HSBC's "Integrity" & "Responsibility": What a load of old Bank...

With the vast corruption and continual bonus-greed rife within the Banking world during the last couple of years, our Capitalist masters have now decided to give themselves a publicity makeover in the hope of garnering our lost confidence. This development can only mean one thing: our weary eyes assaulted on a daily basis by newly-devised TV adverts, keen to sell us the same old themes of trust, assurance and dependability, only with a fresh lick of monetary sheen in order to divert our gaze from the real issues. Yes, it’s just another imagining of the old street-corner “cup and ball” trickster routine from eons ago, their hands swirling in a blur to confuse and fleece us of our hard-earned cash, regardless of whether we are aware of this illusion or not. Accompanying this brazen financial deception is the now socially-acceptable mantra, “Greed is good”: uttered by the main protagonist, Gordon Gecko, in Oliver Stone’s masterful Wall Street (1987), we all have these words ringing in our ears on a daily basis now as we’ve become governed by wanton thrusting, jealous grasping and unbridled selfishness, all unavoidable side-effects from stoking the insatiable furnace of Capitalism.