This meeting should have been the foundation of a new Bretton Woods–the start of new cooperation to prevent the kind of meltdown we’re seeing. But Bush–a dead-ender to the last–refuses to see the catastrophe in front of him, and certainly refuses to work with others to solve the world’s economic crisis.

he was instructed by his puppet masters, he must try to stem the tide of protectionalism and regulation.

the speach was written for him by the federalist and robber barons in the pnac, the libertarian and federalist parties

Let’s try this again in a few months.

Yep. He called them all together so he could bully them and pump his agenda for the last time. Including restarting the dead Doha trade talks.

But that is a classy piece of video and will be a keeper. Don’t expect to see it in the W library, though.

Free markets don’t work. They reward greed, one of the more unpleasant human motivations. Competition is far more inefficient than cooperation. i.e. the HiDef competition between Sony and Toshiba. Bush, free market champion, illustrates the disease. Look at his attempts to bring us down with regulations relaxing rules favoring clean air, clean water and endangered species. It’s not like he doesn’t drink water and breathe air. Do not expect to see reason in madness.

Here at work I don’t have sound, but it strikes me that if you don’t offer your hand to be shaken it won’t be. Bush didn’t even turn toward anyone, just trudged on by with his paw at his side. And this is supposed to be a “snub?” Feh.

So he was snubbing them, iyo?

Was the 30% tariff on Canada lumber products imposed early on by this ‘nachtmare’ admin ever rescinded?

He certainly seemed to be ignoring them. Barely looked to his left, much less tried to greet anyone or be civil.

Hi, Don’t you know that King Bush expects to be greeted by the other leaders.

My #9 meant to reply to eCAHNomics’ #7. Reply button acting up again…

Maybe I’m thick, but this video confuses me. Bush is not putting his hand out either. Why? Did all the others decide beforehand to not shake his hand? That sounds pretty juvenile to me, and I can’t really believe anyone would agree to it. Or is the world stage really just a schoolyard?

I got it. Thanks.

At best, it’s ambiguous. One thing’s for certain: the sense of comradeship so obviously shared among many of the attendees does not extend to Bush. Hardly surprising.

Shake hands? Bush was so drunk he could barely walk a straight line. If he tried to shake hands he would have fallen off that platform.

It’s hard to say for sure, but since it appears that no one makes eye contact with him as he approaches each one, why would he stick his hand out, since it is already clear to him, perhaps, that he is being snubbed?

His body langage is pretty revealing, head down, round back, hands almost in his pockets, he looks like a kid who’s already been spanked and chastised.

Free markets don’t work.

because there is no such thing, the very concept of “money” is a regulation, title and ownsership are regulations, law and order is of course regulation, redress is regulation

there is no such thing as a free market, it’s simply a marketing term which translates into;

“we don’t want to pay our bills and we are going to try to convince you we shouldn’t”

there

No more inappropriate neck rubs for Angela Merkle eh Mr. President?

The bully is now the pariah.

-G

I am someone who really despises Bush, but in watching the event on TV it showed Bush lingering in the hall leading to the room with the stage and greeting many people as they entered and chatting with them.

Shake hands? Bush was so drunk he could barely walk a straight line. If he tried to shake hands he would have fallen off that platform.

it did look like he was watching the floor to keep his balance, look how proud he is when he reaches his spot without tripping

While defending capitalism as the “most efficient system ever created,” Sarkozy has described as “over” the view that “everything could be solved by deregulation, free competition and the market.”

Oh look! even other f… er centre rights are having doubts on freemarketeering.

You would think that those folks would be eager to shake his hand, just to be able to say a loud “Good-bye, don’t let the door hit you on the butt on your way out.”

a personal greeting is differant then the public display they clearly had orchestrated for the stage

DK Goodwin on WJ. Can we stop with the team of rivals already? No, I guess not.

That would be a reasonable explanation. If true, though, it was a major visual faux pas on his part.

Well chimpy did look sadly diminished for whatever reasons.

it seems to me the personage withdrew their hands, nor did they reach out to bush’s hands.

you’ll see them pull back and even place their hands behind their back

Bush= faux pas r us

Or, in this case, faux paw.

Well chimpy did look sadly diminished for whatever reasons.

Hasn’t he always?

What I notice in the video was that some of the leaders, as Bush approached, actually looked away or averted their eyes.

I agree with that. The only ones who acknowledged his existence were Brown and Merkel. Merkel seems to acknowledge very briefly and then turn away, possibly to avoid another shoulder rub.

Bush is walking so close to the man in front of him, pushing him along, not giving him time to shake hands properly.

As a former kid with cooties, I feel for Bush. I really do. That’s pretty embarassing.

But as an American who knows why he’s getting this treatment — you reap what you sow. Congrats to the snubbers for standing up to this bully.

The German Chancellor Andrea Merkel wanted nothing to do with him.

The Incredible Diminishing Chimp.

-G

I avert my eyes when I see him on the tv. But I certainly remember a cocksure belligerant with that henry the VIII watchyamacallit.

