Dorothea Lange "Mississippi Delta. Negro woman carrying her shoes home from church." July 1936 As Groucho once put it: "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it." Vaclav Klaus is perhaps the only man out there I've seen so far who says the right things. Well, other than myself, that is. Chest thumping? I'm just worried, and increasingly so, by the level of complacency I witness every single day in whatever it is I see and read about
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The German edition of Der Spiegel opens the new week on Monday morning with a series of articles on the European situation, which make clear, as if that were still necessary, that Europe is still an absolute mess. You know, just in case you thought it was not. That Mario Draghi's latest unlimited whatever it is had somehow chased away the demons. First, Der Spiegel writes that the Greek deficit is twice as high as previously thought,, at €20 billion,
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Banner demonstration Budapest, September 4, 1012 After publishing Hungary Throws Out Monsanto AND The IMF 10 days ago, I've been keeping an eye on what goes down along the twin Buda and Pest shores of the Danube river. That's how I came upon a video from Johnny Miller for PressTV, which is sort of Iran's version of Russia Today and Al Jazeera, news channels that find their niche and viability "behind the biases" of western media, in much the same
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Obviously, after a week of big-time announcements, the German Supreme Court, Mario Draghi's bond buying scheme and Ben Bernanke's QE3 (both virtually unlimited – or presented as such), it's tempting to think the western world is well on its way to tackling its financial crises. Looking at the stock markets one might even presume all's fine out there already. Still, that is – or indeed, seems – only true if you focus solely – blinders and all – on the
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Noah’s Ark – A Picture of Christ As many of you already know, I have written about economic, financial and industrial/environmental collapse on The Automatic Earth for a few years now. For all human beings who are still fortunate [or unfortunate] enough to exist on this Earth, these are issues of prime and imminent importance. We are now at least four years running into the start of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, which then morphed into generalized private and public debt
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Well, the German Supreme Court decision is through, and it looks positive at a first superficial glance, so what could go wrong from here? Sorry to break it to you, but plenty could. It’s amusing to see that decisions like these, the German court one or last week’s Draghi bond buying announcement, are seen as being positive for markets and/or entire economies, while in fact the only reason they have to be taken in the first place is that the
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Eagle with fasces used on the war flag of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana. Image by Flanker The plan to "save the euro through unlimited bond-buying" that ECB president Mario Draghi presented last week shows one thing above all, and with blinding clarity to boot – why nobody picks up on it is beyond me: it shows that Draghi is the least suitable person to present any such plan. Any country that wants a bailout under Draghi's terms, that is: any
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I don't know about you, but I would label my personal knowledge of Hungary as wanting, if not painfully incomplete. It's not an easy country to come to grips with, not least of all of course because Hungarian doesn't look like any western language we know with the possible exception of Finnish. I did visit just after the Wall came down, and remember huge contrasts, almost paradoxes, between rural poverty and a capital, Budapest, that was much richer than other
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Looking around at those… around me – family, friends, acquaintances and random faces in the crowd of apathy – the level of complacency is so concentrated I can taste it, yet I can’t even describe how bad it tastes. I’m not really talking about the understanding people lack about the numerous predicaments we face as a species – that’s definitely there too… but what I’m talking about is even worse. It’s the assumption that we can just go about our
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Detroit Publishing Co. "Primitive ferry, High Bridge, Kentucky River" 1907 Our Down Under roving reporter Skip came up with a few interesting questions when watching an interview that Russia Today recently ran with economist Richard Duncan. Where doth debt take us going forward, and, for that matter, where has it – really – taken us so far? If and when Japan implodes, does that force the US out of the possibility of moving – or already being – into the
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