Its like the old story of when you owe the bank a little money you are in trouble, when you owe them a lot they are in trouble.
The Spanish could bring Europe down by themselves and as such have no need to be sucking up to the Germans.
They could cut us loose if nessecary without us doing too much damage to them and as such we need to keep them onside.
Europeans have become very placid in general SS**. Why do you think that is? Years of general peace & prosperity in the 90’s and 00’s perhaps? We had it soft for a long time relative to the hundred years before.
A lack of decent leaders is a factor aswell. I can’t remember the last person in Ireland or Europe who actually inspired any enthusiasim in me. We are wide open for a charismatic lunatic left fringe type to come in here.
I think it is far more likely that such a leader will come from the far-right.
Would it not depend on the direction you are facing?
Yeah it would
Agree with wtb. There is an alternative left offering there in ULA and Sinn Fein. Voters just don’t go for them in big numbers. Since partition the left have very rarely performed well. This could be because of conservative nature and right wing media organisations like INN. Labour are party of the centre while FG and FF are centre right so gap is there on far right. TUV could always try and expand to work on an All Ireland basis.
Agree with WTB that it’ll come from the right not the left because the majority of people are stupid.
i) the overwhelming right-wing bias of the media across the Western world has worked perfectly as far as capitalist interests as concerned
ii) the rise of Thatcher’s ownership society of individuals fuelled by persuasive marketing and PR techniques - watch Adam Curtis’s Century of the Self, and the loss of any sense of social soildarity, in English speaking countries at any rate - people measure success in terms of “things” they acquire
iii) the fact there is simply a lot more to do with your free time these days than 50 years ago means people simply couldn’t be bothered protesting - why go out on a cold day and actually do something when you can “protest” in a safe and corporate-friendly way on the internet before going back to doing nothing about anything. I think Arsenal are playing Wigan now.
iv) There are very few people in absolute poverty
v) Very few people have any understanding of economics and so don’t really know what they would be protesting against
Good post. Well made.
the bubble in milk and cattle will need to burst. 2015 is a long way off though
The difference between the housing bubble and food bubble is that one can eat food but not houses.
Farmers are getting a bit carried away alright though.
Do points 3 and 4 not go some way to demonstrating that for all its faults, the economic orthodoxy of the last 250 years has created an evironment that has fostered amazing innovations and inventions, created more leisure time for most people and gone a long way to eradicating poverty in the Western world? Clearly the influence of left-wing ideas and trade unions has been part of that orthodoxy (and been a heavy influence on creating leisure time and eradicating poverty), particularly in the last 100 years, but it’s broadly a capitalist system that has allowed those things to happen. In the timeline of human history, there can’t have been anything like the development in living standards that there has been in certain countries over the last 250 years.
Obviously it’s not perfect. The creeping influence of financial institutions over the last 30 years is insidious and dangerous and the fact that such a huge proportion of the world’s population continue to live in extreme poverty is simply unacceptable, but I think there is less wrong with how Western economies and societies are structured than some people on the left make out.
The deficit rag, oh yeah the deficit rag,
Those budget gaps can be a twelve-digit drag,
I’m telling ya, that’s the deficit,
They really made a mess of it,
That’s the deficit rag!
I am ready to rally behind the red flag of a Robespierre type figure, as long as there are beheadings of cunts I don’t like.
Excessive credit has caused the massive problems in the world economy today, but innovation and the massive increase in the pace of change wouldn’t have been possible without it. Modern society was built on it.
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So from that standpoint you can say that banking fulfils a social need and is a social good. However as with anything to do with money it needs to be regulated and when the regulation goes out the window you see the result. Deregulation leads to monopolies, to abuse of the system.
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Strangely enough in America in the 19th century there was a huge divide between people who didn’t believe credit should be allowed (the “sound money” brigade) and people who did. As far as I can make out the descendants of the sound money idiots are either today’s fiscal conservative Republicans or Libertarians (which is another word for deranged lunatic).
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America’s problem is that the type of people who vote Republican still haven’t got over the colonial expansionist mentality of 200 years ago when you just moved on to the next town if you weren’t making it further east and you didn’t pay tax and if somebody got in your way you shot them. So half the people who vote in the world’s largest economy actually have the mindset of their ancestors who lived in a lawless society from 200 years ago. This mindset has been increasingly getting the upper hand in the last three or four decades.
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The truth is a mixture but generally it’s always somewhere on the left. The world’s most successful societies from every measurement are social democratic. The things that make European societies far more successful are social democratic. Public services. The welfare state, high taxes, public transport. Free education. Free healthcare. Pensions. The notion of egalitarianism. These are dirty words now because of point i) in my previous post.
America’s most successful era coincided with its turn towards social democracy when FDR came in and lasted pretty much until Reagan’s election.
The West is fucked because of a few things - the excessive credit and resulting debt caused by the financialisation of economies is an obvious one, but globalisation – the opening up of the western economies to competition from low wage countries is the biggest factor. China is doing “well” now because it employs massive amounts of cheap labour with no rights and unemployment is low. But China has effectively bankrupted the west. We’re descending to their standard rather than them rising to meet us and this is another huge reason for the drive to unregulated capitalism in the west.
Belief that the graph of human progress will keep going up in a straight line in perpetuity is naïve. Perhaps for the people at the top it will, but the main problem throughout the world is inequality and it’s only going to get worse.
Overpopulation makes mass famine a near certainty at some point in this century. The oil that a globalised economy depends on to move around and to grow its food is running out. The sea is being overfished. Numerous other environmental problems.
Unregulated capitalism without the necessary social protection drives inequality. Mechanisation drives progress and innovation but it also drives mass unemployment. If you think about it, the aim of technological innovation is to do more work with less people. The logical end goal of that is to eliminate employment. But capitalism cannot survive if people most people don’t have jobs. For those who do still have jobs, conditions are being steadily eroded, far from the four day working week people were promised would eventually happen. There are massive changes at work. Retail as an industry is dying because the internet has completely changed the way people buy things
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How about them Greeks?
Check this out
How about that then?
Upwards on €800million withdrawn from Greek savings accounts on Monday alone
Leaked details today show to up to €8bn has been withdrawn from Greek banks in the two weeks since the elections.
It’s happening…
The ECB are cutting off the flow. Come on Germany lets fucking have it :guns:
Facebook Buys Greece - Euro Surges!
17 May 2012
After years of uncertainty, stability has come to Europe with the somewhat surprising announcement that Facebook has bought Greece. Crowds celebrated in Athens as Mark Zuckerberg announced, “They were going for a good price and we’ll pay off a big chunk of their debt. I’m planning on getting a passport soon and we’re moving out of Ireland and the US and setting up shop in Greece. Why not? We own it”. Analysts are saying that the fractured ancient society will now be brought together as Greeks will now all ‘like’ each other. What’s more, the hoody, Zuckerberg’s favourite clothing item, is set to replace that “fuddy duddy acropolis” as the national cultural icon. Asked if this bold move would effect the Facebook public flotation on Friday senior financial analysts in Goldman Sachs observed, “Hell no, I think they’re looking at taking Portugal out next”.
The Euro has since surged on the announcement.