Valentines and Romantic verse - Buy this book, or look inside on Amazon
Political verse - This has some genuinely original material in. Buy it on Amazon
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
My Books
Valentines and Romantic verse - Buy this book, or look inside on Amazon Political verse - This has some genuinely original material in. Buy it on Amazon
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
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
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