The Fruit of Your Labours and The death of capitalist integrity

The global buying up of toxic debt means that ordinary people like you and me are taking on the debts of those who should never have been lent money in the first place. It is as if a street beggar asked you for £50,000 and you said "OK", here's the fifty grand, pay me when you can". But it is worse than that because you did not have fifty grand either, so you borrowed it, and the people who lent it to you may have hedged their money and sooner or later, this IOU has been passed around so many times that nobody knows where the real money is. That's how the sub-prime market collapsed.

Governments like the US and UK are pumping billions into the banking system to shore up the increasingly catastrophic capitalist model. This money is going straight into the pockets of bankers, speculators and people who are already rich beyond my imagination.

I well remember a similar thing happened on "Black Wednesday" when we rocketed out of the ERM and people like George Soros took $1 billion to add to his...billions.

At the time I had a friend who was a partner in one of the oldest, most well known finance houses in the city. He said his computer screen may as well have said "Free Money, get it here". And of course he took it and made a lot of money on the day.

This is what is happening now; it's the reason the markets rallied today because the bankers know they are in a win/win situation.

So what does all this money mean? How can I understand how I fit in? It's actually very easy. I fit in because I will pay for this out of higher taxes, redundancy, re-possession and poverty. In other words, the people who still have jobs will earn this the hard way. Every penny we earn, doing real jobs, such as nursing or selling groceries or picking fruit or fighting fires, will put this money into the Exchequer, who have been busy paying it out to the financiers at a rate never seen on the entire planet. In other words, people who are already very rich are becoming richer on the back of ordinary workers. People will lose their jobs because the liquidity in their industry has been siphoned off to prop up the system.

I heard that a friend of a friend has just been made redundant. These are real people who will face real hardship, possibly the loss of their homes, but certainly the loss of their self respect.

Should we weep or be angry?