Last Straw

Simon Bowers repor­ted yes­ter­day that Wall Street bankers are to take $70bn in bonuses this year, 10% of the U.S. gov­ern­ment handout. It’s a mis­take, how­ever, to blame the fin­an­cial melt­down on bankers and their greed. These people are simply fol­low­ing the rationale of the cap­it­al­ist sys­tem: take as much as you can, irre­spect­ive of the expense incurred to others.

If you think it’s scan­dal­ous to take such bonuses, espe­cially in the cur­rent cli­mate, as I do, then blame the scan­dal­ous frame­work they work within, not them for work­ing within the framework.

I got talk­ing to a home­less guy on the street the other day. He joked to me about how mean­ing­less this crisis is to him, and while the cur­rent situ­ation could make his pre­dic­a­ment far worse I took his point: for a large num­ber of people on this planet — about 80% of the pop­u­la­tion — cap­it­al­ism is per­petu­ally in crisis. Every day. What makes this a “crisis” is that a large por­tion of the other 20% are get­ting fucked too.