The other day I heard someone singing to a friend on the tube. The song was from the hilarious Bill Bailey sketch where he talks about turning down money from Asda because of their reputation on human rights and other issues.
This is one more example of where sustainability issues are becoming deeply embedded in popular culture and indeed counterculture. I heard another one the other night in the village pub from a neighbour’s friend. The friend had come down from London to visit and turned out to be from Goldman Sachs. Pretty soon we started talking about the crisis of trust in banking, the rights and wrongs of huge bonuses etc. He told me about this recent Rolling Stone magazine article which describes Goldman Sachs as a ‘great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’.
I’ve been talking recently with a few bankers I know about these issues of trust in banking. Its not escaped any of them that the reputation of bankers has plummeted of late. But there is nothing particularly new in this. Ever since Prophet Muhammad said “Though usury be much, it always leads to poverty”, Christ drove the money-lenders out of the temple and Shylock demanded a pound of flesh, the money-men have had a bad press.
President Lincoln famously said “I don’t know anything about money, and, to tell the truth, I never had much respect for anybody who did.” In 1920 Josiah Stamp, President of the Bank of England and the UKs 2nd richest man said “Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin… if you want to continue to be slaves of the bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the bankers continue to create money and control credit.”
More recently President Sarkozy has said “we have to put a stop to this financial system which is out of its mind and which has lost sight of its purpose”. Horst Köhler, German President and former head of the International Monetary Fund said in March 2008 “I am still waiting for a clear, audible mea culpa. International financial markets have developed into a monster that must be put back in its place”. In March 2009, Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric and poster child of the ‘shareholder value’ movement, admitted that “shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world”. Even Adair Turner, head of the FSA, now talks of the ‘socially useless’ finance sector.
But what is new is that counterculture, in the form of Bill Bailey, Rolling Stone and others, are placing these debates firmly into the minds of the citizen.
