Less than a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the banks are back. Puffed up with profits, they are flexing their muscles again.
The wonderful people who brought you the invasion of Iraq certainly took Joseph Goebbels’ principle of "the bigger the lie the better" to heart.
This has been a bad summer for left wing intellectuals. The radical political economists Giovanni Arrighi and Peter Gowan died within a few days of one another in June. And then last week the socialist philosopher GA "Jerry" Cohen died suddenly at the age of 68.
Can you believe the banks? While the world economic crisis has deep underlying causes, it was precipitated by the collapse of the credit bubble that had been inflated by major banks in a frenzy of borrowing and lending.
FURTHER EVIDENCE has appeared this past week about how corrupt British politics is. No, this isn’t about MPs on the take or reporters phonetapping. It’s about Afghanistan.
I’ve just returned from spending a fortnight in South Africa. It was my first visit since the early 1990s. A lot has happened since then.
After the Second World War the Labour and Tory parties completely dominated British politics, sharing around 96 percent of the popular vote between them. According to some opinion polls, they will be lucky to get more than half the total vote in this week’s European elections.
Two events last week underlined the fact that Barack Obama is not kidding when he says he intends to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
The idea that the green shoots of economic recovery are sprouting everywhere has become entrenched among a layer of economic pundits. They cite the fact that the stock markets have been rising quite strongly.
Is the worst of the economic crisis over? BBC Radio 4’s Today programme has been babbling about this for the past week or so, and Barack Obama has now joined them.
There is an increasingly ugly and strident – but also quite ridiculous – campaign building up against the public sector.
Nearly a thousand people will be attending a conference this weekend on "The Idea of Communism" in central London.
