Credit Crunch Suicide: poem about the bankers' crash by Anna Chen

Ten years of austerity since the credit crunch crisis and we're even worse off while the rich doubled their wealth since 2008

It is ten years since the bankers' crash went full blown and what have we done? Austerity, Macjobs, disabled payments cuts, a spiteful bedroom tax costing more to administer than is collected, tax cuts for the better off, women losing seven years of state pension after a lifetime of inequality, students leaving university with crippling debt the size of a mortgage, social cleansing in London through unaffordable "affordable" property prices and demolition of their communities, life expectancy slammed into reverse in the North, hate crimes on the up, the lowest interest rates for 5,000 years, quantitive easing (QE) diluting the value of our money. And the culmination of all that injustice and greed: the Grenfell Tower fire.

The Tories and their media mouthpieces tried to persuade us that Labour caused the crisis even though UK economic growth stood at two or three per cent at the time of the 2010 general election; oh for that rate today. In 2010 the Tories were elected on a raft of lies and a narrative as dissembling as the £350 billion NHS Brexit pledge emblazoned across the Leave battle-bus. Mind you, Labour allowed the Tory narrative to set like concrete, allowing incoming Chancellor George Osborne to use the crash to impose austerity, which is basically the transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest.

Once in power, Prime Minister David Cameron came on like a Tony Blair mini-me and had a war with Libya in 2011, further destabilising the world. Cameron promised a bonfire of regulations to "kill off the health and safety culture for good". He also gave us the EU referendum, not because there was any widespread demand for it, but in order to quell right-wing rebellion in his own Tory ranks. Some 52% of the vote — 37% of the total electorate, a quarter of the UK population — voted to "Take back control" and promptly handed us over to global warming oil guzzlers and chlorinated chicken merchants. And his actions may very well end up bankrupting the country should the Brexit trajectory be carried through.

Here's a poem I wrote about the crash in 2008. The shock for me is that we are re-entering the same territory with a mountain of debt and market manipulation.

Credit Crunch Suicide

I could have been a banker
Sitting on a ledge
High up on a skyscraper
Coz someone clipped my hedge

I could have been in business
In the city making bids
Take a shotgun to the wife and dogs
And then I’d do the kids

But I’m just a daily worker
About to lose my home
Savings all depleted
Can’t even get a loan

The bankers got their billions
The doggy got a bone
The millions got the wankers
Whose hearts are made of stone

I can cry into me drink
I can curse the gods above
I'd like to give that banker
A bleedin' great big shove

Watch him splat upon the pavement
A human pizza pie
Coz that's where I'll be living
Until the day I die.

by Anna Chen 29 Oct 2008

Sisters: poem from the Fabulous Ninja Gurl about feminism and politics as sleight of hand

Put the blame on BAME, why don'tcha?

Yelling that you stand up against social injustice does not mean that you do. One of the things that has shocked me the most about my time in the left is how various characters can say and write one thing, and then do the exact opposite, like words don't have meaning.

It's a flimsy Potemkin village of left postures, a sleight-of-hand art mastered by a largely white Oxbridge elite who tell others to check their privilege while failing to do so themeselves; who loudly defend victims while slyly substituting themselves for such and booting out the incumbents; who insist they tell the truth while twisting the narrative out of shape.

Whiny and self-serving, brooking no challenge or debate, it is the art of perpetuating oppression while posing as liberator and utterly gobsmacking in its cheek.

I always thought the role of the revolutionary was to make visible the invisible. That goes for hidden power relations as well as flesh and blood human beings.

Face value and lip service are tools of the trade when you take the public for a ride. Perhaps the inability to discern between actions and words does indeed make you a sucker.

Cue drumroll: on a silver salver, may I present to you a blue pill and a red pill … Your choice.

Sisters (first draft)
by Anna Chen

The siren sisters call,
"Help her. Help her."
Help who?
"Help the woman of colour.
We'll tweet and link
if not our arms then our charms:
I am the good fairy, look at me."

