Time to watch Metropolis Again.

Stock markets up, Prospects down.

Strangely stock markets are still rising as the whole world goes into recession. Very odd. If you have a pension or investments the people who look after them are very keen to make your pot grow, otherwise they’d be out of a job. TINA stands for ‘There Is No Alternative’ meaning the only game in town is stock markets. Basically a huge amount of cash is chasing the best return and as that’s the stock market it’s driving prices up. I’m trying to get my head round it all by typing this. OK but shares are in companies that are busy trying to survive, laying people off and closing plants etc, and we’re all acquiring ever more titanic government debts by the day. I have to say this smacks of Trumpian economics; ‘This is going to be great- invest in me- Oh sorry, unforeseen problems- I’m off- thanks for the cash.’ I imagine he’s currently working on some Martian real-estate scam. So what does the future look like? Mmm, scratch. I think we’ve created a system where the old adage, ‘the rich get richer and the poor etc’ has gone into overdrive: A sort of aggressive slavery (slaves aren’t always black) where the poor, however hard we work, become more indebted and the rich reap the benefits of our labour AND the interest on our debts. Of course this is unsustainable and probably the underlying reason for the current mass demonstrations. Mmm, another scratch. So what can be done? OK what did the black slaves do? Oh this is even more depressing. They couldn’t do anything, and those that did got strung up. They were categorised as lesser beings and subject to different disadvantageous rules. Their subservience was treated with abject fondness and their objections as ‘thugery’ in Preti and Boris speak. It’s the same old ‘ruling logic.’ So? It’s all a jigsaw puzzle where the picture shows ‘Home sweet home’ but the pieces have been rammed into reading ‘Homo swet heet me’. Not great but I am making this up as I go along. So now I’m seeing the working poor demonstrating, six abreast, together in a slow deliberate swaying march like that classic old film Metropolis. It looks hugely intimidating; an organised, unstoppable mass of bodies. No random, disjointed, frenetic, outwardly aggressive milling crowd, just unstoppable. Not leader and followers just homogenous humanity. It would make a great graphic too. We’ll get Stormzy to do the music. Interestingly Fritz Lang’s original screenplay for Metropolis was altered in the American version to show the down trodden workers as the villains. Surprised?