I think we can take banking to mean those particularly wicked fruits of the City of London... things like AIG's collapse, LIBOR and FX rigging, HSBC's drug money laundering, the seemlingly endless scandals of UK retail banking like PPIs, etc etc that have completely eroded the general public's trust of our pinstriped friends. Nobody's complaining about banking. We're worried about banking.

That's not how banking works.

Try reading up.

http://bankunderground.co.uk/2015/06/30/banks-are-not-interm...

I'm aware of how banks mostly originate and securitize loans these days, rather than holding them. However, as banks continue to perform many billions of mundane operations throughout our everyday lives, mere securitization may be problematic but seems inadequate to demonstrate a clear connection to the oppression of the working man.

In general, banks are not above criticism by any means, but making a throwaway statement about the existence of financial industry headquarters in a city being tantamount to Oppression is tendentious in the extreme. If one wishes to make that case in these pages while maintaining some semblance of rational discourse (as opposed to populist rhetoric and invective) then we should do so while identifying the assumptions and world-view which led to it, so that they can be properly understood and critiqued.

They oppress through credit issuance against land. My wages are worth nothing and have been for 15 years as land prices outpace wage inflation.

The UK launders loads of money through UK real-estate also. And helps the rich hide their money from their governments which would be redistributive.

Say what you like, the UK farms workers.