Who ruined my Pension Plan? I know I didn't. I have been religiously saving a ever increasing proportion of annual earnings into my plans since I started work and yet the damn things are nowhere near enough to provide anything more than a pittance in my old age. The very real prospect of having to work for the rest of my life is a demoralising reality.
I have worked in several jobs and so there is no such thing as a defined benefits or a final salary for me. I look at Public Servants and I cannot for the life me work out why on earth they have such fantastic pension plans for nothing when I have paid in so much and have so little to show for it.
Then you read articles like this one http://liten.be//Un5jR and you realise that people are just messing with my hard earned money. Playing computer games with thoughtless programs that don't a fig for who's money they blow or grow or if I have a future or not. It about sums where we are in the world when it comes to high finance.
The banking sector apparently constitutes just about 9% of our gross domestic product yet it has a profound effect on every part of our lives from the day we are born to the day we take our last breath. The argument goes that we should revere those that run the system and look after our money as they are the very cream of society and the world's intelligentia. We should be grateful for their contribution to society as it is 'God's work' that they do.
I don't think you have to be a socialist to realise we have allowed that system to take over our lives and run it. We have allowed a set of largely faceless individuals with no accountability to run our policy making the world over. They have hijacked our money, they tell us how much or little we can have, tell us that we have to invest any we earn with them, tell us whether we have any future or not and then they dictate policy to Governments with a combination of carrot and blackmail.
I am not sure how we break free of this stranglehold that banking and financial companies have over us but you get the feeling that the billions that can be made by very, very few people year on year will drive people nuts when they wake up and smell the coffee eventually.
Ultimately, if we, the citizen taxpayers and bank customers of the world, collectively use our intelligence we can outwit these people and stop them having it all ways. We want sensible investing of our money and we don't want to be held accountable for the mistakes of computer programs, the idiots who write them and the half-wits who pretend they understand them when they make their annual millions and billions.
Maybe I am a dreamer but why should someone earn lavish bonuses for watching a computer program do their jobs for them each day? It would be like me earning a salary for watching TV.
Would it not be a remarkable thing if every customer of every bank asked the question of its senior executive tomorrow morning who earns what money and why at the bank. The poor people who manage the daily customers work hardest, get the least and get fired if the elite blow the money, yet they are the very staff who are responsible for keeping the main supply of cash in the banks that keep them afloat. Over the decades it is the likes of you and I who have provided the underlying and sustaining profits to banks. We are the guarantee.
If we all voted tomorrow by closing every account, policy and plan and asking for the cash, en masse, we would break the system to pieces.
In reality, it is the customers who have the blackmail card on all banks. You and I should never forget that.
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