Loose Bricks & Irrational Fears

*



"What a shocking bad hat!" was the phrase that was next in vogue. No sooner had it become universal, than thousands of idle but sharp eyes were on the watch for the passenger whose hat showed any signs, however slight, of ancient service. Immediately the cry arose, and, like the what-whoop of the Indians, was repeated by a hundred discordant throats. He was a wise man who, finding himself under these circumstances “the observed of all observers,” bore his honours meekly. He who showed symptoms of ill-feeling at the imputations cast upon his hat, only brought upon himself redoubled notice. The mob soon perceive whether a man is irritable, and, if of their own class, they love to make sport of him. When such a man, and with such a hat, passed in those days through a crowded neighbourhood, he might think himself fortunate if his annoyances were confined to the shouts and cries of the populace. The obnoxious hat was often snatched from his head, and thrown into the gutter by some practical joker, and then raised, covered with mud, upon the end of a stick, for the admiration of the spectators, who held their sides with laughter, and exclaimed in the pauses of their mirth, “Oh! what a shocking bad hat!” “What a shocking bad hat!” Many a nervous, poor man, whose purse could but ill spare the outlay, doubtless purchased a new hat before the time, in order to avoid exposure in this manner.

Charles Mackay Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.



As if in all darkness, black cars across black asphalt, the lonely swish of tyres in the rain, his own gut falling sideways into fear, frothing white terror, never knowing what was beyond the perimeter. The drift, he thought of it as; that terrible place where the psyche went, running out of control, the minute he was allowed to feel anything. It was a heartless world out there. He could see the grim night enveloping the tiny tree at the front of the house. He knew he was going nowhere. Oh heart, heart, already everything had died, already friends were passing on, already the significance of what they thought they stood for was being washed away.

He was trying, trying, to become something, do something. He was encountered in dark alleys. He slipped into murky places, steam ridden. He waited for love and found nothing. Already his own history was bouncing back, uncertain, unsure, longing to be someone else, to just be a normal person, for once in his life to just feel normal. He was classified as dark rage, dysfunctional, unable to even help himself. Blinding hangovers greeted every dawn. He really did want to be someone, he really did want to overcome these travails. He just wanted to get smashed, all the time, morning noon and night.

He wanted to feel the first prickle of alcohol luxury as he downed the first beers of the day, the relief climbing through him, spreading through his veins. He wanted to soar. He wanted to sit on the balcony at Watsons Bay, the first there, waiting for the rich to arrive, nursing his drink while waiting for all his rich friends to arrive, to tell him everything was alright, to admire the beauty of the harbour. To pick out the luxury yachts bobbing at anchor as the salt water slapped against the white beach. To be told that everything really was fabulous. That money made everything acceptable. That there was nothing wrong with sitting alone on the veranda, just as his grandfather had done, enjoying a drink before anyone else got there to ruin it.

All was lost, he knew that in his heart of hearts. He wasn't sitting on that fabulous veranda sipping away his inheritance, worrying, or boasting, about the movements of the stock exchange, complaining about the lack of servants. He was stuck in inner city grot holes, where everything was musty and everything coated his own failures. Where shadows darted in the evening light. Where money was always a problem. Where his personality had been barely formed before being wiped away; oh classic hunter, classic day. So little did he think of himself, he draped himself in other people's lives; lived theirs for absence of his own. You could always be the observer, but sooner or later your heart drops out.

Months later, he was blind furious when the tin pot magazine he had written the Roy Orbison piece for refused to pay, claiming he had used slabs of a press release and hadn't earnt his pay. That's what press releases were for, he countermanded, and demanded his lowly sum, all of $75. They wouldn't budge and he wouldn't budge; and as he was on the outside, with no influence, no leverage, no standing, there was little he could do but whinge and complain and demand, all of which he did. He refused to provide any more copy until they coughed up. Finally, they invited him to their Christmas party, promising to give him a cheque when he arrived.

He was drunk when he got there. And instantly got a whole lot drunker. There was nothing like free drinks to feed his already towering addiction to alcohol. Tequila got into the mix somehow. Tequila and cheap wine and beers in the middle. He was taken off into an office and given a cheque for $50, less than what had been agreed. He was outraged. It was just another injustice in a string of injustices. Everything was going wrong. Nothing was working out. Lovers had left and no one was paying on time. He still had to survive, and was sick of the humiliation. He got drunker and drunker and drunker; Christmas was coming for everyone but him. He left the party, and as the lift opened on the bottom floor where the magazine owners had parked their smart cars, he spotted a loose brick. It was a fatal moment.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/19/2394987.htm?section=australia

Labor suffers historic swings in NSW

By Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop

A grim-faced New South Wales Premier last night said he had heard the "sobering" but "entirely expected" message from voters, who have punished the State Labor Government with some of the biggest swings in Australian history.

Lawyer Victor Dominello became the first Liberal to snatch a state Sydney seat from the ALP in 20 years in one of four state by-elections held yesterday.

He reaped a 22.6 per cent swing, far bigger than the 10.1 per cent he needed.

Mr Dominello won outright, claiming 53.7 per cent of the primary votes and 62.5 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis to take ex-deputy premier John Watkins' former seat of Ryde.

Labor also suffered dramatic swings in the western Sydney electorates of Lakemba and Cabramatta, its safest seats until yesterday, but they were not big enough to secure wins for the Liberals.

The Liberals scored a 22.7 per cent swing in Cabramatta and chipped back sacked premier Morris Iemma's 34 per cent margin with a 13 per cent swing in Lakemba.

Labor had held dumped health minister Reba Meagher's seat of Cabramatta with a 29 per cent margin.

ABC election analyst Antony Green says the results are disastrous for Labor.

"The size of the swing means that one in five voters who voted for the Labor Party at the last election have switched to voting for the Coalition after preferences at this election," he said.

"That's an enormous swing and to get that many people changing their minds between now and the next election, Nathan Rees as the new Premier has got to try and convince them why they should go back to Labor."

The ALP's Nick Lalich beat the Liberals' candidate, former ABC journalist Dai Le, to win 49.5 per cent of Cabramatta's primary votes and 56.4 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.

In Lakemba, Labor's Robert Furolo won 58.3 per cent of the primary votes and 71 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.

'Lift your game, or else'

Nathan Rees spent last night visiting the candidates and their supporters in Sydney, telling them he had heard the message to "lift your game, or else".

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/washington/19summitweb.html?hp

WASHINGTON — President Bush has agreed to play host to a summit of world leaders soon to discuss the global response to the financial crisis, a senior White House official said today.

Mr. Bush was expected to announce his decision at Camp David, where he met on Saturday with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President José Manual Barroso, who have been pressing for a high-level meeting of this kind to take place before the end of the year.

The White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to alert news organizations to the president’s expected announcement, said the meeting was intended to explore ideas to prevent any recurrence of the cascading financial failures that have forced the major economic powers to take costly, coordinated actions in the past several weeks.

At the summit, Mr. Bush hopes to get participation and ideas from both developed and developing nations, the official said.

No date for the meeting was set, as this and other details have not yet to be decided, the official said.

Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Barroso contend that the financial crisis presents a good opportunity to tighten oversight and better coordinate the financial markets around the world.


http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2520/223/

Falling Oil Prices: Useful Lessons from the Slump at the Pump Print E-mail
Written by Ben Lieberman, heritage.org

As summer turned to fall, sky-high pump prices in the face of a weakening economy led to lower demand and a drop in those prices. In other words, market forces do work, and they tend to counter big price moves in one direction or the other. The financial meltdown may have weakened faith in markets over the last few weeks, but the precipitous decline in oil and gasoline prices should help strengthen that faith.

