Your corporate overlords have screwed the pooch. They, not the people on the street, have managed to destroy the economies of the world by sheer greed.
The Europeans being a little smarter and better informed have decided the vast theft performed by the aforementioned corporate thugs will not stand. So they are showing their compliant governments some heat.
The US will continue down the road they are on, fleecing the poor and middle class to pay for the mistakes of the rich. This will not work.
Have a nice decade.
And now the fisking:
1. "Your corporate overlords have screwed the pooch." Why yes, they did, PenGun. Here we absolutely agree, though I doubt we've mutually come to that conclusion for the same reasons.
2. "They, not the people on the street, have managed to destroy the economies of the world by sheer greed." Actually, you're letting the average citizen off the hook there. You see the corporate overlords as you put them have done some of their most damaging work by entering into corrupt deals with power hungry politicos and bureaucrats. It's the combination of corporate cash, political influence peddling, and regulatory kneecappings that really have put the world economy in trouble.
3. "The Europeans being a little smarter and better informed have decided the vast theft performed by the aforementioned corporate thugs will not stand." This is nonsense on stilts as the thugs in the streets are being led around by the nose and essentially whining for more free money, not realizing that they've already sold their patrimony and their older sibs and parents ate the mess of pottage. They've run out of funds to steal and redistribute.
4. "So they are showing their compliant governments some heat." You really could do with reading Thomas Wolfe's classic Mau-Mauing the flak Catcher. The guys really in charge have sent up the lifers for the street people to mau mau and the street people will make the lifers wet themselves and then go away. It's all going according to script.
5. "The US will continue down the road they are on, fleecing the poor and middle class to pay for the mistakes of the rich. This will not work." The US has just had elections and created the largest turnover of the political class in decades. It's very unlikely that we're going to continue down the same road as prior to the elections but if we do, we're very likely to have an even bigger turnover at the next polls in two years.
Hi TM welcome back.
ReplyDeleteI'll go along with 1 and 2 but when we get to 3 & 4 I have some input:
The European governments are pretty well all socialist to some extent. The governed/governors deal is different from the USA's. The Europeans fascination with Wall Street has produced some fairly serious breaks in that deal. As they were persuaded to loosen their financial regulations by basically the same crowd that undid yours they have been snookered by the machinations of your large financial institutions. The reason that Ireland for instance has made a terrible deal with the Euro bailout squad is to pay for the awful mistakes these large corporations made. It was not really the population's fault although as everywhere else they are sheep when given some nice grass. Still they paid their bills and took their lumps.
The corporations that profited mightily from all this are taking no lumps. The man in the street in Europe seems to understand all this better than his American brother.
As to your seeing conspiracies here I think you are just blinding yourself. The protests are Europe wide and are quite different depending on the country and situation.
Now 5:
It's happened already. You have fallen off the cliff. It's pretty well all gravity from here. You do not seem to understand the extent of your debt or the vast amount of worthless assets, hidden by mark to market rules. Your commercial real estate is next up and that is kinda huge. It will follow your housing with similar results. Bernake is devaluing your currency as fast as he can but there is no way you will be able to pay your debts. Untrammeled greed has destroyed your country. Dead man walking.
Europe's fascination with wall street was a desperate play to find more money to fuel the unsustainable benefits beast. They didn't get fascinated with this aspect of "neo-liberalism" just by chance. All governing systems whose economic components are faulty end up desperately searching for new sources of cash to feed the beast. Euro-socialists are no different than the court of the Bourbon kings in this respect.
ReplyDeleteThe corporations are always going to be able to game the system so long as we maintain a mixed economy with the government putting its thumb on the economic scales to pick winners and losers. Virtually all regulation is subject to capture by those being regulated which is why it is so dangerous to do. You get the illusion of fair play and protection when in reality you're getting high barriers to entry and protection of inefficient and corrupt incumbents.