How Gordon the Moron Made Greed Respectable - and Made Us Pay for It

Down on our little allotment in South Gloucester in the good old Dis-United Kingdom, my best mate Nosher and I were discussing some of the ideas presented in the BBC2 TV documentary 'Super-Rich: The Greed Game' screened on April First. It claimed to reveal how us ordinary people are paying for the vast wealth amassed by hedge-fund traders and the super-rich during the ten years when Gordon the Moron was Chancellor and made life so easy for the super-rich that most of them now pay less tax than their servants.
In a round-a-bout way the documentary did indeed explain how this has come about, in the now standard patronisingly condescending style of the BBC. This is now becoming so off-putting to anyone with an adult perspective on life that I can't let it go by without further mention. The presenter persistently over-emphasises key words and over-articulates key participles as though the intended audience were sub-teens with little ability to follow any sentence that is not accompanied by a nauseating degree of obviously artifical enthusiasm, combined with clumsy attempts to induce in the audience the uplift of morale necessary to retain the interest of the fragile sub-teen attention-span, which otherwise might be diverted to playing with toys. Thus has the BBC now reduced its expectations of the intellectual and emotional capacity of its audience to that of the average 12-year old.
Nonetheless, both Nosher and I managed to endure being treated like 12-year-olds for a whole hour, and the next day found us exchanging our opinions.
'What I didn't understand' said Nosher 'was why the programme did not explain how our country can avoid being held hostage by these greedy and ruthless people, so that if we scare them away our economy is likely to collapse.'
'That's because the programme's agenda was not to tell us the truth' I replied 'but to convince us that there's absolutely nothing we can do about the situation, although all of us ordinary people, and especially the poor, are paying for it.'
'So what is the truth? Nosher asked.
'The truth' I explained 'insofar as it exists, is that Gordon the Moron made the City of London the best place for greedy, ruthless and morally defective individuals to bleed this country dry by allowing the City to operate hedge-funds with no effective regulation, whilst enabling the sharks in this pool of slime to write their own terms and contracts, so that whatever happened they would come out filthy rich.'
'But in the programme they were saying this was good for our economy' said Nosher 'haven't they created jobs and wealth for the rest of us?'
'In a word: No. They have sucked in billions of pounds of borrowed money, used it to speculate by buying and selling companies like confetti, and at the same time made property prices and the prices of many commodities rise, because the money for their vast earnings has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the ordinary people of this country. Now that the bubble has burst, we ordinary people are still paying for it, as our property values fall, interest charges rise, and costs increase on all sorts of transactions, and in addition we all have to live with increased insecurity on our lives. Meanwhile the cynical moral defectives who caused all this misery will be sitting pretty in their Carribean hide-outs with billions of pounds in the bank to live off.'
'But why did Gordon the Moron allow all this to happen?' Nosher was looking more and more puzzled.
'Because' I said 'Gordon the Moron was intent on borrowing vast amounts of money from the financial markets, and if he didn't make life easy for them he wouldn't have got it. While claiming be fiscally prudent, he has landed the country so deep in debt that over 40% of our GDP is now spent on debt repayments - if it rises much higher our economy will simply implode. So instead he will be raising taxes ruthlessly over the next few years so that the poorest people end up paying for his poor judgement as their already low incomes are further depleted by higher taxes.'
'And there's nothing we can do about all this?' asked Nosher.
'There's lot's we can do about it' I said. 'We refuse to play their game. We borrow as little as possible, we spend only what we need to, and we engage as far as possible in a moneyless lifestyle, using skill-sharing and bartering. And having an allotment plot is an excellent idea because we can grow lots of our own food at a fraction of the supermarket price and far better quality and flavour.'
'But us two are doing all these things already!' exclaimed Nosher.
'That's right' I said 'so when the recession hits, and it's on its way, we'll have a good chance of riding it out with little impact on our lifestyle. It's the one's who've borrowed up to the hilt, who have no skills to share, and who have nothing useful to barter with, who will suffer the most. Ignorance, incompetence, foolishness and stupidity are now the ordinary person's worst enemies, although many who are afflicted with these inadequacies lack the insight to even begin to make their lives easier, such is the precipitous decline of our educational system.'
As we turned to plant our seed-trays I couldn't help but ponder the irony of the motif of wealth the documentary introduced at the beginning of the show: Damien Hirst's grotesquely vulgar diamond-embedded human skull, thought to have been bought by a conglomerate for a reputed £50million. It represents everything that is so repugnant about the super-rich: their poor taste, their vulgar exhibitionism, their over-inflated egos, their indifference to the poverty and suffering their ruthless, selfish greed imposes upon other more vulnerable people, and, above all, the mere fact that they can impoverish millions of people and then fly away to some billionaire's hide-away and forget about what they've done. The rest of us, meanwhile, have to endure life in crime-ridden, rubbish-strewn towns and cities plagued by thugs and bullies who stand little chance of being apprehended by the police, because our justice system is now so ineffective.
This is the reality of every-day life for ordinary people in the Dis-United Kingdom.
More from http://www.overthegardenfence.blogspot.com/ soon.
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