Panic in the credit markets! Sub-prime crash! The new issue of
Mute, Living in a Bubble: Credit, Debt and Crisis looks at the social costs of an era of debt-backed boom now showing signs of busting.
Featuring articles by Dave Beech, Committee for Radical Diplomacy, Loren Goldner, James Heartfield, Suhail Malik, Stanley Morgan, Brett Neilson, Rob Ray, Mark Saunders, Jeff Strahl. Poems by Andrea Brady, William Fuller, Howard Slater, Keston Sutherland, John Wilkinson.
Our contributors explore the links between a global glut of financial liquidity and the capitalist self-cannibalisation that sustains it. Tracing the impact of financialised and looted social existence from the micropolitics of student debt and lifelong labour, via the reign of fictitious capital, to the geopolitics of US militarism and reactionary anti-imperialism, this issue asks us to reimagine crisis as a political question with an open outcome:
Are we about to pick up the tab for the financial elite's decades long free lunch? And if total monetary collapse is a way off, is this because the social crisis and repression we already face are deepening? Whose crisis is it anyway, and if it comes, who is going to come out on top?
Artwork by: Chiara Birattari & Zoe Romano, Esiri Erheriene-Essi, " "[sic] Tim Goldie and a specially commissioned sequence of drawings by Matthew Hyland.
Since this timely issue of Mute hit the (SIV-paved) streets in September, 2007 a number of related essays in bubble-bursting prose and verse have been posted to our open publishing areas
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Soft hands from baby bonds
by Infuriant
In Mute 2.6 fictitious capital collided with hypermetrical verse distemper[*]. What follows makes matters worse by further entangling these things with forthcoming Mute subject matter: baby biometrics, tax credit tagging for Hard To Let Families, etc.
http://www.metamute.org/en/Soft-hands-from-baby-bonds
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Financial Whodunwhats?/ Morgan Stanley recession alert
By Speculative Identity / (Why Didn't They Ask) Ambrose (Evans)-Pritchard
As after a violent crime, when detectives set upon the forensic residues of a now absent conflict, we may approach the papers as the scene of a financial trauma and comb their entire surface arrears (a typo - but a symptomatic one which reinforces my argument!) for clues, signs of fiscal stress and its overflow into the collective imagination
http://www.metamute.org/en/node/11160
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Walkabout
By Michael Hampton
'Walkabout' a poem submitted by Michael Hampton would have fitted excellently with the collection of verse published as part of our recent issue on credit, debt and financial crisis. As a late arrival it joins the site here and as part of our Ongoing accumulation of fiscal verse
http://www.metamute.org/en/Walkabout