"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Saturday, November 05, 2011

Referendum Gamble Plunges Euro Still Deeper Into Crisis

EXTRACT: The troika certainly wants its pound of flesh - and a lot more besides. In order for Greece to qualify for the next tranche of €8 billion in bailout loans - authorised by EU finance ministers on October 21, pending last-minute finalisation by the IMF - the Athens government has to impose on the masses a fresh round of savage cuts. Like further cuts in public-sector wages of between 20% and 30%; the scrapping of bonus and incentive schemes; the placing of some 30,000 public sector workers on 60% pay for one year pending their dismissal; the suspension of collective wage bargaining; the cutting of pensions and lump-sum retirement payments; the lowering of the tax-free income threshold from €12,000 to €5,000 a year; and on and on it goes.
If the Eurocrats were to get their way, then Greek workers would be reduced to a virtual slave class - a fate which the bourgeoisie would like to see extended to Portugal, Spain, Italy, etc. The Greek working class movement has other plans, of course - which is why Papandreou has deemed it necessary to try and pre-empt their resistance through a referendum, that favourite device of dictators and bureaucrats.
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