Irish Left Review - Joined up thinking for the Irish Left

The Irish Times can claim it is stimulating debate on important issues. After all, didn’t one of their columnists provoke debate on the ‘generosity’ or otherwise of our social welfare system? And isn’t that same columnist provoking a debate on job subsidies? What I find curious is the mode of provocation: rather than investigation, examination and analysis, we get inaccuracy (to put it mildly), distortion and slipshod analysis dressed-up as commentary.

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Micheal Taft of Notes on the Front (and ILR) was taking part in a Prime Time panel discussion last night about our ever increasing deficit and whether we have reached the bottom. Also on the  panel were Dan O’Brien, Senior Economist, Economist Intelligence unit, and Jim Power, Chief economist, Friends First.

Visit the Prime Time home page and click on the link for the Panel discussion segment of Rising deficit, is the worst over?

Tony Judt, writing in 2006 used the phrase ‘useful idiots’ to describe a new cohort of American liberals who were happy to use their considerable intellectual reputations to endorse the morally repugnant actions of the US Administration in the Middle East. The phrase came to mind, perhaps uncharitably, while reading Sli Eile’s response in the Progressive Economy and David Begg’s right of reply piece in the Irish Times today, both written as reactions to Sarah Carey’s column in yesterday’s paper. It seems that because her attack on the idea of state intervention in the jobs crisis was based on yet another silly mistake, we now have a great opportunity to highlight the class dimension of the employment crisis, argue for the concentration of resources to help grow a real indigenous economy, and to demand proper focused training in the only area where growth is likely to occur - and to do all of that while acknowledging that we will need to fix the structural problems in the Irish economy - but only where it is appropriate - in the medium term.

If you read his piece, you might notice that the analogy of Judt’s ‘useful idiot’ doesn’t exactly work, of course. After all it is not as if ideologically or politically, Sarah Carey could be attributed as ever having ‘liberal’ (or progressive, if you wish) creditials in the way that Judt describes them, or that she has a considerable intellectual reputation. She is just a columnist in the Irish Times.

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History is such a malleable thing. It can be twisted this way and that to support or oppose any contemporary position. Take An Bord Snip Nua - this is a grand thing altogether. How do we know this? Because, sure, its predecessor was such an outstanding success. Yes, it brought pain but it set the groundwork for the Celtic Tiger economy. So goes the history; if we gird our loins, cut and hack away, we too can replicate this outstanding success. Suffer a couple of years of fiscal pain, and economic paradise awaits.

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I am being perturbed this week to learn about the disgraceful treament that was being meated out to a shoal of English nuns in Crete, where they was doing the missionary work, bringing civilization to the pagan ancient Greeks. According to all the reliable news report, the nuns was being banged up abroad like a clap-happy-slapper from Clapham on the grounds that they was showing their bottoms, “and the rest,” while relaxing after a hard day’s proselytizing in the bars and beaches of Malia, a God-forsaken denizen of iniquity where is congregated all the best places for finding sinners.

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US President, Barack Obama, has identified the cost of health care as the number one threat to the American economy.  In a 55-minute speech to the American Medical Association earlier this month, in which he articulated a thorough understanding of the main issues, Obama outlined his proposals for a public health insurance option that would compete alongside private insurers.  Obama’s initiative is an effort to provide an affordable insurance option for 47 million uninsured Americans and for others who are struggling with the high costs of their current health plans.  Not surprisingly, the plan has met with opposition from the private insurance lobby, which claims that it will drive them out of business.

The cost of American health care is out of control.  Currently, it eats up 17% of GDP, a figure that may soon reach 20%.  That figure is 50% higher than that of the next country in the high spend league table and is more than double what most European countries spend.  To make matters worse, Americans are no healthier for all this expenditure - they have shorter life expectancy and higher infant mortality than many EU countries.

In the AMA speech, Obama referred to an article published in the New Yorker on June 1, by Atul Gawande, a Boston-based endocrine surgeon and former Rhodes scholar who while still a medical student in his mid-twenties became a senior health advisor in the Clinton administration.  Gawande’s article illustrates how the blame lies squarely with doctors and for-profit health facilities.  The fee-per-item payments have produced a system of perverse incentives.

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