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• DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

  SOCIOLOGY LECTURE SERIES 2010

  Prof James Wickham

  Head of School of Social Sciences and Philosophy

  Financial markets and social power - the new inequalities of turbo-capitalism

  Wednesday 10 February 2010

  7.00- 9.30 pm

  Synge lecture theatre, Arts Building, TCD

  A L L   W E L C O M E

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• Kevin Doogan - Not all that is solid | New Humanist

  Analysis of global foreign direct investment patterns also reveals two interesting and counter-intuitive trends. FDI expands during boom periods and contracts during recessions. To blame job losses on capital migration is questionable. Secondly the lion's share of overseas investment goes to the rich rather than poor countries. Between 1980 and 2006 the developed economies' share of global FDI inward stock has grown from 56 per cent to 70 per cent, consolidating their position as the prime target for overseas investment. In other words capital moves abroad to access rich markets rather than exploit cheap labour. This shows that fears of exporting jobs are not related to the actuality of capital relocation but to the threat of jobs going overseas. Research in America, where fears of overseas job loss have a much higher profile than in Europe, shows that companies use the threat of corporate relocation in order to maintain the compliance of trade unions during contract negotiations.

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• Patrick Cockburn | The Case Against Tony Blair

  The case against Tony Blair has revolved too much around his good faith and too little around his competence. The placards held up by protestors on Friday as he gave evidence should have read “sucker” and “dope” rather than “Bliar”.

  Amateurs have a fluency denied to professionals because they see no “ifs” and “buts” which would interrupt the flow of their argument. Books proving that Bacon wrote Shakespeare are often highly articulate and have great narrative pace because their authors see all facts pointing to the same inevitable conclusion.

  It is this mixture of amateurism and evangelical conviction which made Blair such a lethally inept leader before and during the war in Iraq. His greatest weakness was not so much that he adjusted facts to support his policies, but that he had so little grasp of the facts in the first place.

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• Victor Grossman | Oskar Lafontaine and the Troubled German Left

  While German politicians stared at the calendar, wondering nervously what the May 9th elections will bring in the biggest state, North Rhine-Westphalia, with its 18 million people, media attention suddenly switched to a personal drama within the party called Die Linke (The Left). A few years ago this party or its predecessors were getting laughed off the political map. But what is happening today in that party could re-draw the whole map.

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• Henry A. Giroux’s tribute to Howard Zinn | Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered

  "I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and rarely met or read any working-class intellectuals. After reading James Baldwin, hearing William Kunstler and Stanley Aronowitz give talks, I caught a glimpse of what it meant to occupy such a fragile, contradictory and often scorned location. But reading Howard gave me the theoretical tools to understand more clearly how the mix of biography, cultural capital and class location could be finely honed into a viable and laudable politics.

  Later, as I got to know Howard personally, I was able to fill in the details about his working-class background and his intellectual development. We had grown up in similar neighborhoods, shared a similar cultural capital and we both probably learned more from the streets than we had ever learned in formal schooling. There was something about Howard's fearlessness, his courage, his willingness to risk not just his academic position, but also his life, that marked him as special."

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• ONE | Drop Haitian Debt

  As Haiti rebuilds from this disaster, please work to secure the immediate cancellation of Haiti’s $1 billion debt and ensure that any emergency earthquake assistance is provided in the form of grants, not debt-incurring loans. Sign the petition.

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• CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding | Foreign Policy

  John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.

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• The Real News | Haiti and the ‘Devil’s Curse’

  Excellent 12 minute news segment from the Real News on Haiti’s history of poverty, which includes a critical examination of how mainstream media is reporting this history without mentioning the impact that various foreign interventions has had on the country.

  According to Peter Hallward, author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment Haiti’s poverty can be explained as a series of foreign responses to the independence and strength of the Haitian people, but since the media doesn’t acknowledge this, they are forced to propose weakness and bad luck as the sources of Haiti’s poverty.

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• k-punk: Spectres of revolution

  Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism, is talking about "Revolution" :
  "So let's be clear. I'm very far from saying that nothing can ever change. There has been some discussion of whether Capitalist Realism is a pessimistic book. For me, it isn't pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in everyday life - it is what Zizek would call the "spontaneous unreflective ideology" of our times. Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism (which, by its very nature, does not identify itself as such, and is covered over by a compulsory positivity which forbids negativity). Far from nothing ever changing, something already has changed, massively - the bank crisis was an event without a subject, whose implications are yet to be played out. The terrain - the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects - is there to be fought over."

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• UK company law is terrorism’s friend | Prem Sikka | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

  Over the years, I have conducted many investigations into dubious corporate practices for newspapers, radio and television programmes and the trail always leads to tax havens, which hold no public information about the individuals behind those companies. The registered address is about the only publicly available information. One building in the Cayman Islands, a UK overseas territory, is the registered address of 18,857 corporations. British Virgin Islands, another UK overseas territory, with a population of 23,000 has more than 813,000 registered companies, the highest number per capita in the world. These companies rarely carry out any trade in their locales, but facilitate secrecy to their owners.

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