In an unassuming Athens office, just a couple of streets from the ancient Agora where democracy first announced itself to the world, sits Nasos Iliopoulos, Secretary of Neolaia Synaspismou, the youth wing of the Greek political party Synaspismos.... Read more

The ability of the Occupy movement to create platforms outside our closed political system to force open a debate on inequality, the taboo at the heart of the financial crisis, is impressive. It is a new source of political creativity from which we all have much to learn.... Read more

The collapse of the Irish economy has come as a particular shock to many people, at home and abroad, because of its seemingly remarkable success in the preceding years, the period of very rapid economic growth that saw the country, from the early 1990s onwards, described as the ‘Celtic Tiger’. However, that era in fact consisted of two distinct phases. In the first phase, before 2001, growth... Read more

This is an extraordinary time. The astonishing Occupy Wall Street movement emerged as the heart of our 99%, claimed the little scrap of earth in Zuccotti Park on behalf of all of us, and created a live-in soapbox from which to challenge inequality — how the 1% controls our economy, buys off our government, imposes their wars, and avoids paying their taxes. It both reflects and marks an end to... Read more

As Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen recounted in his (1999) Development as Freedom, thousands of years ago Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, noted: “wealth is evidently not the good we seek, for it is merely useful…for the sake of something else.” This line resonated strongly with a similar discussion between a husband and wife recounted in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishads around... Read more

The Catalans have a phrase: 'em planto'. It has a double meaning: 'I plant', or 'I've had enough'. At end of the huge 15 October demonstration of Indignados (‘outraged’) in Barcelona – the papers put it at around 250,000 – we were we greeted with an impromptu garden under the Arc de Triomf, the end point of the march. Campaigners for food sovereignty had planted vegetables in well-spaced rows,... Read more