Nor the UK one?

The American Economy Is Not Coming Back By Dave Lindorff
America, and individual Americans, have been living profligately for years in an unreal economy, propped up by easy credit which inflated the value of real estate to incredible levels, and which led people to spend way beyond their means. Ordinary middle-class working people have been encouraged to buy obscenely oversized homes at 5% down, or even no down payment.

They have been lured into buying cars the size of trucks, one for each driving-aged member of the family (in our town, so many high school kids drive to school that the school ran out of parking spaces and the yellow school buses, largely empty on their runs, are referred to by the students as the “shame train,” an embarrassment to be seen riding).

They’ve installed individual back-yard swimming pools, unwilling to share the water with their neighbors in community pools. Boring faux ethnic restaurant franchises of all kinds have befouled the landscape, filling up with families too stressed out to cook, and willing to endure over-salted, over-priced and tasteless cuisine and tacky plastic décor night after night.

Prudence? Who she?

John Redwood: The overborrowed drag down the prudent
Many running good businesses are struggling for custom and cash as the credit and the orders dry up. Worse than that, the most imprudent banks are the ones that are walking off with the cash, as the government frantically pumps new share capital into them instead of making them address their underlying business problems .We all know that if we work hard and save for the future, it will be us who pay the higher taxes and pick up all the huge bills they are now running up. Policy seems to be based around the proposition that there is no limit to how much taxpayers should borrow collectively, to remedy a problem brought on by some taxpayers and some taxpaying banks and companies borrowing too much individually! Nor is there any apparent limit to how much taxpayers are made to put into weak banks, who carry on paying large salaries and bonuses.

The wheels on the bus...

LabourList.org

COMMENT OF THE DAY: Every Friday, the week's best comment will receive a bottle of House of Commons champagne!
Chris Cowin: "[Brown’s] original objective, set out before Labour came to power in 1997, could with hindsight have been better phrased as "we will abolish homegrown Boom and Bust"... in a sense Gordon Brown can be compared to the driver of a bus which has been travelling a rough and bumpy road. On taking the wheel, he promises the passengers that from now on the road will be smooth and there will be no more "Boom and Bust". He drives carefully along a fine new highway and all is well. But then a storm breaks out and the bus is buffeted from side to side. The passenger s at the back complain loudly that they were misled, that it is just as uncomfortable as before - but Gordon must not waste time arguing with them. He has to concentrate on driving the bus."
And that was the best comment they got?! Jeez.

Update: Friday 30th. FFS! This comment has just won the bottle of Champers.



Message from Grote to Scrote

Professor Honderich answers a neo-Zionist:
Dear Idan Gurel,

Thank you for your email.

With a pile of dead people in Gaza killed by what you call your defence force, I cannot bring myself to reply to your points. If you are convinced I am not good at argument, you might turn your attention to virtually the whole world, and ask why your neo-Zionism is at least adversely judged by all of it, loathed by much of it.

Ted Honderich

Grote Professor Emeritus Philosophy of Mind & Logic
University College London

Is it a bird?...

Charlie Brooker: Obama's inauguration was the most inspiring thing we've seen in years - and the most terrifying, too
For the last eight years, watching America at work was like watching the scenes in Superman III where Superman, under the influence of red kryptonite, goes "bad" and grows stubble and gets drunk and starts vandalising the city and shouting at kids. He's only stopped when his geeky alter ego Clark Kent magically fights his way out from within, and stands blinking before him, in his nerdy suit and thick glasses. Evil Superman scowls, and the pair have a cathartic bust-up in a junkyard - at the end of which Evil Superman is finally vanquished. As a battered but unbowed Clark Kent gazes up at the heavens, the theme music swells, and he pulls his shirt open to reveal - ta da! - a fresh, clean Superman costume he'd been wearing underneath the whole time. Then he flies off and beats up Robert Vaughn or something, which is a shame because until then it had all been a pretty good metaphor for the redemptive spectacle of last November's election. And now it's just a silly action movie I probably shouldn't have mentioned in the first place.

An end to boom and bust?

James Grant, the man who saw the crash coming
The Wall Street Journal gets a swipe round its chops in every other essay in James Grant's book but the targets for his most withering and unwavering censure are - as he put it in a telephone interview with The First Post yesterday - "the criminally negligent and incompetent financiers" who cooked up this mess; and "our masters in central banks and governments" who "keep making determined efforts to thwart the price mechanism as an elegantly simple instrument of deliverance" from our present woes.

Allowing that mechanism to work unhindered would, in James Grant's view, "deliver General Motors to its deserved fate - which is bankruptcy"; and, though he was reluctant to be drawn on the question, Grant would prescribe the same fate, in principle, for RBS.

"The habits of mind of central bankers are perilously close to central planning in their conceits," he said. No individuals personify those conceits more, in Grant's book, than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and his acolyte Gordon Brown. Mistaking a financial boom for economic stability, they were the architects of a palace of debt, with flying buttresses of over-valuation, as fanciful as Ludwig II's Neuschwanstein Castle.

No surprise there, then

Neil Clark: Zionists for the BBC!
My wife Zsuzsanna and I discussed last night how many comment pieces from Zionists lauding the BBC's decision not to screen the Gaza appeal would be published in Monday's daily newspapers. We both agreed that it was long odds-on that The Times would publish such a piece and both agreed that Janet Daley would use her Monday column in the Daily Telegraph to argue that the BBC was right. And we both thought it was the biggest certainty of all time that Melanie Phillips would do likewise in her Daily Mail column.

And lo and behold, what do we have...
And Lenin reminds us:
'Not many people know this, but Mark (Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC) is actually a deeply religious man. He's a Catholic, but his wife is Jewish, and he has a far greater regard for the Israeli cause than some of his predecessors.'"

Carry on as before?

Campaign For Liberty — Obama's War
The new president fired missiles into Pakistan, killing at least fifteen people. The locals say three children were killed. Obama's White House, advertised as the most transparent in US history, has no comment. Less than a week into his presidency, and he's already ordering bombings. Thanks to Antiwar.com for the links.

The Democrats and Obama have long emphasized Afghanistan and Pakistan as the central front of the war on terror, appropriating Bush rhetoric and bellicosity with just a change in scenery. But just as none of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi, none were Afghani or Pakistani either.