Time is All Wrong: new poem about bankers, politicians, crisis and us

The bankers staged a coup while out attention was elsewhere and now everything is run for them. This item from December— found by Niall Spooner-Harvey — sums up the situation:

Unchecked by toothless regulators and set free by poorly drawn capital requirements, the banks rampaged across the continent, chucking cheap money at Greece and Italy, on the tacit assumption, now explicit, that if something went wrong, their richer friends in the eurozone would bail them out.

So I just wrote this.

Time is All Wrong

Time is all wrong, the wrong way round
We are caught in the slack wake
Trailing the event to the horizon's
Razor edge and the Fall.

Where is the slick anticipation,
The chess-player's stratagem?
Too late the creeping realisation
Slow-burns to a new dawn

Of how philosophers were babes after all,
How we were mastered when
We thought we were free
And history was at an end.

It was just a new start
The sky casts its net
They have us in their sights
We were asleep and awaken too late.

(c) Anna Chen 2nd June 2012

Inspired by Paul Krugman, Greg Palast and the voices of those who took the red pill now being heard.

Wall Street protesters on Brooklyn Bridge give hope

This is impressive — and long overdue. Some 700 have been arrested. How many bankers who caused the crisis have been even looked at sternly by the authorities?

Looting and the UK riots: as above, so below

Video montage by Anna Chen to The Bermondsey Joyriders "Society Is Rapidly Changing"

Who could forget the big crisps heist of the summer of 2011? With Poundland in front of us and our comrades behind us, we held the world in the palm of our hands, along with a bottle of Pantene medicated shampoo and a pack of genuine Cussons Imperial Leather soaps. Luxury! That was all we could carry for, in the spirit of solidarity, we had to share our booty fairly with the bredren and we were mindful of such things. I cast my eyes across the cornucopia of Stuff I could only dream of and wept that my pockets were already crammed with Haribo gelatine sweetmeats. So with a giant Toblerone or two clenched between my ample thighs, I hurried out into the night knowing I would eat this day and have shiny hair also.

We felt like kings.

Welcome to Thatcher's children: the logical conclusion of the dictum that "there is no such thing as society", that we are all as atomised as a handful of special-offer broken biscuits. Rampant consumerism, celebrity and bling. Knowing the price of everything (even if you can't afford it) and the value of nothing. How cheaply these kids have been bought and then sold on to the lowest purveyors of crap.

I'd wondered idly before in this blog what it would take to knock Murdoch and the rest of The Sopranos who've been running this country off the front pages. It's as if once the mask was ripped off the Dark Lord's face (and replaced with a foam pie), a maelstrom of malevolent forces was unleashed: a right-wing nutter massacre in Norway, Somalia, the bullet-train crash in China, the end of the US space age that had represented such hope, the deaths of two majorly talented women (RIP Amy and Fran), and now the UK riots.

There may not be a political objective in this insurrection, but the situation has its roots in politics. Triggered by the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan last week, the anger fuelling the riots had been building for a long time.

In this topsy-turvey world, the unelected Tories, backed up by the LibDems (cursed be they unto the last Ramsay McClegg) forced the poor to recapitalise the bankers following their crisis and recession, while the rich remain untouched. Cuts to public services will see this country on its knees while directors and bankers pay themselves Croesus-sized wedge — the bankers in particular are now paying themselves more in bonuses than they are lending, despite benefiting from a public bail-out. Emboldened by the flabbiness of the Labour opposition, the government is even considering cutting the 50p rate of tax for the top one percent.

VAT is the most unfair tax going, and raising it to 20 per cent has halted the slow climb out of the doldrums that was underway. The poor pay the highest proportion of their income as tax and still the party of the rich keep on squeezing.

The media taunt us with images and tales of the super-rich as if they are a good thing. Bernie Ecclestone buys his daughter Regan — or is it Goneril? — a £56 million house in London while her property portfolio includes a £60 million mansion in L.A. The new aristocracy tell us in their demeaning X-Factorish product that you only create "art" in order to gain Stuff, fame and all the baubles that we'd once rejected as meaningless tat. No inner life, no self-respect, no introspection. Just feral impulses encouraged by a feral elite.

What did we think would happen? There have been voices telling us that we have to listen to the people who've been stripped of hope, with nothing to look forward to but a future of Victorian levels of poverty. How much did the EMA cost us? That measly £30 a week to encourage kids to continue their education, to grow inside, feel self-worth and make themselves employable. At £560 million per year for an entire generation, it was cheap in comparison with the estimated £100 million plus that the riots will have cost. And how do you put a price on the damage done to the national psyche? To race relations? To trust?