Of course, markets can work only if they are allowed to. The biggest threat to the functioning of energy markets right now is costly cap-and-trade legislation in the name of fighting global warming. These measures would set a limit on the emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from the combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas. This cap-and-trade legislation, and the energy use restrictions that would result from it, would create an unprecedented level of interference by the federal government in the energy sector and the overall economy. Bottom line: Such legislation would lead to gasoline rationing and higher prices.

The America's Climate Security Act, the only cap-and-trade bill to be voted on in 2008, was easily defeated in the Senate last June, largely due to concerns about costs. The bill was estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to add 0.53 cents to the price of gasoline by 2030, while analyses by The Heritage Foundation and others estimated considerably larger impacts.

Reps. John Dingell (D–MI) and Rick Boucher (D–VA) have recently introduced a new cap-and-trade proposal that could serve as a starting point for global warming discussions in 2009. At the same time, the EPA is pursuing a regulatory crackdown on carbon dioxide emissions.

Costly restrictions imposed by a cap-and-trade bill or EPA regulations would act as a one-way ratchet on oil and gasoline prices, precluding the kind of market-driven declines like the one we have experienced since the summer.



The countryside between Gunnedah and Tambar Springs, NSW, Australia.

As If

*



IN READING THE HISTORY OF NATIONS, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity. At an early age in the annals of Europe its population lost their wits about the sepulchre of Jesus, and crowded in frenzied multitudes to the Holy Land; another age went mad for fear of the devil, and offered up hundreds of thousands of victims to the delusion of witchcraft. At another time, the many became crazed on the subject of the philosopher's stone, and committed follies till then unheard of in the pursuit. It was once thought a venial offence, in very many countries of Europe, to destroy an enemy by slow poison. Persons who would have revolted at the idea of stabbing a man to the heart, drugged his pottage without scruple. Ladies of gentle birth and manners caught the contagion of murder, until poisoning, under their auspices, became quite fashionable. Some delusions, though notorious to all the world, have subsisted for ages, flourishing as widely among civilised and polished nations as among the early barbarians with whom they originated,—that of duelling, for instance, and the belief in omens and divination of the future, which seem to defy the progress of knowledge to eradicate them entirely from the popular mind. Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Charles Mackay Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.



There were times when he was a different person. When, rather than being the hapless victim to whatever circumstance had overwhelmed him, he was confident and bold, angry in narrow focus, the thrower of bricks. There had always been strings of discontent to lead to these peak points, peak experiences, deadline after deadline met, crowds and chaos, multiple unfairnesses, injustices which niggled away at him, stoked his outrage, forced strong measures. The world was so damn unfair. We're coming to get you. Nothing will be solved. All out, we're going to make this a better world, we're going to fix the things that are wrong, we're going to eliminate injustice.

As if. There were too many memories crowding in. The points that he remembered were so obscure. Was there any narrative thread? When he worked, briefly, as the music writer for a gay magazine, thirty years ago, he attended a press conference for Roy Orbison, the American singer of great fame, whether his songs had any special appeal for gay people. Only The Lonely. He had his dark glasses and he was from a different, more historic world. Here, on the outskirts of civilisation, anything American seemed to have more authenticity, because we had grown up with American landscapes on our televisions, American stories, American accents. Walking through Ameican redwood forests seemed more real than walking through the gum trees of Australia, the eucalypt forests towering above.

My songs appeal to everyone, I hope, he said, what else could he say, and there was a prickling shock and uncomfortability that spread around the room at the oddness of the question. He was all bold, all social pioneer, all furious in his determination. He let everything wash over him. As luck would have it he found himself standing next to a very uncomfortable Orbison at the urinal, men going about their business, determined not to look. He wore his dark shades, even in that dimly lit room.

There was that day; there were press releases and records and a tour to promote, and he mixed as if he belonged with all the other music writers from the major papers, and he made a trickle of a living writing for obscure little magazines who were always desperate for copy, who basically would publish anything. It hadn't started well, this music writing thing. He basically knew nothing about it, had no natural aptitude, didn't understand rock. He was awed by everyone around him. He lived with Stuart Coupe, the music writer for the Sun Herald for a while, the walls lined with records, hundreds, thousands of records; and he was perpetually in awe of his knowledge, his talent, his taste, everything about him. He was just a pretender on the outskirts.

He rented the room at the front of Stuart's house; and was amazed by everything about him. The value of that massive record collection; an astonishingly full collection of the history of rock and roll. His impeccable taste. The astonishing number of people he knew. His fame. Everything. Drunk one night, huh, drunk most nights, he told a taxi driver he was living with the music writer for the Sun Herald, boasting. It was his connection to a different world, a real world, where people made money out of writing, where their opinions were respected, where fame was the source of all the bubbles of credibility, the authenticity, the reality. How strong were these things; how strong were these things; after all his years on the fringe.

There was no going forward. He had lived too long in the shallows. No one believed he was going anywhere. He was too drug fucked and alcohol pickled to ever succeed. His occasional moments of notoriety were no substitute for a genuine career path. He clung to others, as if their presence would give him some form of solidity, some substance. Everything was shadows, unreal. Nothing he did was anything but pretence. He didn't know anything more about rock music than he did about nuclear science; all he could do was watch others and mimic their actions. He fed off real people, their force, their substance, their grip on the planet surface filling in his own blank spaces. There was never going to be a good ending, not to this.

Strange things were always happening, he thought, as he stood there pissing next to a very uncomfortable Roy Orbison. As if he could care. Not every gay person was a slut. Was that even real; when the Sydney nights were full of wild presentations of the flesh, orgies involving hundreds stretching from one dark room to the other, music that was going to change everything. There had been so many failures. He had been beaten so badly as a child. He had been so dissolute, so hopeless in his presentations. Already it had begun, nice guy, pity he drinks so much. And the nice guy routine, it was all just part of the pretence, pretending to be a real person, an ordinary customer, when in his head there was only one wish: to be scattered to the four winds, to disintegrate under the weight of a thousand drinks, to find the perfect state of oblivion.

Nice day, if you like that sort of thing. He shrugged, he shook, he buttoned himself up, and they emerged into the light of the hotel ballroom as if nothing had ever gone wrong. As if he had every right to be there. As if he was a normal person. Huh, you have no idea, he thought, lifting a glass of white wine off a passing tray. You have no idea. I'll be shivering on the roof tops watching the hallucinatory dawn break across the city; while everyone else will be comfortably in bed, rolling over to kiss their loved one, getting ready for work. And one day his disease wracked body would be found in an alcove of those rooftops he loved so much, overdosed, his heart just stopped. And no one would know why he was where he was: on the rooftop of an apartment block in Elizabeth Bay; that place where he was more himself than anywhere else; where he could see the light picking up every detail of the harbour, every grand house, every inlet. Let us pass in peace, he thought, and downed the glass in a single gulp.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/17/campaign.wrap/?iref=mpstoryview

(CNN) -- Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden ripped into recent comments by his Republican counterpart that suggested that some places in the U.S. are more "pro-America" than others.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin holds a rally Friday in West Chester, Ohio.

"We believe that the best of America is in the small towns that we get to visit, and in the wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation," she said.

"This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans," Palin added.

On Friday, Palin clarified her comments.

"It's all pro-America. I was just reinforcing the fact that there, where I was, there's good patriotic people there in these rallies, so excited about positive change and reform of government that's coming that they are so appreciative of hearing our message, hearing our plan. Not any one area of America is more pro-America patriotically than others," she said.

