Money Is Shit

I hate money. Money is the root of all evil. Well, that and the X Factor. But money is the the rancid, sloppy dog diarrhoea that you slip on when you're not looking that makes you stink like an ill hound's arse for the rest of the day; it's the big fat knife wedged in the side of your head that you keep catching when you turn round and flicking pieces of your own brain out through your eye sockets; money is the patch of black ice on the corner of a road that just doesn't seem that icy, just before a bend that will lead you flying through the air on a mountain pass for several seconds before smashing you and your car into an unrecognisable metallic splat in a ravine, possibly killing a baby deer in the process. I don't like money.

To be specific, I don't like the power it gives people who know how to make more. I'm not talking about shopkeepers who are often as fucked as the rest of us, financially; I'm talking about the big financiers, the bankers who balls up the economy, have to be bailed out with taxpayers' money, and only a year later have the sheer bald-faced cuntiferousness to actually award themselves the same obscene bonuses that they have been awarding themselves for decades. A million here, £750k there, a few hundred thousand here, there and everywhere. Current estimates put the overall bankers bonus figure this year in London at around a billion pounds. That's about enough to buy Doncaster. Or a three bedroomed house in Kensington. Even ditzy old Boris Johnson, who seems to me to be generally a bit like a political Father Dougal MacGuire wandering around going "Ted, Ted, I'm confused. What's going on?", has gone from defending the bankers against calls to hit their bonuses with a supertax to suddenly realising how much they're paying themselves, then remembered with a shake of his mussed up hair that we're still kind of in a recession, and has now started denouncing the greedy swines. His original argument was that up to 9000 bankers would leave the City if the supertax was levied. Fuck 'em. Let them go. Because the one big obstacle to controlling the (largely US owned) banks and their executive excesses, is about to disappear.

Yes folks, no longer will bankers be able to hide behind the threat of pulling up shop and going back to the US where they can give themselves whatever bonuses they like, because now Barak Obama has decided that something needs to be done to cap their avarice. And if the US is serious about doing something on this score, then the greedy bankers are, frankly, buggered. Once the US starts the ball rolling, other countries (the UK included) will follow suit. We'll start to see tax haven after tax haven getting rolled up, and finally the bankers will have to start doing a dishonest day's work for a still ridiculous sum, though not quite as obscenely ridiculous as it was before.

I personally have my doubts that it will happen. Not because of Obama - I like Obama, he has good ideas - but because of the fact that he will have to get this through the Senate, past a fair number of greedy Democrats and a whining truckful of unfeasibly wealthy Republicans, many of whom have their hands dirty in the finance world. It's a noble plan, but I doubt whether it will get off the ground. However, the mere threat of it is absolutely putting the shits up the bankers, and that gets my vote every single time.

Here's my idea. Abolish money. That's right, get rid of the shitty, life-wrecking stuff. Let's get everyone to work, but we don't earn anything; we just get to live in our homes, have our stuff, everything is free and we all provide our labour for the sakes of keeping the whole thing still running. Work for a year, then take a year off - get to do something you enjoy for a year, write a book, do some dangerous extreme sports like base jumping or laughing at policemen. Seriously, it'd be great. Ahh, but what of those terrible, human, competitive urges, I hear you ask? Simple. In the centre of each town is a stocks, and in those stocks are chained some of the greedy shitbag bankers who fucked over our economy for the sake of lining their own pockets, and every day you can kick them as hard as you like in the balls. Whoever gets to make them scream the loudest gets an ice cream. And this happens every day. People will queue for miles. I would. And as soon as I'd had a go, I'd go straight to the back of the queue again for another. Smug, arrogant, greedy bastards.