Three years after the financial doomsday device was activated, JK wonders if you silly primates have learned any lessons and why no one has important has gone to jail. Here's how it works: if you are a young black man mugging people in the street taking say £20 a time, the police will catch you and you will probably go to prison. But if you are rich, white, wearing a suit and the money you steal is in the hundred millions or billions, then you get a bail out from the tax payer and bonuses go back to normal. The amazing power of being rich and white. Don't forget, the financial crisis, was not accident or something that just happened. The crisis was the product of corrupt, amoral, greedy men who changed banking from funding productive enterprises to making insane bets with other people's money and when it all came crashing down, they took tax payers's cash. This is not private enterprise, it is not even socialism for the rich: it is a shakedown, Tony Soprano style.What's worse is we know who the guilty men are and some are still in post.
The really strange thing is that we fell with for this bullshit once, fair enough, but we're falling for it again. It's like going back to a card shark's table, hoping this time he won't fleece you. Worse still, a strange alternate history is being written where it was all the fault of the regulators. Some right wing cranks in the States even claim Bill Clinton is really responsible, as he promote home loans to the poor or subprime as they charmingly called. Baboom! A conjuring trick which distracts the audience from the real villains with as much intellectual depth as the junk paper the banks misold by the billions. Can you think of any area of business that would say it is not our fault we tricked investors, lied to shareholders, overpaid our staff, mislead the regulators and engaged in activities that are fraud in all but name, but none of this is our responsibility - you have to stop us. Imagine if you went to a restaurant that poisoned your food and the chef said I can't help I just hate customers, unless there is someone from the health inspectorate standing next to me, I will put rat poison in the soup. You'll spot the tiny logical flaw in this argument: banks claim markets are self regulating and need light supervision, except for 2008 when they cause more damage than a war, then it's all the government's fault for not stopping them. We win, you lose and fuck you for even questioning our motives or integrity.
So what is the answer. Don't bother looking to our current leadership for policies. David Cameron and George Osborne believe a free market is giving large corporations and financial interests tax breaks, like the disgraceful tax dodge Osbourne gave multinationals in February this year which allows them to bring money from tax havens avoiding UK tax. Free enterprise is their minds means a free for all for powerful, dominant interests and witness the results - financial meltdown, stagnant growth, rising inequality and social polarisation. It's not surprising that two men who have never worked for money or run a business don't get it (minding shop for your multi-millionaire dad does not count George). They fail to appreciate what a free market really should mean - free from distortion, monopoly practise, tax dodging and special influence. The banks are the most powerful lobby group and have taken over the debate so that what is the good for the City is also apparently good for Britain, when the exact opposite if often true - our world already is starting to resemble a ghastly cartoon of capitalism from a Soviet poster. Our living standards are not rising, by most indicators we are going backwards. But the top 1%, or even 0.5% of the population is doing very well. We are not in this together, Dave, and spare us the cod philosophy of sacrifice and collective effort, it's like listening to a public school boy stoner on a beach in Kerala waxing lyrical about the nobility of Indian poverty. Empty, empty phrases spouted by a man who has floated upwards on a cushion of money.
The rotten core of this problem is over mighty finance who need to go back to being boring bean counters. Banks are inherently fragile and unstable business, which is why they spend so much money persuading you about how solid they are - big offices, smart suits, all the theatre of respectability. To control this risk, you don't want alpha males anywhere near the keys to the safe, because they will bet it all on roulette, whilst snorting gargantuan mounds of cocaine and hiring bevies of women who charge more by the hour than most people earn in a week. No one gets richer in this process apart from bankers, Porsche dealers and high class madams.
When Bob Diamond of Barclays said it was time to stop banker bashing and Goldman Sachs Senior Vampire Blankfein claimed he was doing God's work, the really frightening thing is these men believed what they said. No lessons learned, no remorse, no shame, but it's time to banish these ghouls back to the shadows where they belong. Of course they have to believe this garbage, because otherwise when they look in the mirror they would see a monster, who has sucked wealth off the productive economy and entire life would have been better if he had never existed at all. Keep saying that mantra guys, it might keep your conscience at bay for a while, but JK wonders in the middle of the night, when they wake up all alone, do they have a moment of realisation - the alcoholic's moment of sobriety. When Adair Turner said much of this financial activity was socially useless, he was being too kind. Socially useless is more akin to an ill-advised business venture that goes nowhere - the sort of pointless hat shops you see last about 6 months in posh parts of town where Fennella has persuaded Daddykins to front the money - whereas the banks behaviour was socially toxic, closer to sowing landmines in a children's playground. JK wants to you ask yourself a simple question, if all the these overpaid, egomaniacs had done something else for a living, where would we be now....Oh that's' right, about £150 billion better off and counting. Turns out the biggest damage to Western civilisation was not Al Qaida's 9/11, it was nerds in suits.
So apologies if this week is a little light on laughs, sometimes pure rage is the only correct response. The genie of finance must go back into the bottle or else things will get really nasty. Banker bashing is only words and name calling now, but what if the 99% of the population decided to settle scores with these crooks. There's so many more of us than them, they should start practising their sorry faces. Or else.
For more information, you must watch this film:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(film)
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