   |
||
|
Ann Pettifor: 31st January, 2009 “Davos” said a delegate to me as we sipped champagne in the art-nouveau-style lobby of the Schatzalp Hotel “is full of men gnashing and wailing, dazed and confused by the debt-deflationary spiral. As the newspapers have faithfully recorded the Davos sessions have provided little in the way of
Ann Pettifor: 29th January, 2009 On Monday, 2nd February, the London-based Guardian is organising an event at their imposing new building in York Way. There the Queen’s question will be posed: “Why did no one see it coming?”
Ann Pettifor: 23rd January, 2009, 13.00PM The election of a wise, astute and dignified man as US President; the sight of a happy loving couple, with a pair of well-behaved children taking over the reins of the White House; the power and dignity of Aretha Franklin’s voice, her glorious hat; the radiant faces of
Dashed across to Dublin this week-end, to address the Irish Green Party Conference, and met up with Richard Douthwaite of FEASTA – the excellent Irish think tank. I was shocked by what is happening to our neighbours. One newspaper headline declared yesterday that in this country of just 5 million people, 5,000 are being laid off every week. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, “in October there were 260,300 claimants on a seasonally adjusted basis, up by a mammoth 57.1% on a year earlier, and by 6 .5% on the previous month (the largest ever monthly jump in claimant numbers.)” Ann Pettifor: 9th January, 2009, 17.00PM
Simon Jenkins writes for the UK Guardian, and has a splenetic piece in the paper today. Its an attack on the economics profession which “has collapsed in ignominy and if there were any justice the profession would be sacked en masse”. Could not agree more. But he also has a pop at bishops. “The Church of England” he writes “feels we had it coming to us, though it unfortunately omitted to warn us beforehand.” That’s not true, nor is it fair. The then Bishop of Worcester, Peter Selby wrote a powerful and insightful book in the early 1990s, titled “Grace and Mortgage” in which he both condemned the ‘hegemony of the finance system’ and warned it would end in crisis. And he was not alone. Ann Pettifor: 8th January, 2009, 23.45PM With grateful acknowledgements to both the Financial Times and Thomson Datastream, am delighted to reproduce this very important graph of interest rates – UK, US and EU over the past decade. They clearly show how high real official (i.e. base) rates were before the 2001 dot.com crash Ann Pettifor: 6th January, 2009, 08.00AM A thumbs-up for the great work we (me and my mates, Colin Hines, Andrew Simms, Richard Murphy etc. ) did on the Green New Deal in an editorial in today’s Guardian discussing green new jobs, plus how to reconcile environmental sustainability with providing a cushion in a Ann Pettifor: 4th January, 2009, 11.00AM
First of all apologies for the long break. Like many others, I have been re-charging batteries, spending time with friends and loved ones, sleeping a great deal and briskly walking the wild, windswept and often freezing Suffolk coast. Highlights? Christmas day walk and picnic with my beloved on a windswept beach, celebrated with a flask of tea, a flask of brandy, a slab of last year’s Christmas cake, a candle in a tin, and two crackers. And on the next, Boxing Day, at dusk, a startlingly beautiful murmuration of about 10,000 – or was it 20,000? – starlings flying in unison and is if they were just one organism over North Warren, Thorpeness. Awesome, humbling and very good for the soul. Good too for thinking and re-thinking our collective fates. Under globalisation we hang together pretty much as a murmuration of starlings do…….. Which brings me to the big question: where are our leaders taking us to roost in 2009? |
In the September 2003 edition of openDemocracy I wrote: 
Click here to read the full story in openDemocracy BOOKS:
|
|
|
Copyright © 2012 Debtonation: The Global Financial Crisis - All Rights Reserved |
||