The outreach workers who were connecting with these kids now have no jobs thanks to the cuts. Libraries are closing. Wonderful solid old Victorian brick schools are being sold off as luxury flats while rubbish boxes are built to replace them. Oh, I'm sorry, even that's not happening, thanks to Education Secretary Michael Gove.

People were burnt out of their homes and at least one man has died. The nation has welcomed martial law into our country.

The damage runs deep. The looted items stand for far more than just the acquisition of Stuff.

Two fictional references come to mind: Pottersville, the corrupt town which sprang up where there was once a community in It's A Wonderful Life. And the episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer where our eponymous heroine has never been born. Beloved Characters are now vicious murdering vampires once denied Buffy's positive influence — the finale where lovers and friends kill each other is one of the saddest moments I've seen in a TV show. You look at the kids rioting and it's hard not to imagine each and every one of them as fully-developed, kind, intelligent, self-reflective individuals able to participate in society as productive human beings — if only they had been born in a different time-line.

Instead, we have mere shadows of people. Yes, criminal elements have to be punished. The young people who did this have to learn that there are consequences for destructive anti-social behaviour against their own bredren, innocent people. But so should the grand theft looters at the top who have set the agenda and the example. As above, so below.

Meanwhile, Murdoch and his friends carry on like it's bidness as usual.

Musical commentary by The Bermondsey Joyriders with "Society Is Rapidly Changing". Video by me.

Nice review of the video here.

Brilliant Photoshoplooter pix

Sympathy and condolences to the friends and family of the three who died last night in Birmingham.

Keiser Report: Splintered Sunrise was right

My good friend and blogger Splintered Sunrise has been praising someone called Max Keiser to the skies, describing the addictive phenomenon as "worse than crack". I take that to mean Class A powder and not builders' low pants line.

At long last I took a peek at Splinty's video of a recent programme on robot traders and he is absolutely right. It is fantastic. A very funny and in your face take-down of the crimos running the American economy into the ground as it is pillaged by the bankers, and a completely corrupt system destroying the world like some James Bond villain. SPECTRE rules in Wall Sreet.

I sat there agreeing like a nodding dog in the back of a car (which will mean precislely zilch to my younger readers). Suffice to say that Keiser and his lovely assistant Stacy Herbert articulate what you and I knew all along.

Sample comments from Max about Wall Street: "A psychotic gamblaholic with unlimited credit ... A rhesus monkey can make a billion dollars."

Yes, The Keiser Report is on Vladamir Putin's vanity channel but as Orwell said, even the Daily Telegraph is correct some of the time.

As civilisation sinks like a stone, at least we'll have some laughs along the way. Enjoy.

Keiser Report: Splintered Sunrise was right

My good friend and blogger Splintered Sunrise has been praising someone called Max Keiser to the skies, describing the addictive phenomenon as "worse than crack". I take that to mean Class A powder and not builders' low pants line.

At long last I took a peek at Splinty's video of a recent programme on robot traders and he is absolutely right. It is fantastic. A very funny and in your face take-down of the crimos running the American economy into the ground as it is pillaged by the bankers, and a completely corrupt system destroying the world like some James Bond villain. SPECTRE rules in Wall Sreet.

I sat there agreeing like a nodding dog in the back of a car (which will mean precislely zilch to my younger readers). Suffice to say that Keiser and his lovely assistant Stacy Herbert articulate what you and I knew all along.

Sample comments from Max about Wall Street: "A psychotic gamblaholic with unlimited credit ... A rhesus monkey can make a billion dollars."

Yes, The Keiser Report is on Vladamir Putin's vanity channel but as Orwell said, even the Daily Telegraph is correct some of the time.

As civilisation sinks like a stone, at least we'll have some laughs along the way. Enjoy.

Tony Blair advises shady hedge fund: reward for citizens arrest on war-crime charges

Has this man no shame? Just when you think he can't get any worse, Tony Blair hits rock bottom and breaks through to a whole new bottom no-one knew anything about. Our former British Prime Minister dons fishnets and high heels and makes yet another tranche of loot, this time hundreds of thousands from giving lectures to a shady hedge fund that made millions betting on the failure of our banks.

