Decades Away?

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com The outgoing prime minister of Iceland, Geir Haarde, fell this week, less from abstract considerations of finance, than from the more proximate cause of rioting in Reykjavik. No one could have imagined such a thing, the day before it happened. For as the reality of their complete ruin sinks in, people can become violent. They need a scapegoat, and of course the politician of the moment makes as good a target as any. Then they need a magician to replace him, an Obama of some kind, to make things worse. "Social unrest," as it is politely termed, had already become almost institutionalized in Greece, and has now spread to Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Latvia. Various reasonably credible economic forecasters are projecting huge job losses across Europe this year, from which the ugly urban street forces of the past may be re-assembled. We may therefore know by summer if we were wrong to think the collapse of Europe was still a few decades away.