To all posturing American politicians and anyone who is misguided enough to agree with them

[fpb]

Thanks very much for destroying our stock exchanges and our financial institutions with toxic debt invented and marketed by you (there is no subprime mortgage crisis in continental Europe, let alone Japan, China or India, but all their institutions are paying for your and Britain's insanity) and then refusing to do anything to stabilize the situation. Evidently, to you the world ends at the bottom of your garden. Except of course when you need help cannon fodder for Iraq or Afghanistan.

Comments

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

I would like to take umbrage at your suggestion that the financial crisis is an evil plot imposed on the rest of the world by American masterminds who somehow tricked or coerced innocent bystanders into buying into their schemes. Not to mention the unconnected slam at our foreign policy.

...I would like to take umbrage, but unfortunately doing so would align me with a political class that has just comprehensively failed the most important test put to them since the end of the Cold War. "Posturing" is far too kind a description for both ends of the legislature, and it even fits the executive. (Not to mention both presidential candidates.) Politics carried to the point of solipsism, and now we'll all have to bear the results.

I offer whatever cold comfort you may find in the realization that Americans are going to suffer too.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I have many, many American friends, and I am as concerned with them as with myself. And the weakening of America would be a political disaster of the first magnitude. And I do not say that there was an American plot: all I say is that American politicians trying to do something about a disaster that is largely if not wholly made in American have been acting to their own gallery without even beginning to think that what they do affects billions of people beyond their borders.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

If you expect any group of democratic politicians -- or, for that matter, any demos -- to consider global interests when they're worrying about local & national interests, I'm afraid you're going to have a long wait ahead of you. Especially for Congressman and similar figures, whose concern is supposed to be their own constituents. The most you can expect is the odd dependent clause, recognizing harm done to America "and the world." Politicians in other countries might possibly use different rhetoric, but I don't for an instant believe their actions would be guided any differently.

Surely it's enough to blame them for being idiotically short-sighted.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I don't buy that. If the congressmen who gathered on Friday to deal with the situation did not realize that the problem was global, and that the rest of the world looked to them for global leadership, then they are too stupid to live. Any newspaper, heck any TV news, would have told them.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

Not a question of lack of understanding. Congressmen think it's their job to look out for their constituents and their country -- usually in that order, although they would admit the theoretical point that it should be reversed. It is not their job to look out for the rest of the world.

I do not believe that democratic representatives in any other country are different. Nor do I think that the populations they represent feel any differently. Can you give me a counterexample (of action, not just words -- global rhetoric is a great deal more popular in some places)?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As a matter of fact, I could, but I can't be bothered to look it up now. The Italian Parliament has several times voted in ways that contrasted with Italian national interest but were necessary for European or international reasons. And if what you say were true, there would be no such thing as international aid voted for by parliaments and paid out of taxation; there would never have been a Marshall Plan, and the world as a whole would be considerably poorer and more unstable. You should read your Burke: the job of a representative is not to blindly seek the immediate advantage of his electors at the expense of everyone else, but to seek the best he honestly can see for his nation (any parliamentary representative is an official of the nation as well as of his electors) and for his nation's friends. And beggar-thy-neighbour is never sound politics.