This is the person who makes £2.5 million per year from JP Morgan, the bank that profits most from co-ordinating the pillage of Iraq, from the war that he helped start. Conflict of interest, much? Here's hoping he gets his just deserts when he appears at Chilcot Iraq Inquiry on Friday and realises how reviled he is. Not that I expect he'll care. Money has a funny way of easing the conscience.

Former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle said:

'I never cease to be amazed by Mr Blair's money-making activities. It goes to show that as far as Mr Blair is concerned, his political and public life is behind him and he appears to have no sense of responsibility to those who have been left behind. His entire lifestyle is an ongoing source of embarrassment to everyone in the Labour Party.'

Bob Marshall-Andrews, another Labour MP, said:

'Nothing that this man does surprises me any more after watching him in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.'

Integrity? Propriety? Principles? Going (not so) cheap.

Oh to see him have to spend his ill-gotten gains on lawyers at a war-crimes trial at the Hague. George Monbiot says arrest him and claim your reward:

... was the war with Iraq illegal? If the answer is yes, everything changes. The war is no longer a political matter, but a criminal one, and those who commissioned it should be committed for trial for what the Nuremberg tribunal called "the supreme international crime": the crime of aggression. ... Without legal justification, the war with Iraq was an act of mass murder: those who died were unlawfully killed by the people who commissioned it.

Monbiot has started a pot for anyone willing to bring Blair to book and make a citizens arrest. So far there's £1534.00 up for grabs and rising.

UPDATE: A fascinating-sounding BBC Radio 4 play based on Craig Murray's book, Saturday Feb 20th, 2:30pm — put this in your diaries. World Premiere of Murder in Samarkand by Sir David Hare based on the memoir by the former ambassador about his brush with Bush and Blair as the Iraq invasion became inevitable. David Tennant stars as Craig Murray.

Matthew Norman on Blair the pariah at Chilcot.

Andy Beckett, The Guardian, on how cosy the Chilcot inquisitors are with the Blair posse and the hawks.

Tony Blair advises shady hedge fund: reward for citizens arrest on war-crime charges

Has this man no shame? Just when you think he can't get any worse, Tony Blair hits rock bottom and breaks through to a whole new bottom no-one knew anything about. Our former British Prime Minister dons fishnets and high heels and makes yet another tranche of loot, this time hundreds of thousands from giving lectures to a shady hedge fund that made millions betting on the failure of our banks.

This is the person who makes £2.5 million per year from JP Morgan, the bank that profits most from co-ordinating the pillage of Iraq, from the war that he helped start. Conflict of interest, much? Here's hoping he gets his just deserts when he appears at Chilcot Iraq Inquiry on Friday and realises how reviled he is. Not that I expect he'll care. Money has a funny way of easing the conscience.

Former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle said:

'I never cease to be amazed by Mr Blair's money-making activities. It goes to show that as far as Mr Blair is concerned, his political and public life is behind him and he appears to have no sense of responsibility to those who have been left behind. His entire lifestyle is an ongoing source of embarrassment to everyone in the Labour Party.'

Bob Marshall-Andrews, another Labour MP, said:

'Nothing that this man does surprises me any more after watching him in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.'

Integrity? Propriety? Principles? Going (not so) cheap.

Oh to see him have to spend his ill-gotten gains on lawyers at a war-crimes trial at the Hague. George Monbiot says arrest him and claim your reward:

... was the war with Iraq illegal? If the answer is yes, everything changes. The war is no longer a political matter, but a criminal one, and those who commissioned it should be committed for trial for what the Nuremberg tribunal called "the supreme international crime": the crime of aggression. ... Without legal justification, the war with Iraq was an act of mass murder: those who died were unlawfully killed by the people who commissioned it.

Monbiot has started a pot for anyone willing to bring Blair to book and make a citizens arrest. So far there's £1534.00 up for grabs and rising.

UPDATE: A fascinating-sounding BBC Radio 4 play based on Craig Murray's book, Saturday Feb 20th, 2:30pm — put this in your diaries. World Premiere of Murder in Samarkand by Sir David Hare based on the memoir by the former ambassador about his brush with Bush and Blair as the Iraq invasion became inevitable. David Tennant stars as Craig Murray.

Matthew Norman on Blair the pariah at Chilcot.

Andy Beckett, The Guardian, on how cosy the Chilcot inquisitors are with the Blair posse and the hawks.

