Debt Whores – Updated

We need a recovery but does the recovery need us? What, if anything,  is our role?

In our naivete we might once have thought that in a democracy our role was to take a view and collectively decide what to do. Or failing that at least be consulted. I think that idea was fairly quickly shown for the silly school boy nonsense it was.  The ‘crisis’, we have been told, is a technical matter that requires decisive management by qualified experts. It is too important a matter for democratic suggestions (See Secrecy and Control) and amateur meddling. None of the experts has wished to consult the public. No one has seen fit to have an open debate. We are here to pay for decisions, not to take part in them.

So part one, of educating us as to what our real role was, in the ‘crisis’, was to calm us down and get us to understand that our place in the scheme of financial affairs was a menial one.  That some of us actually got vociferous and angry was NOT in the script, not welcomed and frankly was an unwelcome and awkward surprise.  Important people were seriously offended and more than a little affronted, that ‘little people’ suddenly thought they should have some sort of say in matters that did not concern them such as the pay of their betters.  Frankly words had to be had with those whose job it was to ‘look after us’ and keep us in our place.

Once that phase was over, however, we could move on. Once it was made clear, that the banking crisis, while it required our taxes and money,  did not require or even wish to tolerate our input, once that was made clear, then wiser, wealthier heads could get back to dealing with the ‘crisis’ in the way that best suited them. As they then did from TARP to European Bail out.

But that left us, all the more puzzled as to what our role could be?  Surely we had one?

And yes, actually, we were assured, we did. Our role, it then emerged, and it was repeated over and over, was to be the consumer. Lucky, essential us. We were needed after all.  Our job was to buy stuff. Most importantly houses, and then cars and after that all the other stuff that we used to be so keen on.  Our role was to consume so that others could produce and the bankers could securtitize the debts we would take on in order to do our consuming.  That is how it has been working. No need to think it should change, just because of a little awkward ‘liquidity’ embarrassment, surely?

UPDATE – as if to make my point for me, in case you missed it last night, Channel Four News ran this interview with Mr Bean (I kid you not) the Bank of England Deputy Governor, in which he said, and I quote, “…in the short term, we want to see households not saving more, but spending more.”  Yes you heard him right. It’s your part in our ‘Great Recovery’.

Back to the Original piece –

And give them their due, the experts were there to help us back into our role.  They lowered VAT and they offered tax incentives or rebates on buying a new car and a new house.  Sadly we let them down. Badly.  Not enough of us made the effort to acquire new things and to take on whatever new debt was required.  In fairness, the banks didn’t help us much, but then again they had bigger problems to deal with, we shouldn’t expect them to solve every problem for us, should we?

And so we come to the latest phase. Having failed in the role we were given what now for us?

Luckily it turns out we can be made to help even if we can’t do it ourselves.  You see if we won’t spend our money and take on debts in order to do so, we can have our money taken from us and spent for us.  And that is the arrangement at the moment.

The government has decided if we won’t spend our money voluntarily then it will have to do it for us without our consent.  These are dangerous times. Just as war may require the suspension of ‘luxury’ peacetime laws like trail by jury or no detention without proof, so too in this financial ‘war’ things like public debts may just have to accumulated for the purpose of saving “systemically important banks” and then be paid for with cuts to “systemically unimportant”social services such as policing, welfare, hospitals and education.  These are peacetime luxuries we will just have to live without in this time when the financial class need us all to pull together.

Thus what we have refused to spend, is now going to be withdrawn from us in the form of NOT spending on things we thought we had decided were good things, but now we find are bad and non-essential, AND we are going to have our taxes diverted from those things to pay for the ‘recovery’ by means of paying off the debts the government has wracked up in our name by giving the banks the money we refused to spend.

The truth is we forced them in to doing this. If we had done as we were asked it might not have come to this. But there you are sometimes the ‘common man’ cannot be counted on to do what his betters tell him to. That is what you get for encouraging the unwashed in to thinking they should have a say.

Still, water under the bridge.

In truth, it has turned out, a recovery of sorts can be and has been arranged without us. We have never been welcome as democratic participants. And we are not, it turns out actually essential even  as consumers. Others may soon be brought on as replacements in that role.  Our final and, if truth be told, demeaning and embarrassing final bit part is to allow ourselves to be used as debt whores.

We are being pimped out by our political masters to service their clients. They will hand over our taxes for as long as it takes and at whatever rate it takes, to clean up the mess their clients have spilt on us. And we should smile and be grateful while they do it.