Geography Archives: Ireland

  • The Scorecard on Development, 1960-2010: Closing the Gap?

    Executive Summary: This paper is the third installment in a series (the first and second editions were in 2001 and 2005) that traces a long-term growth failure in most of the world’s countries.  For the vast majority of the world’s low- and middle-income countries, there was a sharp slowdown in economic growth for the two […]

  • Congratulations to the People of Iceland!

      10 April 2011 Congratulations to the people of Iceland! The Repudiate the Debt Campaign welcomes and applauds the decision of the people of Iceland to reject the bank bail-out that would subsidise the wealthy elite.  They showed great courage in rejecting the terms and conditions and in resisting the pressure from the European Union […]

  • Joint Statement of 58 Communist and Workers’ Parties against Imperialist Aggression in Libya

    The imperialist killers headed by the USA, France, Britain and NATO as a whole and with the approval of the UN started a new imperialist war.  This time in Libya. Their allegedly humanitarian pretexts are completely misleading!  They throw dust into peoples’ eyes!  Their real goals are the hydrocarbons in Libya. We, the Communist and […]

  • Call for an Audit Commission on Greek Public Debt

    We the undersigned believe that there is a pressing need for an Audit Commission to examine Greek public debt.  Current EU and IMF policy to deal with public debt has entailed major social costs for Greece.  Consequently, the Greek people have a democratic right to demand full information on public and publicly-guaranteed debt. The aim […]

  • Azmi Bishara on Libya

      On Al Jazeera, Dr. Azmi Bishara said that the violence unleashed in Libya against the Libyan people is beyond belief — indicative of desperation on the part of the political order — or rather “disorder” — in Libya, attempting to put a quick end to the uprising before escalation, as the situation is a […]

  • Plan B for a Post-Mubarak Egypt?

    “Freedom lies behind a door closed shut,” the great Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqi wrote in the last century.  “It can only be knocked down with a bleeding fist.”  More than that is bleeding in the Arab world at the moment. The uprisings we are witnessing in Egypt have been a rude awakening for all those […]

  • Crisis, Chains, Change: The American Exception to Marxism

    A Plenary Address at the American Studies Association Presidential Panel, San Antonio, Texas, 18 November 2010 For Ruthie Gilmore. I am an imposter here: not a real American Studies scholar.  I went to graduate school in the late 1980s to study History and Anthropology.  My interest was in the contemporary history of India.  When I […]

  • The IMF and Ireland: What We Can Learn from the Global South

    This paper highlights a number of concerns about the nature of the EU-IMF loan agreement with Ireland. It is based on the experience of global justice organisations that have long monitored the impact of IMF policies in the Global South. The paper first takes up that experience and highlights the pernicious impacts the IMF — whose governance is skewed towards the interests of rich countries — has wreaked throughout the Global South.

  • Paul Krugman on the Euro Crisis

    Paul Krugman does a very good job laying out the issues behind the euro zone crisis in his NYT Magazine piece.  There are two additional points that would have been worth noting. First, there are powerful forces who are working hard to prevent the partial or full Argentinification (partial default or a departure from the […]

  • The C-word in Germany

    Once again it was the annual big weekend for German leftists of every conceivable persuasion.  It was also a weekend with tons of slush, the result of weeks of cold and snow now ending in thaw weather, but, in the eyes of most participants, also provided by most of the media. As every year, Sunday […]

  • The Strange Story of the Single Market

    For the past few months global attention, especially in the international financial media, has been focussed on the eurozone.  The reasons are obvious.  The group of countries that make up the European Union together constitute the largest economy in the world.  Instability within it — which now seems inevitable, no matter how the current problems […]

  • Fintan O’Toole’s Own Cultural Revolution

    Fintan O’Toole.  Enough Is Enough: How to Build a New Republic.  Faber.  £12.99. Suppose you were swept to power on the back of a massive popular vote — say something like 80%, the kind of number that usually has the USA and its client states jumping up and down and calling you a leftist narco-terrorist. […]

  • Notes on Contemporary Imperialism

    Phases of Imperialism Lenin dated the imperialist phase of capitalism, which he associated with monopoly capitalism, from the beginning of the twentieth century, when the process of centralization of capital had led to the emergence of monopoly in industry and among banks.  The coming together (coalescence) of the capitals in these two spheres led to […]

  • Where’s the Legitimacy Crisis?

    In her excellent 2003 book Forces of Labor, Beverly Silver discerns within the history of capitalism an ongoing tension between the system’s simultaneous need for both profitability and legitimacy.  That is, it needs to ensure that capital can squeeze as much value as possible out of the workers while making sure that it doesn’t exploit […]

  • US Tax Deal Brings Austerity Closer

    Once again, the two old wings of the political establishment do business as usual in Washington.  In the tax deal between Obama and the Republicans — passed with the help of a majority of Democrats — they all cut taxes, especially on the rich, and extended unemployment benefits.  In short, the government keeps spending mountains […]

  • Ireland: “We Can’t Pay That Money, and We Won’t Pay That Money”

      Outside the General Post Office, Dublin, Ireland, 27.11.10 “Well, our gallant allies in Europe have arrived 95 years too late and uninvited, and instead of guns to help the revolution they have brought economic weapons of mass destruction.  Does anybody in this country or in Dáil Éireann think that we can as a people […]

  • The Spectre of Default in Europe

    Default, Debt Renegotiation and Exit When the Eurozone crisis burst out in early 2010, an RMF report identified three strategic options for peripheral countries, namely, first, austerity imposed by the core and transferring the costs of adjustment onto society at large, second, broad structural reform of the Eurozone in favour of labour and, third, exit […]

  • Ireland Should Study the Lessons of Argentina

    When a firefighter or medical team make a rescue, the person is usually better off as a result.  This is less clear when the rescuer is the European Central Bank (ECB) or the IMF. Ireland is currently experiencing a 14.1 percent unemployment rate.  As a result of bailout conditions that will require more cuts in […]

  • Ireland: Whose Rescue?

    For the banks For the Irish Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain.  This cartoon was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 19 November 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print

  • Ireland vs Iceland

      . . . The travails of the lands of Ire and Ice are not so much at odds with each other and come down essentially to the same point — the size of banking assets to that of the general economy; but they do differ considerably in how the two economies approached the battle. […]