Wednesday 24 February 2010

budgetary guidance

Despite telling figures that a quarter of US home mortages are underwater, housing-starts have slumped, American consumer confidence is crestfallen, massive layoffs, endemic underemployment, and planned or threatened buget cuts in all sorts of social services are circulating, there are still priorities (aside from defense, people seem to always find the money to perpetuate wars). 

After a decade of complaints from the community for being a bad neighbor (draconian security and general bother, as well as unpaid parking tickets and some 32 million pounds in unpaid congestion fees), the US is abandoning its embassy in storied Grosvenor Square for a planned site in posh and shabby-chic Battersea.  The US apparently has a billion dollars of ease-worthy funds to invest on this crystalline Borg ship, complete with a moat.
The American government is also allocating more funds for federal prisons, in the face of general cut-backs and Grecian--stoic--austerity measures elsewhere.  That decision seems a little prescient with the proposals for a civil policing corps and all the citizens that might be pushed to resorting to what passes as criminal behavior when their budgets can't be balanced.  So many things are criminalized US and punishable with incarceration, but there still won't be a cell block reserved for the robber-barons.  Of course, at the rate that US and UK attitudes are converging, they may well arrest the hapless photographer who snaps a picture of the construction site and disappear him away to a prison in America.