Friday, Jan 27th 2012
Chris Dillow | “Values” and the crisis of social democracy
Phillip Collins in the Times (£) reminds me why I’m a Marxist rather than a social democrat. He mocks Ed Miliband’s claim that Britain has been run by people with the “wrong values” as being “the dying breath of vintage social democracy.”
What Philip doesn’t do, though, [...]
What was described by European Commission President as a “silent revolution” was passed in the European Parliament on Wednesday with hardly a mention in the mainstream media. The implications of the so-called six-pack of economic governance measures are vast. This package represents a qualitative leap forward in terms of the institutionalisation of austerity and neo-liberal [...]
Harry Browne | Ireland’s Bread and Circuses
Good piece here from Harry Browne in Counterpunch on the oozing of noxious sleeping gas that is the Irish presidential election.
Last Monday, the Irish state paid €1.465 billion (about $2 billion) to senior unsecured boldholders in Bank of Ireland, as part of its obligation under the blanket guarantee of [...]
Filip Spagnoli | Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
The following example is about income shares across the population of the U.S. Technically, the graph below is not a histogram because the y-axis shows cumulated income for ranges of income groups rather than frequencies, but for our purposes it’s equivalent:
This graph is then used by the Wall [...]
Book Review: Marx and the Alternative to Capitalism, Kieran Allen (Pluto Press, 2011)
“It is true that labour produces wonderful things for the rich - but for the worker it produces privation … It produces beauty - but for the worker, deformity.” Karl Marx
Kieran Allen’s treatise dispels the conventional opinion that Marxism is obsolete - [...]
Mary Davis, Presidential Candidate, writing about her mentor Denis O’Brien in 2007
I would only have read about him before he became the chairman of the 2003 Games Organising Committee. When I met him it instantly struck me that he was a true entrepreneur.
He seemed to have unshakable belief in himself and what he could do. [...]
Like many people I am fairly sick of hearing the question, when will Irish people say “enough” and finally take to the streets? Maybe the answer to that is the 15th of October. In the meantime we can only admire OccupyWallStreet…..
Michael Moore on MSNBC
Steve Keen | 1,000,000 economists can be wrong: the free trade fallacies
Not only did the global financial crisis catch the vast majority of economists completely unawares, they instead expected tranquil and even buoyant times just as the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression began. My favourite such observation is from the OECD‘s Economic Outlook [...]
Yes Men | Sorry, but this trader’s banking confession was no prank
Yes Men let the world know that the “insignificant market trader and self-proclaimed financial self-help guru, Alessio Rastani”, whose now famous comments on the BBC about how he dreams every night of another recession and that Goldman Sach’s ‘rules the world’ was not part [...]
