It looks Germany just became as ungovernable as the United Kingdom. We’re not doing so hot ourselves. Things are looking pretty shitty all around, with Greece going to seed, a volcano that won’t stop spewing flight-grounding ash, and an oil gusher that can’t be capped in the Gulf of Mexico. I can’t wait for hurricane season.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Looks like people all over the world are looking for a third way besides pro-business conservatives and pro-business liberals. Even the Tea Party are anti-business, at least anti- big business.
Yet the Tea Party hierarchy is funded by big business.
I almost throw up at the mention of any “Third Way” for obvious reasons(or what should be obvious). How about a party that puts the people ahead of the corporations?
That’s what the Tea Party are looking for. They haven’t found it, of course.
It could be worst, just imagine if John McCain was elected to be President.
Yeah, I can’t wait for Santa Ana fire season here in SoCal. Hoo boy.
OT, but can we moms haz a cute baby pic in honor of Mother’s Day?
Ya know, i’m not sure i like that term “ungovernable”. It makes me think the citizens/voters of those various countries are at fault: they have flown off the handle, and need to get their shit together and stop acting like nutballs. And I suppose that case could be made about the rioters in Greece, although you can understand why they’d be in a rioting frame of mind.
But the Brits? The fault there seems to be with the government. After Iraq and the economic meltdown, what decent person wants to support Labour? And god, the Tories? A return to Thatcherism and wingnuttery? Blecch. I don’t know enough about the Lib Dems, but from what I read unappealing.
I don’t know a lot about german politics, other than that Merkel was a conservative. So overall, it seems to me a lot of the governed think their leaders maybe haven’t done such a good job of governing.
But that’s all semantics.
Broad comment number two: anyone seen the permeable cone stocking idea for solving the gulf gusher? Wishful thinking, or feasability? The comments are interesting…
Uh, Booman? Respectfully, from Key West, about those hurricanes: Shut. Up.
Oy.
::
Yeah, ixnay on the isasterday alktay. Never vex/mock/anger/ridicule/etc. the gods of chaos – we give them enough reason to spite us as it is.
….and the train, it won’t stop going tho’ it could slow down…….
Sorry, but it was there…(apologies to Jethro Tull)
Germany is ungovernable because the election produced a four-way split in party support by voters? The UK is ungovernable because the election produced a three-way split in party support by voters?
That is true only if one or more parties takes the position that the Gee-No-Pee has taken in the US.
Europeans parties are used to negotiating government ruling coalitions between parties. That does not make a government dysfunctional.
Governments become dysfunction when, among other reasons, parties see themselves at war and decide the compromise is weakness. When the game becomes more important than the governance.
you are suggesting that the UK can have a functional government with a the LibDems caucusing with the Tories?
That depends on what Mr. Cameron wants to do. Now would be an excellent time (from the Conservative point of view) for Cameron to do what Tony Blair did with Labor — play against type. And alliance with the LibDems would be an excellent way to start, followed by the disowning of some of Thatcher’s disastrous policies.
Admittedly the UK is more out of practice with the party coalition game than other countries in Europe. But it might help Labour represent labour again.
I’m not anticipating the gridlock that we have had in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
I’m expecting new elections.
Well, that is the way that parliamentary systems handle gridlock, isn’t it.
We just suffer through it.
The so-called civilized world will not see real “ungovernable” until it faces a true economic, energy and/or environmental disaster…or of course some combination of those three factors. A couple of weeks of no food or fuel in a major city or two or ten and the word “ungovernable” will assume some real meaning.
What is happening now in the UK + Germany…in Greece too, on another level and soon in the U.S. if things continue on the same path…is actually a quite healthy people’s revolt against corporate rule.
I use the word “healthy” in a very limited sense…it is healthy only at its root. People are slowly realizing that the entire system…not just the capitalist system but the whole group of major powers including China, Russia, the U.S., Japan, the E.U. and the less firmly allied but still powerful Islamic world…the entire system has gotten so big that it has become totally anti-individual. There are fewer and fewer cracks in the major power/corporate-built wall through which the individual can squeeze.
On any level.
Economic, intellectual, spiritual…you name it.
Now the pace and depth of this ongoing realization is of course being slowed by:
1-The overall IQ of the world’s population…which is by definition only “average”…the overall behaviour of which is most often propelled by the more aggressive and violent parts of that population, parts that could be defined as below average in the brains department, even if hey went to Harvard and won a (stolen) election or two.
and
2-The mind control system of the corporate-owned and controlled media, esepcially in the E.U., U.S. and Japan.
So we see Tea Partiers and inchoate riots, thrashing electorates trying to muddle through a situation that they do not entirely understand and individual bombers blowing up other innocents in the heartfelt belief that their controllers are right and those of their supposed enemies are wrong.
It is the controllers who are at fault here.
Bet on it.
Solution(s)?
None.
This is going to run its course, and the devil take the hindmost.
If the human race is still the viable tip of the evolutionary blade of grass here on Podunk Planet Earth, things will work out in our favor.
If not?
Then we may as well just bend over, put our heads between our knees and kiss our sweet asses goodbye.
Bet on that as well.
We shall soon see. Soon enough.
Meanwhile…keep up the good fight on a daily basis.
It’s all we can do.
Good luck.
We’re gonna need it.
Later…
(I hope…)
AG