The ghost of Christmas present
Monkeyman Cowen has once again shown himself to be the miserable pathetic Scrooge. His reply to Gilmore’s question was the
Better looking than An Taoisech = and more decent
long-winded and rambling equivalent of “Baah Humbug|”
What a pity there isn’t a general election in the offing. I remember the time when Charlie McCreevy paid the Christmas bonus early in a vain attempt to win votes. I was in Dublin at the time and I remember you couldn’t get into a pub.
We are being ruled by a pack of dishonest, lying criminals. Worse, they seem to be acting like hostages to a group of unseen eminences grises in the Department of Finance and the international finance community. In fact, they are showing advanced signs of suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome, where captives become partisans of the aims and objectives of their captors. The aims of those holding our government hostage are simply to excavate yet deeper the chasm between the haves and have-nots, and to consolidate the super-rich in possession of their wealth. It has nothing to do with economics and any attempt to say it has is purely mendacious. Cowen and his cronies continue to spin this lie about a drop in the price of consumer goods. This is based on data provided by the Central Statistics Office, a group in need of a long-overdue reality check. A basket of basic items deemed just satisfactory for nutrition and human health is aggregated. This may be going down, but the items in the basket do not correspond to many people’s ideal of a worthwhile and meaningful lifestyle. The choice of a more realistic basket would indicate that prices are going up. But what Cowen and his cronies are saying is that poorer people must be forced to choose the most basic items – they, as poor people, have no right to any other aspiration. This has been termed the “collard greens” syndrome, because traditionally it was believed that the aforementioned brassicas were a prominent part of Negro diet in the US. Consequently, as many poor people in the US are black, collard greens were part of the basket of items on which consumer prices were based, even though many poor people wouldn’t touch them, preferring other more flavoursome vegetables.
It is unjust that the fates of hundreds and thousands of people should be based on the ill-informed decisions of a group of statisticians.
