[This is the proposal for the pilot course as it stands today - hoping to refine and refocus it over the coming weeks, but this is the base of it here.

If the pilot course is successful, and there is sufficient interest within the organised trade union movement to continue with the course, then I'd see [...]

Schools in Tallaght protested at the Dail to defend their education from savage government cuts.

The hugely impartial Frances Ruane of the ESRI was a former non-executive director of Depfa Bank, which was based in the IFSC and which collapsed in 2008, costing the German taxpayer, via its forced ownership of Hypo Real Estate, well over 100 billion euro. The ‘hands-off’ regulation of the IFSC was key to Depfa’s business [...]

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 [...]

There’s nothing wrong with saying, hey I got it wrong.  We all get something wrong from time to time; never more so when the subject matter is economic and fiscal forecasting.  When people and institutions don’t admit they got it wrong, especially when they got it demonstrably wrong, when the policies they are advocating are [...]

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether 2012 will see property prices hit the ‘floor’.  The Government and NAMA are doing their bit to help to stimulate house purchases through budgetary measures and negative equity insurance schemes.  Unfortunately, there has been little debate about the optimal level of house property prices.  Few have been [...]

At a time when the most vulnerable in society desperately need a challenge to the neoliberal, capitalist hegemony it seems that the only criticism of the system that penetrates the public consciousness is spoken in the language of capitalism. The first step to a new political dialogue might come from reframing that language.
The phrase “survival [...]

Book Review: End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity, Wang Hui (Verso 2011)

Apologists for Beijing sometimes like to say that nobody died on Tiananmen Square in 1989. This is the kind of statement whose technical accuracy is meant to be deceptive. It’s long been documented, if not fully embedded in public understanding, that [...]

Margaret Thatcher faces the final curtain.

Some notes for those who may be unsure of some of the references. On Margaret Thatcher’s thriftiness and the similarity between gonks and Michael Hesseltine.