At a rally in Mesilla, New Mexico, on Friday, Biden responded to those comments in a vociferous tone.

"I hope it was just a slip on her part and she doesn't really mean it. But she said, it was reported she said, that she likes to visit, 'pro-American' parts of the country," he said to loud boos.

"It doesn't matter where you live, we all love this country, and I hope it gets through. We all love this country," he said. "We are one nation, under God, indivisible. We are all patriotic. We all love our country in every part of this nation! And I'm tired. I am tired, tired, tired, tired of the implications about patriotism."

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24513276-661,00.html

HUNDREDS of millions of dollars will be slashed from health and other key programs as the Rudd Government takes the axe to Budget spending.

Faced with the worst economic crisis in decades, the Government is eyeing billions of dollars in additional savings to bolster a falling Budget surplus.

Among a list of potential targets is $234 million in medical and health research funding slotted for next year.

This would put the Government on a collision course with some of Australia's most respected researchers, including Ian Frazer -- awarded the Prime Minister's $300,000 Science Prize on Thursday.

Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner admitted the Government faced a torrid time as it tried to free funds to pay for pension increases and other core promises.

"Next year's Budget will be a very tough one to frame because of the uncertain economic circumstances," he said.

The minister confirmed his department was listing potential savings.

"It is never possible to tackle every problem at once in government," he said. "You always have to make choices about spending and timing."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/18/2394707.htm

News Corporation chief executive Rupert Murdoch says his company is being hurt by the slowing US economy and the global financial crisis.

Mr Murdoch has told a shareholder meeting these are testing times for News Corporation, expressing his fears that the US is about to enter a prolonged economic downturn.

He said advertising revenue had fallen and the News Corporation share price had been beaten down.

"It's tempting of course to stand here and boast about our past year's success," he said.

"I cannot however do that, not while we're in the midst of an unprecedented credit crisis that has weakened the advertising market and beaten down our share price."

Mr Murdoch insisted News Corporation had enough cash reserves to whether what he said could be a prolonged economic downturn.

He said News Corporation had a $5 billion war chest that could be used to fund more media acquisitions in the wake of his company's takeover last year of the Dow Jones group, that left him in control of the prestigious Wall Street Journal.

Mr Murdoch also rejected suggestions media companies should join the big banks in receiving financial help from the US Government.

Trust No One Believe Nothing

*



As our communication system speeds up, driven by the power of cable television and the Internet, news cycles take on characteristics of a tropical storm: swirling centripetal winds, sudden shifts of intensity and direction, a tendency to darken the horizon and blot out memory, or awareness of anything else that might be happening. Participants-news purveyors and consumers-are always in the eye of the storm. So there was rough justice in the arrival of Gustav, a real hurricane, to rain on a Republican National Convention taking place under sunny skies 1,300 or so miles up the Mississippi. Real as it was, for news junkies, Gustav was only the fourth media storm in a week.

First came Media Storms Hillary and Invesco Field, packing plenty of wind and questions momentous-seeming enough to build suspense. (A media storm requires an open-ended question to keep anchors talking and bloggers blogging.) Would Mrs. Clinton's speech for Barack Obama at the Democratic convention be sufficiently tinged with insincerity to alienate her supporters from the candidate? Would his acceptance speech before a crowd of 84,000 on a football field, in front of a set that might have been borrowed from the TV show The West Wing, make him seem less presidential?

"Not really" was the answer in each case but before it could register the questions had been shoved aside as a new one loomed: Could a caribou-hunting mother of five, with creationist leanings and membership in a church that preaches that these are "the last days" and that God has chosen as a "refuge" the state of which she's a first-term governor-and maybe also chosen her to play that role-put enough verve into John S. McCain's campaign to redeem, at a single stroke, his reputation for independence and his sorry standing with social conservatives? A perfect media question that had been daringly sent aloft by McCain himself, instantly eclipsing Obama's big night. The first episode of Media Storm Sarah lasted less then forty-eight hours, then Gustav came along.

The real storm passed without furnishing the images of private greed and public lassitude that made Katrina an enduring symbol of the Bush administration's aloofness and incompetence. George W. Bush's party, spared the embarrassment of having to welcome him and his vice president to its convention, made a solemn show of transforming itself for one evening into a social service organization, filling its party hats with contributions for the hurricane's victims. Gradually then, the Gulf was left to dry out and the political surge resumed, only now the story line John McCain and his advisers had scripted had suddenly changed on them. From a remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, with the Alaska governor as heroine-a feisty battler against corruption in her own party, in McCain's reformist image-it threatened to turn into Juno, last year's sentimental comedy about a pregnant high school student who cheerfully decides to have her baby.

Joseph Lelyveld
St. Paul, Minnesota



The chemical dissolved in his mouth. Spirals of thoughts, highways of information, truckloads of sentiment, we were carried away from the moment of our youth, transfixed, transported. He wasn't sure who he was anymore. Distant voices never made it into full blown personalities. A solipsistic universe, quiet, deadly. mushy in its intent, filled an otherwise tired brain. Nothing mattered anymore. All the profound observations of his youth had disappeared. Perhaps Churchill put it the best, if you're not a communist when you're young you have no heart, if you're a communist when you're old you have no brain. It's all, sadly, too true.

He had stopped believing in everything. Consumer sentiment. A blistering blizzard of disinformation. Nothing was real. Nothing was genuine. Old fashioned socialists paraded as friends of the Australian people, when all they did was serve themselves. None of them had ever done a normal days work in their lives. The government is now dishing out more than $10 billion in a so-called economic stimulus to everyone on benefits. The rest get nothing. So lots of people, millions, are getting thousands of dollars in their kit come Christmas; and a lot of people aren't.

It breeds resentment. It breeds scorn. Time and again people make the point. The bludgers get everything, they get nothing. Everything becomes crowded. Everything is dark. He was so totally unconvinced by anything he heard. They paraded their smug selves beneath their stale smelling undies; they were a pretense, crowded with their own self importance, lecturing all of us, sympathising with no one, bleating endlessly about the weak and the vulnerable. But the so-called weak and vulnerable were smug in their own certaintities that everyone else should pay for them. That there was no point in dying. That getting up and going to work was for the birds.

We joke between ourselves, did you get any money in the package? Did you? No, no, of course not, we're the suckers that get up and go to work. So you mean, said the 17-year-old son of a PR person, that everybody who doesn't do anything, all the lay abouts, get money? Yep. The emails pour in. Handouts for all. Except the so-called "working famlies", the ones who actually get up and go to work. Although even they will probably get a thousand dollars a child. A thousand dollars. Which as many people are now commenting will end up in wrapping and string on the floor, surrounding some piece of plastic with the label: "Made In China".

Everything's made in China these days; our own manufacturing base has been destroyed. We don't make anything. We don't do anything. Except dig things out of the ground and sell it to the highest bidder. Except pour scorn on our own people. Except persecute the people who fail to agree with the status quo. The masive deceptions. Mass Delusions and the Status Quo. Book titles. Peculiar deceptions. Astonishing what people will believe. He was caught in all these fractures of over information, disinformation. The flooded networks.

