global financial crash yay!

[luka]

you'll have to email tea im afriad, my inbox here is full of messages from someone who died and i dont want to delete them.

 

[vimothy]

Lazer Beams Inc eh. It'll be Skynet next i suppose, then there'll be trouble. Where are you in NL? I used to live in Leiden. Great place, if you like windmillls, nutella and cheese that tastes of nothing.

Oh and by association Luka that makes you part of Britain's ruling class. Fuck asking your sister about the crisis, it's practically her fault!

 

[Mr. Tea]

That's very poignant, luka. You still use that heronbone address?

Vimothy: yeah, pretty much. On Friday I got a tour of the clean rooms; one of their machines is an experimental prototype for self-assembling circuits using some crazy molcule or other. I was like, you guys have seen The Terminator, right?

Edit: I'm in Eindhoven. Traditionally Catholic, therefore some pretty bad-ass looking churches. Well cool.

 

[luka]

that's true vimothy, she planned it or at least she was on the planning committee. she doesn't work for them any more though. she said the people that pay their wages are the people that commission them to write reports and that its very hard to be objective and honest when you're trying not to upset your paymasters. she ended up basically hating it. also there is quite a few bullies there. it made craner jealous tho cos she got to attend talks by luminaries such as condeleeza rice when she was still stalking the corridoors of power. (now presumably she is skulking in a oaklined study somewhere penning her memoirs, honing her dick cheney zings)

 

[craner]

Her memoirs are already penned and published. I have my copy on order. (I will look for your sister's index entry with interest.)

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

one of their machines is an experimental prototype for self-assembling circuits using some crazy molcule or other.

DNA?

I was in Amersfoort last week, very pleasant town. Why is everywhere i visit in Europe like a polished, expensive-looking version of the UK? Or another way to put it - why is nearly every town and city in the UK such a fucking grimy, gloomy, tatty dump?

 

[Mr. Tea]

DNA?

I was in Amersfoort last week, very pleasant town. Why is everywhere i visit in Europe like a polished, expensive-looking version of the UK? Or another way to put it - why is nearly every town and city in the UK such a fucking grimy, gloomy, tatty dump?

Have you been to a seaside town in Spain? Most of them look like someone got halfway through building the place and then just gave up.

But yeah, Britain has a lot of very dump-y towns, agreed.

 

[baboon2004]

Something I was reminded of this weekend from being in Spain was that clone towns seem to be a specifically British thing (eg always the same chains dominating the centre of most cities int her country). While El Corte Ingles, FNAC, a few fast food chains etc might have a branch in every town, independent businesses seem to be the norm rather than the dying exception in most European countries. i think that's one of the reasons I like mainland Europe so much, and I hadn't properly identified it until now.

 

[faustus]

Something I was reminded of this weekend from being in Spain was that clone towns seem to be a specifically British thing (eg always the same chains dominating the centre of most cities int her country). While El Corte Ingles, FNAC, a few fast food chains etc might have a branch in every town, independent businesses seem to be the norm rather than the dying exception in most European countries. i think that's one of the reasons I like mainland Europe so much, and I hadn't properly identified it until now.

this is exactly right. supermarkets haven't taken over - they don't sell household goods or chemist stuff, people tend to get their fruit from the grocers and so on.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Yeah, the homogenisation of British high streets is pretty depressing. Nation of shopkeepers? Nah. Uniformed shop assistants, maybe. Why is this, do you think? Is it just down to tax laws and other regulations that favour big businesses over small ones, do you think? Or has it got more to do with the ubiquity of advertising?

 

[baboon2004]

There's a good New Economics Foundation report on this, though I'm not sure it's so much prescriptive, rather than simply descriptive. i went to Glasgow over the summer, and wandering round the city centre was just depressing. No character of its own, save for a few bagpipes.

i think it's something to do with much of Britain's seeming disdain for the small pleasures of life vis-a-vis convenience. People just don't seem as bothered about quality, or, more accurately, quality has been reframed as a 'middle class' thing. if anyone can explain how or why (or when) this happened, I'd be very interested.

