Line ‘em up, take their pictures, and then somebody PLEASE get rid of these motherfuckers, each and every one. Over the weekend, they all sat down and guaranteed that anyone who hadn’t been fleeced in the Bank Crisis of 2008 would get fleeced in the Double-Dip Recession of 2010…all except the bankers, of course, who continue to rob the industrialized world blind with the silent approval of these assholes (in return, I’m sure, for a few crumbs from the bankers’ tables). They all nodded their heads about reining in deficits by slashing desperately needed economic stimulus, even as the U.S. prepares to waste another $33 billion on Afghanistan.
At least they had the decency not to be photographed in silly costumes this time, The wall of black-suited men (pace Angela Merkel) is appropriately funerary for the death sentence they all signed off on.
A selection of news articles and op-eds:
- Paul Krugman has already come up with a name for what is about to happen to us all: “The Third Depression”
- Naomi Klein, writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, reminds us how the original G7 came to be expanded into the G20 in the first place as brainchild of Larry Summers and Canadian finance minister Paul Martin while they were setting up the conditions that caused all this mess a decade ago
- Economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was the guy who first sounded the alarm back in 2008, wrote this op-ed in the British newspaper The Independent over the weekend about the new Tory-LibDem government’s austerity budget and how it will devastate the weakest segments of British society.
- Economist and member of Parliament Robert Skidelsky posted this article about Keynesian economic ideas and social democracy on the commentary site Project-Syndicate.org, which puts a little context on the current situation and also tries to separate traditional notions of Keynesian economics from the ideological blinders of the current debate.
- Meanwhile, on the right…Tory cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith wants Britons to “move where the jobs are” (do you suppose he means China or India?), conservative blowhard George Will said that unemployment benefits are a subsidy for lazy bastards, and the international business editor of the London Telegraph opined that “The only plausible escape route for the West is a decade of fiscal austerity offset by helicopter drops of printed money, for as long as it takes.” You know, like Zimbabwe.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
