Energise This!
I’m writing this with Newsnight playing in the background – they’re talking about the rising cost of living, the so-called credit crunch and the ever increasing energy bills. This was also the lead item on ITV news, as well as Channel 4 and the BBC.
It’s a big story – we’re apparently due a recession, the economy is going wild and we can only expect it to get worse before it gets better. It’s all because, so the trusted news sources say, of the credit crisis and rising energy prices.
Now I’m no economist – and I’m thankful for that – but on one hand we have the banks and energy companies posting incomprehensibly high profits, and on the other hand we have a nation scrambling to afford the rising food costs. Could someone possibly explain to me, therefore, why we think it’s perfectly ok to allow these companies to make soooooo much money when it puts the rest of us in dire straits?
I think the problem we have in this culture is that we defend the notion of unfettered capitalism above almost anything else. We seem to equate financial freedom as the most important freedom of all, and to suggest that people or corporations should be capped in terms of how much they can make is tantamount to communism. Energy prices go up because the energy companies feel that their right to make profits must take precedence over anything else – so what if the poorest people will be hit for another 15% of their yearly incomes, that doesn’t matter because if they don’t then British Gas won’t be able to post their £571m profit and capitalism will have failed.
Like I said, I’m no Milton Friedman and I don’t understand the specifics of how the economy works – but I do know that I find the idea of this profits to be disgusting, utterly utterly disgusting. Making money is one thing – making ridiculous profits off the back of people who are legally obliged to be in business with you is another. The banks are the worst offenders; you can’t do anything in life without being tied to these enormous corporations and yet we’re subjected to their unfair rules, their obscene charges and their morally dubious behaviour on a daily basis. These people have been given free reign to trample over our lives and play by their own, often secret, rules whenever they wish, and our government not only defends them but positively encourages it.
Mind you, this is the world we live in now; a place where our leaders sanction the selling of guns because it makes good profits, where they’ll happily invade countries for resources and where they’ll happily give even more of our money to the banks when they screw up. What’s that? HSBC got really greedy and lent more money than they should have done? Well we had better give them the money they need because if we don’t they won’t be able to continue to exploit the workers of the country and capitalism will have failed.
I’m not trying to be some crazed leftwinger – I’m just suggesting that when the banks and the energy companies post grandiose profits of the backs of people suffering massive financial problems, brought upon by excessive charges and prices of said companies, something is wrong with our system. These are not nice institutions – they are greedy, self interested, pathologically corrupt companies and their behaviour is not only sanctioned by our system, but encouraged and defended by it as well.
When you have a monopoly over resources or power profiteering should not be a right – it should be a responsibility. Just because you have the ability to make obscene amounts of money, doesn’t mean that you should. Opportunistic greed is not a virtuous trait, or a characteristic to be celebrated – it is a disease and it betrays a lack of humanity, both in those who practise it and those who allow it.
One day there come a point where everything is owned by one person, when all the money is possessed by one institution and the people truly have nothing. Then, and only then, will we see that we have been well and truly fucked over. Then, and only then, will we reconsider how this system works.
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