"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)

Thursday, June 07, 2012

Last-chance Saloon Closes for Business

EXTRACT“Single currency gloom goes viral” - so went the headline to an especially downbeat editorial in the Financial Times, a newspaper to be avoided these days if you are after a cheery read (June 1). The universally gloomy economic news is reviving unfortunate memories of late 2008 and the collapse of the once mighty Lehman Brothers, which sent the world’s major economies into a tailspin - and only massive state intervention by a reluctant George Bush saved the day for the global financial/banking system.
But this time round the stakes are, if anything, even higher - a potentially catastrophic break-up of the euro zone itself which triggers an unprecedented global slump. Yet the capitalist ruling class as a whole seems paralysed by the pace of events, seemingly unable to come up with any viable plan or strategy to save their system. Instead, locked into a state of near permanent crisis management, they jet from one carbon-unfriendly summit to another - going precisely nowhere. Giving the unfolding story an air of tragic - or farcical? - inevitability. In the words of one online broker, “When the tide is this strong, there is no point in swimming against it: simply get in your lifeboat and hope for the best.” An almost perfect summation of the bankrupt capitalist system, seemingly drifting towards the abyss.

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