The static build up was overloading the system. Consumer sentiment. He couldn't care less. Mortgage stress. He couldn't care less. Somewhere there was an overwhelming story, a gripping narrative, a point to existence. But not here, in these fragile fractured days, amongst all the bleating and all the lies, in a place where people believed nothing but garbage, where their heads were full of noble sentiments packaged and sold to them by a political party, anti-racist, pro-global warming, everything we had been taught to believe simply wasn't true. He was caputred by the throat, yet none of it made sense, not at the core. There was no passion, no courage, no simple decency, there was deception and sleights of hand and politicians spending billions upon billions of dollars to make themselves look good. The nation had become a sad and dysfunctional crock. Trust no one. Believe nothing.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24507853-7583,00.html

KEVIN Rudd's Gordon Gekko speech shows clearly that despite his modern packaging his economic core is very much old Labor. Gekko, Oliver Stone's caricature of a financial speculator from his 1987 film Wall Street, is the archetypal financial capitalist for those on the Left. Stone, of course, is a great admirer of Fidel Castro and in more recent times an associate of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

The Prime Minister claims that somehow the present global financial problems are a hangover from the 1980s philosophy of "greed is good". He makes the extraordinary leap that the greed-is-good era brought the stockmarket crash of 1987, the savings and loans debacle in the US and the global recession that gripped many countries in the early '90s.

He claims today's problems are the fault of the 21st-century "children of Gordon Gekko" who have failed to understand the lessons of the greed-is-good era. If Rudd is to be believed, all the present problems arise as a consequence of the failure of values, "greed has triumphed over integrity", "speculation over value creation" and the "short term over the long term". In the Prime Minister's words, "this crisis bears the fingerprints of the extreme free-market ideologues who influenced much of the neo-liberal economic elite".

Rudd's comments remind me of the ideological nonsense I used to hear at ACTU meetings from left-wing trade union officials in the '90s. Bob Hawke and Paul Keating were repeatedly attacked by the political Left for their neo-liberal policies of global integration and deregulation. Doug Cameron, now a Labor senator, gave a speech to the Tasmanian Fabian Society in 2005 in which he attacked, among others, the Labor Right for being neo-liberal. It's an example of the ideological typecasting the political Left habitually uses. Anything that doesn't conform to their world view of greater government intervention is described as neo-liberal. This epithet is a favourite of the anti-globalisation crowd. Indeed, there is nothing more old Labor than protectionism and industry subsidies.

Much of Rudd's analysis is wrong.

Michael Costa.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/financial-crisis-will-pass-climate-change-wont-garnaut-20081016-52ee.html

THE "unprecedented" financial crisis — no matter how severe — will be short-lived and should not stand in the way of global action on climate change, Ross Garnaut says.

In his final salvo before winding up the Garnaut review office, the outgoing government climate adviser warned it would be bad policy if long-term structural change to cut greenhouse emissions was delayed by a short-term response to economic upheaval.

His comments came hours after Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi threatened to veto a world-leading European Union climate agreement on the grounds that businesses hit by the crisis should not be asked to carry extra costs.

Professor Garnaut urged governments to think about how the world got into the current financial mess — by placing too much emphasis on short-term economics.

He said the financial tumult was not likely to slow growth in emissions, and the available evidence suggested the long-term cost of climate change would be extraordinarily high.

The veteran economist predicted the current crisis would have run its course by December 2009, when a new global deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol is due to be reached at a United Nations meeting in Copenhagen.

http://news.smh.com.au/national/pm-to-meet-business-chiefs-over-crisis-20081016-51u0.html

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says he will be meeting with business leaders in Sydney on Friday to discuss the impact of the global financial crisis.

The meeting comes against the backdrop of further turmoil on global share markets which saw the Australian market drop around 5.5 per cent following the biggest slide on Wall Street since 1987 overnight.

"Fall on share markets and commodities markets reflect a general concern that the global economy is slowing rapidly," Mr Rudd told parliament.

He said the latest drop in US shares came after data showed US retail sales suffered their biggest decline in three years and comments by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.

"Ben Bernanke ... said by restricting flows of credit to households, businesses and state and local governments, the turmoil in financial markets and the funding pressures on financial firms has posed a significant threat to economic growth," Mr Rudd said.

Mr Rudd said the impact of financial market turbulence and stability in recent times has flowed through to equity markets and the real economy.

"That of course has implications for jobs," he said.

He said last Sunday's banking system support package and Tuesday's $10.4 billion economic support package are important and responsible responses.

"At a time when the global economy is going backwards at a pace of knots this level of stimulus is absolutely necessary and is responsible and it should obtain genuine bi-partisan support," he said.

He said business had welcomed the $10.4 billion package.

A Blinding Flash

*



3.5 Premature Victory (The Dangers of "Super Success") There is danger that
movements focusing on reducing stigma prematurely claim victory in the
face of a positive media attention or sudden (but often superficial) shifts in public opinion.
The fastest way to kill anything in America is to turn it into a superficial fad that dies from distortion and overexposure.
The Washingtonians died, in part, from over-exposure, and one of the
greatest threats to AA came in the 1970s and 1980s at the very time that the
rehab/recovery fad was generating explosive growth in AA. The threat was that historical AA would be drowned in a sea of treatment psychobabble and commercialized recovery paraphernalia. The most insidious death of the recovery movement could occur if the essence of that movement died while the illusion of its
continued existence remained. This would be an invisible death--a death by value dilution and corruption.
Cosmetic change can pacify a movement and lead to claims of premature
victory. Such superficial change (tokenism) often masks the absence of fundamental change.
Social change is like personal change in that it involves the twin
challenges of initiating change and then sustaining that change over time. Social change, like personal recovery, requires a maintenance program in order to avoid regression and relapse.
It has been interesting to watch recovering people whose own transformation spans years of false starts and regressions get involved in advocacy and become impatient and angry at the slow pace of change in their communities.
Conversion experiences are rarer for communities than they are for individuals;
social change often involves the same slow stages of change that so
often mark the process of personal recovery.

http://atforum.com/SiteRoot/pages/addiction_resources/Recovery%20Movmnt.pdf



There was a blinding flash of anger, before anger became unfashionable, the subject of rehabilitation courses, something men did while women suffered. Something immature and grimy. The brick went straight through the front door window. He kept the taxi running. I'll only be a minute, he said. The flat's front door was down a narrow alley and at the back of the building. Their wrong? They had suggested he not do certain things at their place, not bring certain people. As he had introduced the pair of them, Jenny and Harry, he felt rightfully wronged. They wouldn't have even known each other if it hadn't been for him.

They were building up their lives, getting their act together. The rent was paid and they had their own place. Narrow alleys and strange acts in the middle of the night. They had been so warm, so cozy up there. Had there been a dog? Was everything alright? The whack whack whack of the crystal light pursued him through his dreams. Caravans pulled up on the side of outback roads. Unresolved, here was a point which had crystallised out of the confusion of their lives. Somewhere to call home. Somewhere to act like everybody else, dutiful members of the toiling middle class.

He was still out on the edge, the lone ranger, following his destiny down a glug hole, drinking desperately into the early hours of the morning, following dreams, growing older. But he had never expected to grow old, to shift from the hunted to the hunter. So when they said no to him, he was angry and hurt. And predominantly outraged. How could they, how dare they? Didn't they know his destiny was written in the stars, it would be his recording of events, his tracing of their lives, that would make them trails in the history of the world, who would make sure they did not go unnoticed, who would record their tiny, dismal lives for posterity.

And so it was that he asked the taxi to stop for five minutes. And he went round the back of the block of flats. It was about 1am. The flat, on the second floor, was in darkness. He found a loose brick in the wall down the side of the building, dank and covered with moss. He was determined not to think twice, he was so damned angry. How could they do that to him? Expel him from the inner circle? Just because his habits were getting out of control. Who the heck did they think they were?