But I am a woman of colour.
"We are all women of colour now."

No, I AM a woman of colour.
"Not sure your type qualifies.
That's almost white but not quite.
Help her. Help the woman of colour
except for the ... what is it you are again?"

But I AM a woman of colour.
"Then help yourself."

Okay.
I would like to thank all the white sisters
who say they could not give a shit
or who say they do, without whom ...

I am the fabulous Ninja Gurl who dances among you
blowing kisses and raspberries,
turning cartwheels and juggling flames.
"Is there a draught in here? Shut that door,"
say the dames atremble
that some ghostly elephant has thundered into the parlour
and pissed on their parade.
You are chilly and chilled in your icicle tower
and can freeze me out at a hundred paces.
Your thousand-yard stare is as close as you can bear
my ashy traces in the sand.

I am not insubstantial, a helpless damsel in distress
who you can pet like a mouse,
neither am I an industry powerhouse, of use.
In your dark lens I am let loose, the barbarian at the gate
who you secretly rate,
but who you fear would play buzkashi,
pounding your carcass into dirt under my horse-hooves.
I, subspecies, stinking of animal skins,
ripping carcasses with graveyard teeth, blood on my breath,
who's fought in battle for our cause,
dived off sheer cliffs and hobbled
on smashed spine back to health.
No wonder you won't let me in.
I am the wind under your roof,
the fierce blast shaking your ballast,
that rattles your windows.
And how are you enjoying the view?

Every Cinderella should have such sisters.

In the shadows, in the cracks beneath the crags,
While you file your copy, I file my teeth to jags.

Case study of experience in the British left.

Thatcher dies, Judy Garland banned: BBC asks Wizard for brain, courage and heart

Flying monkeys force Wizard of Oz to ban "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead". Munchkins furious and appeal to Glenda the White Witch to intercede.

Judy Garland banned, the Lollipop Guild crushed. Rainbow privatised and handed over to the chaps in the Emerald City.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the right in general and the Daily Mail in particular, with their foaming at the mouth over the widespread lack of respect for Baroness Margaret Thatcher on her demise, as rebel Munchkins respond with raucous celebrations rather than a frenzy of forelock tugging.

Yes, I know that Thatcherism lives on but her spawn have left us so few opportunities to feel happy, that it would be a shame to waste this one.

We're crashing into the limits of free speech as the BBC bans all but 5 seconds of Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead on their Radio 1 Chart Show this weekend. An innocuuous piece of material has become subversive through the meaning its listeners give to it, not what it actually is. Suck on that, Tom Stoppard!

It's the greatest bit of recontextualisation since Stanley Kubrick's "Singin' in the Rain" in A Clockwork Orange.

Double and triple standards all round as Thatcher's funeral is mostly paid out of the public purse instead of being put out to tender to the lowest bidder — funny how it's always socialism for them and capitalism for us. And, even though the market has propelled Ding Dong into the charts, the state has decreed that we can't hear it on the the radio. 'Cause we have, like, you know, freedom of expression in this country ... unless they don't like what it is that's being said.

So three cheers for Edgar Yipsel Harburg, the leftist who wrote the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz. Let's see the Mail string up THAT name with his own piano wire.

Let us show the respect due at her funeral. There should be no violence on Wednesday. Just line the route and sing the Thatcher Death Song.

Here's my poem for the occasion.

Margaret Thatcher Died at the Ritz
8th April 2013

Margaret Thatcher died at the Ritz.
It fits. Her blitz on the poor,
national assets thrust into the mitts
of corporate bandits.
Wealth trickled-down like a horse shits
undigested grain for birds that flit
round what it is its rear end emits.
Compassion deficit, dried out tits,
the country in bits, run by greedy gits.
Her fans omit the price
of crimes her class commit.
Her legacy is the pits.
(And she closed them as well.)

Thatcher's blue touchpaper stayed alight
til the nation was run by her acolytes;
she took a look round at pauperised Brits,
said, "My work here is done," and called it quits.