Barefoot, Pregnant and Get Back into the Irish Kitchen

When I first read this article in the Irish Times, I thought it was tongue-in-cheek. In this day and age, surely, the country of my birth could not possibly be advocating a return to repression and misogyny? Herewith an excerpt from the article:

"Of course there will always be a place in the world of business for exceptional women. Women also have an important role to play in jobs that are too demeaning for men, like teaching. But the general employment of women is another matter. Indeed, working women almost certainly caused the credit crunch by bringing a second income into the average household, pushing property prices up to unsustainable levels."

But now I see it being referenced in reputable blogs and by serious journalists and I rethink it may not be satirical at all.

Last time I looked, not one woman was mentioned in the Ponzi schemes and I was particularly taken by photos of all the male bankers, insurers and car manufacturers, caps in hand, approaching governments for obscene bailouts.

Oh, wait a minute, now I get it. It was women in drag, right?

Dissonance

Is there anyone else out there suffering from an excess of dissonance these days?

I know I am.

1. When I hear endless wittering about the bailouts solving the whole problem of the economy which hit rigor mortis over a year ago but was burnished and paraded around like the corpse of Eva Peron until even the true believers began to question the heavy makeup.

2. When I hear bleating from the automobile manufacturing sector about unfair competition from Japan when they themselves killed the electric car, oh, 20 years ago.

3. When I hear of the bailouts of the obscene bankers, the ones who are so removed from any semblance of human compassion and who got us all into this sad and sorry mess to begin with.

4. When I hear of the bailouts for ‘responsible’ homeowners. Who determines who’s responsible, pray tell? Push button two for corruption in the making.

5. When I hear the fading yelps of the Obamabots telling the rest of us cynics that there is still hopey changey in the air. In spite of all evidence to the contrary.

6. When I hear our prime minister, Stephen Harper- aka Bush-Lite – finally giving green energy some lip service in the light of Barack Obama’s visit and his feigned interest in same. Two emperors wearing no clothes for the price of one.

7. When I see absolutely no MSM reporting on the bankruptcy of California – IOUs issued in lieu of tax refunds to its citizens, 55,000 prisoners released to the streets for lack of funds to feed and house them, and oh yeah, some of the citizen journalist reports where I read this have been, yup, deleted. But you can read much about it here in The Independent

8. See: I watch California for the canary in the goldmine that it is, its disease will sweep across the US, gobbling Canada in its wake and then on and over to Europe which is already in its death throes.

9. I see absolutely no emergency preparations being made by Thems Wot Rules Us. Except here in Ontario where, for over a year now, we have been exhorted to have our emergency survival kits at hand.

10. Maybe we’ll be one of the few places that won’t turn on TWRU in primitive savagery when civilization collapses around us.

Enough already, you get my point. But honestly, my head hurts. Most of the time.

Smarter than yer average turnip?

Do you bang your head off desks, steering wheels, walls, like I do when you hear all the carryon about these corporate bailouts, should we, shouldn’t we. As if there is any other answer apart from no, no and no?

Are we all now smarter than the turnips that govern us?

Like we know, unlike the government, that the North American auto industry in U.S. & Canada is dead on its feet, has been for years: Hello Japanese Toyota Hybrid, Welcome German Smart Car!

They were all fast asleep at the switch churning out Hummers, SUVs, Wagons, Caravans, et al for the so–called soccer moms (I don’t personally know any, no one I know knows any) and their grunting big-country ranger-spouses. So what’s with all the wittering on about throwing something like 25 billion dollars at The Big Auto Three?

They are lining up as I write, cap in hand, waiting for a bailout. For what? For being so stupidly thicker than the afore-mentioned turnips for the last twenty years? For not even investing a dime in alternative energy or a cleaner planet? For killing the electric car? For heart-stopping dividends and bonuses to executives?

Now this is on top of all the other bailouts, summarized for us nicely below:


That’s totalling $4.28 trillion dollars, for starters. OK, here it is written out so we can catch all those zeros:

$4,284,500,000,000

that's more than what was spent on WW II, if adjusted for inflation.

Like I said before, this will go down as the greatest robbery of wealth from the public sector by a very privileged few in the history of the planet.



Finally:

Mission Accomplished for the Shrub and his cronies.

On second thought, maybe we are not smarter than the turnips after all.