freely associating

As the Greek crisis develops and spreads, threatening to become a Europe-wide sovereign debt crisis, I thought the following line from The Economist's editorial on the matter ('Acropolis now', 1 May 2010) is worth noting: When the unthinkable suddenly becomes the inevitable, without pausing in the realm of the improbable, then you have contagion. Another piece in the same issue is entitled 'The cracks spread and widen', which reminds me ...

I've been thinking about some of the issues around events in Greece and also 'public concern' over government debt in many other countries, including here in the UK where all three main parties are promising austerity in order to sort out the 'public finances'. From the perspective of the financial markets, the number everybody's talking about is the spread on bond yields between Greek government debt and that ...

Oh dear, last weeks wide-eyed talk of green shoots have already been replaced by a new sense of gloom and talk of a double dip recession. That must rank amongst the shortest, least noticeable economic recoveries in history. I suppose wishful thinking can only get you so far. Ultimately the pundits and spinners are going to have to face up to the idea that the present economic crisis ...

Things have been quiet on this blog (we’ve been getting on elsewhere with life, birth & death, among other things). But the other night I got pulled up over my reservations about the forthcoming anarchist movement conference. So here are some rambling responses… There’s all the usual trivial stuff about what “anarchism” means. Like a lot of people, I have a love/hate relation with the label. In the grand ...

Last night I gave a short talk on behalf of We Won’t Pay For Their Crisis to the Climate Chaos Cafe at The CommonPlace. There’s nothing staggeringly original in it, but it does contain some nice insights harvested from all over the place (some chunks were lifted verbatim from the latest issue of The Commoner and libcom). WHAT DOES THE ECONOMIC CRISIS MEAN FOR THE CLIMATE CHANGE MOVEMENT? We are ...

Things have been a bit quiet here because we've been trying to piece together our thoughts on crisis for an article in the next Shift. Those speculations can be found here (although we may one day produce a slightly longer version because we ended up cutting sections on wealth and value, among other things). As we threw ideas around, one that kept bouncing back was the meaning of ‘crisis’. ...