Terrence and Philip

Martin Rowson in today’s Guardian sums up my own thinking on the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand affair, really. No prizes for guessing whose physog is going to be on top of the bonfire this Guy Fawkes night, eh? But, as the cartoonist Banx commented in The Financial Times this morning, the scariest Hallowe’en trick-or-treat costume of all is the ‘hedge fund manager’ horror mask. Let’s get a sense of proportion, shall we kiddies?
Of course, I have been fascinated at this latest media frenzy. BBC Radio 5 devoted its hour-long morning phone-in to it three days running! I downloaded them all onto my new iPod! You betcha, as Sarah Palin would say.
Naturally enough, this outrage on the part of the fuddy-duddy tabloid press over an interview with ‘foul mouthed comedians’ did give me a strong sense of déjà-vu, that history from thirty years ago was repeating itself like a big burping belly that’s too full of Country Life English butter.
Well, today I found not one but two copies of Thursday’s Daily Mail on the bus. I was able to read, for the first time, a full transcript of Ross and Brand’s notorious prank telephone call, available only in snippets elsewhere. Here it is, least you forget how terrible it is, the Mail shrieked. I read it and I now have a shameful confession to make. You see, previously, when all I had to go on was a bald description of what was said, filtered through Terence Blacker in The Independent and others, I was sickened. It sounded vile and disgusting. The worst kind of bullying and taunting. But, when I was able to read it in context, and saw what those two fonejackers had actually said... I’m sorry, but I laughed. I thought it was funny.
Now, Jonathan Ross is a man I have no time for, but I do have a soft spot for Russell Brand. I know plenty of people hate him, but he is a friend of a friend* and that predisposes me to like him, I suppose, though I genuinely do think he is gifted at what he does. He pretends to be an idiot, when he is really very, very smart, while Ross is much the other way around.
Anyway, I shall leave aside the details of the prank call itself to draw attention to an interesting little detail in the Daily Mail warts-and-all transcript**. ‘Here is the bit that was not broadcast,’ they said, printing a section that even the few who had originally tuned in would not have heard. Now, I wondered, where did they get that from? Did their podcast have a special hidden bonus track at the end? Or did it come to them from the production team? Well, what do you think?
You see, I think this is not about whatever jokes Ross and Brand may or may not have thrown out in their ill-advised chat-show. That didn’t bother anyone for weeks, anyway. No, I think the joke that this was really all about was Ross’s off-the-cuff remark a little while ago that he was paid so much that he was ’worth as much as one thousand journalists...’ Now, to journalists that’s a challenge. That’s like a white glove across the face... it gives them the right to choice of weapons. And they have a mighty armory.
If they were going to write an honest op-ed piece about it, I reckon it would go a bit like this:

‘You think you’re worth a thousand of us, do you Ross? Well, watch what we can do to you, boy. How d’you fancy being the new Jade Goody, then? We can force the worst financial crisis in sixty years right off the front page to make room for your ugly mug every day... We can make the two minute hate last a whole week. We can cost you a million quid and make you smile as you let it go. That’s what we can do. And what can you do? Where’s this power of a thousand journalists that you’ve got then? Nowhere, chum. We can bend you over and make you take every inch, and there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop us. You may think you’re the biz, but you’re just another fucking civilian. We made you and we can break you. Just so’s you don’t forget who’s boss.’

By the way, that’s a warning to us as well, of course. Just so’s we don’t forget who really runs this country.

Footnotes:
*Although, weirdly, so is Jonathan Ross, now I come to think about it....
**Of course, the uncut version has found its way onto YouTube for those who would like to catch it It has already had 242,837 views... a bigger audience than the original radio programme had in the first place... while a shorter, but higher resolution copy has had three times the original audience...

Taxi rank

Following on from PJ O'Rourke's estimate of the quantity of money the 1989 Savings and Loan bailout represented (see below) I did a quick, back of the envelope calculation on the subject of the five hundred billion pound payout to the banks. It is roughly enough for Gordon Brown to take a London black cab from Westminster all the way to the Kuiper Belt Object (formerly planet) Pluto... and back again... ten times and fill in Peter Mandelson's name on the spare receipt so he can claim expenses for him too, and still leave enough for a substantial tip. Oh, and that includes the cabbie going over London Bridge twice - once in London and once in Arizona - and charging extra because he doesn't go south of Jupiter after midnight...

