Ireland austerity economy: Is Ireland, with its sharp spending cuts, model or cautionary tale? | LA Times.com
Michael Burke provides a more succinct remedy in this LA Times article on the Irish economy.
"Officials in Ireland say the payoffs from their austerity plan are gradual, designed to put the country of 4.5 million people on more [...]

FT.com | Oaktree set to take control of Irish housebuilder
As long as the Irish property market remains structured to allow for speculative building Irish building firms will remain an appealing investment opportunity for roving internation equity firms to plunge capital into. According to yesterdays FT:
"Oaktree Capital, the US private equity group, is in talks [...]

FT.com | The crisis of middle-class America
FT meets the Freemans….
"The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 [...]

3:AM Magazine » Interview with Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism
Interesting interview about his book Capitalist Realism, maybe more to me as I have just read it.
"3:AM: Capitalist Realism does a number of things, but one of its applications is to bring together a number of extant critiques of postmodernity succinctly and accessibly. To [...]

Prof . TERRENCE MCDONOUGH’s letter to the Irish Times
Madam, – Michael Casey, reviewing The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life(Business, July 26th), reads that evolutionary theorists believe the murder of 20 million Congolese by Belgian colonists was not down to imperialism but due to an evolutionary failure to develop sufficient trust in [...]

Locking them up like its going out of fashion | Prisons in crisis as number of inmates rises 14pc
The prison accommodation crisis confronting the Government is underlined by unpublished figures showing a rise of almost 14pc in the number of people sent to jail in the past year.
The statistics, which are due to be publicly [...]

t r u t h o u t | The Story of Cosmetics (Video)
The Story of Cosmetics, examines the pervasive use of toxic chemicals in our everyday personal care products, from lipstick to baby shampoo. Produced by Free Range Studios and hosted by Annie Leonard, the seven-minute film reveals the implications for consumer and worker [...]

Where’s the beauty in the femicides of Ciudad Juárez? « The Anti-Room
Great post on an excellent blog….
"The problem with MAC’s new Rodarte collection? The products are inspired by a city in Northern Mexico. But not any Mexican city – they’re inspired by Ciudad Juárez, a place so dangerous for women that the term ‘femicide’ has [...]

New Statesman - John Gray Reviews Ayn Rand’s We the Living
John Gray talks complete rubbish - not about Rand necessarily but about 'left-wing progressives ideas about society'.
"Rand is easily mocked - and rightly so - but the type of thinking she exemplified is to be found not only on the right. Her capitalist superman [...]

Racisms, Migration & Citizenship in Europe [audio] | darkmatter Journal
Racisms, Migration & Citizenship in Europe – hosted by Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP), Dept of Sociology, Goldsmiths.
Audio of Seminar I: Etienne Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra in Conversation [Audio-English] – 25 May 2007