In other news, what happened to OWS - Bloomberg is such a cunt.

 

[faustus]

Yeah, the homogenisation of British high streets is pretty depressing. Nation of shopkeepers? Nah. Uniformed shop assistants, maybe. Why is this, do you think? Is it just down to tax laws and other regulations that favour big businesses over small ones, do you think? Or has it got more to do with the ubiquity of advertising?

i think it's all those things, certainly - the amount of political donations by all the big supermarkets in recent years, and so on.

but a more mundane explanation that sometimes occurs to me is that in a lot britain people live very far apart - the population density in towns and cities is far lower than in, say, spain, where people generally live in flats in five or six storey terraces. No-one in Spain drives to the shops: it's easy to visit lots of local shops on foot, rather than doing one big trip for everything. (on the other hand, I heard that the British have the lowest average square-footage of living space in the EU, which surprised me a little)

 

[Mr. Tea]

Well yeah, Britain's hugely crowded - England considered by itself is something like the third most densely populated major country in the world - and on top of that, a lot of land is owned in big chunks by big landowners. Not that that's all bad, as it does at least mean we still have a few odd bits of hillside and meadow here and there that are not yet occupied by out-of-town shopping megaplexes and some beautiful old houses that are open to the public instead of being the private pad of some Russian energy tycoon.

I'm not sure about faustus's point about Brits having to drive to the shops, but I'm probably talking from a biased POV because I've always lived in inner London since I left home and have never had my own car in any case - I guess it's probably a lot different if you live in suburbia and the only shopping options are a crappy, overpriced 'convenience' shop nearby or a massive fuck-off Tesco a couple of miles away.

And I don't think it's a new observation to say that Britain just doesn't 'do' cities very well, at least not for the majority of people who aren't very wealthy. They're not very bike-friendly, for example, with the result that even people who don't have much money end up spending a large part of their disposable income on maintaining a car. Though this is even more accute in the countryside, where bus services are often risibly infrequent as well as extortionate.

Jonathon Meades links this to a collective self-deception that the "real England" is still a green-and-pleasant-land of picturesque farms and small villages with thatched cottages and stone churches, with cities as some kind of aberration. Whereas Britain was the first society in history to have a majority urban population, and is still intensely urbanised.

 

[Sectionfive]

 

[IdleRich]

"Jonathon Meades links this to a collective self-deception that the "real England" is still a green-and-pleasant-land of picturesque farms and small villages with thatched cottages and stone churches, with cities as some kind of aberration. Whereas Britain was the first society in history to have a majority urban population, and is still intensely urbanised."

Yeah, this vision of England as a bucolic paradise that became urbanised yesterday is a persistent myth.

But anyway, what's going on with Occupy Wall Street? They're being maced and tear-gassed in the name of health and safety and no media are being allowed anywhere near is what I read this morning. Any changes?

 

[hucks]

Cheery reading. Anyone more clued up than me able to offer a view as to how likely this is?

 

[baboon2004]

Was reading the other day about how in 1981 (pretty recent, all things considered), 200 troops machine-gunned the ceiling of the parliament building to attempt a coup. Politically, things could get very 'interesting' in southern Europe if the expected scenario materialises.

Very interesting article.

 

[faustus]

Was reading the other day about how in 1981 (pretty recent, all things considered), 200 troops machine-gunned the ceiling of the parliament building to attempt a coup. Politically, things could get very 'interesting' in southern Europe if the expected scenario materialises.

Very interesting article.

this was in spain though, right? or did it happen in italy too?

there was a very good film that came out on the thirty-year anniversary

 

[faustus]

I'm not sure about faustus's point about Brits having to drive to the shops, but I'm probably talking from a biased POV because I've always lived in inner London since I left home and have never had my own car in any case - I guess it's probably a lot different if you live in suburbia and the only shopping options are a crappy, overpriced 'convenience' shop nearby or a massive fuck-off Tesco a couple of miles away.

yeah, inner cities are different of course

 

[droid]

Fintan O'Toole yesterday:

Just try imagining there was no EU . . .

