As Naomi Klein has been pointing out recently, effective action on climate change requires changes that go well beyond simple shopping decisions about which lightbulb to buy – what’s actually needed is political change on a global level. Rather than shrinking back from this idea, what if we embraced it and recognized that such change, if carefully planned and implemented, could bring about vital improvements to the lives of most people around the world?

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland. Cross posted in Naked Capitalism In 2008 profits in the US economy crashed out. But they soon bounced back. This bounce was largely due to the profits being reaped in the financial sector – which sickened many given that 2008 was in large measure [...]

Ann Pettifor is depressing reading in her blog ‘Debtonation’.  She was right before and sadly, likely to be so again. …We, and many others, expect the banks of all the major OECD economies to collapse over the next few months. This will drag the UK, Eurozone and US down. In other words, and to be [...]

Quoting  from John Grail in the Guardian Bill Mitchell in Billyblog elaborates why exactly the Euro is not and never was a success in any of the ways that matter.  [...]

Good post by Cian O’Callaghan describing the frustrating size of the task before us  – and the Occupy movement in the irelandafternama blog.  [...]

Writing in the Asian Times, Chris Cook gives a very useful and to my mind accurate description of the evolution of our current money system. He predicts a crash in oil and other commodity prices in the first quarter of 2012. He was also bold enough to predict the form of the new economy to emerge post the mayhem of this crash.

Bill Mitchell outlines in comprehensive and heart sinking detail the impossibility of recovery under the current ‘austerity reich’. Hes says “Ireland will struggle while they remain in the Eurozone. The system is geared heavily against them.”

In a follow-up to her earlier post on preparing your household for a currency crisis, Theresa Carter suggests a range of practical preparations that communities can make in order to build resilience.

There are really three dimensions to the current crisis: the banking and finance dimension of elite fraud; a crisis of uneven development accentuated by competition that has reached outer limits; and a limits to growth crisis. Action to clear up any one of these problems will not succeed without our working on the others as well.

Mna n hEireann should take note of Latvia’s experience -”No People, No Problem”: The Baltic Tigers’ False Prophets of Austerity By Jeffrey Sommers, Arunas Juska and Michael Hudson*. Ignore our politicians’ rhetoric about the value of ‘seeing the world’, exporting our young was ever the way to avoid dealing with entrenched interests (usually older) in Ireland.

The news overnight from Brussels is that the 17 euro countries, led in this particular respect by France, have refused to allow the UK to exclude itself from their emerging plans to regulate financial transactions.

Helen Brown links national money policy to her oft heard cry for State (in eurozone, read Member State) charter banks. We have forgotten our roots, when the American colonists thrived on a system of money created by the people themselves, debt-free and interest-free. The continued dominance of the Wall Street money machine depends on that collective amnesia. The fact that this memory is surfacing again may be the machine’s greatest threat — and our greatest hope as a nation. [...]

Spiegel Online repeats Wall Street Journal reports “from insiders”
that central banks around Europe are preparing for a break up of the
eurozone – even looking into where they can get revived national
currencies printed – in particular the Irish central bank are looking
into where they can print new money in case in “in the short term they
have to introduce a national currency”