Worldbystorm of Cedarlounge has just put up a post on The Just Society. I want to focus on a particular aspect of that document, one which ties in with the present banking crisis.
On pages 10 to 12 of the document, the authors concern themselves with Irish banking and monetary policy.
They noted that ‘neither the [...]

I’m working on an article for The Citizen at the moment, on the general theme of ‘Is Fianna Fáil Dead?’
It’s more of a reflective piece on the development of the party since its inception 85 years ago this week, and on the contradictions between its position as a populist party with a strong working-class base, [...]

I’ve never read a David McWilliams book. I’ve dipped into them for research purposes, but I’ve never sat down and actually read one from cover to cover - to read it in its own terms, as it’s meant to be.
Last week I was in Readers Paradise in Wexford and they were selling Follow the Money [...]

Since 2008, the number of middle class jobs in Ireland has fallen by about five per cent. During the same time, the number of working class jobs has fallen by about 15 per cent - three times the rate of that for professional and managerial occupations.
However, when we look at the amount of jobs lost [...]

Kevin Doogan in his excellent book, New Capitalism? correctly points out that employment is the achilles heel of right-wing economic analysis.
You can’t model jobs - either they are there or they are not.
If you follow work, and keep focused on the jobs, then more realistic appraisals of the actual dynamics of the economy start to [...]

What a thing for a country to do to people - to take away who they are.” (Peter Sheridan, playwright, 2005)
In 2004 the author and academic Helena Sheehan wrote that for the first five years of RTE’s flagship soap opera, Glenroe, nobody worked for a wage. She also noted that in its other soap, Fair [...]

It is often said that a definition of insanity is to do the same action over and over again, each time expecting a different result. In that case, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), Ireland’s single-largest creditor, is a 21st century Bedlam.
Originally set up as a temporary measure, the EFSF was created in June 2010 [...]

This recording is from the opening of the Centre for the Study of Working Class Lives, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, which took place last Friday.
Have a listen to Zweig’s address to the conference, it’s great.
Michael Zweig, Glasgow, 11 March 2011
For more on Zweig, here’s something I wrote a couple of years ago.

There has been no end of discussion and analysis regarding the present financial crisis, yet little on the actual nature of finance within western economies. This applies to both the mainstream and the left-wing where criticism has focused primarily on the moral shortcomings of bankers and financiers, with shouts of ‘greed’ and ‘arrogance’ to cover [...]