Should Bush and Blair be tried for war crimes?

[Kirkland Laing]

Indeed. I would love it if 50 million Americans joined forces and marched on Wall Street with their guns in tow. I might even alter my anti-gun policy for such an occasion. A revolution is sorely needed right now. The forecasts are bleak and 2010 is going to be a very hard year for many. Jobs will continue to be lost and then when the temporary recovery begins to lull, yet more stimulus money will be thrown back into the void. This carry on needs to stop and the 'too big to fails' need to die. They are vampires sucking on the soul of America.

The economy will eventually recover although it may go into reverse for a while again and either way it won't seem like recovery unemployment-wise for a long time. Once they get a recovery going they can then get to work on inflating the bubble that they've just created with government money, the one that's currently propping the markets and the banking system up. When that one goes pop and people discover that the government just let the banks run riot after the 2008 meltdown while only pretending to re-regulate them and that the banks are now automatically backstopped by the government for unlimited taxpayer dough it'll be pitchfork time, probably.

You would think it would get to a point where the people just don't take it anymore. I would have thought that point might have been reached with many cities already having upwards of 20% unemployment, but we will just have to wait until it degenerates some more. It takes an awful lot of corruption and bullshit to get even the smallest reaction from people these days. And then of course you have the reactionaries like Lyle. I live in a country where hundreds of thousands protested against beef imports (of all the silly things), and yet the Americans can't even organise themselves against government and big business who are openly looting the populace. It's bizarre.

Things will have to get a lot worse before anything happens. It's going to take a bigger meltdown than last year's before a critical mass of people get motivated. There's a good chance that the economy just staggers sideways for a while, maybe back into recession once or twice in the next few years. It's hard to see any real economic recovery happening for some time but when things do pick up in a year or a decade from now we're going to see it end in another massive mass bankrupcy of the financial system, huge taxpayer bailout etc.

Anecdotal evidence from people working in the city is that bankers are getting verbal abuse on the street now. Some guy had a cup of coffee thrown over him recently but that's the worst thing I've heard of. If people in Britain actually realised how many thousands they're each going to have to pay in extra taxes or lost services over the next couple of decades to pay back the debts the bankers rang up things would be a lot worse than they currently are. Over the next few years as taxes go up/services get cut awareness should tick up quite a lot.