60 days and counting.

Ahem — Alptraum bitte!

They were lining up for their class picture and Bush was anxious to go crashride his bicycle.

She probably remembers the inappropriate backrubs too.

EW, you’re too good a journalist to be unwilling to examine other evidence which might suggest this was NOT a snub. BagNewsNotes has deconstructed that image of Bush looking for his marks on the floor, with a much longer segment that clearly shows others engaging in the very same behavior.

Bush can do a lot of damage in 60 days.

Worst President EVAH.

Oh, he’s gonna try.

That’s how it looked to me, too. He was in his take-all-my-marbles-and-go-home 8-year-old mode. Here is a man who never even came close to growing into the office he held nor the chair he occupied. Think Edith Ann.

We are certainly facing a time of transition, but it could turn better or worse, depending on the decisions made in the next couple of years. I heard on NPR this morning a national intelligence report projects that “democratic capitalism” will decline and “state-driven capitalism, like practiced in Russia and China” will be ascendant.

IMO, that would be a disaster. What is practiced in Russia and China seems to me to be an update of fascism.

While I certainly think the demise of of complete laissez faire fundamentalism is necessary, I’d rather see things turn to a more social-democratic system.

If we had an adequate safety net in place we could let a giant bank or car company fail without ruining the lives of millions of working people. Then we could let the free market work to bring down dinosaur companies and make room for innovative start-ups. The current system spreads the suffering while consolidating the wealth, we need a system that spreads the wealth in good times and limits the suffering in the bad.

We’ll see how Obama deals with these things, although it looks like he is backing down on almost all of his campaign promises:

http://cbs2chicago.com/local/O…..69896.html
http://www.washingtontimes.com…..dont-tell/

Thought he was going to lead us back to the promise land. Getting the feeling that reality is starting to settle in.

An’ that’s the troof.

Does Congress take a break over the holidays? Will someone be left on guard at all times?

I just read the article and I don’t buy one bit of his explanation, bush isn’t “herding” anyone, and these heads of state are in fact withdrawing their hand.

this is a snub plain and simple, you see some of the leaders openly greet, most of them even divert their attention

Well said.

The G20 should summit again in 30 days and invite Obama. Yeah, it’s that bad.

Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it.

That is a perfect image.
If I had photoshop skills, I’d do it. Oh, maybe not. We have enough stomach wrenching images of him already.

They left last night. I don’t know if Reid has left someone in the Senate to keep it in session so Shrub can’t appoint people to unravel the govt over Thanxgiver.

he’s already deconstructing consumer and envirnmental protections in a method that will make it impossible for obama to reverse easily

I am hoping obama is aware and knows what to do to get these things reversed asap, this should be a snap with the majority he now enjoys

I google image’d to see if someone’s already done it, but didn’t find anything.

Congress and Obama are aware of what’s going on. I’ve seen different time frames related to the Congressional Review Act so I’m not really sure how it’s going to play out. Just haven’t taken the time to the do the research myself.

I agree with the many perspectives of the commenters here. There is yet one more. It is not mine originally, but another poster here at the lake. I can’t remember who or at which site; have read too many, but the credit is their’s. Here it is:

Bush does not like to shake hands. He has a thing about being contaminated. (a development since his campaigning days?).

I had to think about that a while. Then I recalled that when Obama made his visit to the WH, Bush used a spray disinfectant on his hands after shaking with Obama, then offered the container to Obama.

hmmmmm– symptoms of the Pontius Pilate syndrome? Compulsively trying to cleanse his hands of all the blood? Full-blown psychosis ahead?

See? You are a cutting-edge thinker.
((Barbara))

The free economy as we knew it is dead..the Republicans killed it and are serving it to the homeless. It should and can be reborn with the regulations that use to be attached and some badly needed new ones. Let’s all pray for progressive government and work to ‘eliminate ALL the dead enders with vigor’.

Full-blown psychosis ahead?

Ahead? It’s pretty much taken root by now. :-))

The current capitalist, free market system cannot keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies. We need jobs to survive and we fight to keep them even though we make internal combustion engines or synthetic chemicals. We will make technological mistakes, but we can’t change course because someone has an investment in the plant that makes the bad stuff and of course there are the lost jobs. Social democracy or whatever you may call it won’t do because it’s hierarchical and has all the impediments to progress as capitalism, though perhaps not as extreme. The only viable alternative is utopia, a classless, moneyless society but that seems wildly impractical considering present circumstance. Should you come to see hierarchy as madness-our social distinctions are meaningless because we all die in the end-then all we need do is heal ourselves, a lot more easily said than done.

Or Shakespeare’s queen: Out, out damn spot.

But we have to change course. There is no such thing as Utopia, but we can certainly improve on our current dystopia.

Bush is likely concerned that anyone shaking his hand may slap some cuffs on him and drag him to the Hague. This war criminal needs to be behind bars.

Free enterprise Capitalism is the only game in town that is everlasting..it’s like regular freedom. It has some drawbacks but with the right dose of regulation and enforcement it can’t be beat.

