistance in return.

[Editor’s Note: Alamerica Bank, which is

Advertisements

Hi WordPress! What’s up with all the SPAM?

Used to, the good folks at WordPress had fantastic SPAM catchers.

Nowadays, it very much seems like they’re falling down on the job.

Too much SPAM!

Check out the latest offings.

More to follow below…

Fighting Fire with Fire: Standing on ALERT for more SPAM

For your perusal, ladies and gentlemen.

Behold the SPAM.

Recall that earlier, I’d shared tips on how to detect SPAM.

Bad speling, poor gramur, same IP address, some kind of store, and often asking for something – such as other social media locations.

Here, in this instance, notice the Time Stamp, the

SPAM Alert! Akismet up to bat… swings, misses. Striiiike one!

Most often, Akismet – a spam filtering service by Automattic – catches spam.

Sometimes, it does not.

Here’s one instance in which it did not.

Just in time for Christmas!

*!* Conspicuous Consumption *!*

*!* Consumer Alert *!*

From our “Useless Junk Aimed at the Stupidly Über Wealthy” Department:

With “Black Friday” looming in a few days, it’s not too early to begin thinking about what you’ll get for that person whom “has everything”!

Perhaps you work

A note on Illegal Immigration

Image via Wikipedia

The following is one of the typical e-mail “you must do something now!” kind of messages that so many of us receive in our e-mail in boxes.

In such typical fashion, they are either contain a type of ‘the world is going to end’ (and soon, if you don’t act now!), or either “the sky is falling!,” type of message.

While the motivation for the message, or the idea behind them may – at times – be worthwhile, often the delivery is suspect.

Following is the message, and – NOT TO BE MISSED – is

Spam the Spammer

If you keep a blog, or if you have an e-mail account, you know what a headache it is to get such garbage in your inbox, or on your site.

I’m referring to spam… not the tasty mixed-meat-in-a-can which is apparently popular with Hawaiians, but to the automatically-computer-generated gobblydegook that purports to promote everything from