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Eric contemplates the bill we have to pay

The consquences of greed

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Thursday, 6 November 2008

Greed’s a curious thing, and like all out of control addictions it always comes back to exact its own heavy price. We are now dealing with the consequences of greed in our financial world and it will effect us all.

I grew up through the miners' strike and a recession in the valleys of Wales and I learned the value of things. Not the things that folk owned or earned, but the value of communities and looking out for people less fortunate than myself, the value of care. When I first came to Brighton there were no beggars on the streets and no internet either. We forget how quickly we accept things as normal, as if they always were.

For all of us winners of the last 15 years of financial boom, there has been a loser.

It's not the bankers or share traders, the stock marker dealers or the directors of companies we should point the finger at and rage about their greed bringing us to this state, we must point those fingers at ourselves.

We have all enjoyed the good times, with the housing boom, the cheap endless food, flights that cost next to nothing, the strong pound, our easy jobs with their good salaries. The credit cards and pushy loans, the endless money to spend that is not quite real or ours. We have all indulged in this.

All along our clothes, which we bought for next to nothing, were being made my children who were paid even less, our food grown in countries where farmers children starve as they export food to us, our recreational luxurious lives devastating whole areas of the world from cocaine to coffee, carnations to cars, our insatiable hunger for the good life is our undoing. Our bankrupt credit for handbags and holidays all along stopping loans going to people who really needed the funds to build their lives.

We stamp our feet and rant and demand justice from the fat cat scapegoats and their swollen bonuses, we demand our sacrifice to the god of recession but we should look closer to home, in the mirrors and see the real blame and shame in our faces.

To be biblical about it; we are locust and legion. We made this happen, our inaction (or most of our inaction as some folk kept the light of fairness bright) allowed it to continue and as long as we all got what we wanted it was ‘turn a blind eye - business as usual’.

We are now about to learn the value of things once more and it’s going to hurt, badly, for a long time but then again we are getting what we deserve.