Wednesday, Feb 8th 2012
My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters - Hit Bankers Where it Hurts | Matt Taibbi
Matt Taibbi, writer for Rolling Stone magazine is perhaps best known for this quote:
“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped [...]
Book Review: Marx and the Alternative to Capitalism, Kieran Allen (Pluto Press, 2011)
“It is true that labour produces wonderful things for the rich - but for the worker it produces privation … It produces beauty - but for the worker, deformity.” Karl Marx
Kieran Allen’s treatise dispels the conventional opinion that Marxism is obsolete - [...]
The current falls in the prices of bank shares are widely covered in the financial media. However the overall pattern and scale of the decline in market evaluation of banking shares is still not sufficiently frequently drawn together. The aim of this note is therefore to show this pattern in clear terms. It reveals market [...]
For months now we have been reading and hearing European political leaders decry the manner in which the perfidious ratings agencies (Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch) have continued to downgrade the ailing Eurozone economies. On the 13th of July, last, the German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble expressed his bewilderment and inability to “decipher” the [...]
This article was originally published on Socialist Economic Bulletin. Republished with permission.
The Greek economic and social crisis continues to unfold. Around it a series of myths have arisen and been perpetuated. It is necessary first to dispose of some of those myths before moving onto a concrete analysis of [...]
Gillian Tett | Shadow spreading across international banking
Gillian Tett is looking at investment firms and hedge funds and explains how ‘non-banking’ (and non-regulated) firms are expanding rapidly and taking business from the banks that are now being more highly regulated. They’re also lining up to buy up state assets and it seems are preparing the [...]
The Crisis, especially in Europe (not to mention Greece), is all consuming. Every day our minds are highjacked by its latest twist. Today, here in Athens, a general strike has temporarily suspended the news’ cycle and given me a few moments to reflect. I thought that today’s post, reflecting this… reflective moment, should transcend that [...]
Several commentators have remarked about the sudden outbreak of class struggle in the United States. I see the brutal behavior of the state and federal governments as an indication of the failure of class struggle.
Let me explain. Back in the 1960s, when the United States was enjoying the so-called Golden Age of economic [...]
The first decade of the 21st century witnessed two mass media events that stand out from the rest: the first was visible, the second was invisible. 9/11 and its aftermath offered a feast of visible shock and awe. These images were devoured by media consumers, but the human realities they portrayed remained at a safe [...]
This Government, like the Irish economy, is holed below the water line and is sinking. The life-raft being constructed by the EU and the IMF is not designed to solve the deepening problems facing our people but only to save the rich and powerful, in particular the German, French and British banks, as well as [...]