Watching the Defectives

Of course, you know that selling mortgages to people with no money and no assets isn’t going to make you rich. Your granny knows it. Fred down the street knows it. The toothless hobo shining shoes for beer knows it too. Just ask him, he’ll tell you. So how come all these bankers don’t know it? We keep being told how intelligent they are, but when even stupid people wouldn’t be that stupid, then just how talented are they?
The crash of 1929 came about mainly because the bankers were conning the public at large by selling them shares they secretly knew to be worthless. The Savings and Loan crash of 1989 was about them having tried to con each other, selling bonds to fellow bankers without telling them they were junk. But this latest one has gone beyond all bounds. The marks, the suckers, the victims of this latest con were the traders themselves.
”If I buy this worthless mortgage contract, I can pay myself a lot of money for it and with that money I can buy a lot more worthless contracts which I can sell to myself and then buy more... I’ll be rich in no time.” It’s like one of those perpetual motion machines that scamsters used to peddle to gullible nobles in the eighteenth century. The ball bearings roll over the top of the wheel, and then fall down the other side, dragging the wheel around faster each time, so it turns forever! Except that it doesn’t. There’s no new energy coming into the system to overcome resistance. Same here, except with money. But don’t worry, we can fall for as many dumb shell-games and shills as we like - it’ll all be okay in the end because the government will always bail us out!
If you want a mythological analogy for this, it’s easy to see. Sitting in the middle of his labyrinth, the half-Prince/half-bull Minotaur could be kept under control just as long as the King made it a regular blood sacrifice. Virgins, young men and women from the country were led into the maze, never to emerge. This was the contract the mortals had with their royal monster... In our new world order, the beast-like ‘Princes’ of the financial world can wreck havoc in our kingdoms, but every so often they demand we make a vast sacrifice to appease them. They want money, not blood, but the effect is the same. The City of London even looks like a labyrinth on the map, I notice.
If we are going to cut a deal with the dealers in the future, it ought to involve having some genuinely intelligent people accompany them at all times, charged with dragging them away from “Hunt the Pea” and “Find the Lady” stalls... at gun-point if need be. Where would you find these guardians? Oh, any unemployed seventeen year-old could do it. That toothless hobo I mentioned earlier would be more than capable of minding these brainless dimwits. He’s got far more common sense than any of them, but a thought occurs to me that we could kill two birds with one stone. Bankers love their drugs. Oooh, don’t they though! And drug dealers are not fools. They know how to make money. So, who better to award the contract of supervising the day-care of our banker class? It’s a win-win. It keeps them all off the streets. I think it’s a marriage made in heaven.

