The Sound of one Hand Applauding itself

Meet the pacifist haterZ:

"Should politicians be tried for the crisis?"

There’s nothing quite like a kangaroo court, or a expression of impotent rage, or (secretely) a public hanging to get Europeans excited.

And I think that, even more than bankers and businessmen, the politicians are ultimately accountable for their lack of vigilance – or even worse, at times, for political complicity with the former. Those who hold great responsibility and are paid in one form or another for such responsibility also have a duty to respond to failures of management. That a crisis like the one we are living through should have no guilty parties is the biggest slap in the face to its victims. Will no one stand up and answer for it?

I’m still trying to figure out if this is any different from the Chinese executing the minster in charge of food safety a few years back.

Iceland’s former Prime Minister, Geir H. Haarde, has appeared before a special court accused of “gross negligence” in the country's financial disaster of 2008. The crisis caused three banks to collapse, payments of its foreign debt to be suspended, the currency to fall and unemployment to hit ten percent. Did European governments know what was coming before the crisis hit them? How much responsibility did the banks have? Do we need more robust judicial action against politicians and bankers?

An answer worth actually waiting for, but no, I doubt that anyone could have projected the precise value of their worthless debt built up by their welfare-addicted countrymen in the marketplace in 2009.

Otherwise I’m interested in this new form of government that a panel egged-on by El País is proposing:

Without doubt, and after being stripped of their immunity, those politicians who are guilty of illegality must be prosecuted. But political accountability should, above all, extend to the political machinery. This includes the elections, but parliaments too. In many countries, those parliaments are merely arenas for crude displays of competition among the parties – and within the parties themselves, which are showing themselves to be particularly inept at holding their leaders accountable, thanks to some supposed 'loyalty' that keeps them muzzled

Of course ‘voting them out’ is an option that just seems too timid for them, and doesn’t do enough to bring about the new man or something, who has neither greed in his heart, nor a desire to shod their children, or feed them, and that sort of thing…