Re-posted below is one of the only human interest pieces I've read on the banking crisis. I think it really does put in to words what a lot of people think and feel.
And this from the lead singer John Jones of Oysterband - a band that spent much of the 80's raging against Thatcherism and the Tories in general; you couldn't get a greater, musical, social commentary of that era than "The Shouting End Of Life"
Read and consider how far we've really come:
"CONSCIENCE:
Reading the paper today reminded me there was a moment this week during the
Today programme when the radio was nearly thrown through the window. It was
when Mervyn King, our benign innocent Head of the Bank of England was being
questioned on the credit crunch and the banking collapse and his role in it.
Time and again he was let off the hook and it ended in a 'boys together' chat about football with the sports presenter. What angered me was his assertion that the procedures and regulations were not in place to control the banks, as if gut feeling, instinct and morality....just a sense of "this isn't fair, this doesn't feel right"...were completely alien to him. Maybe they are absent from his world. Like the Vatican and the Catholic Church of Ireland when facing terrible abuse claims! They know how to deal with it now but they didn't know back then, the procedures were not in place. Where was the conscience? Within the large closed financial and religious institutions that run our lives they only hear the cries and feel the pain when the procedures are in place. We are burying a collapse in free-market capitalism in weak questions and vacuous answers that fill a 24 hour indiscriminate media........just as surely as the Vatican will bury the cries of those children. That outburst of anger on the streets of England last summer burst the complacency but missed the hypocrisy. If you want to know why I walk so much, it is to help me dissipate overwhelming anger that consumes me sometimes, like now. I waited before posting this. JJ"
Time and again he was let off the hook and it ended in a 'boys together' chat about football with the sports presenter. What angered me was his assertion that the procedures and regulations were not in place to control the banks, as if gut feeling, instinct and morality....just a sense of "this isn't fair, this doesn't feel right"...were completely alien to him. Maybe they are absent from his world. Like the Vatican and the Catholic Church of Ireland when facing terrible abuse claims! They know how to deal with it now but they didn't know back then, the procedures were not in place. Where was the conscience? Within the large closed financial and religious institutions that run our lives they only hear the cries and feel the pain when the procedures are in place. We are burying a collapse in free-market capitalism in weak questions and vacuous answers that fill a 24 hour indiscriminate media........just as surely as the Vatican will bury the cries of those children. That outburst of anger on the streets of England last summer burst the complacency but missed the hypocrisy. If you want to know why I walk so much, it is to help me dissipate overwhelming anger that consumes me sometimes, like now. I waited before posting this. JJ"