FINTAN O'TOOLE

THERE’S NOTHING unusual in the fact that nobody knows what the future holds for the euro, the European Union and the global capitalist system.

That’s what happens in a systemic crisis: the assumptions on which projections are based cease to be valid. What may be somewhat unusual, though, is the degree to which what we might call “false futures” hold sway. The vast bulk of popular and political opinion now coheres around solutions based on two things that are definitely not going to happen.

One false future is that the monetary union of the euro is turned into a fiscal union. The 17 members of the euro zone will collectively acknowledge the inherent weakness of the single currency structure. They will agree to give formal and institutional shape to the coup that has already happened in Europe, with an unelected directory in Frankfurt assuming control of national budgets. The Frankfurt Group (Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Mario Draghi, José Manuel Barroso, Jean-Claude Juncker, Herman van Rompuy, Christine Lagarde and Olli Rehn) which has assumed command with no democratic or legal mandate will be given retrospective legitimacy by changes to the EU treaties.

Whether or not this is a good idea is irrelevant for one good reason: it is not going to happen. The weaker members of the euro zone (like us) will never vote to create a centralised technocracy whose only aim is to impose more and more austerity on citizens while forcing those same citizens to bail out banks. And the stronger members of the euro zone are not going to do the one thing that would make the weaker members change their minds: bribe them by writing off their debts. So the future imagined by the conservative right is an impossible one.

But the other thing that isn’t going to happen is the future vaguely imagined by much of the left: that the German taxpayer decides to pay for everyone’s mistakes by simply underwriting a system of eurobonds to which all the debts are converted. German public opinion is surely less hostile to the idea of sharing the pain than is generally assumed, otherwise the Social Democrats and Greens, who suggest doing precisely that, wouldn’t be riding so high in the polls. Some honest discussion of the role of German banks in the reckless lending that helped to create the crisis would help. But there’s a big difference between sharing the burden and assuming it in its entirety. It is both unjust and impractical to expect ordinary Germans to pay for all the collective follies.

We have, then, two completely unrealistic “futures” for the euro and the EU, one in which we all vote to make our loss of national economic sovereignty permanent and the other in which the average German wakes up one morning and says, “Don’t worry, lads, just send the bill to us.” Is it any wonder that there is such a state of paralysis?

What’s needed, obviously, is a response that doesn’t expect us to surrender to permanent technocracy in Frankfurt and doesn’t expect the Germans to bail out everybody else. The odd thing is that a detailed and realistic plan which depends on neither of these impossible things has been on the table for some time. It has very wide political support across Europe – everywhere, it seems, except at the top tables.

The plan was drawn up by Stuart Holland, former economic adviser to British governments, and Yannis Varoufakis, professor of economics at the University of Athens. It is based on assumptions that are much more realistic than the current orthodoxies. Holland and Varoufakis argue that there are three interlocking crises – banking, sovereign debt and (one that is usually ignored) under-investment – that have to be dealt with simultaneously. They suggest (and everything that has happened this year bears them out) that loading more debt on peripheral nations does nothing to address the banking and investment crises and doesn’t really tackle sovereign debt either.

What they propose, therefore, is a three-pronged approach to the crisis, using three existing EU institutions. The aim is to “Europeanise” the problem without treaty changes or asking the Germans (and the Dutch, Finns and Austrians) to bail out everyone else.

First, the European Central Bank would issue “e-bonds” to back the portion of sovereign debts (60 per cent) that is permitted under the Maastricht criteria. Effectively, that debt would then be owed to the ECB, but at the low interest rate the ECB could get. The member states continue to service this debt – there is no demand that Germany or anyone else does so.

Second, the European Financial Stability Fund is used as the mechanism for cleaning up the European banking system.

Third, the European Investment Bank is empowered to embark on a major infrastructural investment programme across the euro zone, with the aim of supporting the economic growth necessary to solve the crisis.

This is a big, bold, ambitious plan and it requires the capacity to imagine an active, coherent and courageous EU. But if that seems fanciful, try imagining the only realistic alternative: no EU at all.