So he hurled the brick through the window. It made a startling, satisfying crash and then his nerves leapt into his throat and he was back round to the taxi, and heading into town. He looked back. He could see a light come on. He could see a shadow in the window, Harry, or was it Jenny. He stayed away for many months. The taxi ride was full of the world, he chatted idly, pretending to be a normal person. Why did you do that, he thought later, they didn't deserve it, after all the struggle they had gone through to get the bond, to get the place together, their own cosy retreat.

But there was no cosy retreat for him. The taxi dropped him in Oxford Street and he kept on drinking, a serious binge where there was no tomorrow. He was determined to smash the world, and himself, to smithereens. He didn't know what drove him, the wild escapades, the despairing gestures, the flips in the crowd, darling, darling, good to see you. Driven into oblivion, driven into the shadows, he switched to bourbon and coke, the black drink for a black heart, and he drank and he drank until his body ached with the chemical load, and he could no longer remember, where was he, who was he, why was he doing these crazy things? The shattering glass echoed through the days, why did he do these wrong things, why had he been abandoned. He disappeared into the arteries of the city, lost to himself, unable to make friends, unable to connect, lost in purpose and in heart, lost soul. He could see the brick at the very moment it hit the glass.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/last-chance-for-mccain/2008/10/15/1223750129896.html

THE economy - and how to pull it out of its slide - is set to dominate the final presidential debate today, Sydney time, in what could be John McCain's last chance to get back into contention in the 2008 race.

The 72-year-old senator from Arizona is facing daunting poll numbers, which will sharpen the dilemma for him on tactics: should he go after his rival, the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, on issues of character by raising associations with people like the former Weatherman William Ayers? Or will attacks distract from his economic message which is the overwhelming preoccupation of voters?

On the eve of the debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, The New York Times/CBS poll found the Obama-Biden ticket leads the McCain-Palin ticket 53 per cent to 39 per cent among likely voters. A week ago, before the Town Hall debate in Nashville, Tennessee, the margin was just three points.

The big gap has opened up because independents who are likely voters - a group that has swung back and forth between Senator McCain and Senator Obama over the course of the campaign - are now lining up more solidly behind the Democratic ticket, with Senator Obama having an 18-point lead in this group.

These startling results are echoed by a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll. It found Senator Obama leads Senator McCain 50 per cent to 41 per cent among likely voters.

Not surprisingly, the Los Angeles Times poll found the economy was the dominant issue with 69 per cent of voters of both persuasions. The Iraq war was a distant second and health care third. Senator McCain said on Tuesday that he did plan to raise William Ayers in the debate as Senator Obama had dared him to, but the event is likely to focus squarely on who has the better formula to revive the economy.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,24504519-643,00.html

KEVIN Rudd stands accused of bank-bashing after vowing to penalise financial institutions that lavish executives with multi-million-dollar pay packages without requiring them to follow responsible investment practices.

And the Prime Minister will ask the governments of the world to follow his lead to link bank capital adequacy requirements to executive pay levels to discourage high-risk investment of the type that triggered the financial crisis.

Australian banks have angrily rejected the idea, insisting they are profitable and, unlike overseas counterparts, not lining up for taxpayer-funded bailouts.

"There is no evidence that Australian bank salaries packages have weakened our banks," said Australian Bankers Association chief executive David Bell.

"In the current credit crisis, this performance is a testament to the sound management of Australian banks."

Mr Rudd made his call for the world to reject "extreme capitalism" in a speech to the National Press Club in Canberra yesterday.

It came a day after he raided his $22 billion budget surplus to fund a $10.4 billion stimulus package to boost economic activity in the face of the global crisis, which has caused bank collapses and wild swings on stock markets.

And at the weekend, Mr Rudd guaranteed bank deposits.

Yesterday he said: "As we contemplate the impact of this financial crisis on real economies, real people and real lives, it must galvanise us to act in the future so that we never allow greed and lax regulation to put us in this position again.

"To put it simply, when markets fail, government must act."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24503801-5013404,00.html

THE nation's reliance on China to carry it through the impending global slowdown has been dealt a blow, with mining giant Rio Tinto saying it no longer expects the engine of Australia's resources boom to bounce back this year.

Rio Tinto chief executive Tom Albanese said yesterday a post-Olympics slowdown in commodities demand would drag on longer than the company had thought just two weeks ago and the company may slow mine expansions.

"We expect to see Chinese economic data in the third quarter of this year showing an exaggerated economic slowdown because of the Olympics effect," Mr Albanese said. "It now seems clear that any bounce in net demand will be delayed until next year." The pessimistic prediction from Rio Tinto came as the Australian share market weakened as concerns about the global economy overwhelmed investor relief at the co-ordinated banking rescue efforts around the world.

And the US economy was yesterday declared to be in recession by a senior Federal Reserve official, Janet Yellen, who said growth had slowed to zero in the September quarter and was set to fall sharply in the last three months of the year.

The S&P/ASX200 weakened after reports of her assessment that "the economy appears to be in recession", ending the day down 35.2 points at 4300.

Japan's market also weakened yesterday on concerns about growth, while London's FTSE was down 3 per cent in early trading last night.

Although the cost of insuring banks against default has tumbled following the rescue packages in Britain, the US and Europe, improvements in bank funding costs have so far been small.

"In the US, bank funding spreads only eased by 10 basis points over the last week and are still in excess of 300 basis points (3per cent above their cash rate), which is still completely dysfunctional," ANZ interest rate strategist Katie Dean said.



This is a lamp at Michael's shop. I couldn't work out what was wrong with the mobile phone camera, turned out to have tomato sauce all over it.

A Dark And Pointless Death

*



I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

I don't want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,
how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.
I'd rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for
nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn
with its snakelike nose.

I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,
that I have a golden manger inside my lips,
that I am the little friend of the west wind,
that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.

When it's dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me
because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,
and pour a little hard water over my shoes
so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.

Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,
because I want to live with that shadowy child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

Garcia Lorca, Gacela Of The Dark Death.



Delicate flowers, heat beneath the bushes, ancient queens flocking across Centennial Park, striped umbrellas held up against the rain, all things, all major and minor contributions to the flow of humanity, all sweeping desires, all longing for the end to come, it swirled inside a gut wrenching heart, it finished for good. He flapped his wrists. He was ashamed. He knew desire and he knew the infinity of longing. He made sharp noises and he meowed in despair. Famous people had died here. Sally Anne Huckstepp was drowned in a pond. We thought these things were part of our own story, their tragic destinies and short lives, all folded into one.

Daylight saving has dislocated the nation. It's dark when it should be light and light when it should be dark. I love it, people said, but for him the shift in hours just added to the disorientation. There was never enough time. Reality crinched back into tiny focus. Smart recovery. I don't think so. There was always a point when the longing should have ceased. Those early years, asleep over the teleprinters, the news of the world hammering out beneath him while he slept on the midnight to dawn shift, it was all part of his embrace of the universe, his desire to know everything, to understand everything. To embrace the great philosophers and the great novelists. To make the world his own.

Come hither, make your way to the front gate. Be a normal human being. Celebrate the weekend. Be happy. Break open bottles of champagne. Serve up the picnic lunch. At the same time, on the edge of the oval in the centre of the city's largest park, he couldn't help but watch the furtive comings and goings from the public toilets. The trees were charged with tension. The green on green of the landscape held a sickening despair, a futile gasp, a magic realm. A group of footballers jogged past. The palm trees arked in perfect succession down the drive. The ducks broke the surface of the water, while the water hens picked their way through the reeds.

Was it here, in this pond, that they found Sally's body? Here, or here? He spread the chicken and mayonnaise out on the picnic cloth, and between them they guessed which pond it had been, the hopeless junky, the police pariah, the charmer and the desperate, speaking out after her boyfriend, Warren LeFranchi, had been shot. Will we ever really know what happened? Who killed who? Was it the police themselves who left her body in the pond, who decided she had caused enough trouble for one life?

