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Why I'm going to St.Paul's

There are times in the life of all us, normally in childhood, when we come to realise that the myths that we’ve been raised on, the narratives and convenient fictions; Father Christmas, the Tooth Faerie, the Stork, are false. Moments when we realise that what we held magical is nothing more than the actions of people more powerful than us, working in a world that we must grow to understand. This is how I feel about money.

For a long time I thought money was “stuff”, a pre-existing thing, a commodity. And as we all chugged up the hill of last decade’s debt bubble I begrudgingly bought the arguments that the denizens of the Square Mile’s glass plated towers were a special breed, an energetic intelligentsia working a great alchemy on the world’s resources.

Then, bubble full, we crested the hill and as it burst and the capital markets dropped precipitously away, the landscape became clear. No longer is money a thing, something dug from the ground as gold or sterling silver, something hard won from the bowels of the earth, it transcended metal long ago and now has transcended paper. Now money is just magnetic patterns captured on cobalt and ferrous oxides, patterns created and altered with a keystroke in particular institutions, producing IOUs to which we all adhere.

For me, the magic of money evaporated with each round of conjuring. Each spectacle of waist-coated, grey-haired men presenting from behind polished tables, each new round of tricks pulling more billions out of the hat. So that now the creation of money seems more like a circus act, a conjuring trick. Even a material notion of money exposed as chimerical.

It has become clear that money is a convention. A convention in which each unit of currency originally represented a promise. Promises which persist and can be passed among us. And if we investigate the origin of these promises, we can trace relatively few back to workings of government and central banks. The printing presses of nations provide little more than the snow cap on the mountain, little more than the icing on the cake which we seek a better way of dividing.

At the birth of these promises we find bank debt. We find mortgages, credit cards and loans. Promises of private institutions, made good because somewhere they have more money than each particular loan taken separately. But they make these promises again and again on the understanding or gamble, that no more than a few percent of their clients will call on their promise at once. A gamble so bold and profitable that 97% to 99% of the money in circulation originates from private banks in the form of debt. Money created not by miners, manufacturers or sage men in waistcoats, but by private bureaucrats, bank managers and financiers. The great mountain of currency created through contractual bondage at the touch of a button.

If you were to take the same idea onto Dragon’s Den: take one person’s cash for safekeeping and then assign the same deposit to ten or twenty people as debt, on the gamble that all the creditors won’t come calling at once, you would be arrested for fraud. But in bygone days the Crown bestowed banking licences on a few select institutions and these institutions have been conjuring currency at a stroke every since.

When we examine how these institutions use this extraordinary privilege we may not be surprised, but most are appalled, because we find that half of all the money they create, fifty percent of their turnover, is paid out as wages to their staff and the bulk of that to a small portion of professional gamblers and big contract salesmen. Something approaching fifty percent of the world’s money supply going to not more than a small town’s worth of people, all from the privilege of the trust we place in their keyboards.

And while some of this vast wealth was putatively trickling down, it seemed the politics of envy to challenge the mountainous accumulations. Just jealousy of an occupation we did not understand. But now the very same institutions that claimed they were rational and beneficent have come to the general taxpayer, and even to pensioners and the unemployed, to guarantee their very existence and guarantee with it the luxurious living of a handful of their staff. The great money factories have come saying that it is rational for us to sacrifice a generation, to dismantle the extra market services in education and health that have paved the road to the prosperity of so many, to serve the continued gluttony of so few. Rational on what premises and for what purpose I ask.

For when one person’s gains place no burden on another it is envy to call for them to be curtailed. But when a person guilty of mistakes calls for others, less rich, to bear the burden of these mistakes so that they can maintain vast disparities of privilege, it becomes an injustice and a natural affront to humans, however you conceive them.

The current arrangements are pouring so much of general taxation into the hands of private institutions, private institutions that dismiss talk of social purpose as irrational and hand the fruit of taxation to the already rich; and all as a cost of saving these same institutions from bankruptcy. Such arrangements raise questions not from miserly or base emotion. Questions arise from concern that the costs of grand misjudgments are falling not on those who made them, but on the innocent and the innocent children of the innocent. Such that to question the position of the cooks, let alone how the cake is divided, can no loner be fended away as the politics of envy because it is so clearly the politics of justice.

I ask, if there are institutions that have the power to create money and give it to whom they please, is it right that they are all in private hands, working for private purpose? Would some diversity in their ownership and purpose provide a new tool to resource socially useful activities and address some destructive patterns in current resource allocation? Can we create decentralized institutions that allocate resources, which are directed by a broader set of values than simple greed?

