12th September 2011 is the day when the Banking Commission will release its final report with the decisions about banking reform. On the same day a protest group calling themselves Department of Corporate Sustenance (a spoof government department) is making an entertaining point about how the inevitable failure of a fundamentally flawed banking system is being passed onto ordinary people who did nothing to cause the crisis…
Information about the Department was revealed over a number of weeks through a sinister poster campaign, advertisements on social networking sites (you can join their Facebook site here) and a ‘hack’ of the Department’s website.
At 6.30pm on 12th September, over 100 members of the public dressed as ‘zombie bankers’ will stage a flash-mob outside Canary Wharf tube station where they will ‘feed’ on doctors, nurses, teachers and other public sector workers in a spectacular orgy of fake blood and gore.
The group is seeking to raise awareness of the huge ongoing taxpayer subsidy to the banking industry. Without the estimated £30bn+ subsidy, the big five banks would have made no profit last year, and without the bailouts, these corporations would have been liquidated by now, motivating the ‘zombie’ analogy.
Even the strongest proposals of the report by the Independent Commission on Banking will not eliminate the subsidy. Neither ring-fencing nor full separation of retail and “casino” banking would address the fundamental problems. Until they realise that the crucial issue is who gets to create money and how they use it, they’ll be missing the point.
To join in the fun you can log into the Department of Corporate Sustenance’s site at:
username: gosborne
password: z0mbies
