False flags, Wolf Meat & Greedy, braindead banks

Just a few opening lines to tell you first, the target for two boreholes to be drilled in the tiny hamlet of Toniataba in the Jarra district lower river region of The Gambia has been reached: work starts the day after tomorrow and will be completed by next weekend. Second, the generosity of Sloggers says everything about them, and restores one’s lagging faith in decency – donors big or small, I thank and salute you. And finally, please don’t send any more money, as the appeal account is now closed.

As for the rest of the content today, the headline above says it all…

At 9.24 pm Gambian time Saturday, Elon Musk posted the following (clearly meant to be) ”sensational” tweet:

”Gosh,” we all exclaim, ”He gets it! Maybe he is on our side after all?”

I’d love to believe it, but I’m not sure I do. At all. Elon achieved his goal of going viral immediately (he was still trending 18 hours later) and spookily, his intervention came at the end of two days during which the nasty folks seemed to be having a bad time. We were given lots of clues like ”Elites in crisis?”, ”Schwab admits control of most governments and banks”, ”Putin condemns Schwab as legitimate military target” and so forth.

A year ago at this blog, I posted that ‘Klaus von Schlaphead is merely the lighting director. He and the Global Pharma bigwigs starring in this bizarre and unimaginably evil production will be thrown to the wolves.’ So could be that’s what might be going on at the moment.

Certainly, 36 hours ago, Hillary Clinton was allowed onto the interview airwaves without a minder, and finally made clear the true nature of her illness – she is blue blithering barmy bonkers – by suggesting that Trump voters might well be required to go to concentration camps in order to be ‘deprogrammed’. Perhaps she too is on the list to be a victim of her own lone-car crash methodology at some point.

But lets try to be positive where we can be: not everything looks dark. The emerging Brics New Development Bank [NBD] certainly talks a good game when it comes to restoring the original plot about banks being ‘disaster-resilient, technology-integrated and socially-inclusive’….but can it walk the walk?

The NBD has just announced a three-year ‘de-Dollarisation’ plan as part of its sure-to-be accepted invitation for six new members to join the alliance. This is very obviously an enormous threat to Washington – and equally important – to the uni-polar hegemonists busily encouraging the US, UK, EUNATO and other ”interests” to bankrupt themselves and face socio-cultural ruination as the rationale for New Normal World Order government…a concept supported by roughly 0.03 per cent of the global human population.

Whatever the up and downsides of Islamic and Chinese values might be, the genuinely encouraging nature of this determination to keep the Earth multilateral in terms of power is not a giant leap for mankind, but it is a reminder that ”you reap what you sow” and with luck the mad folks just might wind up cancelling each other out.

The other key advantage to remember is that, in that context, the power of Mexican Bank of International Settlements (BIS) boss Man Mountain Agustin Carstens just might be limited…

If anyone was ever to run for the title of Banker Incarnate slob (BIS) then Agy’s main priority would be commissioning a feasibility study to solve the problem of how to break into a run without breaking both his legs. He could of course suck his belly-button and then roll in a generally forward direction, which would be fun to watch – but painful if he was using his hands as brakes, given that they’ve encountered nothing more challenging than a knife and fork since 1960.

He weighs in at 136 kilos which – for the morbidly sadistic among you – amounts to 5 kilos more than a fully stocked four-door fridge, the same weight as a female grizzly bear he might keep in the fridge, six kilos more than a king-size bed (frolics not recommended), sixteen kilos more than the giant Arapawa pig of New Zealand, and a mere two kilos less than a Grand Piano.

When Carstens attends a meeting, he has to be lowered into it via the roof – using a crane, sturdy rope and the kind of chair last seen straining under the weight of Henry VIII. He has been censured several times by the Mexican financial authorities for his outrageous flying costs (he needs five First Class seats on either side of the aisle to ensure a safe take-off) and when travelling by ship to save costs, Agustin is banned from the outer deck because, were he to fall overboard, he would represent a more serious threat to shipping than a Titanic Class iceberg.

But perhaps most important of all, Agustin Carstens is banned from jumping up and down in New York City, as were he to do so, there is a 1 in 3 chance of him causing a Tsunami off the coast of South West Australia.

But while I poke fun at the elemental case of Senor Carsten the ultimate banker symbol of excess, we should never underestimate the callous nature of bankers with more freedom of movement than The Carsten Kid.

In the Slogstocks today [so have your rotten cabbages and semi-liquid tomatoes at the ready] is the truly appalling sellout that was once the trail-blazing antibank Transferwise, latterly converted into Wise Bank – and thus neutered to the point of being Blies Wank, the enthusiastic user of incompetent AI.