I am not alone in asking these questions, many others within our democratic societies ask the same question, but the elite seem to be of a single mind, united around the historically rather unoriginal idea, that the 99% should sacrifice for opulence of the 1.
And while the agents of finance were swift to grasp the implications of the information revolution, and civil society were too, governments and offices of power act as if world still runs on paper. Governments have been slow to create channels for citizens to pose, even less get serious answers to questions. They have been slow embrace the democratic possibilities of the information revolution.

There have been some window dressing initiatives, but the substance of policy, they make plain, must serve the markets. But markets represent little more than the concerns of the rich and the greedy, and when I last looked, they did not have a vote in our constitution. Yet finance has bought seats at the table of power through providing 45% of Conservative party funding, and now those who should be our representatives stand up and claim to represent the market.

And that is why I’m going to St.Paul’s

When the light returns

And when at last my light returns
What will I have learnt?
What twit, to who
Will I tell
This so pissed it's worth apologies?
What will I have learnt?
Not grace, but elegies
Not arias or dance or any arts
Worth students.
It will return,
At least the rudiments
A spark,
For fuel some foolish passion
Like dry grass.
But what of setting oak from dark.
Just a spark,
A spark
All that it can light is grass.
What passion could be gas
Or peat or coal,
Renew my soul,
Just sparks flying
And all so cold.
Where before a fire burned
I tire and I hurt
And if my light returns
What will I have learnt?

Have I declared my love

Have I declared my love of late
With trumpets, gongs and a genocide of roses
Have I sworn I have no heart
Save the heart I gave to you

Have I proclaimed in boldest song
There is no love upon this earth
That could show itself as true,
That could claim such title,
Beside the love I have for you.

If not, shall I leave it alone
Suggest that cupid rest
And turn the ochestra of cherubs home
Now that once again you've come
And could be close enough to hold.

Those who should be dead

Blessed are those undead
Who walk the icy limbo
Above our supplicant mass.
We sacrifice,
Our young
Give up to hungry wraiths,
To those who should be dead.

Oh unholy,
Those who should be dead
But through our sacrifice
Live on.
They haunt the great mountains,
The looming, bleeding fires
The ghoulish chorus
Of their legions deafens

“Pay double, pay again
For the imperfections of your worship
For the excess of incense and censers
You have lavished
So that we may dance
The precipice
And not slip to timely death
So calamitous.

Pay double, pay again
Carve the haunches
Of your bellowing, sacred cattle
And offer up unto us.
Satisfy us with sacrifice
So that we might again suckle
On rich saturated life.”

Profligate in our offerings
They curse
Penance must be paid
For we have witnessed the sins
Of these ghosts,
We know sin,
And in our penitent worship must become
More as imitations of them
Grey, bonded and thin
And sacrifice our young
So these gods might live again.

For the Atlantic

She had turned straw to silver
Made her own crown
And strode a field of buttercups
In a scarlet velvet gown.
I fell for her then
Without recognising
I was falling again.

She was full time at play
A sensitive vocation
Pointed the way
Over the style by the side of road
Into nature's creation.

She sipped at me
Delicate and careful
Not to leave her lips a gloss,
We talked of who she was
How I might be
I thought of how things lost
Are found
Looking over the valley
I know I'm older now.

When our words first danced
To the crescendo of young ideals
I was spoilt and cavalier
My words neon, indiscrete
And without ears
Our sentences, insensitive
Squashed each other's feet.
If I tripped then
I never called it falling.

So when we met again
Somewhere in my valleys
She didn't know me
So she claimed
Hid in innocence
Of ignorance, played
A merry game
And blamed semantics
Had some man
But for the Atlantic,
Her eyes
Charming even the sofa
I wouldn't know her
As one
Who I had fallen for
For days.

Long after I realised
We met amid hills
That rolled together as lovers
On over the horizon
I didn't recognise
Her who I once stumbled on
Not from the door
Where I admired
How she orchestrated harmonies
Made musicians
And called two tribes to unison.
Crowned, she shared
Then I knew her name.

When the games began
We played the wind
Between our bodies
Like an instrument
The Atlantic,
Her eyes explained
So we refused memory
To make instances of melody
And harmony with wind.

In the morning
We knew each other
High on the hills
Looked at the horizon together
As far as the Atlantic,
Her eyes saw
I knew she would never
Choose one who falls in love
As a lover,
It would create distance
As she would only rise
As a lover
And that when we meet again
We'll both pretend
We never recognised each other.

Blossom on the wind

It had been a season
When light is colour
Drained, life
Adjusted to stretches of darkness
And cold become engrained.

A time of lunar streets
When all I hear
Is the great grey mouth
Of the Northern sky
Screaming within my ears
And looking forward
Brings gusts of icy vengeful teeth
That score the face with tears.

When you can pull the clouds near
And the city seems pressed flat
The next storm never far away
And days repeat from grey to black

But when it's below the freezing point of sound
When even crystal clear air weeps
We celebrate lovers
And from ground so hard
That it would blind an axe
Comes blossom on the wind.

