The World Crisis

The picture is a representation of Steen's Dissolute Household. You can see Steen's work in web form here.



As I've suspected for a couple of years now we are all sinking into a deflation and there is very little that can be done about it. Nevertheless, it is still shocking to discover the way what can only be called the political-media class massages reality and only holds those it maintains a distaste for to account.

Sergei Diaghelev, the choreographer, once told his ballet classes to 'astonish him'. He'd be open mouthed at Mitt Romney. Romney was always a little soupy and creepy on the campaign trail, but here's how he pledged last January to 'save' Detroit. Here is how he wanted the city's main industries and millions of people put into bankruptcy once he failed to win the presidential nomination or to matter in the presidential campaign.

Romney, of course, would dispute my characterisation and would say that he was merely trying, via bankruptcy, to suggest that Detroit's problem was the way unions got companies to generously fund healthcare for employees who were expected to give the best years of their lives to firms that did not otherwise care for them.

Why are companies, quite rightly, never meant to be charities, whilst workers are, working away for less than they could get by free but collective negotiation? The logic of Romney's argument is either that Detroit's former workers should be betrayed, or that the government should have borne the burden of universal healthcare insurance years ago.

It's disgusting really, but not the only astonishing thing about the past few days. Having not had any money to repair bridges, or levees, or roads, or to invest in the future, or to pay off the debt, Hank Paulson has now discovered eight hundred billion to throw at the banks in the dying days of the Bush administration.

Not to be outdone, the British political class have put down the environmentalist cult for a moment or two--but only that--and laid plans to raise value added taxes and national insurance taxes, as well as stupid 'green' costs, in the near future whilst throwing away billions in a seemingly uncoordinated attempt to 'stimulate' the economy now. It's like Victor Frankenstein pretending that he was only doing electroshock therapy and not animating a brain-damaged corpse.

There were aspects of what was done that I thought good, but five years too late--like the VAT cut that may help out small businesses and the new awareness of waste in government. But this new money that the government is throwing at the banks will either go straight out of the country or back to them, because the banks are gibbing at their former obligations to the government accumulated last month.

All the actions themselves seem illiterate, and informed by a central reluctance to go to the heart of the problem. Government is bloated with the products of universities that do not teach anything and who do not make society much better and vast departments regulating life and fulfilling the worst aims of the faux-radical late sixties. At the same time, its proper responsibilities are outsourced to expensive private companies who have an incentive to provide a shoddy, expensive service. Those things it cannot sell off, like the police, armed forces and courts, are hobbled by bureaucracy and the bottom line of accounting so much that their culture has changed.

This is all going to end in tears, given that this economy and this society has been hollowed out by all parties for over thirty years. People seem determined to make the worst decisions and then, with a few exceptions, to applaud them. Is this the way countries fall? I am torn between the fascination of staying and seeing what happens, and finding some way to emigrate as quickly as possible. Who ever thought New Zealand or Cape Breton would look so attractive, given that Donegal is probably crowded now anyway?

There is an old Irish poem, which summed up the grim determination that sometimes passed for optimism in all the long years of imprisonment. It went (in Gaelic);

Time has triumphed, the wind has scattered all,
Alexander, Caesar, Empires, Cities are lost,
Tara and Troy flourished a while and fell,
And even England itself, maybe, will bite the dust.

It is a final thing of amazement to me that I may be around to see it.