There were rumours and rumours as to who had caused the trouble, who she had gone to meet that fateful night. He opened up the chutney and spread the rolls. Another man entered the public toilet on the opposite side of the oval, and took some time to emerge. Pigeons gathered at the sight of the bread. They dragged her body from the pond the next morning, and news of who it was spread across the city almost instantly. Her damaged good looks, her fervent threats to spill the beans, to expose corruption, were captured on film and screened into the nation's lounge rooms.

Fame, it was thought, would stop them from killing her, after the things she had said to the news reporters, her smeared good looks poignant, the distress over the death of her boyfriend in a shoot out with notorious policeman Roger Rogerson, seen as the epitome of the force from a different era. These images were everywhere. And we thought even then, almost as she said the very words, how is she going to get away with this? She must be marked. They must want to get rid of her now.

She seemed to us then, the scarred, the marked generation, that she stood for something more noble, that the delinquent adventures of our generation were worth preserving, that she was one of us. That her death, her brutal extinguishment by the authorities, was something worthy of fighting about, writing about, that just because she chased the dragon and called the police corrupt was no reason to kill her. But her death washed away in the historic annals of the city, and in the end it was just a blip in a city full of strangers, in a place without a soul, a park with no history, a death with no purpose. She disappeared quicker and younger than the rest of us, but in the end we would all be washed away, here in the cathedral air of the southern continent, here in this vast strange place.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE49A36O20081013

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Governments around the world bet hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue failing banks on Monday, sending world stocks soaring and giving Wall Street its biggest one-day gain ever.

The U.S. government is set to buy $250 billion in equity stakes in banks, a source briefed on the situation said, after Britain, Germany, France and other European countries pledged more than 1 trillion euros ($1.36 trillion) for bank guarantees and equity stakes.

U.S. regulators would announce details of the U.S. plan at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, the Treasury Department said.

The Dow Jones industrial average and the S&P 500 index raced to an 11 percent gain, their biggest ever, after recording their worst week in history last week amid panic over collapsing banks and fears that major economies were headed toward recession.

Stocks worldwide added more than $1.7 trillion in value on Monday, based on a record 9.3 percent gain in the MSCI world equity index.

"Sometime last week it seemed like we faced Armageddon, so to have a coordinated plan on stabilizing banks is huge progress," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson met with top Wall Street bankers on Monday, agreeing to spend $250 billion on equity stakes and a three-year guarantee of bank-to-bank lending, the source said.

This was an about-face from a previous U.S. focus on buying bad debt from banks, after world finance ministers coalesced around a British proposal at weekend meetings in Washington.


http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10641&Itemid=5812

October 15, 2008: A tumultuous global financial system is leaving Kenya with less of the much needed hard currencies adding the pain of a weak shilling to an economy under pressure from runaway inflation.

The shilling yesterday touched a new low of Sh75.86 against the US dollar and dealers said they had seen no indication the decline would stop soon.

The currency has since the beginning of the year lost 14 per cent of its value against the greenback leading to a windfall for earners of dollar-denominated salaries but adding a huge burden to an import dependent economy.

But even as millions of Kenyans feel the pinch of a weaker shilling in their pockets, opinion is divided as to what is driving the deceleration.

Though the Central Bank has largely maintained that the currency swings are a result of speculative activity by a few key players in the market in search of a harvest, the ground is rapidly tilting in favour of those who see it as a product of changing fundamentals.

As the global financial meltdown deepened in Europe and America, dollar inflows from key sources such as remittances from Kenyans in the diaspora have been thinning.

This means that a dollar scarcity is slowly creeping into the domestic economy, piling pressure on the shilling.

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2485/218/

PS: I do not agree that any of Mr. Gore’s ideology has changed. He is espousing the same pseudo-scientific environmental nonsense that he has been for many years now. The difference in the ideas in the two presentations lies in their intended purpose. An Inconvenient Truth was intended to frighten the American people into pushing Congress to pass the carbon tax legislation, solely for the purpose of putting huge amounts of power and profit into the hands of a select few. That profit will cost an unthinking public dearly. The Assault on Reason, in part a vengeful and spiteful attack on President Bush for winning their electoral contest, actually has a far cruder (believe it or not) basis. It is another attempt to scare the American public into pushing Congress into another type of legislation, this one to more specifically benefit Mr. Gore. The book urges Americans, for the benefit of our democratic process, to insist Congress pass laws allowing broad band users of the Internet, those who resell parts of that bandwidth to others for a profit, to be allowed use of the Internet for the same fees charged to individual home users. While most would agree that those who use more of anything should pay in accordance with the portion they use, this book lets us know this legislation to prevent such proportional payment is necessary to insure continued freedom and democracy in America. It has nothing to do with Mr. Gore’s recently acquired half ownership in a broadband user attempting to compete with “youtube.” Just as carbon legislation requiring American industry to subsidize projects by “sustainable” companies has nothing to do with Mr. Gore’s half ownership of an investment company buying up ownership of many of the sustainable companies our companies will be forced to pay tribute to. The amazing thing is Mr. Gore counting on America being so stupid as to not notice the difference in the two sets of ideas. As to which has the most ability to influence America, the carbon legislation will as absolutely destroy our economy as it did that of Czechoslovakia. The assault on reason was just a foolish exercise lacking greatly in the sophistication of the first ruse. The difference between the two suggests strongly of other minds behind the environmental coup in progress.

SGW: Mr. Gore had a mentor of sorts in his early days as an advocate for change to fight global warming. Who was he and how did his relationship with Al Gore change over time?

PS: I do not know if Professor Roger Revelle, one of Mr. Gore’s instructors in college, claimed our environmental savior as his protégé, but Mr. Gore certainly claimed Mr. Revelle as his mentor in his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance. We are told Mr. Revelle drew a correlation between the processes of civilization and changes in the composition of the atmosphere, and what would happen if we did not change, and everything was clear. Mr. Revelle did not, in fact, make this projection into the future. In a 1984 interview with Omni magazine, asked specifically if CO2 increases were responsible for worsening weather, Dr. Revelle indicated an increase would be more likely to temper weather extremes. In a 1991 article for Cosmos, he warned against the economic harm and potential human suffering possible from acting precipitously to curtail emissions when decades of research were still required to understand the real effect of such gasses. He advocated that we looked before we leaped. His rebuttal of Mr. Gore’s misrepresentation of his work, claiming the proof was not yet definitive enough to cry “wolf,” changed the nature of the relationship between them. Three months after that article in Cosmos, Mr. Revelle passed away. The differences between what he believed, and what Mr. Gore claims he believed, became national news in the 1992 presidential election. Mr. Gore’s response was to claim his “mentor” had become senile before his death. He also claimed the co-author of the article had lied about Dr. Revelle’s involvement. After a defamation suit, an apology was made in 1994. There is no way to know now what Mr. Revelle would think of his protégés current drastic proclamations. We do know he had no time for them while alive.

The Charge Was

*



The charge...was that men who had been leaders of the German legal system had 'consciously and deliberately suppressed the law' and contributed to crimes, including torture, that 'were committed in the guise of legal process'. 'Men of law', the prosecutor told the Nuremburg judges, 'can no more escape...responsibility by virtue of their judicial robes than the general by his uniform.' In his closing arguments LaFollette summarised the various bases for individual responsibility. One of them was that the defendants 'administerial legislation which they must be held to have known was in violation of international law'. Those words rang a bell.
Philippe Sands.





