Climate Justice Photosteam From Copenhagen 2009

Very nice photostream from Climate Justice taken during the recent protests outside the Copenhagen 2009 Climate Change Summit.

Christopher Bickerton | No means no; yes doesn’t mean yes

Bickerton, in this Le Monde Diplomatique article, argues that Ireland’s final yes vote in Lisbon II, and the whole journey of the EU constitution from initial drafting to full ratification, illustates that Europe’s governments value the opinion of their peers more than that of their citizens. That isn’t democracy.

What emerges from the journey from Laeken to Lisbon is that the EU has failed to secure any popular appeal; European integration has entrenched the gulf between governments and their peoples, not between member states and Brussels as Eurosceptics maintain. Ireland has been a striking example of this. When the first referendum produced a No result, the Irish government was embarrassed and contrite; it felt it needed to apologise to other European governments for not having secured the result that it had promised. It did not feel that it had to represent to other member states what a majority of its citizens had decided. Governments across Europe now derive their legitimacy as much from their peers as from their peoples, a fundamental shift that challenges the basic tenets of representative democracy. We should hope that the debate about this has only just begun.

Annie Leonard: The Story of Cap & Trade

The Story of Cap & Trade Annie Leonard’s brilliant 20-minute animated film looking at COP15’s favorite sustainability solution. The engaging, fast-paced film probes into the hidden dangers of the proposed (non-)solution, from how the biggest polluters are exploiting the system’s loopholes to why climate Band-Aids like fake offsets don’t work, and exposes the dysfunctional reverse logic at the core of the concept. (Via Brain Pickings)

Full film on the Story of Stuff site, but the teaser is below.

Perry Anderson | Acting in the Name of Integral Nationalism

Perry Anderson’s much anticipated book on Europe, New-Old World is available now from Verso, although it was supposed to be published in May 2009 it only became available in November. It’s a meditation on the history of the European community, not in the sense of the ECSC, or the EEC or even the EU precisely, but like Europe itself it looks beyond current borders to the European dimensions of the near East. Some of its chapters are already available in a series of essays published in the London Review of Books and the New Left Review. His LRB essay on Turkey is worth reading in the context of Michael Youlton’s two articles which were published in Irish Left Review in the last week – Turkey and the EU, published last week and A Concordance of Events published today.

From Anderson’s LRB article on Turkey in the London Review of Books:

“The implacable refusal of the Turkish state to acknowledge the extermination of the Armenians on its territory is not anachronistic or irrational, but a contemporary defence of its own legitimacy. For the first great ethnic cleansing, which made Anatolia homogeneously Muslim, if not yet Turkish, was followed by lesser purges of the body politic, in the name of the same integral nationalism, that have continued to this day: pogroms of Greeks, 1955/1964; annexation and expulsion of Cypriots, 1974; killing of Alevis, 1978/1993; repression of Kurds, 1925-2008. A truthful accounting has been made of none of these, and cannot be without painful cost to the inherited identity and continuity of the Turkish Republic.”

t r u t h o u t | Zombie Politics and Other Late Modern Monstrosities in the Age of Disposability

With the cruelest of ironies, zombie politics and culture invoke life as they promote death and human suffering. For example, zombie politicians who oppose the welfare state, health care reforms, investing in a quality education for all children, rebuilding the nation's crumbling infrastructure, and creating a federally funded jobs program for young people and the unemployed often argue that they oppose such programs because they will saddle the next generation with a massive debt.

Zombie Zeitgeist | Why Undead Corpses Are Dominating at the Box Office

"In fact, I'll go out on a severed limb and take it further: If zombies specifically represent the apocalyptic downsides of immortalized mindlessness, then today's zombie zeitgeist is not merely a result of scary quandaries created by stupidity. It is a reaction to both those problems and the sense that they can never be thwarted.

Here we are, a year after a financial implosion that should have driven a stake in the heart of free market fundamentalism. Here we are, a year after an election that was supposed to pour holy water on Wall Street vampires, exorcise the economy's demons and challenge the ancient mummies of neoconservative foreign policy. Yet here we are, with virtually nothing changed, watching the same zombie crises indomitably stumble forward."

Bad science | Climate change? Well, we’ll be dead by then

"Among all these, reigning supreme, is the "zombie argument": arguments which survive to be raised again, for eternity, no matter how many times they are shot down. "Homeopathy worked for me," and the rest.

Zombie arguments survive, immortal and resistant to all refutation, because they do not live or die by the normal standards of mortal arguments. There's a huge list of them at realclimate.org, with refutations. There are huge lists of them everywhere. It makes no difference."

Trade Union TV from Budget day at the Dail

Protests took place all day on December 9th 2009 outside the Dail while the Fianna Fail / Green / Independents’ voted to savage public services and the pay of Public sector workers while letting the rich off. Hundreds took part in rolling protests through the day and many braved the awful weather conditions after work where many gathered to voice their anger after the Budget was announced.

Watch the response of Community groups, Civil Servants and Teachers for reporting of events that you won’t see elsewhere except on Trade Union TV.

Sinead Pentony | Why no standard-rating pension tax relief in Budget 2010?

TASC Statement on the failure of the government to bring in standard-rating pension tax relief in Budget 2010.

“TASC has proposed standard-rating pension tax relief – which disproportionately benefits higher earners – and using the resulting savings of around €1 billion per annum to universalise and, over time, increase the State pension.  Three out of every five pensioners depend on the State pension for 80 per cent of their income, and the State pension will become even more crucial as the recession causes more and more people to opt out of private pension coverage”

And

“The decision not to address pension tax relief in the Budget was a missed opportunity.  It is now up to the Government to publish the pensions framework document – promised over a year ago – and finally grasp the nettle of real pension reform”

Irish Election » Tell Them to Expel the Papal Nuncio!

We want you to tell the Minister and your local TD exactly how you feel about the behaviour of the Vatican toward the investigation.

Fill out the form below either leaving our template letter (which will look like this in the email) or drafting your own comments. The email will go to the official Ministerial email for Michael Martin and the local TD you choose.