Some recent comments reproduced here. Please contribute more. Joe Hockey seems like a nice guy, an intelligent guy, but he's just too rich to be really useful to anyone who isn't. He reminds me of Marie-Antoinette, a foreign princess who didn't want to try to understand the problems of the people and her husband. People look back and say, "How could she be so silly? Couldn't she see that the people were angry and desperate?" But, you know, she had other priorities.
It is said that Marie Antoinette, wife of King Louis XVI, when confronted with the fact that people had no bread, said, "Let them eat cake, then." This story is supposed to illustrate how out of touch Marie-Antoinette was - so much so that she could not see the absurdity of her pronouncement - which was that she was rich but the people were starving. Australia has a whole slew of Marie-Antoinettesque politicians who peddle fundamentalist global economic policies, apparently with no idea at all of how angry people are becoming about being treated like children with no rights to self-government at all.
The current economic crisis in Europe can be compared to a couple in a street building a three storey mansion in a street made up of one storey dwellings and then forcing the residents of the one storey dwellings to stop paying their electricity and gas bills to meet the mortgage repayments of the couple who built the three storey mansion. Article by Joe Toscano
Recent comments