Crunchy

What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Jim Morrison

Friends have been asking me what I think about this whole crisis thing. Of course, it’s hit me very hard indeed, but I am trying to see the big picture. It’s no oil painting. I’ve tried to make it all hang together, but the Ratmen posting below still says it all for me. The rest are thoughts, unconnected, but parts of the whole. Here’s the first.
Money is not a natural resource. It won’t run out soon - unlike oil. It is not even a real thing. It is only a symbol that stands for real things. It is very easy to forget this. In 1995, the K Foundation burned a million pounds in cash as a performance art work. Many people ignorant of economics attacked them on the grounds that they had destroyed the earth’s resources, cheating the poor of bread. In fact, they had done the reverse. Just as forgery creates inflation, the destruction of bank notes boosts the value of a currency. Every remaining pound was worth very fractionally more. The size of the British economy was exactly the same as it had been.
Gold doesn’t have any real value either. It only seems to because we believe it does. Gold does not rust, granted, but its tensile strength is rubbish. You couldn’t build the Forth Bridge out of gold, it would sag in the middle. Massively heavy gold trains would fall off their bendy gold rails before they even got out of their drooping gold station.
Food is a real value thing, and it’s a finite, though renewable resource, unlike energy, which is finite but not renewable.
The sub-prime thing is nothing new. In the words of Carl Giles, for those too young to remember and for those whose memories may have grown short, back in 1989, the Savings and Loan crisis was just the same. Having bought into the junk bonds market, all America’s local savings banks went bust at once and the first George Bush agreed to bail them all out. I remember reading that it was equivalent to the entire cost of World War Two to both Allied and Axis powers combined, plus the Marshal Plan. I recall PJ O’Rourke writing in Rolling Stone magazine (“Piggy Banks”, 24th August 1989, pp. 43-4) to explain how much the public would have to pay. In layman’s terms, he said, it was like taking a New York cab all the way to the planet Neptune, ‘and that includes going over the Brooklyn bridge twice because the guy thinks you’re from out of town.’
Effectively, Junk Bonds were shares in bankrupt or even non-existent companies. Yet they could be traded as if they were real money. In that sense, they’re little different to sub-prime mortgages. Just as long as everybody went on believing in them, they could be treated like something real. The only problem with them came when someone asked for them to be turned into actual money without understanding that that’s not what you’re meant to do. Likewise, sub-prime mortgages can be bought and sold and, as with junk-bonds, they all come tumbling down the moment the bearer demands to be paid.
The S&L crisis was bailed out to tune of 124.6 billion US taxpayer dollars, and now the big banks have run what is effectively the same balls-up, US and UK taxpayers are rushing in to bail them out too.
The banks have now been bailed out twice, and now the bail-outs have come to look like business as usual. That’s how it goes. You put all your money on the armless, legless ‘living torso’ to win the World Kick-Boxing Championship Smackdown and the bookies gave you great ‘sub-prime’ odds, so how could you possibly lose? But don’t worry... big government will give it you all back again.
Just like the Ratmen of Rodencia, the bankers are holding hostage the very thing they are demanding as ransom.
“If you don’t pay us a vast amount of money, we’ll kill a vast amount of money!”
Unlike Saddam, they really do have WMDs, weapons of monetary destruction and they will use them until liberal democracy cries “Uncle”.
The New Capitalism runs like this: the banks make hay while the sun shines and when they crash, they get all their money back from the state. Heads I win. Tails you lose. Hold on, though. This doesn’t really sound very much like capitalism at all to me.
Let’s be honest about this. The credit crunch is not a natural disaster. The banks could stop it any time they liked. I don’t think it began deliberately, but they’re keeping it going on purpose. This is a corporate war and it’s being fought with money. It is also the banks saying to liberal democracy that it needs them more than they need it.
The crunch will carry on until Obama or McCain (but probably McCain) becomes US president and signs on their dotted line. In fact, it’s started already. In agreeing to buy up all their debt, the US government is effectively nationalising its banks... just like Charlie boy Marx said budding Communist administrations should do first on taking power. Welcome to the U.S.S.A. and its client state the Soviet Socialist Kingdom of Britain. You lucky people!

For further reading: From Buildings and Loans to Bail-outs: A History of the Savings and Loan Industry, 1831-1989 by David Mason (Cambridge University Press, 2004, ISBN 052182754X, 9780521827546)

“The great Ponzi-scheme rescue act of 1999” by PJ O’Rourke, Rolling Stone magazine, volume 148 (810), 1999

Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government by P. J. O’Rourke and Andrew Ferguson (Grove Press, 2003

“When Hell Sleazes Over” by Kathleen Day, New Republic Mar. 20, 1989

“Looking for Lessons From Agency That Mopped Up 1980s Thrift Mess” by JOHN M. BRODER
(published: New York Times, September 19, 2008)

On the fiddle

Oh God, no. Not Mandy again! What is it with this man? He gets the sack time after time, and still they bring him back. I can understand why outstanding political figures may clash with their leaders. I can also understand why men and women of overwhelming talent and ability have to be brought back from the wilderness because they are just so remarkable. But Peter “Mandy” Mandelson? Who the hell do they think he is? Seneca? Palmerstone? Voltaire? If “Mandy” has any of the powers of these heavyweights, it has remained stubbornly invisible to me, and to most of the British public.
Actually, the Seneca analogy is not entirely bogus. A thorn in the side of many early emperors, notably Claudius, Seneca was brought into the Nero administration because he was a political genius and Nero rather needed one of them, given his somewhat significant public opinion deficit after setting Rome on fire. Although Seneca tried bravely he did not have a lot to work with, as the Emperor Nero was - quite literally - a flaming maniac. I cannot put “Mandy” in the same frame as Seneca, who was one of the most brilliant literary and political minds of his age, but I can picture Gordon Brown as Nero - fiddling while the economy burns.