Why do we not listen to ‘our’ nobel prize winners, like the American economist Joseph Stiglitz, who warns about the danger of introducing austerity to weak economies, as happened in the US in 1929, until visionary American leaders introduced programmes of National Renewal? Perhaps with the Barclays debacle, suggesting nothing has really changed since 2008, there might be some moral renewal that could help, but are the likes of Bob Diamond, or big bad bankers, really ‘evil’ men? At one level we want bankers pilloried and prosecuted – in the Elizabethan city of London there was after all literally that ‘Stockes Market’, to shrive transgressors – at another level we want financial services, world importance, and New Labour’s giant breaking of the bank, opening up a culture to a casino mentality, now written across TV too, with its Million Pound Drops and Endemols, is the ‘culture’ of Super Capitalism. A kind of world gambling too, reflected in clever, devious or ultimately fraudulent banking packages. Stiglitz himself, talking about Greece and Europe, said that came from America, with the massive repackaging of sub-prime toxic debt, but also the super deregulation of Presidents like Reagan, then Bush, and the Chicago Economists like Friedman, that produced the kind of macho madness many have called ‘Shock Capitalism’. That led straight to Enron, which did not start out as, but certainly became pure fraud. But a fraud that was bought greedily into by a great many people, in the games of success and perception played on the markets all the time. The voices that came out of some of those American traders might well be called evil, or completely amoral, and that ‘culture’ may also have led straight to the Iraq war. But while the likes of Diamond has at least taken responsibility for something bigger than him, or was forced to, in a way ‘honourable’ politicians stopped doing years ago, it will happen again and again. The ‘Big Bang’, a rather pompous term compared with the origins of the Universe, was designed, in all its glorious energetic deregulation, to keep the City of London there as a high rolling world player. Perhaps the brutal truth is that none of us really care about the morality of the City, as long as we are not the worst losers. Maybe that is nonsense and a great many care about increasing kinds of responsibility or interconnection. David Cameron may be a Tory grandee, but he does not seem to agree with Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society“. Even the humblest students of nature or indeed physics must realise that everything has an eco-system.
Though neither Marxism nor Communism worked, with command economies and totalitarian models, actually deep human evils, do we not think the anti-capitalism protestors have a great deal to say though, if they could only articulate it, especially about the appalling and growing disparities? Yet the problem is what is a better kind of Capitalism, and does anyone really know who is in control of a system anymore? Are the systems we have created then, and which perhaps we are all becoming victims of, like some giant call-centre in the sky, not only unsustainable at many levels, especially environmentally, but part of the rot from high to low, that produces the London Riots too?
We don’t know the answers, but they are all themes inside the thriller The Godhead Game, that talks about the Mayan ‘end of the world’ this year, that we trust will not stop the Universe, even if you do want to get off, but might start some kind of waking up and involves not only a Game of spies, and a search for real crystal skulls, but posits how you might actually beat world markets themselves! It has an ultimate moral purpose, though the problem is that to do it, a rather cynical and brutal Game has to be played, that is much like the financial Games that are played non stop in the City and on Wall Street, and other world financial centres. Perhaps it is something about the competitions of life itself. An email invitation arrives in Washington, inviting an FBI systems man to change his life forever, as his footballing brother is simultaneously kidnapped. But the real story behind it is a dialogue about what we really believe in anymore, including the battles between science and faith, perception and reality, and if there are not other things to talk about in terms of world renewal, than the often corrupt games of money and numbers that spiral on and on. It might give a new meaning to the banking term “Futures”! Available at Amazon.com
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