It occured to me, the other day, that fuel prices are now way beyond, any true sense of, a joke. But I distinctly remember a time when there were trucks picketing oil refineries, preventing deliveries of petrol and diesel to forecourts, all across the country. One of the most ardent displays of protest that this country has ever seen, caused by petrol prices reaching the heady hights of 79p a litre. The real question is that now, due to opec production restrictions (artificially keeping the price of oil up) and governmental taxation being amongst the highest in europe, fuel is now at £1:24 a litre and it's only going to get worse. So where the hell are the picketlines? Where the hell are all the disgruntalled citizens, protesting being so fleeced for the privilidge of owning and running a personal mode of transport? Have we become so deeply un-revolutionary that we can now put up with any number of rip off merchants, dangling us upside down for every penny that we can call our own. In this time of recession why do multi-national banks and companies feel that they have to make more profit than they did when times were good? It undoubtably boils down to the fact that all of these companies have stock holders that they have to keep happy with a healthy dividend. I honestly believe that it is shareholders and profit speculators that are bleeding the world economy dry. Whatever banker came up with the idea of a company selling off little bits of itself to raise capital, effectively giving said conpany a monkey for it's back, 'forever', for 'one' financial investment deserves nothing but a horrible, horrible death. Given that this is an old, old idea then hopefully he met his hideous end at the hands of, say, a threshing machine. Bastard proberbly died peacefully in his sleep, but I can dream. Truth is that greed is undermining the world we live in, The wealthiest demand more and more, the poorest end up giving much more than they can possibly afford. Just how much wealth do these bastards need?
There is, after all only so much money that a person can possibly spend, maybe that sounds abit 'communist' to some but the more truely rich people there are, the more the money seems to migrate to the top of the heap leaving very little at the bottom. Our economy is now floundering because;
a) as a country we no longer make anything
Our country used to be at the forefront of manufacturing, coal, steel, shipbuilding, car production, natural gas, fuel industries, they've all gone leaving a massive trade deficit in it's wake. So, as a nation what do we actually do? Back in the late nineties, the labour government seemed to want britain to become a nation of import and service industies thus stagnating our economy to the point where collapse was inevitable. House prices went through the roof, the retarded estate agents and economic 'experts' waxed lyrical about how we'd never had it so good. Pressing everybody to 'get on the property ladder' so they cauld all enjoy the benefits of being a profit speculator. 'Property portfolio' was the new buzz phrase, what was never mentioned was that once you started down that road, with rents paying mortguages all over the place, all that was needed was a 5% downturn in property prices and that was it, you were fucked big time, and in that circumstance, if one or more of your tennants got into trouble, then the stupid house of cards that was your economic life would come crashing down, leaving you wearing margarine trousers on a slide into oblivion. (one of my favourite clarkson-isms) Next stop, a card board box under a flyover, with a bagged bottle of j.d and some small spotted dog.
b) there are more 'haves' than ever before.
Am I the only one in the country who was so incensed with the way that the R.B.S was almost run into the ground that, if I had been making the crisis decisions for our country I would have had Sir Fred Goodwin taken into a field somewhere and shot in the back of the head as an example to all the others. Instead the talentless turd was allowed to resign, retaining a £750,000 a year pension and then had the unmitergated gaul to moan when some of his mansions windows got bricked. Remember Freddie, if we were a bit more revolutionary as a nation you would have been burned at the steak by an angry mob, count yourself lucky, tosspot! There are so many people who have got into serious financial difficulty because of the banks attitude to mortguages, lending people far too much (because of artificially inflated house prices) there was no other way for these people to get on the 'property ladder'. The more you have to borrow, the slimmer your margine for error, and an economic downturn, such as the one we're in now, will prove desasterous. The number of repossesions from this recession was staggering. Some estimates put it at nearly 3% of all home loans in the country, which admittedly, doesn't sound to bad but that equates to almost 300,000 homes reposessed since 2007.
Banks have to take responsibity for thier actions, mortguage-gate in america let the general public there know exactly what kind of scum there were dealing with. The mere idea of a mortguage hedge fund that was designed to fail, would be abhorrent to most poeple but that's what these bastards did. How do these scumbags sleep at night knowing what it would mean to hundreds of thousends of people who were effectively, lined up to loose thier homes. Seems to me that the seventh pit of hell is going to get awfully crowded when these 'bankers' start dying. Pilots going to be complaining about the morals of his roommates.
