This latest recession is America's doing. It 'got drunk' as someone said and the chill is being felt everywhere else with the UK taking a battering but of course Gordy Brown can't wag his finger at his good pals across the Atlantic. Too big and too powerful so he has to make sympathetic cooing noises and help his pals dig themselves out of a multi-billion pound hole of their own making.
The British solution to American's playing up used to be sending over a British force to burn down the White House but as that option is off the table, what we could do with is a small, weak nation to kick about instead. Hello Iceland.
The tiny island's banking sector has collapsed and taken with it a billion of local councils cash as well as billions more from small investors which Iceland is saying it hasn't got the funds to pay back even a percentage of our loses.
Step forward fearless Gordon to puff out his chest and show that nation of ice bound fisherman that they can't cost us Brits money and not feel our wrath. America can, and have, but we are bigger than Iceland so it's sleeves up and someone fetch Gordon his best arse kicking shoes.
The Icelandic banks froze our accounts and the British government retaliated by using anti-terror laws to seize Icelandic assets, adding Iceland to the axis of evil on our changable terrorist countries list.
Mr Brown says Iceland has acted 'illegally' his Icelandic counterpart Geir Haarde accuses Britain of 'an unfriendly act' and an awkward stalemate has been reached. They have our dough and we have them by their assets. Treasury officials have travelled to Iceland for crisis talks before we send Her Majesty's Royal Navy steaming northwards intent on crushing plucky little Iceland and its 301,931 inhabitants.
Unbelievable we would do such a thing? We did it in the 1970s over fish and NATO had to step in to negotiate the end of the 'Cod Wars' so we have precedence of not taking any nonsense from tiny countries we could safely slap around a bit.
Iceland, and anyone else smaller and weaker than us, you have been warned. Don't mess with us.
11 comments:
"This latest recession is America's doing."
Um no, it isn't. Recessions come and go, it's called the business cycle, and it will always happen and no no one is to "blame", the answer is that we have ups and we have downs, fact of life.
'...and no no one is to "blame",' says King Cody, the Canute of the ailing Land of the Stars and Stripes! It's just the 'business cycle' he adds soothingly for our edification. Obviously he didn't lose any money, unlike many.
King Cody is in his normal state of profound denial. He is to be pitied and what he says must be completely ignored!
Afraid it is Cody, blame your sub prime market which kickstarted this whole shebang.
See what happens when you help poor people buy a house...
Anonymous, what you really meant to say was: see what happens when you allow immoral, greed-crazed spivs to have free reign in the financial markets while a right-wing American government sits on the sidelines and applauds!
Your comment is tasteless and misleading.
It's all about dangling those shiny baubles at the right (or wrong) folks Q. Immoral, greed crazed spivs sums them up nicely.
Then let's play the 'no one is to blame game,' Nog.
Let's assume that anything untoward done by humans either individually or collectively is a result of bad programming during their learning phase and/or a flaw in their genes. They are all victims!
Therefore, Jack the Ripper, Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, George Bush, the Israelis, the Germans, the scientists who made nukes, the people who invade and occupy and torture, the paedophiles, the sex slave traffickers, the rapists, the murderers, etc, etc, ALL ARE BLAMELSS, INNOCENT!
There, the silly blame game is over. Do you feel better now?
Haha! We're getting on the right track!
Basically, what I'm trying to illustrate is how absurd it usually is to attribute "blame" or "guilt" to massive aggregates. Massive aggregates don't act. Yeah, on paper a corporation or a government may have "personality", but that doesn't make them people.
Obviously the acts of the Queen of England are not Lucy's personal (or collective) fault. What the Queen does is her own damned problem. Likewise, whatever George Bush does isn't Cody's fault.
This isn't to say that there are no complexities to issues. Hypothetically I could vote for some other slate of electors (which would have a nonexistent effect on the outcome) or start a revolution (which would fail miserably on account of my lack of military knowledge or will to kill others). Maybe if I worked in some area where I was able to make a change on the margin, I would have some duty to do it, but the whole idea of "blaming American Greed" is utterly laughable. This, again, isn't to say that there aren't bad greedy people who may have some fault, but rather that "American Greed" is a sort of glittering generality which means absolutely nothing.
We need to keep our micro with our micro and our macro with our macro, and to understand our macro in light of our micro (which any good economist, of which there are sadly very few, would tell you).
-Nog
I had a flashback to a former commenter then Nog, i think he ended up going mad and throwing himself off a shoddy cabinet he made onto a Menorah in temper one afternoon.
' "American Greed" is a sort of glittering generality which means absolutely nothing.' So said Nog.
So now we have the position where no one is to blame followed by the edict that 'generalities about America are meaningless.'
So folks, the fact that Americans consume a disproportionate amount of the world's resources, generate most of the world's greenhouse gases, generate most of the world's wars, spend more on armaments that most of the nations of the world combined, have a political system that is largely controlled by Big Business and the Jewish lobby, have large groups of evangelical fanatics, have a huge gap between the rich and poor, have serious racial problems, etc, etc, despite all this, no generalities about Americans can be made.
Don't you just love the semantic pea and thimble tricks which the pseudo-intellectuals employ! Is it any wonder our world is in such a mess (Oh, Nog, forgive me for I have used a generality!).
-"Americans consume a disproportionate amount of the world's resources"
And produce a disproportionate amount as well.
-"Don't you just love the semantic pea and thimble tricks which the pseudo-intellectuals employ!"
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