PIRATES AND ROBBERS: CAPITAL RULES…
Milton Friedman was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite monetarist. He said “What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system.” The first half of this utterance is true; the last bit is abject rubbish. And why does he think we need greed in any case?
As the old saying goes, ‘To make the rich work harder, you pay them more. To make the poor work harder, you pay them less.’ Whereas there is a basic truth in this, once the rich become rich, few of them work ‘hard’ except in that department of their occupation which keeps the shareholders happy. For the underbelly of western society, whereas the modern concept of ‘poverty’ does not always fully apply, (we still don’t see as many beggars on the streets as in other parts of the world), the concept of hard work is given as a burden at birth, unless you acquire the basic drives of greed and avarice somewhere along the line. Of course, atthis point in history, it’s all too late. From 1979 onwards a generation was taught that greed is good, and even for old dreamers like me, I have to accept what Nikita Kruschev said: “When all the world is socialist, Switzerland will have to remain capitalist, so that it can tell us the price of everything.” The trouble is with capitalism, however, is that it knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing – and especially humanity.
Captalism has always been based on criminality. The desired answer to this schoolteacher’s arithmetic question ought to clear this point;
“Tommy buys six oranges from the market at 5p each. He sells them to his friends at ten pence each. What does he get?” Answer? Six months in jail.
Of course, Tommy grows up and continues buying oranges and anything else he can screw his friends for at a profit, and eventually might own a chain of takeaways or become one of the new noxious breed of greed-driven property speculators and landlords. Once he’s made his first £5 million, he realises that this isn’t enough. He then realises that buying and selling things is a mugs game if he wants to be a billionaire. So he becomes CEO of an insurance company, or decides to run some kind of business/management consultancy. In such occupations you don’t have to suffer the messy indignity of buying, making or selling ‘things’. Such transactions involve the employment of human beings with some kind of skill, and skills mean wages. The secret is, once you have the capital, it does the work for you. Sitting at your laptop you simply shuffle it around, and wait for each investment to make a profit. The distant, unseen repercussions of your daily keypad adventures, the closure of factories, the robbing of land, evicted families, the manufacture of arms, the raiding of pension funds, are not your concern. In any case, by this time, you’ve been given the ultimate accolade by capitalism, which rewards sophisticated criminality whenever possible – a Knighthood, or even better, you’ve ‘taken the ermine’ and you’re sitting in the House of Lords. The latter is a much preferable title, much better than the low-rent indignity of becoming an MP. As of recently, fiddling your expenses not only loses you your job – it can land you in jail. The only secret is not to get caught, but as a Lord you can have six months in Ford Open Prison, get a nice job in the library, sleep like a log every night and when you come out, as per Lord Archer, head straight back to the Upper Chamber, don your ermine and claim your lucrative daily expenses. Lords can do what they like. Don’t dare mention criminality.
Led by the rapacious greed and Machiavellian fiscal plotting of the banks over the past four decades, we now live in a world of total financial piracy. Payment Protection Insurance – that ‘give us your wages and we’ll give you bugger all back’ plot, - was early evidence. Thankfully, they dropped the ball with that one, but they’ll continue to trouser their massive bonuses (failure in your job almost guarantees this) from all manner of other charges – from overdraft ‘fines’ and Byzantine charges simply for the privilege of having an account. Their brothers and sisters, the power, oil and water companies and the insurance internationals all hide behind a well-built façade of something called ‘Customer Care’. The banks will always make sure that money takes a one-way journey – from you to them. Thus a credit card payment will be added to your debt instantly, whereas when you receive a cheque, it will take five days to clear. Whilst you await this, the money you have earned, like the leeches they are, they will suck their few milligrams of blood interest before allowing you your wages. Pay for something on line, and use a credit card, and more than likely there’s a fee – why? This is the equivalent of me offering to pay someone a £10 debt using either two £5 notes or a single £10. “Ah – if you pay using two fivers then the price is £11.”
Somewhere in those exorbitant glass towers in the City of London there are committees meeting daily to find new methods of financial piracy, from airport taxes and extra luggage charges through to excessive punitive charges for those hapless enough to get on the wrong train with the wrong overpriced ticket. But Virgin Trains and Midland et al don’t need to worry about the upkeep of the rails they run on. We suckers, the great unwashed, pay for the upkeep of the system through our taxes. Making a profit must be protected at all costs. There's no profit in health and safety schemes. This relentless greed has filtered down (is this Thatcher’s ‘trickle-down’ process of capitalism?) into our local elected councils, where even the disabled are now punished with a £60 fine for not paying £2 to stay 10 minutes in a Civic car park. Lcal government is now a brave new world where everything is farmed out to the private sector. It has seeped like a toxin into our NHS. No longer the volunteer-run café in your local hospital, with a fund-raising charity shop alongside. Such human touches do not provide profit, and have been removed. In their place are Costa Coffee at £2 per slug, alongside W.H. Smith, and in Rotherham, where their hospital specialises in obesity treatment, they actually have a branch of Burger King on site. Can’t have the fatties getting slim – where’s the profit in that? But when you're really ill, we can sell you BUPA, and when BUPA's profitability schemes can't squeeze any more cash from you, we'll throw you back to the NHS.
There are no politicians now who want to want to change the world. In Britain, we have the rotting dung heap of the House of Commons. This is a place where the elected members are paid to do what should be a full-time job, and paid handsomely for it by us, its 'shareholders'. Yet check out the Parliament channel on TV on any given day, and apart from PM’s Question Time – where are all our ‘employees’? They’re doing their second and third jobs, running their law firms, stockholding and banking companies and PR outfits. If you are lucky enough to be interviewed for a job in a factory or as a nurse or delivery driver, try asking your new boss “Is it OK if I don’t come in on some days so that I can run my little business?” You'd be back at the Job Centre in minutes. So, we can safely assume that being a Member of Parliament is not a full time job, despite its full time salary and expenses. Until someone is brave enough to pass a law stating that as an MP, this is your sole occupation to which you have been elected and paid by the People – and thus you will DO NO OTHER WORK, then this stinking system will carry on. If we're 'all in this together' then why are 16,000 policemen losing their jobs, thousands of nurses, benefits cuts, whilst the increasingly rich get a tax cut to make them even richer? Why are we 'having' the Corporate Olympics, and celebrating the publicly-funded 60 year 'reign' of a Queen who shakes hands with despots and deniers of human rights? A Monarchy, for Christ's sake? Where are we living - Tolkien's Middle Earth or 21st century Europe?
Capitalism’s lifeblood is its lack of morality. A ‘Captain of Industry’ or even an MP is someone who, by definition, can ill afford to believe in anything other than the monetary doctrine of the bottom line. Deprive him of his God-given right to lie and cheat and steal, and he stands a better than even chance of becoming one of us – the increasingly unemployed underdogs, from whose grimy fingers Cameron, Osborne, and the duplicitous NHS pirate Andrew Lansley hope to snatch the tattered remnants of democracy.
