Friday, Jan 27th 2012
t r u t h o u t | Just Say “No” to the Credit Rating Agencies
Gerald Epstein, Professor of Economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) argues that Credit Rating Agencies like Standards & Poor should be ignored. Their actions are ideologically driven and their objective is destructive: “For starters, the [...]
David Harvey Interviewed on New York Public Radio
An interview with David Harvey in which he answers questions from the public. The only two calls that the show receives though are quite typical of what one would imagine from a mainstream US audience . One listener says that Marxism inevitably leads to totalitarian communism, while another [...]
Absurd and cynical abuse of powers - Fintan O’Toole
Fintan on the hypocrisy of picturegate and calls for heads to roll:
“Can anyone tell us why this alleged crime was so thoroughly investigated while it took years for any real investigation into Anglo Irish Bank to get under way?
Will Hanafin at Today FM says he was told [...]
Purification rites - India and Israel
India and Israel started out as formally democratic and economically left-wing. A mere decade separates their political transformations, when hardline right-wing groups long deemed marginal – the Likud in 1977 and the BJP in 1989– began to dramatically change the political culture of the two countries. Unrest in occupied territories [...]
The Elasticity of Demand | RP on the Political Economy of the Wire
Interesting political reading of the Wire:
“The activities of pushing and policing in The Wire mark out a territory that is divided, crisscrossed and sutured (constituted in antagonism); in other words, wired. Crime at one end, joined to the law at the other, it [...]
Over on the progressive-economy@tasc blog Sean O’Riain, Professor of Sociology in NUI, Maynooth has published perhaps one of the most significant pieces of commentary on the Irish economy in the run up to the April budget: Stimulus for Development. In it he updates the argument he put forward in his Exchequer Returns Emphasis the Need [...]
Labour is quickly approaching a crossroads. It is seemingly torn in two directions: a new stimulus strategy that prioritises rising unemployment and declining economic activity; or an accommodation with the orthodoxy, compromising within parameters laid down by the deflationists (or just as worse, paralysed at the crossroads unable to choose). The Labour Party conference provided [...]
One of the major problems of political life in this age where everything is available almost at an instant is the sense of familiarity, even dullness, of policy proposals. Take, for example, the idea of a third tax rate for high earners as mooted at the Labour Party National Conference yesterday by Eamon Gilmore. It’s [...]
Zardoz by Fredric Jameson
Via Infinite Thought, Fredric Jameson’s first published piece on film was about the film Zardoz - with the big stone head and Sean Connery running around in a very scary red leotard. Infinite has pics which show the uncanny resemblance between the stone head and Karl Marx. Jameson has a nice description [...]
A good friend made a bet with me in January. He wagered the economy would contract by 10 percent or more by the end of the year. I gladly took the bet. But he rang me yesterday wanting to know if I wanted to pay up now. For the news that the economy contracted by [...]
