CrisisJam #4, curated by Gavan Titley, is now live!
Another batch of excellent articles from #CrisisJam. Contributing to #4 this week:Nyder O’Leary, Tom O’Connor, Eadaoin O’Sullivan, Siobhan O Donoghue and Sara Burke.
Browse the links below, or see the full edition here.
The really real world of what David McNally calls the neoliberal mutation requires a renewed lexicon. The ‘necessity’ of gouging public expenditure to reassure investors - dismayed by the very government debts that have guaranteed their survival - has given rise to an ‘age of austerity’. Steven Poole has recently blogged of the Unspeak of austerity as implying ‘a severe self-discipline of the kind that is laudable, virtuous in its serious asceticism.’ In Ireland, this moralization is lacquered with a feel of Operation Transformation, as an emetic to bloated ‘lifestyles’, with Olli Rehn replacing his compatriot Dr Eva as the symbol of the cool new Lutheranism. Nyder O’Leary unpicks the new virtuousness.
Thus far, the general election campaign has been marked by ‘don’t hold me back’ style commitments by the major parties to renegotiating the EU/IMF deal. With their political masters under pressure, political correspondents such as Stephen Collins andShane Coleman went into overdrive, insisting that any moves to renegotiate the terms of the deal, never mind default, are delusional, and that the country must simply ‘knuckle down and pay its debts’. Yet as Andy Storey showed in his Crisisjam piecelast week, there is a basic analytical consensus among radical political-economists and such figures as David McWilliams, Constantin Gurdgiev and Colm McCarthy on the inefficacy and extortionate terms of the deal (if not, obviously, on ‘the instrumentality of the debt response to the furtherance of corporate power and wealth’). In a week which saw the ULA and Sinn Fein continually pressed on their ‘delusions’, noted CIT economist Tom O’Connor sets out an alternative plan for dealing with ‘our debt’.
Following the launch of the Edelman Trust Barometer and Enda Kenny’s affirmation that he stands for trust, trust and more trust, Eadaoin O’Sullivan looks at nodding dog syndrome and why some world views appear more credible than others.
Migrant workers must not be used as a political football
Integration is a two-way process, interculturalism enriches all our lives; migrants, you’ve been so vibrant, but now off you pop to where you come from. In advance of an election campaign in which prominent politicians with a track record of populist pronouncements will star, Siobhan O Donoghue outlines the precarious situation of many people who have migrated to Ireland, and sets out mimimum issues that any new government must address.
The health myths that have outlasted Mary Harney
Mary Harney may be gone from the health ministry but many of the myths (and bad policies) that the PDs propagated about the health system remain. In the first of a series of articles drawing out the neoliberal myths that have structured health policy, Sara Burke starts with some of the most basic.
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