Bankers and Politicians

I like the news these days; good news is always a nice, heartwarming thing to have but bad news will guarantee a healthy audience and stir some motion in the social ocean. And boy have we had some bad news of late.

First off, I have no income, no job, no real raison d'etre at the moment; I'm in between university courses without anything to do until September. I have no mortgage woes, no pension worries, no political allegiances. I find the news to be quite riveting entertainment. It's actually a whole lot of fun to watch these tales of bitterness and money woes; I feel I shouldn't be enjoying it so much, but I do regardless. Like the Enron scandal, but for the entire world.

Every MP, banker, or general rich person in the world right now is feeling a weird, underlying guilt, even if they've "done nothing wrong"; or at least they ought to be. The environment for this crazy state of affairs has allowed them to flourish, but even within the rules so carefully guarded and upheld, everyone's now seeing that it wasn't so foolproof after all. I mean, hardly anyone's actually broken the law; it's just that everyone with the power to screw up the economy in a little way has done so, and these things accumulate. Resulting in a massive shitstorm of outcries and uproar. Everyone on the news is resigning, all the banks are saving each other from collapse, all the investors are gazing dumbfounded as the stock market does it's thing.

MPs started getting greedy, at a time when they really, really shouldn't have. Feeding the hard-to-come-by money of the taxpayer into the whole allowances model doesn't seem right to begin with, but it's understandable; after all, they do need a place to stay in London while their families chill out at the house in *enter-constituency-here*. Just, y'know, should have given them a little bit less, that's all. Maybe they don't exactly need multitudes of bedrooms in the finest neighbourhoods in the city; if we (a loose we; not really a taxpayer at the moment) are paying for their houses, surely we should be able to see what extravagances they are allowing themselves.

Greed is contagious, and greed is inevitable; but this kind of thing could have been stopped. I honestly don't think that MPs are in much money problems anyway, even if you don't count the allowances. But I'm no authority, I'm just the freeloader in Cardiff, watching the entertaining news and wondering where it's all heading.