Are Banksters more Rotten-Gangster than the gods of Science/Technic?

[alice wellintown]

Banks are perfectly placed to make money by aligning themselves with their
customers’ interests. That process is baked into what they do: they align
themselves with us by taking our deposits and looking after them safely,
and they align themselves with us by lending us money to buy things and
houses and keep the economy running. Their business *is* our interests. Or
should be. But the PPI scandal showed a fundamental breach in that
alignment between them and us. The other scandals of recent years are
variations on the theme of banks breaking rules and making mistakes. This,
though, wasn’t a mistake or a rule-breach, or rather it was, but the main
thing about it was an order of magnitude more important. PPI was about
banks breaking trust by exploiting their customers, not accidentally, but
as a matter of deliberate and sustained policy. They sold policies which
they knew did not serve the ends they were supposed to serve and in doing
so treated their customers purely as an extractive resource. That is why,
uncharismatic as it sounds and dreary in many of its specifics as it is,
PPI is the worst scandal in the history of British banking: the one that
shows just how badly wrong the industry had gone, and just how
fundamentally it violated what should have been its basic values. No wonder
that there’s been what the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards,
in the very first sentence of its 571-page report, calls ‘a profound loss
of trust born of profound lapses in banking standards’. PPI is the final
proof that our banks became rotten.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n13/john-lanchester/are-we-having-fun-yet
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