Saturday, October 23, 2010

Hatchet jobs

Two wonderfully dismissive pieces on the dismal cuts about to hit predominantly the poor - yes the poor do come off worst.

Paul Krugman keeps up his Keynesian crusade here.
No widespread fad ever passes, however, without leaving some fashion victims in its wake. In this case, the victims are the people of Britain, who have the misfortune to be ruled by a government that took office at the height of the austerity fad and won’t admit that it was wrong.
And remember Clegg, Keynes was a Liberal.

The most amusing article though, and we do need a good malicious laugh at times like these, is by the cartoonist Martin Rowson in Tribune, recalling the first time he met George Osborne, "a bit of wimp, and with an unfortunately unlikable face".

His conclusion? He has,
...a mental image, of the type cartoonists experience, and it’s of an 11-year-old boy sitting in front of an Enigma machine and repeatedly hitting it with a hammer, just to see what might happen. There is, in other words, a stench of deranged naivety surrounding George Osborne, David Cameron and Nick Clegg ...
Thanks to Mike

2 comments:

Roger said...

I was an attendee/freeloader at the 1998 exhibition opening Rowson talks about (it is the only time I've ever been in kicking distance of Mandelson who was at the very height of his pomp and positively emanated repulsiveness).

I was standing next to him when a middle aged lady said that she loved his work but being unemployed couldn't afford any of the cartoons on sale - Martin immediately whipped out his pad and did a truly vicious little caricature of Mandelson who was standing about 3 feet away and then presented it to her.

So I am willing to forgive him all the idiotic cartoons of Blair and Bush sodomising Iraqi babies he's produced since...

BTW his Tristram Shandy is a small work of genius - pity it didn't sell better (who did he expect to buy it?) as then he might have found his true calling as a graphic novelist.

Brigada Flores Magon said...

He has done 'The Waste Land' as a graphic novel......Penguin 1990.