Oct 03 2008
The Giant trembles
No friends, this is not a science fiction post or the tale of Thumbelina, what we are going to discuss here is the pure realitiy we are living..
Back in the 70s there were two giants who lived far from one another and hated each other. Both seemed omnipotent and invincible, but suddenly one of them, overnight collapsed and its vast territory, was free, so each of the countries that composed it returned to their independence and some even recovered their original names. The causes for this giants collapse was the ambition to conquer more land, wars, the poor democracy that was offered to its citizens and a mishandling of public finances through a system that never worked.
The other giant was then left as world leader. It seemed to him that the world was his and that he could act as the “world police”. Therefore without looking in the mirror of his former rival, engaged in wars (declared and undeclared) which bled its budget, abandoned its economy by letting its industries leave for other countries which resulted in unemployment of its people, and distributed money to finance companies that invested in the worst possible way which ended up in bankruptcy. Meanwhile, it was the nation who suffered the consequences of an inept government financially speaking, devoted to war, with a lousy administrator that was deaf to the voices of his neighbors and allies.
The first of these giants fell sharply and today seeks to get up without much success. The second, trembles desperate in seeing his ailing economy and seeks remedy. Today its congress will inject its financial system with an amount that in fact I don’t even know how to write (around a zillion $$, is that even a word?) and all this with a warning that resembles that of the warning of a father to a son going away to college … “lets see what you do with this because I have nothing else left after this. ” But the worst part of all this is that the administrators of this obscene amount of money will be same who squandered the national coffers with clumsy business operations in the first place and this just sounds to me like putting the wolf in the henhouse.
But there is still something even worse, a few days ago the ” thinking head of this giant” stood before a television camera and told his people …. “Everything is under control”, only to pronounce a few days later with several face adjustments, that the money aid would need to be approved immediately or he would have to declare “Every Man for Himself, the boat is sinking.”
Meanwhile those of us who are on the other side of the pond are seeing the affects of the giants disease and our economy is resentful that this monster has infected us with a flu that is turning into a pneumonia. But this I leave for another post.
