‘Free markets’ depend on state intervention
In this Real News segment Leo Panitch argues that the notion that somehow ‘states’ and ‘markets’ exist apart from one another is an illusion suggesting instead that the state is intigrated into the structure of capitalism itself.

cearta.ie ” The disjointed progress of the Defamation Bill, 2006
Eoin O’Dell updates us on the course of the Defamation Bill, which is still making its way slowly through the Houses of the Oireachtas, just in case everyone has forgotten about it.

“If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.”
- Kathleen Parker, a National Review online columnist and a former Sarah Palin supporter.
Bullshit is big at the moment. And the ubiquity and effects of this anti-science and anti-logic form of fallacious rhetoric or argumentum verbosium (proof by verbosity) are beginning to be taken [...]

FactCheck.org: FactChecking Biden-Palin Debate
A website that checks the claims made by politician's during the US election. This post has checked the claims made by Biden and Palin during their one and only televised debate last Thursday. Shorter version, Palin got number of US troops in Iraq wrong, and claimed that “millions of small businesses” [...]

Towards the end of Tuesday night’s edition of TV3 current affairs programme ‘Nightly News with Vincent Browne’ the host asked one of his guests, almost rhetorically, whether the media have some responsibility for the artificial inflation of property prices in their promotion of the market through property supplements and advertising. His guest agreed that to [...]

Barbara Ehrenreich: The Communist Manifesto Hits 160
To celebra the 160th birthday of the CM Barbara Ehrenreich describes modern immiseration as the 'process you’re undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.' And then goes to say: "But all this immiseration – combined with fabulous [...]

Bailout inept and potentially dangerous -Morgan Kelly - Irish Times
Morgan Kelly thinks that the government did the wrong thing. They should have followed the Swedish model: “Suppose that you are a bank that has lent €100 million each to 10 developers who are having problems meeting their repayments. What you do is bundle the loans [...]

With the Dail debate playing in the background, some notes on what Brian Lenihan insists is not a bail-out.Professor Morgan Kelly relates an incident at a conference he attended:
‘Bankers are well known for getting carried away during bubbles which is why governments appoint central banks to keep an eye on them. You probably think that [...]

Do the findings of the TASC survey, The Solidarity Factor - Public Perceptions of Unequal Ireland, published this week, represent a paradigm shift to the left among Irish adults, particularly among wealthier people?
According to the survey of 1000 adults interviewed in April this year, 70% believe wealth distribution in Ireland is unfair and 80% are concerned [...]

Sometimes something happens that takes one breath away. It makes it hard to speak, never mind coherently. The Government’s bank guarantee proposal is one such. It constitutes a fundamental capitulation, not to the logic of the ‘free market’ nor to the necessity of state ownership, but to a uniquely Fianna Fail policy of propping up some [...]