© Steve Bell 2008 (Guardian)Like the credit crisis, the Wall Street Crash was caused by irresponsible lending, as hundreds of thousands of Americans, reassured that they could only make money by investing in shares, borrowed heavily to invest in the stock market. (Telegraph, today)
I think 'irresponsible lending' is the key phrase here. Our lives are at the hands of so called 'financial geniuses' (and I mean all our lives, not just the lives of people that are paying credit to their banks, although these people are hit more, I'm sure, how lovely...) and these self-designated genius are now leaving us in deep shit.
I'm not going to discuss this much, I'm not an economist and I will refrain from propagandising my political beliefs, which may be very distant from the idea of capitalism but do not change the fact that I live in a capitalist system and behave accordingly. I'm as capitalistic as they come, I guess, so my political convictions have obviously not taken me very far.
The question is now figuring out what to do. Perhaps trying to keep our cool and not believing everything that the media tries to feed us. Quite frankly, either I'm extremely dumb and cannot understand what they're on about or these media people/economists, whatever they are, are in more turmoil than banks and tax-payers. Just try reading the business section of the Guardian today, for example, and you'll see what I'm talking about (and I do like and respect the Guardian). Better yet: read the Guardian, then read another equivalent broadsheet and compare their analysis. One week we're not going into recession, the other week we're facing the worst recession since 1929; one week petrol will reach $200 a barrel, next week is going down after all; one week the Central European Bank will finally lower interest rates, the other week is increasing them after all, so on and so forth. All the predictions that journalists, economists and commentators who have aired their opinions on the media have made turned out to be utterly and completely wrong, so I for one am trying not to be allarmed by the madness that has taken over the media.
It seems, however, that the people who are running our lives don't really know what they're doing. How do they justify the money that they make at our expense? I don't know, but like I heard someone say, they still sleep at night. Is it shame on them or shame on us? We all borrow from the bank after all, from mortgages to credit cards to overdrafts. And we're not children, so we should all be smart enough to know we're dealing with complex financial institutions and a very sophisticated financial system that will only help us out if it gets something in return, ie, our money. But did we ever really have a choice? Was there ever a point at which we could have opted out of this system? I guess not, and that is our saving grace. Of course there are people who try more than others to be out of the system (ah, those lovely hippies). All the better for them, but do not tell me they don't need money to live, so they probably have a bank account as well and that's all it takes to be in the system. So, we're all on the same boat. Just hanging on. Hopefully we'll get to Ittaca some day, I really just hope that happens while we're young.
1 comment:
It's a great thought to try to be part of the system but in an honorable way. I don't know the answer to that. I've always admired Chomsky because (among many other things) he has decided to fight the system from the inside, he's a professor at MIT and an anarchist. It's not always easy, because systems can crush you when you're inside them, but I think it's worth to try. It's the only way.
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