Urbi et Orbi

Our message to the world on the Feast of All Fools

Dearly beloved

We suppose we must call you that, although clearly some are a fair bit more beloved than others. Anyway, listen up.

You continue to be governed by a group of venal incompetents unprecedented in history. Half of you are bankrupt without knowing it and there is scarcely anything about the world we live in which is better than it was five years ago.

We want you to think about your rulers on this, their Feast Day.

In America, the man who came to power looking like a Messiah has turned out to be a busted flush. His unpopularity made itself felt in Congressional elections last year. He has lost control of the House of Representatives and has a tiny majority in the Senate. The confusion as to whether the President or the Congress is in charge of the recession means that proposals for monetary expansion and contraction are bandied around at the same time. The economy is like a monopoly player who wants to carry on buying houses but has run out of money.

At the next Presidential Election the people are likely to go for someone who is boring, not a gifted speaker and doesn’t know everything about everything. There’s plenty to choose from.

The Far East was like a huge toothy grin from the direction of the rising sun until they discovered their major customers had no more money. The exception was Japan, where the economy was moribund anyway. The Japanese needed a reason to repatriate large sums of money to invest in their own country, and now they have got it. The earthquake / tsunami / nuclear disaster has shown Japanese management to be the lying, handwringing, incompetent responsibility dodgers many of us already knew. What they need is to borrow some different people from abroad.

Europe has got itself into an unnecessary war which will soon become unpopular. As the dole queues lengthen they are pumping out missiles at $500,000 a go in order to allow one set of corrupt shysters in Libya to take over from another set. We have been pleased to see the involvement in this conflict of Belgium, which whilst having no common language and no government has a couple of spare F-16s lying around to shoot at the towelheads. Belgium’s presence makes the war seem truly ridiculous. Ireland went bust trying to bail out its banks, which had been involved in an unregulated free-for-all. It has now discovered it needs a further €24 billion to get them up to snufter, around an extra €4,000 per head of population. Germany has decided it doesn’t like bailing out less diligent members of the eurozone but can’t face seeing them go under. They are beginning to learn what happens to you if you sit on a fence for too long. France seems to have decided to ditch its President next year in favour of someone even more statist and inward looking. Britain has an unpopular government nobody voted for and is about to start feeling the pinch, while believing it has already felt it. Italy’s Prime Minister is likely to be spending a fair bit of time in court, and without leadership the country’s future looks no worse than it did before.

The Middle East will have to abandon feudalism this year and the results will be messy and expensive.

Africa looks as if different sized countries (the Maghreb, Sudan) will be ruling it next year, but led by the same corrupt elite.

So much for lousy leadership. Perhaps the world should empower people’s committees to run things, although that was the philosophy espoused by Muammar Gaddafi.

And look what happened to him.

God help you all.