A Worrying Week for the Western World

The USA which has led the West for decades is in deep debt and deeper political crisis read here.

Italy faces a vote of no confidence in its Government.

Britain's oldest political party has been abandoned by its natural supporters and at a demonstration against the party at its annual conference has appeared to be filtering the live news feed to its once respected state broadcasting corporation, the BBC.

Germany lacks a government following an election campaign where the true economic issues facing the Euro and thus the EU were obscured from the voters. Thereby neutering the entire EU from confronting the problems now facing Greece, Portugal, Cyprus, Italy, Spain and others.

Greece has arrested democratically elected MPs for belonging to a criminal organisation which appears to refer to the political party attaining recent popular electoral success.

US Constitution is stronger than the 44th President

An attempt to continue playing politics, long after the campaign was done, blew up rather badly in the faces of President Barack Obama and his VP Joe Biden this weekend. They figured it would be significant to hold their inauguration on 21st January which is also Martin Luther King Day. Unhappily the Constitution requires the oaths be taken on 20th January. It appears that for a while this inconvenience seems to have been treated as if it could be ignored, but finally the Justice who took the oath, at some personal inconvenience (as Joe Biden informed the watching cameras) to the Justice concerned, made it to the White House on Sunday so that the correct procedures were observed.

Yesterday's events were therefore pure show and emptiness. A fitting way to follow on from the first term of office of these two men. The speech itself was a giant attack on any still believing in the old-fashioned virtues of hard-work and self reliance. I found the sentence starting  "No single person can train all the math and science teachers.." particularly rankling as it mis-states the ideals of his opponents and unnecessarily signals a pending poisoning of any attempt to conduct affairs with respect for another's point of view.

In Britain we were treated to another inside view of the hopelessness at the heart of Obama's second term, when a spokesman insisted on the Sky News Programme, Jeff Randall Live, that this second administration could spend created money as freely as it wished as long as interest rates remain sustainable, in other words as long as idiots existed in the world ready to park their assets in a nation heading for default. The foreign policy of the second Obama administration, must be read in that scenario, to create the illusion that the US nevertheless remains the destination of choice for such liquid wealth.

One last thought on this confusion of oath taking. In the first inauguration President  and Vice-President  bungled their words and had to re-take their oaths again after the ceremonies. This second double ceremony thus makes them, given the Presidential two term limit, the only men to have taken these presidential oaths four times. Twice as many as that for any of their predecessors! I am therefore tempted to wickedly wonder in print, if that may not be due to a portent that their word may prove to be only half as good?