An Eternal Drain

Close your eyes, give them our cash,
Do you see output falling, do you understand?
Do you feel the same, am I only dreaming?
Is this churning an eternal drain?

I believe we're going to bleed,
For the profits of bastards, we are asked not to see
Do you feel the same, am I only dreaming
Or is this gurning an eternal drain?

We don't face the pain and hide inside from the rain
A game so broken, that we don't even have a name
I don't want to lose our future

Oh

Embrace the pain, sun shines through the rain
Make the c*nts who caused it face up to the pain
I don't want to lose this feeling

Close your eyes and give me your hand
Do you feel my heart beating, do you understand?
Do you feel the same, am I only dreaming
Or are we learning that we need a new game?

Is this burning an eternal drain?

An eternal drain?

Theme: failure of deregulation

So we have the second great crisis of deregulation embodied by the phone-hacking scandal, on the back of the (still continuing, no matter what they try to tell you) financial crisis.

In the 1980s businesses all over the world, but especially in the UK, successfully lobbied for deregulation and privatisation on the grounds of efficiency gains. After 20-30 years of this it has been conclusively proved to be a failure - unrestrained and so called self-regulating markets do not self-regulate, not even in their own self-interest.

Banks and Newspapers (and energy companies, supermarkets etc) need to be regulated by the state on a number of key grounds:
Honesty / Transparency
Viability / Probity
Serving the public interest

If any of these tests are failed (at a strategic, not a one-off tactical level) then the businesses should be nationalised or at the very least all the management replaced with NO compensation.

We need change in our society. Huge corporations who shape our world must be made genuinely accountable to society - if this can't work then they should be forcibly split apart and restructured so that they do so.

Bonus Bandits and Billy Bragg

I used to bank my chips
With an aggressive lending machine
The profits they seemed healthy
But I knew it was not what it seemed

"Do you want debt advice?"
Was what I heard them say
But in the language of the ghetto
That means "How much more can you pay?"

I wanted to free me
In my dreams I could see me
Running naked in the woods round Barclays
Trying to get away from the loan shark please
Unsecured debt
and the unrestrained bonus culture that was lurking
round the Gherkin

At a little low-level table we would talk
I carved the interest rate on a little wooden fork
Into the bank came the bonus bandit gang
They snatched the fork from out my hand

The bonus bandits looked at me
To assert my masculinity
I said "Oi!!"
They said "What?"
I said "Nothing".

(with deepest apologies to Bill Bailey and Billy Bragg)