2008 was not a financial crisis – it was an armed robbery – rich of the poor.
In the UK politicians had allowed banks to invest everyone’s money – recklessly.
The banks, as institutions, fluffed the money away.
It was ‘financial mismanagement’ of the highest order if it wasn’t intended. Or a giant robbery if they did – and a giant robbery anyway – even if they didn’t.
Whilst the shareholders creamed off dividends, and the staff creamed off commissions for themselves. None of this money was ever recouped and put back into the system.
And by the way, is it a coincidence that this happened just after Blair departed? (probably, but who knows for sure? Seriously – is there anyone who can know for sure?)
Then Gordon Brown’s government used tax payers money to buy the decrepit bits of the bank and give money back to the banks so they could pay investors’ money.
Gordon Brown and his ministers should be in jail for this. They had no right to do this. Well – it seems they did – because they did it – and no-one has taken them to court. Investors and banks should have been made to suffer. They messed it up. Banks did the real big mess. Then investors and savers should have been punished for investing in the banks. The banks should have gone to the dogs. The savings with them.
But rather than make the rich and savers pay for their mistakes – Gordon made the taxpayer pay for the mistake – and then the people decided to elect – fresh faced private schooled piggy Dave – to ensure that it was the poor and working people who made the ultimate sacrifice.
The impact of impoverishing working people and the poor in this way – to benefit the rich – has led to an extraordinary level of cynicism.
Its not as if the poor got together – and thought – right – now we need to be determined to create a political movement that never allows the rich to do this again.
Instead the social consequences of piggy Dave’s policies were to create a new generation of super-cynical and traumatised and scared – uneducated zombies – who have grown up starving, hopeless, ashamed and distressed and depressed.
The poor and impoverished working classes – rather than creating some unified revolutionary front – have become more traumatised and scared of the powers that be – like a cowed kid in the playground – they are now more then ever the first ones, the most willing people to get behind and offer their services to the biggest playground bully – Trump, Musk, Farage – to preserve their sense of psychological safety.
They meekly bend their lives to the beck and call and whim and mercy of zero how contracts – and why away from the unions who look like they might be the next victim or with whom association risks more bullying.
Now their only frame of reference now is globalised social media alt-right anti-liberal anti-socialist cultural shit show – and a vacuous celebrity culture as their only frame of aspirational reference – no wonder – turning to the States people vote for Trump – or in the UK – like the orange skinned pin-striped Nigel Far-right-age.
If anything – the poor – are so cynical now – and not through their consciously choosing that – have such little sense of any kind of benefit coming out of collective action and self-interest – they are now unthinking subservient followers – of this new tribe – which is under the spell of the totalitarian authoritarian – entertainment shit show.
Democracy is finished. Maybe its not.
But one thing is for sure.
The only way the state or government is ever going to get impoverished people to start looking after themselves – is if the state and government starts looking after them first.
Give Gordon Brown his due then – although he missed an opportunity to give people a wake up call – and to get them interested in the banking system and to take responsibility for their personal finances and that system – but at least he saw a future – in which the government would continue to invest in its people – and its poorest.
But enter piggy Dave – and then enter piggy Boris – and so on and so forth – and roast piggy Nigel – and politics is just now an entertainment show – the only show in town is a slowly emerging preparation for some kind of gigantic Hunger Games scenario – an idea that people seem glued to – like a slowly braying crowd. Is Starmer piggy too? He seems half-pig half-human – David Banner and the Incredible Hulk – stuck in transition. Like Blair said, ‘I always wondered, what would the Daily Mail think?’
Bring back Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour party. Its not so much Jeremy – but his policies – which were never particularly socialist – but rather the social liberal democracy of the Nordic states. Denmark, hmm.
There were some countries in Europe, whose people had elected politicians, who had decided not to hand over the ability to fluff all the money that savers had put into the banks, into loans for housing that were never gong to get paid off (but who cares, as long as I get my commission?).