There is no such thing as utopia, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be. I concede it’s a stretch, but not as impossible as is generally believed. The first order of business is to organize ourselves better on the net. I’m not sure of the form that would take, but we need something far more powerful than blogs and comments.

Capitalism is everlasting because we have been crazy a long time.

The whole G20 meeting was kabuki. Bush is in the dead duck period of his Presidency and is both discredited and irrelevant. But as I have pointed out numerous times, we also have to look at the responsibility of the rest of the world in this current mess. Asian and European bankers and governmental leaders can add and subtract as well as anyone. There was no reason, other than greed, that kept them from assessing accurately the dangers of the financial instruments they were so avid to buy. The same came be said of the G20 meeting. They knew that the US in the midst of a Presidential transition was not in a position to make any commitments but, for their part, they came to no serious agreement on what they could or would be willing to do. In other words, they continue to hide their own lack of action behind criticisms of what the US has not done.

It’s an economic system created by men not a revealed truth handed down by the Gods!

You got it. Extreme cynicism of world leaders to go along with such a photo-op only meeting at such a time. Shame on them all.

It’s not everlasting. Humans existed for tens of thousands of years without it and even after the rise of agrarian culture and cities, it wasn’t the dominant structure for quite a while longer yet.

Even in modern times capitalism has taken many different forms with different doses of “regulation and enforcement” making a big difference in how it works.

Western Europe leans more to the social democrat incarnation of capitalism while Russia and China lean more to the authoritarian neo-fascism model. Currently the U.S. is kind of a third branch that tips the balance of power to the corporate oligarchs rather than the people or the government.

Yesterday C-Span 3 had Prime Minister’s Questions on. The discussion was of course about the financial meltdown. Outside of the US it is centered on the securities bought by various banks and other investors without due diligence, seeing only the profits being made before they discovered, or ignored, that the securities were toxic.

tips the balance of power to the corporate oligarchs rather than the people or the government.

The corporate state.

This may bring me scorn, but I have the same impression of the Big 3 CEOs. They have lined their own pockets, coffers, safe-deposit boxes, Swiss bank accounts, whatever at the expense of their workers and the American people. Every time I see a photo of them together, I have to remind myself that these are titans of American industry and not Kremlin strong-armers. And now they come with no freaking plan (as noted earlier in this thread), asking for a bezillion bucks on good faith that they’ll come up with one. Considering their success records, pre-economic implosion, forgive me if I’m a tetch skeptical.

I know this is OT but it’s just too good not to pass on.

In today’s NYT Brooksie is upset because people being vetted for the next administration are from the top of their class, this from a Harvard alum.

One line is particularly telling though: “If an enemy attacks the United States during a Harvard-Yale game, we’re in trouble.” Apparently he doesn’t see the irony in that line because the US was attacked while a guy who got degrees from both schools was supposedly in charge.

I know people who never went to college who could have run this country better and not run it into the ground like this little prick did.

thanks for that. accuracy is important. the interesting thing in the bagnews article is the part about the pm of australia revealing that, in a conversation with bush about the upcoming meeting, bush didn’t seem to know what the G20 WAS. OMG>

more like lady macbeth

perris, you don’t have to “buy” Dr. Shaw’s interpretation of Bush’s behavior with respect to the others in the photo op. As Shaw says himself,

This still doesn’t fully explain, however, why the first-row leaders entering and falling into position behind Bush manage to greet some second row counterparts when 43 isn’t.

Shaw does, however, plant a seed of doubt. And, doubt, something which has been sorely lacking on the Right, is something I am loathe to see absent on the Left. Personally, where other explanations exist, and where there is evidence to support alternative interpretations, true to my liberal roots, I feel obligated to consider them.

Michael Shaw is every bit as meticulous in his examination of evidence as Marcy is her examination of evidence. I reach for Shaw with all of the same trust that I reach for Marcy. I am unable to dismiss his interpretation out of hand. But, as they say, YMMV.

Um, I guess you didn’t see my #65

In a dream it came to me… The other leaders were notified in advance that Bush had forgotten his hand sanitizer, therefor he wouldn’t be engaging in any touchy-feely activities.

no i didn’t, not until after i posted mine. does it matter? they say great minds think alike!

His statements on “free trade”, my g-d! that’s why we were calling him “bubble boy” a few years back. He doesn’t live anywhere close to reality.

AND I saw him looking for a friendly face and not finding one.
This is past comprehension for a US president to be treated this way…really shows how far we have fallen in the last 8 years.

Of course, it isn’t all his fault. But everyone needs someone to blame and I’ll take Bush in lieu of the others, mainly because it was him who sold US out to Freidmanite economics on steroids. I think he’s a traitor who had a lot of help getting US here.

And people are going to be howling for his head when it’s too late, and he’s ensconced in his non-extraditable haven in Paraguay. ( with our $$$ courtesy of the bank bailout)

Bush does not shake hands unless he has hand sanitizer nearby.

It’s hard to argue he’s being snubbed when he never offers his hand.