Can collaborator, electronic guru, Liverpool ex-pat and all-round dude, Jono Podmore delivers his Getintothis festive message with an accusatory finger pointed firmly at the fiscal filth.
It’s that time again – time to review the fabulous heart-warming events of the past year and look forward to another 12 months of media-manipulated fiscal cock-ups and disasters natural and otherwise.
Here’s a new word for the dictionary coined in 2011: BANKOCRACY.
A hideous state of affairs that has existed for a number of years but now at least it’s got a name.
I was discussing with a friend of mine in Cologne (actually her on the left on the cover of Roxy Music‘s Country Life) the demise of democracy in Europe, specifically that the banks, not the voters, had appointed new leaders in Greece and Italy.
She said that it all sounded like those ridiculous conspiracy theories that abounded in Germany in the seventies – the doped-up anxieties that fuelled the Baader-Meinhof and Red Army Faction years. Problem is that this time – it’s true.
The sci-fi-esque conspiracy of private banking interests that can sweep aside our governments with a flick of their satanic wrists have decided that enough is enough.
They will no longer tolerate the behaviour of us mere bloody mortals and they want their money back.
No more wasting their precious dollars on educating our kids, building hospitals, preventing crime, malaria or malnutrition – we need to pay our debts to them.
Philip K Dick couldn’t have made this up.
So how come we ended up owing them so much? How come entire nations are in hock to these whoppers? Because they pushed the debt on to us and rammed it down our eager throats til we couldn’t borrow a penny more. It was normal – it was proper – it was right.
But unlike the reality we all live in, when they make an investment that doesn’t pay, WE have to pay them back what they lost. What a remarkably sound business model!
If we don’t pay up they’ll have our leaders replaced by their representatives until every asset in our societies is stripped and handed to these shitbags on a platinum platter washed in the blood of all the women and children in the third world who generate the wealth they squander.
Just as a little breather. I’d like to point out a surprisingly little known fact. The newly appointed leaders of Greece and Italy, and the head of the European Central Bank are all advisers (i.e on the payroll) of Goldman Sachs. Look it up.
But what can we do? The Bankocracy is bigger and more powerful than all our governments so what can the little people, us feeble munchkins do in the face of such POWER?
That’s exactly what the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain and Syria used to think – and now they know that those unassailably massive edifices of power are just people. Well armed bullies, but still just people nonetheless.
The occupy protesters are pointing this out to us every day. But unlike the power in the middle east and North Africa, the bankocracy isn’t organised in the way that a dictatorship is.
It has the propensity to start eating itself if it isn’t fed – and it needs us to feed it. It needs our debt to take to the casino of the stock exchanges to gamble into inflated food prices and mass evictions. It needs our acquiescence to the wars it starts to profit from the arms sales and the ‘new markets’.
If we don’t have the will, or the time or the life structure to be able to join the occupy protesters, start by taking your money out of the hands of the bankocracy. Easier than you think.
There’s a big co-operative organisation that shares it’s profits with it’s members rather than shareholders; that has an ethical policy that prevents it from investing in the arms trade or in environmentally damaging corporations; that’s alive and well and growing here in the UK.
Strangely, it goes under the cryptic name of The Co-operative Bank. How can that possibly work?
Ethical appears to be profitable – the co-op was utterly untouched by the 2008 crash because they didn’t invest in the sort of short term financial sector/turf accountancy that stole our money.
If you sign up with any of the high street banks, you’re part of the problem, whether in the red or the black. If you have an account, close it and transfer it to the co-op.
There isn’t a single service high street banks offer that the co-op doesn’t. A small, easy step any of us can take.
But hey! – global financial mash-up, earthquakes, tsumamis, social upheaval, war and revolution are all well and good – but what about the TUNES!
Frankly – tunes are in good hands.
The bearded folk misery of cholera nostalgics who had their arses frozen to their bean bags in the chill out basement of the party they were too scared to enjoy is finally entering the mainstream.
Good night Vienna!
Time for a shave, motherfolker! Put down that nauseatingly mistuned acoustic guitar, dickhead! Forget that longing for a countryside you never knew, city boy! Put your tortured, gurning wretched face straight and join the rest of us in the 21st century!
But what’s so great about the 21st century? Frankly – LOADS. The bankocracy may be in cahoots with the XXX-factor death-throes of unpopular culture, but there are plenty of us standing by with radical and beautiful cultural structures to delight you with when the house of cards collapses. Here’s one I prepared earlier.
and here’s a proper approach to nostalgia.
And there’s plenty more where they came from. And how come I’m so sure we’ll see this cultural victory? The bankocracy is maintained by ignorance.
The ‘mysteries’ of the financial markets are kept from our eyes and described in incomprehensible terms so as to preserve their quasi-mystical smokescreen that hide nothing more than THEFT AND AMORAL GREED.
Culture on the other hand functions on knowledge, enlightenment and sharing.
This is why I’m looing forward to seeing the bankocracy on it’s back foot in 2012.
We’re all desperate to clue each other up – to fill each other in – to share and inform. Remember the six degrees of separation between all members of the human race?
It’s now down to 4.2 degrees and falling every day. And this is where the politicians have majorly shot themselves in the foot – especially the dorks that run the EU.
The sheer idiocy of believing that finance and market forces could unite disparate societies while ignoring the cultural aspects (and impact) beggars belief.
Nevertheless some politicians are doing this consciously, their paymasters demand it for two separate reasons.
Primarily short term profit and secondly to maintain a culturally destitute under-class of credit fodder to exploit.
Well tough shit, you nasty, corrupt bunch of arseholes, we can educate EACH OTHER these days, so off you fuck!
Oops, did I go off piste and get in another paragraph of bile concerning our friends in global finance? Well surprise, surprise.
So, one and all have a WONDERFUL 2012, and clean up your act – bank with the co-op and remember culture comes before the route to all evil.
Jono’s Getintothis Christmas message 2010.
Jono’s Getintothis Christmas message 2009.
Jono’s Getintothis Christmas message 2008.
