‘Is money good?’ the creepy, hollowed, grey man in the suit asks to camera, ‘or is money bad?’ (It must be pretty bloody bad because he looks like he’s in some late stage of illness). His conclusion is
neither. He is a disgraced, corrupt millionaire on parole and as if in some later day Christmas Carol this Ebenezer Scrooge-cum-Bernie Madoff character narrates the ad as we see money as the axis of moral
disintegration in the community. He concludes by saying that it is how you use money that counts and that if you are good to money it will be good to you. This didn’t make much sense having given the impression ATMs were as bad as tinny houses. It is only at the end where it is revealed the puzzling ad is for the BNZ bank.
Even though the trite ending hardly challenges any basis of the money system – indeed it puts the bank at the centre and synonomous with good practice while deflecting all ethical failings to flawed individuals rather than conflicted and self-interested institutions and elites – it is still the best bank ad on TV by far. The creatives must have been secretly astounded the BNZ big knobs had signed off to open the Pandora’s Box on the philosophical and sociological understanding of money itself.
Given the BNZ was bailed out by the NZ government both in the 1880s and a hundred years later – in identical circumstances – using money, taxpayers’, certainly worked out good for the bank and its politically protected shareholders. Of course those millionaires and politicians never got a perp walk like the generic American narrator. The likes of Richard Long weren’t touched for his hype after the Hanover collapse and Sir Douglas Graham will do nothing more than a few months mandatory gardening leave about the estate after the blizzard of appeals is over for him.
Whether it is an actor or whether it is Alan Hawkins or Rod Petrecovic being paid to ponder the question, the answer will always be self-serving coming from a bank. Or rather the question is self-serving. A more relevant question would have been: who owns the money and who does the money own?
If the BNZ had posed that question it would have been closer to the heart of the political connexions and inertia arbitrage of the big banks that allow them to generate such handsome and easily won profits from this country. The flashbacks in a more accurate ad on the question of money ownership would have to feature the London debts loaded onto the government by the NZ Company bail-out and the private looting through much of the 19th century – all to be paid for by taking land off the Maori whether they agreed to it or not. How’s that money looking now you don’t have any land or any rights you were guaranteed? How much worse does it have to get for money to be bad?
Money has been authorised in NZ by the government from the earliest time (as it has been in other nations) primarily to pay for war and otherwise to enable taxation and government revenue and ultimately to control people rather than as some neutral act of choosing a currency to benefit people or establish anything that is beyond governmental control.
And just as today – when the Tories are selling off public assets but not using it to pay off debt – these national debts were never repaid. The developers and capitalists and settlers in the property game made
subsidised super-profits and the debts were never paid off, only increased. The elements of the pyramid scheme essential in the NZ money system – immigration, overseas loans and ‘free resources’ (ie. confiscated land) – is not sustainable or an equation whose product will be positive to anyone other than a certain exploitative elite and the classes content to aspire to the same.
The BNZ man should have been more straight up and laid it out less like a confused ramble to the parole board, with justifications and pseudo-science, and more to the point: ”Yes, money is bad. But, you know, we’ve got fly-bys”. Maybe the BNZ can apply the same sarcastic acid wash of their grating ‘I’m going to work till I die’ Kiwisaver retirement ads (heard all over the radio at least) to their normal banking business: ”I’m gonna pay fees till I die… I’m just paying rent to the bank…”
The other banks are more comfortable with the petty smearing of their cartel colleagues, than in attempting to challenge conventions, despite all the on-screen efforts. The TSB pushing Kiwibank into
second place for xenophobia. Their campaign features a short fat middle-aged Australian who is a clueless alien who must discover what money and banking are. Like Mork, but not dressed as David Bain. He
is told a series of half-truths by his human mentor that banks are good, esp. NZ owned ones. But recently these have been replaced by a more overtly nationalistic ad that rips off the Coutts ad (and now a
Speights one too has appeared) recalling the supposed hero qualities of brewing magnates (for cunning acts to defeat rivals and government) like a micro-documentary. TSB is the little bank that could resist the foreigners we are told. However this great corporate boardroom stoush is even more boring than whatever Coutts was up to in the lab. It just sounds smug. That is the over-riding and lasting impression of all the bank ads: we are smug and we want our customers to be smug.
Not merely secure, but smug about it. Every bank excepting the Co-operative Bank (whatever and whoever they are) and the former building societies making up the Heartland Bank (with their hokey ads of gramps and winking kids in a cardboard cut-out utopian community) consider themselves a cut above and are focussed on the wealthy punters, which means pretending they are all that, plus interest.
The National Bank and the superior intonations of Craig Parker and his best Kings/Collegiate voice is no more following the purchase by the ANZ. The ‘Mentalist’ star – an Aussie using an American accent – is
not nearly as smug as Parker. But he is a know it all, which may be less smug but more infuriating. If he is to discern anything so readily it ought be from reading the minds of the ordinary person : ”I know what you’re thinking… ANZ has the worst customer satisfaction since forever, the decision to allow a merger with the National Bank was anti-competitive, it is a foreign bank gouging massive profits out of your country and they have the nerve to have an Aussie acting as a Yank trying to sell this to you.” Now the ANZ has switched to a brain wave ad making out every loan is for innovation when in all reality they are ostensibly for supporting the Auckland housing bubble and dairy farm valuations, both of which have caused a reversal of egalitarian outcomes. The banks do not loan on ideas alone: you need the proof of successfully having completed a period of voluntary debt slavery – preferrably to them as masters – before you are entitled to the right to beg to have your financial existence ruled by them. And no matter how deep in the Crafar you get they aren’t inclined to help out even the biggest of their Frankenstein creations.