TransferWise was a UK-based foreign exchange financial technology company founded by Estonian businessmen Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus in January 2011. I am happy to record that I opened a large account with them very early on, because their transfer service was efficient, incredibly cheap and approachable with phone and email access to advisors that was a welcome change from the faceless iniquity of so called retail and investment banks.

Käärmann’s stake in the business is worth approximately $2.1 billion, while Hinrikus’ is worth $1.2 billion. So clearly, they have done very well from having had an excellent idea that revealed the wanton profiteering of international banks. In 2012, Wise was named one of “East London’s 20 hottest tech startups” by The Guardian, Start-Up of the Week by Wired UK, one of five “start-ups to watch” at Seedcamp’s 2012 US Demo Day by TechCrunch, and appeared in Startups.co.uk’s list of the top 100 UK start-ups of 2012.

But somehow – it seems – the banks got into their knickers….and then at their throats: In April 2013, Wise stopped letting users purchase Bitcoin, citing pressure from banking providers. In April 2017, an round-robin email from Santander claimed the bank would lose 84% of its revenue from its money transfer business if its charges were the same as Wise, warning its monopolous community that the Estonian upstarts were in danger of massacring the cushy life banksters enjoy.

The dream was finally over in January 2021, when Transferwise appointed Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as joint global coordinators for its planned initial public offering. Inevitably, on 22 February 2021, the company rebranded from TransferWise to Wise Bank. By July, co-founder Hinrikus aanounced he would step down in a bid to keep up to date with his money counting, and he was replaced as Chairman by David Wells.

In June 2022, the Financial Conduct Authority reported that the remaining Wise CEO, Kristo Käärmann, was included on their list of individuals and businesses receiving penalties for a deliberate default regarding their tax affairs. As from the beginning of this year [2023] 2023, Wise partners with BlackRock for its interest bearing accounts.

The rapid toboggan slide from monopoly disrupter to swamp dweller was complete.

The change was summed up in these columns late last week, when I wrote:

‘Wise Bank, for example, has screwed up every transfer made from my funds there to any bank with an African address – be they for guitar repairs, charitable donations, backing for a transport business or a motor bike redesigned to help a small retailer buy more stock in bulk. The bank insists it must obey EU rules on secondary verification, but I haven’t been resident in France for eighteen months, and none of the banks involved are. I tried seventeen times to take a picture the AI bot liked, then I gave up and refused to comply. All these measures (we hear) are to protect ”our” money; but as we’ve seen already, the law says it’s THEIR money….hence the concern. Meanwhile, every month a fraudulent $40 standing order goes through. They ignore every message I send them to stop it’

This evoked the following comment thread from a Wise Bank staffer, who opined:

‘…..is it any wonder that things go wrong? Not really…..a couple of the Big Four banks in the UK have had enough. No more expats will bank with us.’

But if that horse’s mouth condemnation isn’t enough for you, once I decided enough was enough and it was time to leave, I tried to get Wise’s attention by being rude about the service, using Twitter as the medium of complaint. As always, it had the desired effect…up to a point. [This reality alone is the reason why Musk was hired by the Secret State to decimate Twitter’s audiences]

As to the ”up to a point” thing, there now follows a genuine photo-capture of the exchange that took place between Wise and I on Twitter DMs. I suspect it will make you both amused by the flagrantly false rationales and yet also very angry at the obstacles being hastily erected at every turn to confuse the client or justify risible service.

Here we go….my replies are in the dark blue – pretty appropriate given the colour of the air at the time.

[‘Shortly’ is Bot-speak for ‘longly’. The agent never materialised. Perhaps he was a secret agent.]

[At this point I gave up. I was all reached out. The next Bot who says that to me, I will reach out to as well. And strangle him]

In order to finally escape from the light at the end of my tunnel – which was surely another train stashed to the gunnels with irrelevant ideas heading directly for me – I snuck off and loaded a new transfer to the most trustworthy person I know in this region, and sent her a transfer of the total amount at risk but requiring a forex from GBPounds to Euro….thus ensuring I could get the authorisation via Whatsapp.

It worked first time. But here’s the moral of the story: Wise charged me 131.77 GBP. Seven times more than normal, based on little more than pure spite.

Let me just conclude as follows. Please don’t dismiss me as a self-obsessed penny-pinching Shylock: this is what happens when Neoliberal Communism delivers nothing for the citizen, but everything the financialising 3-card tricksters need in order to apply for seats at the Top Politburo Table.