Bankers (spelled with a “w”) are doing God’s (dirty) work

Bankers are doing God’s work. It’s true, I tell yer. How do I know this? Well, a banker told me.

Well, he told the Sunday Times, actually, and, because I rarely read about these people – bankers, that is, spelled with a “w” – I missed it.

But Ekklesia has picked up on it, and the fact that the parasite concerned, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, has come in for some stick.

Now we all need banks, yes. Why? Because the world has been created that way. We’ve been funnelled into an existence whereby we can’t do without them, by politicians who have big business – the bigger the better – at heart, politicians who can sanction the decanting of billions of pounds from taxpayers’ funds into these monstrous institutions at the drop of a crocodile tear from . . . well, from bankers (spelled with a “w”), yet won’t fund socially cohesive institutions such as the Post Office.

But to say bankers (spelled with a “w”) are useful in a useful sense of the word “useful” is just useless. They produce nothing, but move money around, create money out of people’s debt and don’t have to have actual funds to match the stuff that’s owed to them. They decide to pay themselves obscene bonuses, and then claim that what they are doing is God’s work.

Well, this raving idiot claims it, anyway.

“We’re very important,” the pompous arsehole tells us. “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth.”

It’s not the only model, you know, but it’s the model you would support because it keeps you in more money than most people would have space to store it if it were given to them in large-denomination notes.

If he cared about helping companies to grow, really cared, banks would make it cheaper. They have to make a living, but do they have to make so much? Get real for a moment: who needs that sort of money? Only pompous arseholes such as Mr Lloyd Blankfein.

“Goldman Sachs last month announced that its top staff would receive combined bonuses of £13.4 billion, a record sum,” says Ekklesia, adding, “The resulting criticism led to suggestions that the bank would donate around £600 million to charity.”

Church Action on Poverty have declared themselves “puzzled and offended by the assertion that the continual creation of more wealth – concentrated in the hands of those who are already wealthy – is somehow ‘God’s work’ ”.

Mind you, didn’t Jesus say the following?

Matt 13: 12: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”

Matt 25: 29: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

Mark 4: 25: “For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.”

Familar scenario, that.