‘You mean, we’re giving the banks all this money just so they can lend it back to us with interest?’ Well, yes, that is precisely what the bank bailout currently means – and an incredulous ‘vox pop’ interviewee on a radio station in Britain had got it in one. So had a woman in the US who pointed to one of the empty ‘foreclosed’ homes in her street and said: ‘It’s not as if there’s anything wrong with the house.’
Common sense is uncommon among the light-fingered people who have had their hands on the tiller of the ship of state, the luxury yacht of globalization. What the rich world faces is, in truth, nothing much more complicated than a good, old-fashioned debt crisis – even if ‘credit crunch’ sounds nicer. Either way, it’s a matter of living beyond one’s means, of not paying debts where they are due. This has been possible only because the debts are owed, for the most part, by the rich and powerful in the Minority World to the poor and vulnerable in the Majority World – and to that ultimate creditor of everything, nature itself.
