Presaging. Prefiguring. Whatever. They’re just a little further down the road than the US.
All around the world, economies remain trapped in a global web of debt that runs into trillions. Debt that won’t be repaid. It can’t be, there isn’t the value in the system to do that. What’s going on now is various power blocs trying to get others to bear the brunt…The politicians helpfully took the debts of bankers and speculators onto the State’s books…Massive injections of government capital have staved off collapse. Austerity measures passed the debt to citizens, at the cost of deflating world economies even more…What needed a radical, Europe-wide response received instead a grudging, piecemeal, nationalistic response…In this context, focussing on a cut in the EU loan interest rate is like standing on the bridge of the Titanic as the ship heads towards the iceberg and requesting a better cabin…”President Obama believes in us”, Kenny says, “it’s time to start believing in ourselves.” He truly believes this economic collapse is a mere challenge to our morale…If we think positive, we’ll triumph. Think positive, talk up the economy. Isn’t that phoney cheerfulness, that determination to avoid reality, a major part of what screwed us?…How do you disentangle a massive global knot of debt? How can there be growth if you cut the wages and jobs of the people who are supposed to buy the stuff the growth produces?..It’s not just that the [politicians] have no answers — they don’t seem to realise that these are relevant questions.
Nice rhetorical flourish there, fitting for the country that produced James Joyce. Nice, too, to see someone devoting some actual thought to things, although the columnist here, one Gene Kerrigan, seems to be talking around things rather than coming right out with it. He should come over here and read a little if he wants a concrete idea about what to do. I’m talking, of course, about the “J” word: jubilee.
Lawyers on Strike 