As if all was over, the bath run, a life already lived, he was astonished by moments of what seemed almost like happiness at the end of the race. It didn't matter any more what happened. Is this how normal people felt? Unladen by gloom, no longer desperate for oblivion. The days opened up into party avenues. Friends dropped by. Companionship was easy to come by. Thailand is the easiest country in the world to get laid, the stranger said. It was a well known fact. He got drunk at the bar in the brothel, and resisted the staff's offers. Later he was not sure why. A natural prudishness over came him at the most inappropriate moments. A thin man lived inside the fat man. He wasn't the person he used to be.

The financial crisis sweeps the globe. People talk of hundreds of thousands being unemployed in this country alone. Any one who works are trapped by ridiculously high taxes, so that the week of grind is hardly worth the effort at the end. You have to be making $70,000 plus just to be on an equivalent income to a single mother with all the assistance medical, rental, transport that they mop up. Their dirty secrets. They've made it barely worth going to work. Raise the dole and you start to surpass the minimum wage. Everyone seems to agree that the aged pensioners deserve an immediate $30 pay increase, the proposal of the opposition which Rudd has resisted, waiting for a review.

They've hit the ground reviewing, Malcolm Turnbull repeats, treating us all like fools, ignoring the question of the interviewer. What would you do differently? How would you deal with these problems? They're shadows, they're arrogant fools. They live in our lounge rooms thanks to television. They make marks and they savage high learning. Think not for yourself, you will be crucified. The march to a communist state in this country was barely halted by a conservative government which adopted
or out bid all of Labor's policies, spread welfare into the middle classes. And once you give someone something, it's very hard to take it back.

They were Christmas, they were stealing, they were the real thing, hiding beneath the lip of the world, snarling beasts. He was filled with dread and the urge to hide. This world no longer belonged to him, if it ever had. Savage play, savage laughter, a dance on the edge of time, casual criminality, they tried their best and there was nothing left. The socialists had taken over. The lowest common denominator ruled. Cloaked in social justice rhetoric, businesses were destroyed, hope was stifled. We'll shut down pubs, the minister for police declared in yesterday's screaming headlines. There is no fun, no laughter, no chance to stray.

Straight laced, the gloom of the middle class filtered into every street, every nook, every cranny. Soon we will be free. We will escape the bonds of work and live easily in the country. The grinding turmoil of the city will disappear into a foggy memory. Laughter will be mine. All the spring mornings, all the optimism, it will dance in his blood as he travels the globe. Many things could have been, but he didn't believe in the social engineers any more. The left was equally as venal and self interested as the right. Shadows were cast; and his soul mission was to escape.

Noble savages; that's what they called them. He exits his car. He shakes his head as a drug dealer starts to walk towards him. No, he doesn't want anything. Haven't they learnt by now he lives here. Redfern has deteriorated all over again. The dealing is more blatant than ever, casting aspersions on the entire aboriginal community. Tourists get off the station and the first thing they see is the little collection of boys working the streets in front of the station, the needle bus parked directly behind them. Buy, sell, deal, all under the watchful eye of the police cameras. The affects of last months clean up have clearly faded. Another raised eyebrow. You want something... you want something..?



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/3187662/Financial-crisis-Australia-and-New-Zealand-guarantee-all-bank-deposits.html

The move comes after currencies and markets in both countries suffered heavy losses last week.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said his government would guarantee Australia's entire deposit base of AU$600-A$700bn (£238-£278bn), including savings in credit unions and building societies, for three years.

"We are in the economic equivalent of a national security crisis, and the challenges are great," Mr Rudd said.

He referred to recent moves by other economies, such as Britain, Germany and Ireland, to extend guarantees or state aid to their banking systems and warned Australian banks could be disadvantaged if his government failed to act.

"I don't want a first-class Australian bank discriminated against because some other foreign bank, which has a bad balance sheet, is being propped up by a guarantee by a foreign government," he said.

Last week, $190 billion was erased from the Australian stock market when the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 Index slid by nearly 16 per cent. At the same time, New Zealand's NZX 50 fell by 11 per cent. The Australian dollar slid by more than 5 per cent against the US dollar on Friday alone.

But on Monday Australian shares rallied to their biggest one-day gain since October on the heels of Mr Rudd's announcement, with bank stocks making some of the largest gains despite warnings from analysts that the new-found optimism could be short-lived.

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced her deposit guarantee scheme moments after Mr Rudd.

Speaking at the launch of her party's campaign for the Nov 8 election, she said: "Our government has agreed to implement a deposit guarantee scheme which will provide New Zealand depositors with additional confidence."

New Zealand, which is in recession, has offered to guarantee retail deposits for the next two years, with deposit-taking finance companies also included in the scheme.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24485552-16741,00.html

THE world's political leaders and bankers have reached their Waterloo, and they know it. The eye of history is on them more closely and mercilessly than they might ever have imagined it would be in their climb up the ladder of success. That realisation itself is a measure of progress towards an achievable solution to the global financial crisis, even if no concrete and immediate remedies emerged publicly from the weekend's emergency meetings in Washington of the Group of Seven and the Group of 20. International acceptance has at last arrived of the scale and character of the credit freeze, and of the need for co-ordinated action by governments in rich and developing countries to unfreeze credit by force of money from injections and interest rate cuts.

A new kind of grand coalition is demanded by events to meet a crisis equivalent to the greatest of security threats. Only joint stimulus by solvent governments can reopen the clogged cardiovascular system of the world economy that has become the financial sector. Actions by individual governments, even those at the trillion-dollar level, have been insufficient to calm the financial and stock markets. The weekend's meetings may not be enough for some national markets today. But Australia, among the least culpable of nations in the causes of this crisis, is doing its part. Kevin Rudd announced yesterday a series of dramatic measures to lock in confidence in Australian institutions and help them compete for scarce funds on world credit markets.

Let there be no misapprehension of what confronts us. The toxin, as it's being called, in the financial system is likely to take years to remove fully. This toxin lies in foolish and sometimes politically driven loans in a once-booming housing market and their entry into the world's holdings of derivative investments, estimated to be worth up to $US536 trillion before the credit slide began last year. The lending that underlies some derivative securities includes good and bad loans, particularly mortgages, at the price of transparency. If the problem were as relatively simple as bailing out institutions that had lent foolishly, the crisis would be more manageable. But exposure to debt losses and risk is proving far harder to assess than in that case, and so banks are reluctant to lend to other banks and institutions, or even to strong businesses in the face of the predictions of global recession caused by the lack of credit.

The choice is stark for world leaders. They can let the global economy flap in the wind until the financial toxins are eliminated, they can leave us to take time off and suffer a deep recession - a depression in some countries. Or they can lead us towards adaption to and working around the crisis and returning to business as near as possible to usual in the wider economy of goods and services. As the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, said at the weekend in Washington, the measures taken so far "have not yet achieved the goal of stabilising markets and bolstering confidence". He continued: "Intensifying solvency concerns about a number of the largest US-based and European financial institutions have pushed the global financial system to the brink of systemic meltdown."

http://voanews.com/english/2008-10-13-voa29.cfm

The World Bank president says the global economic crisis could hurt poor people in developing countries most severely.

Robert Zoellick said in Washington Sunday that as governments try to fix economic problems at home, they must not forget commitments to help poor countries reach the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty.

Zoellick added that a prolonged credit crunch or a sustained global slowdown raises the risk that poor nations will be seriously hampered in efforts to improve the lives of their citizens.

He said officials from the world's advanced economies agree that the international community should continue to help.