Death Rides an Iron Horse: suicide by train in the Credit Crunch

Here are some figures you won't have seen in the national press. One week. Three journeys. Four suicides.

Last week my associate Charles Shaar Murray traveled to Oxford to lay some cool slide guitar on a friend's album. Both journeys out and back to London were delayed by a fatality on the line, one of them on the Tube leg of the trip. My Bedford train from St Pancras the next day was delayed by a fatality on the line. Another friend, in town for the day, was late due to ... a fatality on the line!

If we had four deaths in three journeys (one of them a return), what sort of suicide pattern must be emerging across London and the UK, let alone all the other countries hit by the recession?

The money-making jamboree of the past decade made unimaginable fortunes for bankers until the Credit Crunch and sub-prime market failure ended their bonanza but they're not the ones picking up the bill. The depression in the 1920s may have had bankers leaping off skyscraper ledges but no such luck this time around. All gilt, no guilt, they've been insulated from the fallout — their fallout — by governments too scared to take meaningful action except chuck our money at them (coins sharpened to a razor's edge are acceptable, thank you, but not billions from public funds, if you please), or which are so heavily compromised themselves that they risk being squished in the bail-out feeding frenzy.

Despite government bluster that bloated bankers responsible for the bad debts and subsequent economic collapse receive no bonuses, Lloyds TSB, having just shared in the £37 billion rescue package due to having nothing but moths in their coffers, now insist that their executives get their bonuses because "they deserve it". I do wish the culprits would get their just desserts in this instance but the deity in charge of cosmic justice must be washing her hair. It's now workers without millions to cushion them who face eviction, destitution, rising bills, failing services, relationship breakdown and all-round general purpose hardship. Most of us have few savings. British debt is running at £1.69 for every pound made so many people have no slack to take them through the next nightmare period.

The train suicides are the canaries down the mine, the frontline, the first over the top of the trenches. The rest of us can only watch and shudder knowing that soon It Could Be You stepping off the planet. Better buy that Lottery ticket quick while you can afford it coz it's the best chance most of us have to extricate ourselves from Other People's mess. Some hope!

Poor train drivers. I hope they're getting counselling coz there's gonna be a lot more of this going on for the foreseeable.

Death Rides an Iron Horse: suicide by train in the Credit Crunch

Here are some figures you won't have seen in the national press. One week. Three journeys. Four suicides.

Last week my associate Charles Shaar Murray traveled to Oxford to lay some cool slide guitar on a friend's album. Both journeys out and back to London were delayed by a fatality on the line, one of them on the Tube leg of the trip. My Bedford train from St Pancras the next day was delayed by a fatality on the line. Another friend, in town for the day, was late due to ... a fatality on the line!

If we had four deaths in three journeys (one of them a return), what sort of suicide pattern must be emerging across London and the UK, let alone all the other countries hit by the recession?

The money-making jamboree of the past decade made unimaginable fortunes for bankers until the Credit Crunch and sub-prime market failure ended their bonanza but they're not the ones picking up the bill. The depression in the 1920s may have had bankers leaping off skyscraper ledges but no such luck this time around. All gilt, no guilt, they've been insulated from the fallout — their fallout — by governments too scared to take meaningful action except chuck our money at them (coins sharpened to a razor's edge are acceptable, thank you, but not billions from public funds, if you please), or which are so heavily compromised themselves that they risk being squished in the bail-out feeding frenzy.

Despite government bluster that bloated bankers responsible for the bad debts and subsequent economic collapse receive no bonuses, Lloyds TSB, having just shared in the £37 billion rescue package due to having nothing but moths in their coffers, now insist that their executives get their bonuses because "they deserve it". I do wish the culprits would get their just desserts in this instance but the deity in charge of cosmic justice must be washing her hair. It's now workers without millions to cushion them who face eviction, destitution, rising bills, failing services, relationship breakdown and all-round general purpose hardship. Most of us have few savings. British debt is running at £1.69 for every pound made so many people have no slack to take them through the next nightmare period.

The train suicides are the canaries down the mine, the frontline, the first over the top of the trenches. The rest of us can only watch and shudder knowing that soon It Could Be You stepping off the planet. Better buy that Lottery ticket quick while you can afford it coz it's the best chance most of us have to extricate ourselves from Other People's mess. Some hope!

Poor train drivers. I hope they're getting counselling coz there's gonna be a lot more of this going on for the foreseeable.