More Cuts and more Bail-outs

Already wags in the financial press are suggesting we will shortly hear the sound of Ben’s helicopter flying over head. This is an hilarious reference to Mr Bernanke quoting a Milton Freidman image (still with me? It’s so hilarious – really!) of how the Fed could deal with deflation. Just drop money from a helicopter! Aren’t you in stitches? I’m not. In fact when I hear this I want to see bankers in stitches, and casts and traction.

You see public finances and borrowing are in crisis. Schools are being closed. Hospitals cutting staff. And they are closing because our nations have run up such huge debts. Those debts were not because the state sector was too large nor because nurses are over paid nor because firemen have outrageous pensions. They’re pensions may be generous, I don’t know. Nurses may be paid handsomely for all I know. I hope so. And the state sector I am sure is over-staffed with a thick scum of target setting, quota meeting, managers. BUT none of these are why our debts have exploded in the last two years.

The sole, and only reason our debts have exploded in the last two years, and why our borrowing costs are rising and why we must, actually, rein in our debts – is because we have borrowed, printed and spent hundreds of billions in only 24 months making sure the senior staff and senior bond holders of insolvent banks did not lose one solitary penny.

And now those same senior bond holders, who are also “the Bond Market” from whom we as a nation have borrowed, are telling us that WE must now make swingeing cuts to public services to offset the money we gave to them in the bail-out.

And to add a dose of acid into the wound, those cuts will not affect the bankers or the bond holders. Those people do not have any need for Social Securtity, unemployment or disability benefits, help with child care, national health or help when they get old. And because they personally don’t need these things and may even, not have ever interacted with any of them, they have no interest in them beyond the vaguest and intermittant sense of noblesse oblige.

In the UK the Tories talk about making cuts fair but in reality, unless you believe in the tooth fairy, fair and Tories just don’t sit together in the same sentence. Much like Labour and honesty. Or LibDem and principles. None of these work for me.

And neither does the joke about Ben’s helicopter. Because when you do hear it flying over head ready to shower the banks with more fresh cash, don’t look up. Because it won’t be cash falling on you it will be piss. Ben and the financial class will be pissing in your face from their helicopter.

The sound of that helicopter is the sound of their full bellied contempt for you. After weeks of stern lectures about how absolutely necessary it is to cut back our debts, those same people will now all line up to insist that hundreds of billions MORE debt must be taken on to save the banks. Of course they will try very hard to not say it that way. They will disguise who is being saved by talking about mortgages and real estate markets. But the institutions and the people who will benefit will be the banks and those who would be ruined if they fell – the senior bond holders.

And when they are done with telling us all the things we must save with more ‘stimulus’, they will turn around and without hesitiation tell us how it is even more imperative than ever, that we make even greater savings in the public sector.

And millions of chip munching morons and “we should trust those who know better than us” Uriah Heep cowards and cringers, will believe them.

What those of us who do not believe them can and should do I am not at liberty to say. All I do know is that our options and time are both running out.