All A Question Of Perspective

Lead story of most of the world’s news media today was the appalling carnage in northern Iraq, as al Qaeda – unknown in Iraq prior to the US invasion of 2003 – continued its policy of murder and terror, much like it’s American counterparts further south in Baghdad.

NBC Nightly News did get around to mentioning the attacks on the Iraqi villages of Qataniya and Adnaniya, but only after it had reported at some length on the “crisis” in the US money markets, and held us all in suspense with sneak previews of its “Elvis” feature later in the program. According to NBC’s resident expert, who would probably be more at home advertising Botox than analyzing the nation’s finances, substantial falls on the Dow and Nasdaq resulted from too long a period of low interest rates.

Dammit, the poor have ruined it all for the rich by their demand to own homes, and now the rich have got to take it all back, so the poor can be really poor again and not just pretend to be. It really was a bad show, you breadliners. Do you realize those rich bastards are now having to cut back on their Lear jets because of you? Ms Botox failed to mention how the insatiable greed of the wealthy, and their manipulation of Hedge funds, may just have had something to do with it.

Meanwhile, reports are emerging that the US administration is about to bestow the much sort after “Grand Order of the Noble Terrorist” on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The rumor is, it’s all come about because Dick Cheney got mad when he found out their secret hand-shake was identical to the one at his own Masonic lodge. It is something of a misnomer, however, given that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard holds eighty seats in Iran’s government and half the parliamentary cabinet ministers are from its ranks. Declaring the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, is no different from denouncing Iran as a terrorist state.

Of course, we all know that poses no problem to the delinquent idiot presently posing as “leader of the free world”. His minions, spread out across America like great dollops of cow dung in an over-grazed field, will no doubt rally to his support, whooping and hurling straw bales in the air at the very thought of another good rumble in the Middle East. After all, there’s been damn-all on the telly since CNN’s “Shock & Awe”, back in 2003.

It was a surprise that five hundred dead Iraqis made it onto the US news at all, given the truly dreadful situation out of China right now. Poor, dear, Mattel, that icon of American toy manufacturing beloved by generations of citizens, has been duped by nasty Chinese business people more concerned with making a fast yen than with the safety of American children. It would seem the Chinese have stopped being inscrutable, and are now just unscrupulous.

No blame can be attached to Mattel for the recall of these eighteen million toys worldwide, or, indeed to its subsidiary, Fisher-Price, who had a similar problem involving a mere million toys, two weeks ago.

After all, when you close your American factories to save on wage costs, and move your operations to a country where it’s possible to get a week’s work for a handful of rice while you rake in the profit margins, you should be able to trust your operatives not to dish you in the dirt, shouldn’t you?

One of the co-owners of the Chinese factory involved in this issue committed suicide when the facts came to light, but compared to another five hundred dead in Iraq today that hardly seems significant.

It’s unlikely Mattel’s Chief Executive, Bob Eckert, will join his Chinese counterpart and do the decent thing by leaping out of his Lear jet without a parachute at thirty thousand feet. Though it is likely, between the unscrupulous Chinese dropping him in the dung, the American poor refusing to pay their mortgages, and more than a few peeved Mattel shareholders baying for his blood, it may not be too long before has no Lear jet to jump out of.

Still, to look on the bright side, it seems unlikely Mattel will have to fund a company expansion into Iraq for quite some while yet. Which is a shame for them, because the Iraqis probably wouldn’t be too worried right now about a little bit of lead paint.

Filed under: Perspectives