Coming to country near you.

I have three things on my desk that are important to me: my Mac and a motivational toy given to me as a birthday present by some dear friends. It’s a large, battery operated button on the top of which is written EASY. On completing a task I press it. A gravelly voice says, ‘That was easy!’ I love it to death.

The third is a Post It note on which I have written ‘Gene Burnett, Jump you fuckers.’ This was a tip-off about a protest song that another friend thought I would appreciate. And how! It’s on YouTube and I advise everyone to listen, laugh and learn.

The people he’s urging to jump from tall buildings, bankers, and so on, never do. It’s the victims of their actions, those whose lives have been ruined by financial skulduggery who do the jumping. So if the following seems a tad obscure to you, I’ll assume that you may not be aware of the interconnectedness of the financial and business world, and how this interconnectedness has ruined and is set to ruin millions of lives.

In view of the fact that if all goes well with Facebook’s float onto the stock exchange, our favourite social networking company may get out of paying any corporation tax in America for a decade, and stay within the rules. This will have serious repercussions. Don’t ask me how they’ll get away it. I’m not a (dopey) regulator.

In addition, the New York Times reported that between 1999 and 2009, US multinationals hired 2.9 million workers in India, China and elsewhere around the world. During the same period they laid off 870,000 workers in America, for which American tax payers are still picking up the tab - lost tax revenue, welfare payments, rising crime and the massive costs of incarcerating millions. One positive aspect is that America can no longer afford to start any more wars.

All our multinationals now have unfettered access to global markets. They are able to pick and choose and move to countries offering cheaper labour. Meanwhile, following advice by merchant banks such as the legendary ‘Giant Vampire Squid’, (aka Goldman Sachs) a slippery creature that advised Greece how to gain access to the eurozone by a supposedly legal subterfuge, they set up tax avoidance regimes involving off-shore accounts. The cash they save enables fat cats and selected shareholders to live off the fat of several lands.

Of companies like the Great Vampire Squid; if, like Adolf Hitler, you wanted to arrange for your Central Bank to trade gold for cash with another Central Bank, let’s say the Swiss Central Bank, trade gold, say, gold that you’d extracted from the mouths of exterminated citizens and converted to bullion, you would choose that sort of company as your go-between. That sort of company would get the job done without restraint or reference to the moral issue. You’d have to give them at least 10% and they'd insist on one of their employees becoming Finance Minister, but it would be well worth it.

It’s not hard to imagine that sometime in the future, when all the bank and sovereign bailout money has been spent, one of our favourite countries is going to go bust. This means that the people who can’t get away with not paying their taxes will be squeezed half-to-death by job losses, inflation, increased indirect taxation and battered to bits by one or another austerity measure.

As we slide further into recession and unemployment rises inexorably, our multinational corporations react. They duck, dive and cut so successfully that they can't help making record profits. Yet tax revenues (are set to) decrease, à la Facebook, Vodafone, Google et al, and none of the profits will be used to reduce trade deficits or stave off recession. Ergo, our multinational corporations will not contribute one iota to the difficulties that we and our favourite countries are set to encounter.

The price for our apathy and our pathetic faith in Free Market Capitalism is going to have to be paid by us, and not by them, in full.

Personally, I’d like to not only see some of the fat cats jump from tall buildings, but as they flail away I’d press the toy button inside my soul and shout, ‘That was easy!’