Monday, May 21st 2012
Yesterday evening I was on Matt Cooper’s The Last Word (5:00 segment) with a representative from IBEC discussing wage levels. I quoted the numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Eurostat and Destatis (German Statistical Board) to show that Irish labour costs are not high; indeed, they’re rather low by comparison with our EU [...]
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 [...]
Socialist Register 2010 - Morbid Symptoms: Health Under Capitalism (Merlin Press) Ed: Leo Panitch & Colin Leys.
There’s been some excellent work published on the many faults of the Irish health service by campaigning journalists like Sara Burke and Maev-Ann Wren. For those who want to put the debates about Irish healthcare in an international context, [...]
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 [...]
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.
Earthquakes Leave Us All in a Difficult Position
Like everyone else in the world, I have been watching the earthquake coverage on the television from Haiti and making prayers morning noon and night that God will stop now. I am as lacking in compassion as the next man, so long as the next man is me, [...]
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.
It’s interesting reading the article by Harry McGee in the Irish Times about Sinn Féin and its current troubles. That topic, though, is for another day, albeit I find it hard to disagree with him when he argues that
“There are some who believe Sinn Féin is in terminal decline, like other republican parties that preceded [...]
Today Haiti is most commonly known for being the poorest country in the ‘western’ hemisphere and a land wracked by destitution and despair. This picture has only been reinforced by the horrific consequences of the January 13th earthquake, 15 kms south-west of Port-au-Prince. While the media networks are falling over themselves to relay stories of [...]
Comparisons between Ireland and Iceland abound, but as recent events there show, the public response has been more vociferous to the injustice of the Icesave bailout. However, as political activist, poet, editor and member of the Icelandic parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir shows here, Iceland is also like Ireland in that it is a small Island with [...]
