CRUNCHY CREDIT?

There is a very good friend of mine, Seamus, who is a bank manager but works in a pub on a Sunday. He has been part of the Feast-day furniture for a few decades. The joke being that if there were photographs of the pub going back through the years, Seamus would be in each one looking pretty much the same as everything around him changed. On entering the boozer of a Sunday the opening sallies would always be along the lines;
‘Hello mate.’
‘Morning.’
‘How is the heady world of finance?’
‘Oh… you know. Heady.’
For many years this has been our opening exchange, however times change. The pint request is now accompanied by;
‘How is your credit? Crunchy?’
Over recent weeks, Seamus has come into his own by offering an insider’s view on the current global, financial crisis.
‘I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you. It’s all a load of b**locks really.’
When Seamus starts to worry it will be time to panic. The speed and severity of the situation, though, does require at least some investigation seeing as how, ‘We’re all doomed.’ There have been warnings of a ‘credit crunch’ for some months back with dark mutterings from people, mainly fat men who have as much money as they could wish for if they were reasonable, about belt tightening and the like. Then, in August, against all of the dire warnings, High Street spending was up. Outrageous. Do these people not know when it’s time to embrace austerity? A month or so later and banks were on the verge of collapse as though it were all the fault of M&S knicker consumers. It was, all of a sudden, a terrible emergency requiring unprecedented financial jiggery-pokery. The figures involved are extraordinary.
The digital counter in Times Square that shows the exact level of the American National Debt has run out of digits now that the total stands at more than $10,000,000,000,000. The American Government has ‘found’ $700,000,000,000 from somewhere to bail out the system. This is for a population of 300,000,000 people. In what used to be the UK there was, just like that, £50,000,000,000 available to the banks to keep 60,000,000 persons from panic. Half of the world’s population, 3,000,000 live on less than $1.00 a day. The Click Campaign of yesteryear had such luminaries as Bono and Kate Moss informing us that one child in the developing world dies needlessly every three seconds. That has not changed. ‘If child dies every time Bono clicks his fingers, why doesn’t he just stop?’ Zimbabwe has appealed for £27,000,000 of aid otherwise 45,000,000 people will be starving come January. British Councils are bleating that they might have lost £700,000,000 in Icelandic banks and are demanding recompense. They want taxpayers’ money to pay back the council tax payers’ money that they lost gambling. Constant phrases on the wireless are ‘credit crunch’ with ‘Doom and gloom’, and everyone is worried. The Government, those kind souls, has guaranteed every UK saver that their savings will be honoured up to £50,000. Meanwhile, in China, the formerly boom industry of toy manufacture is suffering with 50% of all businesses gone bust, but their Space Program is going ever so well.
Back home, those overfed, overpaid, vicarious gamblers are talking up recession, or is that down? Words are being uttered at expensive dinner parties. There is such a concept as a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. First they make up the definition of ‘recession’; that plus that, minus the number you first thought of and it’s not my round. Then they warn it’s about to happen. Any minute now. Then George W, never one to be fully aware of what’s going on, holds a conference of world leaders to discuss how to stop such a dreadful thing happening again, and promising to defend the role and freedom of ‘free trade’. America? Free trade? Right.
What the French Connection is going on? Of course, if this were the BBC, I would immediately have to point out that other euphymisms for swearwords are available. What the Top Shop d’you think you’re wearing?, for example. My; you’re looking L’Oreal glossy, being another. Of course, one could dip into irony. This is McDonalds’ tasty. You’re such a Starbucks individual; and etcetera.
There have been more than a few earnest types on radio and TV stating that this is not the ‘death of capitalism’, that great beast of our times, the nemesis of the evil communism. That fact that communism is alive and well doesn’t seem to bother anyone. This is not the death of capitalism but capitalism is showing itself up for the utter load of b$£locks that it is. Even though charities have been campaigning for funds to help the world’s penurous all through the ‘boom’, little seems to have been done, other than ‘celebrities’ increasing their good PR. Suddenly, there is all this money to keep the rich, rich. How can anyone sit on £50,000 when they know, they must know, how much suffering exists on this planet? They could only be described as miserable, miserly, indefensible, inexcusable and rather bathetic. Keeping hold of such money for a nebulous but completely selfish purpose defies the very essence of humanity. Sales of safes have risen exponentially. What foul people.
An entirely bizarre scenario seems to exist that, not only do politicians think that people believe and trust them, but it seems as though they do. How could anyone think that politicians do anything other than lie?
The really stupid thing is that there is a very simple answer to all of this. Money is nothing other than a concept. The idea that a lump of metal or a piece of paper with numbers on, are equivalent to anything is just daft, but we all play along with the lie. We are like children approaching Christmas. If we all behave…
If, we simply decided that money did not exist anymore, carry on as normal taking a step at a time, not much would happen. The world would still turn. The hideously rich would not be any more. The grindingly poor would cease to be so. For most life would be pretty much the same but a bit better all the time.
A little known fact is that drugs have been decriminalized in Portugal for a number of years. Certainly, I had no idea, despite the phrase book, when I visited there in 2002. Thinking about it, a lump of Black was very easy to buy after asking the right question outside a bar, and the dealer seemed unperturbed at being paid from a cash-point right by the Police Station. It is not widely known because it has been hugely successful, freeing up police everything. ‘They’, whomever ‘they’ are don’t want anyone to know. That sort of knowledge is dangerous. The two greatest blights on humanity are money and religion. It would be hard to do anything about the latter since people will always want to believe in superstitious silliness, but something could be done about money. Everything bad that happens in the world, and everything good that doesn’t, can be traced to either/and those two. If humanity is going to escape from the parlous and suicidal path it is currently on, we have to do something radical in the extreme. The people who do really rule the world, not the politicians dummy, would rather they held onto their totalitarian power. There is a song lyric, ‘You can breathe in space, but they don’t want you to know.’
We could rid ourselves of the curse of money if only people would work together, selflessly, with trust and trustworthiness. It would be easy enough. Fat chance.