Banks crush People

So what next?

So much has been written about our financial situation but most of it has concentrated upon the health or otherwise of the banks and more recently the health of national currencies and debts. Thus the frame of reference has always been far above the level of our scurrying little concerns. In so far as we appear in the narrative at all, it is as the crowd of extras who add the sense of atmosphere behind the leading actors.

And this, I think, is genuinely how the bankers and politicians see it. They are the stars who move the drama. We are the crowd to whom the drama happens. We will be saved or sacrificed, depending on what the principal actors and their drama require. Their drama, their needs, not ours. No good script lingers on the needs and wants of the bit-part extras.

And so far we seem supinely compliant with this state of affairs. We seem, for the most part, content to treat ourselves as the bankers and politicians see us, as expendable. We seem content watching the trials and tribulations of the banks, central banks and national debts as if they were soap stars.

But it isn’t a soap opera is it? It’s real lives, our lives, filled with our hopes and our anguish. So what about us? What does this script hold for us?

Well a quote from a Japanese Citigroup analyst talking about Japan gives me my clue and starting place. This quote seems to me to be naively unguarded .

“We think moves like a consumption-tax hike, a corporate-tax cut, a focus on fiscal discipline, deregulation, the sale of government assets, monetary easing, and efforts to weaken the yen would be positive for share prices,” Citigroup analyst Tsutomu Fujita said in a note to clients Thursday,…”

Lets take this apart shall we? And we will find the template of how the script is going to be written.

A consumption tax hike, but a corporate tax cut. Corporations must not be taxed unduly because that would hinder them in their glorious recovery. Instead, what ordinary people eat and wear and need to live their ordiinary scurrying lives, must be taxed. More money must be squeezed from the crowd, so the corporations and banks can rise heroic, from among us, more shining, more powewrful, more glittering and untouchable than before.

There must be ‘fiscal discipline’. We must accept our part as the faceless army assembled at the feet of the lords and ladies of the aritocratic, global financial class. We must be disciplined and ready to do whatever is required for the great and the good to ride to victory. So cut public spending on all things to do with little people. The education of their children, the care for their elderly, their health, their pensions, help when they are unemployed – all must be ‘disciplined’. That’s the watch-word that sounds good on the lips of the leading actors. To talk of discipline sounds heroic. The camera never lingers on the hunger of the troops – only on their beaming faces, as their feudal betters pass and for a moment shine down dignity and meaning upon the insignificant ranks.

And we must also have ‘deregulation’. We must sweep away the pettyfogging carping of do-gooders who think that by restraining the power of corporations and banks, some good can be done. We can have no more truck with this. The banks and corporations must be freed from restraint. They must be set free and so must we. Free from the laws which we thought were protecting us.

Then we find that the glorious drama is to be funded by ‘the sale of government assets.’ Government assets makes it sound like they were things left lying around by a careless and stupid owner. What he means is sell off to the corporations and banks, all the assets that you and I and our parents – the pubic – have paid for and built up over years of work and patient care. And what then? How will this be better?

Well in the short term the government will have some cash to make its debts seem lower for a while. Debts in large part created by the vast cost of bailing out the banks. And the assets themselves? Well they will have been bought by the banks with the very cash the governments taxed from the people and then used to bail out the banks. The banks will aquire assets from us using money taken from us. Then, once they have ownership, the banks and corporations will use the new deregulated work-place to cut wagesand benefits, fire without notice, hire back as they please on ‘more flexible’ terms and conditions, cut back on any services not deemed profitable enough, and either dump pensions back on the public purse or start to whittle them away in the name of efficiency.

And lastly we must have financial easing – print more money for the banks to use – and weaken the currency. Never mind that it will make the money in your pocket buy less of what you need.

To my mind it is a charter for the empowerment of the wealty by the robbing of the poor.

Is it only in Japan that this is being advocated or imagined by those it will enrich? No it is global.

In Europe the markets believe both Greece and possibly Portugal will eventually have to default and restructure. They will, in the end, be the lucky ones. Spain and Italy cannot be allowed to default. They must endure the prescribed recovery. Spain has nearly 20% unemployment. This will GO UP as the banks and bond market get their way. Recovery will become a euphemism for sustained, prolonged and unprotected unemployment. IF we allow it to happen that is.

The same will happen in Italy. It is already happening in Ireland. It may well happen here in GB.

The Spainish government is on the verge of foring upon its own people, labor law ‘deregulation’. This will not be a gentle removal of silly restraints on sound business practice. It will be the forcing of ordinary people to work harder, longer and with less redress than their neighbors.

And even in America where people are so in love with their myths of can-do and rugged individualism, that they do not want to hear about 19% unemployment. Or the fact that unemployment figures simply don’t include those who come to the end of the 99 weeks maximum unemployment benefit and simply fall off the end into oblivion. Those people and their families become non-american. Not un-american, just non existent. Some of them will still believe their country is a great nation. But their nation won’t care to rememeber they even exist. I feel a wave of sorrow for these people – The faithful poor.

I feel sad about what I have written. We, the people, have brought so much of this upon ourselves. We were greedy and stupid and beleived those who said house prices would never go down, so of course you can withdraw that equity. But it wasn’t just us was it? Our governments believed those same experts when they told them the could ‘finesse’ budgetary short-falls with clever currency swaps and crafty investment vehicles. Our regulators turned a deaf ear to all and any who warned the banks were storing up debts too large to service and leverage too massive to withstand the slightest down-turn.

But none of them is going to pay a thing for the vast waves of suffering and hopelessness. None of them will be found in the crowd of jostling extras eager to have their face recognised if even only for a minute.

How shall we describe tthe situation we have been shepherded to? I would say for the sake of brevity – Banks Crush People