Storm clouds pre-Katrina, anonymous photographer.
The financial and economic crisis now upon us is by far the most menacing of the past century - even more so than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is not just a "subprime" crisis; it is systemic - affecting the entire financial system. It is also global, affecting various countries in various ways but affecting them all. In achieving a certain "globalization", we have been uniquely successful in globalizing collapse, chaos and misery. It is a globalization which, in our short-sighted negligence, we never envisaged.
In this crisis, even a country such as Australia is no more than a subordinate, neo-colonial, financial and economic dependency. In essence, we have reverted to what we were before and during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when Whitehall, Westminster and the Bank of England played the tune to which we jigged...
From 1969 and especially from 1971, when the United States cut the dollar link with gold, Australia surrendered any worthwhile independence in its economic and financial thinking. We swallowed American financial and economic formulae, whether we were academics or policymakers, industrial entrepreneurs, banks or providers of "financial services." ...
The Black Death of Financial Collapse
By James Cumes
If there was nothing to be gained, it was hard to understand why he acted that way. There were many and various sources; clouds dumping wild storms, damp eternal nights, wet leaves on lonely pavements, all these things were destined. The question was what part he played in it. He welcomed back his old self; a solipsistic world. Although he knew everything about them, or at least everything that was in documentary or recorded visual form, the other people he worked with or lived amongst were like shadows. He wanted them to be real, he wanted to feel their pains and joys, but he had been burnt too often.
He couldn't understand, standing n this remote place, where the father confessor figure in his life had gone; whoever it had been. He couldn't understand why he was no longer in love. Handsome faces caught his attention, dozens every day, but none of them even noticed he existed. This was the joy of grey hair. He had become invisible. In his heart of hearts he knew something had gone deeply awry, that out there were solutions he would never be able to embrace. Was it God, was it friendship, was it a greater exploitation of the implant's potential?
He didn't know; and didn't want to know. What he was seeking was an explanation, a timeline, something that would explain how the world had reached this point, a sociologist or commentator who would cut to the core, who could explain the lack of dissent, the neat ordering of this world he had been placed in, or been allowed to re-enter. Part of him kept firing warning shots, don't rock the boat, don't question anything, you can only fight from the inside, keep your own counsel.
But he knew now they could read his thoughts, every last one of them. A man was now in jail, facing the death penalty, or at least a total brain wipe and re-education, simply because he had recognised him in a crowd. Simply because his own brain, his own role as a news reporter, had identified the man as a "person of interest". That had been enough to create a cascade of events, his own entrapment and hospitalisation, the downloading of his memories. Two months in the wilderness unconnected. For a lonely soul like him, that was punishment enough to make him not want to repeat the experience.
It was all very well to be of independent mind, to survey the rest of the population as if they were nothing but data points and sources of information, but to cut him off even from this level of comfort was cruel indeed for a professional empath. He needed the babble, the flow of voices, the warmth of their lives and their flesh, the big city cocoon, drowning amongst millions, just to feed a tiny flame of warmth in the empty hearth. But he needed to be brave, he needed to think of ways to get to the source, to understand everything.
As a child he had worked his way through a series called The Great Books, struggling through Aristotle and Socrates, Descartes and Tolstoy and the rest of the crowded, almost incomprehensible greats. He had wanted to understand everything, know how the world worked. He had never wanted to become this lonely, hurt, fragmented creature, for ever seeking the warmth of the winter hearth. Masking his own thoughts and his own motives in the probably vain hope they would not be detected, he began to search back through the origins of it all.
And all that he could think of was a giant billboard set up along the side of highways: Do You Want Longer Lasting Sex? The signs were shocking for the simple fact that they were seen by thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of children every day. What does that mean mommy? Longer lasting? Do you want longer lasting sex, mommy? Daddy? The letters were in vivid red, the background a vivid yellow, they could be seen for miles and there was no escaping them. Why this image, of these confronting tasteless signs from decades before, kept coming to mind he did not immediately understand.
Then in his searching, he finally found it. An obscure reference in a now defunct newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, a columnist, Miranda Devine, often denigrated as being right wing, had railed against the signs as a symbol of urban breakdown, of the collapse of any normal moral standards, as a symbol of a decaying world. Quickly, furtively, he cross referenced everything he could find, early, incomplete data, before everything was automatically digitalised. He struggled with the reference: nasal spray delivery system. He looked at the original planning decisions. There didn't seem to be any. The company, he could now see, had been a major contributor to the government of the day; and had faced little outcry. Yet this was in an era of increasing environmental awareness, when there was constant chatter about audio and visual pollution. Clearly it didn't matter. Longer lasting sex was not an affront to anyone, they had returned to the animals. It was here, at this point, that the world began to turn; the churches lost their authority, the traditional husband and wife family collapsed, the so-called "bonds of community" collapsed, leaving the society open for takeover. And that, he could see now, was exactly what had happened.
Storm clouds pre-Katrina, anonymous photographer.
stuff
The welfare state has now been tested to destruction. But the Tories are too timid to take the bull by the horns and pledge to restructure from first principles the relationship between the individual and the state.
Nor are they setting out a convincing programme to defend this country’s identity from being destroyed through mass immigration, EU integration and human rights law.
And despite some welcome noises about shoring up marriage, they convey scant urgency about tackling the collapse of public order through the combined effects of pandemic family breakdown, educational collapse and drug abuse creating not just epidemic crime but horrifying levels of cruelty, sadism and gross neglect.
Instead, they have provided a stream of opportunistic gimmicks. So-called ‘quality of life’ issues such as green taxes.
Giving every parent the right to work part-time — which would bring much of the workplace to a grinding halt.
The absurd promise of a maternity nurse for every new mother. Pledging a referendum on the EU constitution –but only before it is ratified. Opportunistic ducking and diving over Iraq. And so on.
But the public aren’t daft. They twig that such pronouncements are being made merely to gain power. So when it comes to the key issue of public trust, the Tories just haven’t earned it.
As a result, the electorate is monumentally and dangerously disaffected from all politicians. And when such a dim view is taken across the board, voting becomes a fraught and highly volatile process.
Melanie Phillips.
Storm clouds pre-Katrina, anonymous photographer.
just because it is known....
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