it's a hell of a town

7th July

manhattan was built from the gutters up, kicking downwards till crowns scraped the sky - squashing and compressing the sewage and tiny decaying organisms below it into thick layers of sediment till it could be drilled for oil. crude hydrocarbon dollars cunjured up from the skeletons of sons-of-obituary-less depression casualties, from the blood and guts with which artists used to paint, and from the dust of dry graffiti crumbling like weathered tapestries and withered scriptures of 10th generation slaves which tourists have explained to them from the top deck of a congested tour bus as it lurches through the slits in the grid system; between the castles of capitalism. monuments to its disciples who have brought freedom and riches to this land, and shared with everyone through the creation of dead-end jobs and wage slavery. they call it the trickle down effect, but i see no dollar bills falling from the 50th storey. from the pyramid scheme palaces full of paper money pharoahs with debt for sale! debt for sale! roll roll up and get your debt. earlier this year Barclays payed off somewhere in the region of £290 million to different organisations (the FSA, US CFTC, US Department of Justice) to settle claims that they have been rigging the economy by manipulating Libor and Euribor inter-bank lending rates. they do it all the time. a settlement is basically a bribe, but a bit less sleazy, you know? like they turn up with a suitcase and lay it out rather than wink at each other and pass wads under the table. but we're accountable for our debts though aren't we? we can't get the economy on tick with the claim that we're "too big to fail", and then get someone else (ie. the taxpayer) to pay it off when we're wrong. the only sector that can claim to be too big to fail are the people and their labour hours. that's what makes the world go round, not speculation. but we have to pay our tab, don't we? we have to do our fucking time. do they owe us a living? course they fucking do - and the best we can get away with is shoplift? fuck that. when the papers are talking about trillions of £££s in fiddled interest - with these fucks getting away with such robbery, fraud and extortion - the question to ask is... why let them have all the fun?