Tuesday, Feb 7th 2012
Michael Roberts, the self-described Marxist economist, has a great post on the Capitalism in Crisis series which was run in the Financial Times recently. Capitalism doesn’t seem to be working as it should, the FT thinks now, given all the protests and the tendency of the ‘Great Global Financial Crisis” (three years and counting so [...]
Netherlands “Universal” Health care insurance scheme has gone from a two-tier health system to a three tier health system | Dominic Haugh
Dominic Haugh has a very good analysis of Fine Gael/Labour’s FairCare “Universal” Health Insurance scheme which they’re proposing will transform Ireland’s two-tier apartheid health system into a single tier equitable one. It’s nonsense of [...]
Chart of the Day: Greek workers work 48% more hours than Germans
This chart illustrates what many will find to be counter-intuitive. The most recent data from the OECD covers 2008 and shows that in that year, Greek workers on average worked 48% more than their industrious German neighbors. The OECD data shows the average Greek [...]
Hostile and Notorious: The Conditions of Private Property | MARK PASCHAL - Viewpoint Magazine
Very good essay here on the conditions around private property and how this relates to the occupy movement, specifically the recent occupations of buildings in the US. Of course, although the particular history of US property law maybe be slightly different to [...]
Germany Resists Europe’s Pleas to Spend More
Commanding austerity across your European market while recording the lowest unemployment for a generation with exports booming? Uuuuro, suits you sir.
“One of the lessons of the crisis,” Mr. Weidmann said, is that cutting budget deficits “should be postponed as little as possible.”
That view annoys many people outside Germany, who [...]
Smell Ms Merkel’s Whip Hand in Glove with the Fiscal Sadists
The language of S&M is also now part of the eurozone discourse. The joint letter sent last month by Sarkozy and Angela Merkel to Herman van Rompuy, president of the European Council, explaining the Franco-German plans for future governance of the single currency stressed “fiscal [...]
The eurozone will pay a high price for Germany’s economic narcissism
Hans Kundnani in the Guardian on the German minimalist approach to the euro crisis as informed by ordoliberalism, which is…
“…a peculiarly German form of economic liberalism influenced by Adam Smith but also by 20th-century German history. Developed in the 1930s and 1940s by Walter Eucken and [...]
Emigration and education appear to be behind a fall in unemployment in the Republic.
The numbers signing on have dipped by 2,295 in the year to 434,784, with a marked 8% drop in youth unemployment, new Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures reveal.
However the Irish Government was accused of a “hopeless and harmful” reliance on emigration instead [...]
Time to Stop Being Cynical About Corporate Money in Politics and Start Being Angry Buying Congress in 2012 | Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben’s resolution for 2012 is to be naïve — dangerously naïve.
I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, [...]
As previously mentioned, Look Left 9 or Vol.2 No.7 is now available in Easons and other outlets both north and south. There is plenty in there for everyone, but I thought as Look Left have published it on their site that I should link to Conor McCabes’ piece Gombeens, Spivs and Bankers. It provides a [...]
