by David Malone
When Cancers grow they don’t do so according to any plan. They grow when cells cease to regard themselves as part of a larger body and choose instead to gorge themselves, unregulated and unchecked, upon it, and are enabled to do so by the absence of the body’s Programmed Cell Death system which should normally force the shut-down of dysfunctional cells.
Our social body is being eaten alive by a cancer of debt backed finance. Some in our banks no longer care about the health of society and wish only to grow as large as they can as fast as they can, for their own sake. And our body politic has lost any means of shutting them down. There was once such a shut- down mechanism, but our politicians were too cowardly or corrupt to enforce it and have now surrendered it to the banks themselves.
But a characteristic of cancerous growth is that it mutates. So does financial fraud and lying. A mutated and newly aggressive lobe of a cancer can suddenly erupt from within itself and grow until it starts to envelope that from which it grew. Sometimes it diverts blood away from the original growth to the point where the original starts to necrose and rot.
Both in cancer or in our present financial system there is no loyalty. Both are a living tissue that has become blindly greedy. Neither has any thought for the future, not even their own. In both cases what was once healthy has mutated, out of control or care. They exist for their own immediate survival only, for which they will consume even that which once supported them and upon which, they themselves ultimately depend. Cancer and debts eventually consume and destroy everything, even themselves as they draw everything into themselves.
I think we are beginning to see this happen in the tangled, misshapen growth of our banking and debt cancer. What was theft and fraud is mutating into legal retribution and blame. Different growths within the debt and banking cancer are trying now to devour each other. Like starving spiders in a sealed jar they all have their fangs in each other poisoning, digesting and sucking with a cold and thoughtless ferocity.
And this provides me with some hope.
If the financial fraud mutates as I think it will, and nations increasingly try to find ways of claiming that regulators and bankers in other countries were the cause of their own banks downfall so this mutation of the fraud itself may do what our pathetically corrupted regulatory regimes have failed even to attempt.
Till now there has been, to be blunt, a special relationship between the regulators and the banks – like that between a whore and those who pimp her. The banks pimp out their regulator to make the pubic feel better. Their job is to provide relief with a sham inquiry here and a quick stress relief test there. How else could you describe three ‘inquiries’ in to Irish banking, each so tightly drawn as to assure none of the difficult questions could be asked let alone addressed? In all our contries ‘our’ financial regualtor works for the banks and is there to manage public anger and make sure our access to facts is strictly ‘regulated’.
But events are now overtaking the regulators themselves. We are now beginning to see legal action taken which will, I think eventually not only by-pass the regulators but eventually draw them in as accused.
The recent Madoff case citing UniCredit, HSBC, Bank Austria and others is a case in point.
If every country tries to blame the banks and regulators in other nations, we may yet get at the truth.
David Malone is the author of the book Debt Generation which you can buy here. You can read and listen to excerpts from his book here.