Month: September 2011
‘Jobbridge’ is a scam
Looking for work? Good news- courtesy of the government's 'Jobbridge' scheme, there's all kinds of full-time opportunities on offer. The Corner Bakery in Terenure is looking for a Bakery Assistant. The Landsdowne Hotel in Ballsbridge is looking for waiting staff. Axa Assistance is looking for a call centre worker in Athlone. You'll even get an extra €50 euro a week.
Greek default and the end of the Eurozone?
A spectre haunts Europe – the spectre of a default by Greece, Greece's subsequent exit from the eurozone and a break up of the eurozone. All the signs – economically and politically – are that key sections of the European establishment are increasingly coming to the realisation that this is now a real possibility.
Metro West vital for jobs and transport
Austerity madness must end
Government exposed with U-turn on burning bondholders
In June the Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, was in Washington DC and held talks there with the International Monetary Fund and with the US Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, on Ireland’s financial crisis.
Mortgage crisis: Government has no solution!
Right now in Ireland one in eight mortgages are in trouble. This represents 95,158 households which are in arrears or have already had their debt restructured. Of these mortgages in arrears 72% have been behind in payments for more than six months and of these the average amount owed is €21,000. For people owing so much, repayment looks impossible without a major transformation in personal circumstance.
America’s Strange Fruit: The Execution of Troy Davis
In 1939, Billie Holiday sang of blacks hanging from trees in the protest classic “Strange Fruit.” Since then, the means of racist execution have changed from extra-legal lynching to cold and calculated state murder, but the inherent cruelty of execution and the aim of preserving ruling-class power remain.
Karl Marx – the relevance of his ideas today
“So Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalisation, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth distribution of income away from labor to capital could lead to capitalism to self-destruct (though his view that socialism would be better has proven wrong). Firms are cutting jobs because there is not enough final demand. But cutting jobs reduces labor income, increased inequality and reduces final demand”- Nouriel Roubini
Euro crisis – democracy diminished to facilitate austerity
In scrambling to avoid a break-up of the eurozone, the approach of the elites in Europe has been characterised by two common themes – austerity programmes to make the working class pay, and a further diminishing of democracy to facilitate the implementation of that austerity.
Dail returns – prepare for battle
‘We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpieces filled with straw.’ So opens the famous poem by TS Eliot and closes with the lines, ‘This is the way the world ends/not with a bang but a whimper.’
Libya: Imperialists salivate at the spoils of war
The tremendous revolutionary uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, represent the clearest indication, along with the great recession in the world economy, that we have entered a turning point in world history. The power of the working masses to take matters into their own hands and overthrow the most brutal regimes has been dramatically shown. How things will develop from here remains to be seen, but the example of Libya shows that important and difficult questions are being posed for the future of the movement and the region as a whole.