You can bank on it

Nck Baines made some astute observations in the run-up to the Tory conference last week. It's here: You can bank on it � Nick Baines’s Blog. And this is something that I want to amen heartily: "his nettle still appears not to have been grasped. We are afraid to impose limits – even when ‘we’ own the banks by virtue of having bailed them out of the mire of their own making. And when we hear about the ‘poor’ or the ‘disabled’, we are not talking about ’shirkers’, ‘blaggers’ and ’spongers’. But, even if we were, couldn’t we describe the failure of the banks and their subsequent cap-in-hand rescue by the taxpayers as ’sponging’ (claiming money that isn’t theirs), ’shirking’ (responsibilities to those they damaged) and ‘blagging’ (claiming special rights and threatening government against squeezing with arguments about ‘incentives’ that only apply to them and not those at the bottom of society who don’t have the voice or the power to claim the same)?"
We are naming, I think, the ideological mote in the eye of global capitalism. It comes down to one rule for the rich, another for the poor. It expresses itself in unseen hypocrisies and double standards such as those noted by Nick above. The rhetoric of 'free trade' is used but the reality is of using quasi-monopolistic or creating such powers to disadvantage the poorest. So much for the much vaunted benefits of perfect competition which are used as the bit of economic theory to justify markets but then are discarded because the practice tends towards monopoly and oligapoly which doesn't work for the benefit of the consumer. In banking this is part of the problem: too big to be allowed to fail is not about competition but oligarchy. This is the corruption at the heart of our systems and it's part of the wider issue implicated in unfair trade, global poverty and even somewhat with climate change.