And finally, as for the ASB, they have gone from one foreign tack to another without once revealing the fact they are wholly owned by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. ASB had only just got rid of the New
York Jewish character and his NY Bank in a comedic ad campaign saga that seemed to be thwarting the longest due dillegence process in the history of takeovers. If I’m following the story so far the NY Bank
went under in the GFC so the ASB was saved. Now with Dame Judy Dench (wasn’t it?) voicing ads and the introduction of the insane Brian Blessed, bellowing his way across their TV ads, I take it the English
are supposed to be interested. But why a certifiably mad Englishman known especially for his being stark raving bonkers? Is this any more odd than having an American financial felon front for the BNZ, an
American Mentalist for the ANZ, or an alien for TSB?
What are they trying to tell us?
This article made me cringe all the way through. Good work!
There is one bone I wish to pick however and that is your definition of money. This will always be a thorny subject and there will be those who disagree with my definition also.
To review you said;
‘Money has been authorised in NZ by the government from the earliest time (as it has been in other nations) primarily to pay for war and otherwise to enable taxation and government revenue and ultimately to control people rather than as some neutral act of choosing a currency to benefit people or establish anything that is beyond governmental control.’
I would first like to point out that money predates modern forms of government by something in the region of 5,000-10,000 years depending on what you consider to be true money. This is actually more important than it at first seems. If we consider the case of the feudal peasant he did not generally have money. He paid his taxes to the lord in say half the wheat he produced, no money changed hands. But something interesting happens we can see definitely the peasants exploitation and even express it as a percentage. The lord receives 100% as much of the peasants product as the peasant does himself.
But what if the peasant was payed in wages? We will assume the peasant still produces the same amount of wheat and the rate of exploitation 100% remains unchanged. The lord takes his wheat to market (as all capitalists do) and sells for money from this money he receives a portion of money which covers the cost of the peasants(now a wage worker) wages plus an additional amount that he calls his profit. But where did this profit come from? Didn’t it come from the value added by the farm and human need (marginal theories of value) say the modern economists, after all wages are the fair market rate of labour and thus their own cost!
But if we return to the above example we can see that the relationship of exploitation has not changed but for the introduction of money as the general form of exchange. The profit the lord (capitalist) makes is but a portion of the peasants product 100% as exploitation, though realised in money form. It is unpaid wages, just as the wheat stolen was unrealised use value to the peasant. Money obscures this relationship it makes it seem as if everything is paid for at its price, and the relationship between exploiter and exploited becomes a ‘money’ relationship.
But what do these two relationships of exploitation have in common how can wheat in one relationship and money in another be freely swapped? They are after all quite different, you can’t eat money, and wheat spoils. The quality that both of these things share is they are the products of human labour, both the wheat and money (for the purposes of simplicity full weight gold coins) are the products of human labour and though they can never exchange exactly at their labour value (for reasons I will not go on about here) they will over time on average exchange at their labour value. So now armed with this examination we can in part make a statement about what money is.
Money is a crystallised form of human labour in circulation. It is a product of human labour that not only embodies human labour but can be exchanged for all other multitudinous forms of human labour, without having to carry around a few wagons of wheat we can now buy a laptop with a few clinking coins.
But we have also obscured the relationship between people as producers of things. Now we have a relationship (or so it seems) between things themselves, and most importantly the one particular thing against which all other things must be measured, money. Thus so is our relationship between exploiter and exploited obscured, hidden behind the fetish of things, lies the relationship of exchange and exploitation of people.
Thus money is integral our current form of political-economy, capitalism, for are not all things measured in money? If you ask a capitalist how much he owns he does not tell you in the number of factories, inventories and all sundry. He tells you in a quantity of money as the measure of all social wealth. And if the measure of all wealth is money and money is human labour then the measure of wealth is the amount of accumulated human labour someone has in their possession. Human labour which represents in the case of the capitalist exploitation, suffering and unpaid wages of the workers. Which he puts to work like a vampire to suck ever more money and unpaid wages off the living, which makes his pile of dead money labour ever larger and more powerful. The more powerful it grows the more it must exploit with an undying hunger. The labour of the past feeds upon the labour of the present.
So money is not just a tool for the government to keep people in line or to stop alternatives. It is the very backbone of capitalist accumulation and exploitation itself! Without money capitalist accumulation is impossible, but they are in themselves also slaves to money and the labour it represents just to as are the governments. They pretend to control it for if it was revealed that we are at the mercy of the raw forces of the market despite the noises from government, then what sort of democracy do we have if any? And if they control it why can’t they stop economic crisis? No, there is but one alternative, to end the reign of capital and money, to truly have a democracy not just in name but deed. The international revolution of the working class, the planned economy of the associated producers freed form the shackles of exploitation and accumulation. Can be the only, final and decisive blow against capital, money and exploitation itself!
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