Cry me a river, Capitalist pigdog

Last week we were watching Insight's take on the 'financial crisis'. They had a couple on who were in dire straights. Hearken unto their tale of woe. Hubby ran a restaurant while his wife ran a store selling Disney memorabilia she imported from the US. They were worried about being able to keep up with their investment properties because sales of plastic Disney crap were a little soft in the current economic climate. What have things come to when people can't afford to maintain multiple properties they don't live in, but own to gamble on getting rich, off an income generated by selling rubbish made in China, shipped to the US and shipped here?

Just today there was an article in the SMH where baby boomers were yet again trying to pin everything on younger generations. Fucking pathetic, apparently we need a 'jolly good' recession to teach us a lesson. Of course it can't be a recession that harms their investment properties, stymies endless clutching greed or dents the billions of dollars in retirement savings they've gambled on the stock market in the hope of making it big. It should be just big enough to fuck everyone else. After all, everyone knows that the current economic crisis has nothing to do with a dipshit baby boomer who's president of the US, or the procession of boomer PMs we've had that gave them free educations, paid for by the war-generation, and then endless cash handouts, culminating in pensions that their children will have to pay for. It isn't my generation that has endlessly opted for war, greedily despoiled the environment and failed to properly raise their kids. Of course none of this is ever the fault of people who get into this mindset. The problem is always the yoof. Those damn under 30s with all the money they have in the stock market and their paid off houses. They're the ones to blame. Well, thanks for drinking the well dry guys. Keep in mind that people under 30 still have their entire working lives ahead of them, as opposed to people who are about to retire and find that there might not be as much left in the kitty as they thought.

The miserable truth is that the baby boom generation have accomplished little of note in their time running things. The generation before them created workers' rights, universal suffrage and pretty much all of the scientific developments we enjoy today. By contrast boomers just got high and then sold out for money and stuff:

The 1970s: coming to power

Between 1962 and 1972, Australia's adult population leapt by almost three million as the baby boomers reached voting age. For years Australia had been under a conservative government and the radical ideas of baby boomers called for change. A charismatic Labor leader called Gough Whitlam [born 1916, not a boomer] ran for Prime Minister under the slogan 'It's Time' with policies designed to get the baby boomers votes including free university education, withdrawing Australian troops from Vietnam and anti-discrimination laws for Aboriginal people. In his pre-election promise Whitlam declared:

The real answer to the modern malaise of juvenile crime, drugs and vandalism is not repression and moralising. The answer is to involve the creative energies of our children and our youth in a creative, concerned community.
Policy Speech for the Australian Labor Party, delivered by Gough Whitlam at the Blacktown Civic Centre in Sydney, 13 November 1972, Accessed 13 June 2004.

[Obviously they weren't listening]

Not only were Whitlam's politics aligned with young people, but his campaign also had the support of young musicians and artists. When Whitlam was elected Prime Minister it was the first change of government in twenty-three years. Whitlam quickly introduced a lot of changes that had Australia reeling. His reforms saw a record number of Bills introduced into Parliament and a record number of laws enacted (although the Senate also rejected 93 of the Bills introduced). Whitlam's reform package became known as 'the Program' and introduced changes across every field of government including:

• Australia's first federal legislation on human rights, the environment and heritage
• establishment of a Schools Commission and national training and education scheme
• abolition of university tuition fees
• resumption of diplomatic relations with China after a twenty-four year hiatus
• establishment of the Australian Legal Aid Office, a National Film and Television School, the Trade Practices Commission and the Law Reform Commission
• introduction of a substantial regional development program
• establishment of a Royal Commission into Aboriginal land rights that led to the drafting of land rights legislation and the establishment of an elected National Aboriginal Consultative Committee.

Australia's Culture Portal

They then went on to later reverse almost all of these accomplishments. I'm sick of the offensively stupid idea that people who have just begun to participate in a system authored by their parents are responsible for its failings. It's really dumb and pathetic and appeals to the kind of idiot who is responsible for things being this way. Namely people more concerned with their 'property portfolio' and the mindless acquisition of meaningless petty baubles than the kind of world they will leave to their children. These are the same people who blame junk food, TV, video games and teh Internets for the way their children turn out because nothing is fucking ever their fault. Maybe I'm unfairly bashing an entire generation but they have all the votes and all the positions of power and this is a democracy. There are more of them than any generation so why don't they do something about it?