Spring 2008 - Welcome to the New Depression

Well, it looks like the end of the road has finally arrived. After a freezing winter in which we huddled under duvets watching television wearing jumpers and blue nylon thermal underwear - spring finally arrived last month. The thermometer crept above 10ºC and exactly eight months after we had phoned to place an order for wall insulation the company arrived to do the work. Thanks guys.

And then, just as the park is full of beautiful pink blossom and you can go outside in a tshirt, the doomsday predictions made two years ago all come true at once: oil at $135 dollars a barrel, food prices going crazy, the American economy disappearing into the toilet. It’s a rerun of 1970 when a decade of spending billions dropping bombs and screwing up working class and black kids in Vietnam caught up with Uncle Sam. You can only hand out so much money to the pigs at the tough of the defence industry (Cheney being the biggest pig of all) before someone has to pay for it, and now we all have to pay for it. And still they want to attack Iran. (See the Real News link on the left for more on this)

If McCain gets elected, as looks more and more likely, he’s just enough of an arrogant hot-tempered shit to really finish the job in the Middle East. This is the man who got tortured in Vietnam, supposedly, yet is happy to give the nod to torture in Guantanamo. He still refers to the Vietnamese as “gooks” to his journalist pals - a fact that didn’t endear him to a number of Asian leaders when they finally got to read about it (in the one US paper that could be bothered to cover it). He’s the man who bravely leads 'the fight against the power of lobbyists', yet has around 50 lobbyists on his election team, one of whom represented the Burma generals. He’s the man who has voted against banning assault weapons, who will refuse on principle to even speak to the Iranian leadership (making him, possibly, even more of an areshole than Bush). He has eight homes across America and was bankrolled into his political career by a rich second wife (he dumped the first one after she was badly hurt in a car accident), but we are expected to believe he’s a ‘maverick’ Republican. Oh yes, like George Bush was supposed to be a ‘compassionate Republican’. Piss off. Don’t believe a word of it. Just check their voting record to see what any of these tossers really stand for.

So we’ve got this tortured seventy-nine year old bastard to look forward to, and a smarmy public school boy to take over from the gibbering neo-Thatcherite Gordon Brown who thought last year he could steal Tory thunder by robbing the poorest in the land to fund a tax cut for the rest. The British economy is looking very shaky, we’ve blown all the North Sea oil money on God-knows-what so we’d better start digging up our garden to grow some spuds. The only good news is that nobody can sell their house so we won’t have to listen to any of those torturous after-dinner conversations about house sales.

Apologies for the rant, it’s out of my system now.

We’re all fine by the way, ..er, how are you?

McQueen family sporting the New Depression look shortly before the landlord's bailiff (far right) threw them onto the street.