TASC have released a detailed report called ‘Mapping the Golden Circle’ that reveals the "network of 39 individuals [who] held powerful positions in 33 of 40 top public organisations and private Irish businesses." Their analysis shows that within this 11 of these people were "very well connected" and that the most tightly interwoven institutions were all banks. This are the gang who now order us to ‘share the pain’ yet in 2005-7 they awarded themselves 40% pay increases while most workers were getting one quarter of this.
Archives: Blog entry
A <em>blog entry</em> is a single post to an online journal, or <em>blog</em>.
Last night I was on the ‘Right to Work’ march that went to the Dail where some scuffles broke out as some of the crowd broke away to try and push through the gates. I’m not going to discuss that much, far too much in the media already about what amounted to very little. The main topic of this blog is the Right to Work Campaign itself and the question of how we should approach these sort of party controlled fronts. it is generated in part by the failure of WSM to come up with a collective approach and as a result being caught somewhat on the hop by last nights events.
This is the story of a dog, a dog from the streets that lives in one of the European PIGS. [The basket case economies of Europe have been grouped together neatly into this porcine gang – Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain.] Our dog, the stray dog lives in Athens and for the last two years or more he has been appearing at every single protest that has been fought there. As the World slipped into the tail spin spiral of a global recession, one dog was putting in the hours, pounding the pavements in protests, knowing which side he was on in the battles being fought.
Eva Rowe’s parents were among the 15 who died that day in Texas City.
“A worker who actually worked at the plant collapsed to the floor crying, telling me he was so sorry that he couldn’t find my parents, that he’d been looking for them since the explosion happened. So then I knew,” she recalled.
This morning I managed to sort out a long running tech problem with the Pageabode sites and took the opportunity to catch up on Anarchist Writers visitor states through AW Stats, the Facebook fan page and google analytics. I’ve summarised some of the findings here including the additional information coming from Facebook which lets us know the gender, age and location of our Facebook fans.
On April 23rd, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed SB1070 into law, giving local and state police broad power to detain suspected illegal immigrants.
One of our ideas with running the Rethinking Revolution discussion series is to try and return to old core concepts for the left in fairly fresh and non dogmatic ways. It probably comes in part from a view that a lot of the ‘movement of movements’ left are tending to throw the baby out with the bathwater on some of these concepts in focusing on quite narrow, orthodox interpretations of these issues. The audio with this blog ‘How do we know who will Struggle?’ was the first of the meetings where we tried to return to the importance of class through a somewhat indirect route.
As 2007 turned into 2008 and the themes of the economic commentariat shifted from the question of whether a recession was avoidable to whether a depression was avoidable, a new theme emerged – the possibility of "decoupling".
The audio this blog is about was a presentation I gave last week on ‘Will we see a revolution in our lifetime’ to the Rethinking Revolution discussion at Seomra Spraoi in Dublin. I go into some of the thoughts behind what I said on the night and the idea of the discussion sessions in general. This was the second of these meetings, the idea of which was inspired by the interest shown in the Better Questions discussion series which I’ve previously blogged about here. This one was set up as a debate between Alan MacSimoin and myself, he is the other speaker on the recording.
I got notification early on Saturday that some comrades from the left republican group eirigi had just occupied the Anglo Irish Bank offices so I hoped on my bike with my trusty camera to go down and get a few photos which I include with this post as a slide show. Anglo Irish Bank (not to be confused with Allied Irish Bank) was the super dodgy property developer bank whose collapse was a key feature of the crash in Ireland and which is going to cost workers in Ireland some 30 billion as we pay for the speculation of a couple of hundred of the superwealthy. That figure is based on the fact that 50% of Anglo’s loans were to 147 or so accounts!