The Great Credit Card Contrick!

The Great Credit Card Contrick!

THE con-trick of easy credit made available over the past decade or so by way of a plethora of credit cards has hidden the real problem that working people face in their daily lives. It is so easy to blame people for getting into debt as a result of using that little plastic card they have in their pockets or handbags but in reality they camouflage the low-wage economy in which we live.

Low wages have been subsidised by credit card borrowing which has had a number of major effects - people have subsidised their own wages, increasing profits and therefore massive pay awards to the rich - people's real incomes have been disguised through the ability to obtain easy credit and consumer spending in the high street continued to rise regardless of the contradictions posed by this Alice in Wonderland economic system which was eventually bound to collapse.

Furthermore, working people have had to pay back that part of their income that they have had to borrow, and pay it back with interest. It is this simple low wages easy credit contrick that has fuelled massive profits for a few and poverty, debt and misery for many.

Now people are left with massive debts, low wages or unemployment as the credit driven economy goes bust, of course, people's real incomes could never continue to subsidise their borrowed income indefinitely. We must not make the mistake of blaming ordinary hard working people for getting into this debt because that excuses the real culprits behind the financial collapse.

Another element to the con-trick is to have us believe that it is only something called the sub-prime market in America that is to blame. The so called "credit crunch" is much more about the whole system of allowing credit to finance low wages or meagre incomes in terms of pensions or benefits.

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England made this very point talking to so-called business leaders in Leeds:

"So, taken together," he said, "the combination of a squeeze on real take-home pay -and a decline in the availability of credit poses the risk of a sharp and prolonged slowdown in domestic demand."

Not that he is worried about low wages only the effect that a slowdown in domestic demand caused by credit restrictions will have on profits.

The answer is not for the poor to subsidise the rich with billions of pounds in handouts to this bunch of scroungers who run the banks. The answer is the end of the low-wage economy and credit card dependency but that, as Mervyn King recognises, would hit the pockets and profits of the fat cats that created this mess.

Another essential ingredient that was needed to carry out the contrick was the shackling of trade unions by repressive laws to stop them representing and fighting for fair wages for their members. It is time that those antitrade union laws were repealed. It is not the job of trade unions to save the fat cats at the expense of working people and their families.

WILDCAT BANKERS

Politicians from all three main parties, and indeed all around the world, are expressing their disgust at the risk averse wildcat gambling of the bankers. Nick Leeson, who brought down the Barings bank in 1995 by his irresponsible gambling, was chased around the world arrested and sentenced to six and a half years imprisonment.

Those who have caused the unprecedented collapse of the world's banking system have so far escaped without charge and remain at large to do the same thing again with billions of pounds of our money financing their obscene pension pots.

The simple answer is to take the banks into public ownership instead of handing over billions and billions of pounds of our money so that they can say "Oh thanks" and then just run off with it.