When I still feel the need to shield
Myself in hibernation
Closeted behind stone walls
She calls
And though fearful I yield
To curiosities temptation
Where before I stalled.

Now all seems more familiar
As colour in timid buds begin
I trust the sun to touch me now
Because of blossom on the wind.

She leadeth me
Back to once bowed skeletons
Made scaffolds for hope
Aching in the naked pain of change
Every fibre striving
Tearing to grow again
Upwards.

She alludes to sunshine
Kaleidoscopes, hours of light
And times when the skin is free
She makes the wind her friend.
She leadeth me.

Risk reward

We've got ideas selling guesses
Ideas constituted
By special pieces of paper
Selling guesses about the total
Of other guesses in the future.

Its rational as proved
Through symbols accessible
To those schooled in the scripture
As if in the seminary
And they take everybody's money
And talk of risk reward.

Now if rather than using the bridge
I choose to run across the motorway
Which is a greater risk
In terms of time, my total pay
Is something I won't miss

And if now and then
Rather than the usual pool
I choose to swim
Across the Thames
Only some errant fool
Could try contend
I wouldn't be in better trim.
But for how long?

I suppose with PR and photography
I could earn a sponsor's fee
But that all sounds like work to me
And threatens no more jeopardy
No, risk reward it has to be
So I can't see the point really.

He said its funny biz
But risk is where the money is
He was bright as a laser beam
Fresh out of his teens
Creaming over a Chinese dream
That imports steam
Made by teams
Of pristine seamstresses
Fed on beans
Its a winner.
More spins of the fruit machine
Than you've had hot dinners.
He had a one kilo watch
Shoes of patent leather
A barber to keep him warm and dry
In any kind of weather.
Did I mention,
He was in charge of my pension.

So if there's two ways to make a profit
Gambling and exploitation
The great financial innovation
Is gambling on exploitation
All wrapped up in queer equations
But what the symbols don't depict
Is that gambling makes addicts.

And gamblers talk nonsense
Like “On this course in this condition
This horse is a certain proposition
The odds might seem a little long
But this jockey can't do wrong”.

Nonsense.
Or like “In a perfect market
Populated by rational, far sighted
And boringly single minded bigots
The maths works.”
Nonsense on a hydraulic jack.

Because the map
Don't fit the territory
There's errors in the theory
And some brokers should be very sorry.

Sad as it is tragic
When they've pissed away the pot
Like any other addict
They'll come asking for another lot

“Just another Trill'
We'll double up
You'll get your cut
Sure you will
Some if and buts
And maybe not
But give us some more fifties still
You know it's risk reward”

The fact is it's a cultural cancer
What happened to hard work
And dirty words like labour
Skill, co-operation, effort, thrift
I guess the Emperor's Tailor
Has been on the stitch up
For a new Tux
Made from more hot air
But when its all laid bare
It looks like a racket
Stacked with gambling addicts
Creaming a packet
And talking of risk reward.

Did they sit down and talk about it

Did they sit down and talk about it
Or was it a nudge and a wink
Did their eyes meet across the office
What do you think?

Did one think of it first
And tell the other the plan
Or did they just look at each other
And both understand?

And when they went into action
Did they go separate ways
Or plot moves over bourbon
At the end of the day?

What I’m saying is
Did Bush take his kid and play pimp
Or did Cheney say “I’m fucking your son”
What do you think
Which way did it run?

Bush was grand spook
An eminence in professional grey
If you’re off to the Whitehouse
You’ll meet his dogs on the way.

So did Bush say to Cheney
“Here’s my sons strings
Play with this puppet
And we can be kings”?

Did they come out in dimples
Over jesting with Jeb
Or was there frisson and tension
And so much unsaid?

Afterall, who shot Cheney?
What was it for
Was it just about the Constitution
Or was there more?

Did Cheney say “the kid’s simple
I can get in his head
Put Halliburton to work
And soon fleece the Fed”.

Was the whole thing an accident
That Bush never intended
Was he fighting a rearguard action
Against what Cheney then did?

Or was it a joint venture
Right from the start
Two men bent on power
With very cold hearts.

But then how far back does it go?
To Sixties and Nixon
An attempt to privatise power
Without any restriction?

Did they sit down and talk about it
Way back then
Saying those pesky kids got us this time
But we’ll come again.

Did they say we’ll copy the Kennedys
Once they’re out the way
Or are they enemies now
At the end of day?

Did they say we need a war
So we’ll turn a blind eye
We can do Orwell’s 84
If we let those planes fly?

Did Bush go to Cheney
Or Cheney to Bush
Did they meet in the middle
Was there a pull or a push?

Did they sit and and talk about it
Or was it nudge and a wink
Did they play together or each other
What do you think?