"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, October 11, 2012

Troika Demands Yet More Austerity

EXTRACT: Inevitably, Spain’s social fabric is starting to fray - 500,000 homes have no breadwinner, while half of all under-25s and migrants are jobless. And, with one-third of them not qualifying for unemployment benefit, despair is setting in amongst large swathes of the population. One telling consequence of this breakdown is the removal of old people from care homes, with families either unable to pay the fees or just desperate to have the stable - albeit meagre - income provided by a pension ‘relocated’ back home.
Almost all welfare sectors can tell similar stories. Hospital wards are being closed. Madrid’s state schools have started the term with fewer teachers and some secondary schools have closed their science laboratories. The Catholic church’s Caritas charity, which hands out food packages, says it is now aiding one million people. In some neighbourhoods of the capital, increasing numbers of people root through bins at night hoping to find food - a pattern being replicated across the country. As austerity and poverty envelops greater parts of Spain, squabbling over increasingly scarce resources is bound to intensify - potentially threatening breakaways from national minorities. Bluntly, Spain could disintegrate. If so, a break-up of the euro zone’s fourth largest economy - and the world’s 12th biggest economy - could kindle nationalist feelings in the rest of Europe. Numerous unresolved national questions still remain on the continent.

Posted by at 9:45 am

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