The World Bank estimates that high food and energy prices have pushed another 100 million people into poverty this year alone.

The director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, said the current economic crisis puts additional strain on countries that are already suffering.

Zoellick, Strauss-Khan and officials from the world's seven most industrialized nations discussed the crisis over the past few days in Washington.

Zoellick said the World Bank has a one-point-two billion dollar fund to help countries cope with the impact of high food prices.

He said the the bank's private-sector lending branch, the International Finance Corporation, also is considering creating a fund to help banks in the developing world.

Reflections in an art gallery window, Redfern, Sydney, Australia.

A Secret Within A Secret

*



The photographs thus appeared to show systematic abuse by American interrogators at Abu Ghraib, and their publication unleashed an immediate and violent reaction. 'A photograph is a secret about a secret,' the photographer Diane Arbus once said. As Abu Ghraib's secrets were uncovered, the Wall Street Journal published an article about a classified Defense Department Working Group report on interrogation methods. Hazy details about secret memos began to emerge; some documents and even a legal advice were leaked; and the kernel of a suggestion began to germinate. Was there a connection between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the Administration's own secret interrogation policies at other places, including Guantanamo?

Philippe Sands, Torture Team.



He cried out loud, as if frightened, but in fact the strangled noise he made suggested courage and renewed determination rather than fear. All those years his consciousness had been disintegrating. The chemical load destroyed all the normal boundaries. Voices in the wilderness. Crying out. This is all wrong, this place, this time, this culture. None of what you believe is true. Created on figments of your imagination, on derivative social theories, on media saturation in the hollow echoes of the self, all that, it wasn't real any more. Man oh man, he said, wiping the sweat from his brow, and none of it meant anything, anything at all.

Once, all the future had lain ahead. Christmas was long gone, those what they thought of as terrible times, when they were the only kids on the street who didn't get Christmas presents, while they moped around at the dead end and stared with envy at the toys of the neighbourhood kids. Everything echoes. Moments have a profound resonance. Cringing selves were yet to come. They ran through the bushes with their pants down. The heat stifled in the moving air. Violence was back there, inside the house. Hysterics were far off, in the trees. The whispering voices. The air came from other places, and sheltered here. The caves in the sandstone cliffs could have been inhabited thousands of years ago.

We are one, we are many, goes the popular song, but back then, way back when, we were barely emerging from the chrysalis of childhood, our brains were barely functioning, as The Great Books and the Brtiannica encyclopaedia loomed over his sleeping form, as dreams of intellectual triumph, movement at the station, long walks to the bus stop, the sound of the budgerigars tweating in the neighbour's aviary, as hushed spells settled across the bush, broken only by the fear of his parents, the thought that sooner or later the day would have to end. Magic moments. They stood on the top of tall rocks and shouted: "I'm the king of the castle, and your a dirty rascal."

Mr Nobody came and inspected his land. There was talk he would sell, or build, he didn't seem to really now his own intentions. Us kids gathered around him, listening to his stories, pestering him for information. We didn't meet many people from anywhere else, and we regarded him with fascination. All was lost, lost. Were they going to rob his house because it was smarter than their own? Was Tambar the peace he sought? Everything moved in circles, and he knew those fearsome days, those early despairs, were being finally cast off. There was nothing to be afraid of any more. No one could hurt him. He was master of his own destiny. Clouds and ruin, that luminous, lyrical despair which had propelled him for so long, had gone.

The crowded scenes, the voices, the angst, the eternal quest for satisfaction, the longing for community, the peaceful place that he knew lay somewhere, the burden that had been placed upon him, to see all, to understand all, had been placed by a translucent calm, almost the absence of something. The world was no longer clogged up. He wasn't plotting for the next escape. He dreamt still, perhaps he would always dream, of bars and splendour and joyous toasts, of crowded wonderful days and passionate declarations, of alcohol fuelled diatribes and an astonishing intensity, of shadows that would always stalk him, a despair that would always be his deepest, most loyal partner, an eternal companion, a lover without measure.

A lover which wanted to kill him. An intoxication which would ultimately destroy him. A passionate intensity which would eat away his overriding integrity, would hurt the very one it loved, would demand saviour but instead be his constant companion. He didn't know where it came from. He didn't know where it would end. He missed it when it wasn't there. These shadows, these days, these passings.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.canada.com/cityguides/winnipeg/info/story.html?id=9be246c1-4f50-4d20-949b-725370d403f9

WASHINGTON - A heightened sense of urgency over the economic crisis gripped world leaders Saturday even as U.S. President George W. Bush appeared with the G7 finance ministers - among them Canada's Jim Flaherty - in a bid to underline their resolve to tackle the problem.

At the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund, the head of the organization warned the world financial system was teetering on the "brink of systemic meltdown" amid fears over the health of banks that have frozen credit markets.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn said measures taken by rich countries had so far failed in their goals of "stabilizing markets and bolstering confidence," and warned further intervention and co-ordinated actions would be necessary.

Meanwhile, finance leaders from the IMF's 185 member countries on Saturday endorsed the G7 plan to chart a course out of the credit crisis, hoping the broader support will calm markets.

Egyptian Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali, who chairs the IMF's policy-steering committee, said the endorsement should help restore confidence in financial markets.

"We are committed to the plan of action," Boutros-Ghali said, "This is an essential element for restoring confidence," he added.

In a bid to quantify the consequences of the continuing crisis, the IMF's chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, said stock markets could fall by another 20 per cent before governments are likely to be in a position to stop the rout.

Markets around the world fell by about that much over the last week alone despite the announcement of major government plans, which have included the U.S. government's $700-billion pledge to buy distressed securities from banks, and an internationally co-ordinated interest rate cut by six nations, including Canada.

In Europe, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called a crisis summit in Paris of the 15 euro zone countries Sunday - even though they had scheduled to meet in Brussels as early as Wednesday.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/12/2388645.htm?section=justin

Finance ministers from the G20 group of leading economies have been meeting in Washington to discuss ways of dealing with the world financial crisis.

Among those attending the G20 meeting is Australia's Treasurer Wayne Swan, who has described the mood as sombre but determined.

World finance ministers have agreed decisive action needs to be taken to prevent more bank failures and kickstart stalled credit markets.

International Monetary Fund (IMF) chairman Youseff Boutrous-Ghali, says it is essential there is a coordinated response to the financial crisis.

"Because the crisis is global, the solution cannot be local," he said.

"The solution has to be global and it has to have the support of the entire financial community."

The crisis meetings will continue tomorrow.

http://business.smh.com.au/business/crisis-spreads-faster-20081012-4z54.html

THE Federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan has warned that the economic crisis is flowing through to developing economies much faster and more brutally than expected - including Australia's major trading partners.

Mr Swan emerged from a weekend meeting in Washington of the G20, a group that includes developed and developing nations, saying he was now more worried about the likely effect in Australia and all options were on the table should they be needed.

"People are very sombre because this is now spreading to the developing economies," he said.

But despite the assessments being gloomier than a few days ago, Mr Swan said he believed Australia would avoid a recession.

"My view is we are still better placed, but what is new in the outlook the IMF has given us, and through feedback in meetings and discussions today, is this is spreading with far greater speed to developing economies," he said.

In an interview shown on the ABC's Insiders yesterday, Mr Swan said although Australia would also be hit harder by the crisis of the past week, "all our advice at the moment is that we will continue to grow".

The G20 meeting received a detailed presentation on the latest International Monetary Fund forecasts, which have been revised since the World Economic Outlook was released last week.



Picture window, local art gallery, Redfern, Sydney, Australia.