I very much like gardening metaphors and find I agree with much of what you say.

I understand the desire not to let this into a left vs right type discussion (there r lots of boards where everyone can yell at each other about that), or an endless point scoring competition of who did or did not do anything to get us where we are and I realise it is more unifying to say lets get rid of all the current lot than to try and unpick who might or might not be less corrupt/ easily influenced.
But I would worry about what happens when the decks are cleared, all too often in history, that did not work out too well. Most of the time those idealist who swept in to put everything right fell foul of the same corrupting influences they were supposed to be so against.
I think we should try to identify those who are in the system, who are aware of the pressures and who have shown some integrity in speaking truth to power, as well as supporting new blood. A more grafting approach to use a gardening metaphor, rather than just trowing some more seeds on to the same ground in the hope they'll magically do better. I think change that has come about in this way has been more lasting and more effective. In the end as in most things I think the hard painstaking way tends to produce the most lasting goods.

Speaking of which I have to respect the way you have painstakingly sifted through all the information to bring us this blog, I tried to read some of the sites and gave up pretty quickly

Sorry, I seem to have a complete lack of talent for the short pithy comment – verbal diarrhoea.

Naming is doing too, though not what VladZ seems to think it's doing. I am aware of what you said about this being a trap you don't want to fall into, but it's easy enough to avoid the trap once you know it's there. I'm afraid most people don't, and they're being pushed right into it by the mainstream media. You reverse the curse of this inside-out and upside-down discourse constantly by revealing what debt, whose debt, who's bailing out whom, and so on.

This blog might not be the right place for discussing what "humanitarian intervention" and "peacekeepers" are, but the curse is the same.

Conventaionl politics has turned itself inside out. So left is right, up is down and foul is fair. Time to throw off the lot. New politics won't be made from tarnished hopes.

It's up to us to make it. And we can.

Totally agreed re nu-Labour in Britain. I guess I am just clutching at the hope that the Labour party here might miraculously turn out to have some integrity and backbone. If they got in with the New Left Alliance (who are very very anti bail out) there might be some hope for a normal democratic solution to this crisis.

Ok you can go ahead and laugh at me now, I am clutching at straws I know. It will almost certainly be a FG/Labour alliance and they will be about as much good at fighting neo-liberalism/corporatism as Blair was. Fianna Gael being the most blindly fervently pro EU party we have.

I am just sickened though with how insiduously 'lefty' is used almost become almost a synonym for 'loony'. Even now when neo-liberalism has so spectacularly failed and then when people want to imply its the fault of socialism as a concept (rather than parties that were nominally/formerly) socialist, I just …. can't

You speak my mind on not wanting to follow an American neo-liberal model and yet finding how Europe is being taken to be deeply anti-democractic and corporatist.

All this discussion of who is left and who isnt' who claimed to be and who didn't is the trap I do not wnt us to fall in to here. Forget who claimed what. They were as they did and that's syrely the acid and only test.

I don't care that Labour was once a left wing party. What Tony Blair did was Thatcherite and neo-liberal with a sop here and there afforded because we were in a boom.

As for the EU. I too deplore how the Irish Labour Party is every bit as willing to tug its forelock and implement the new bata scoir with regards to the Lisbon and Nice referendums. But I have to point out that the only real political opposition to those treaties, and to the banking bailout has come from the extreme left of Irish politics – Sinn Fein and the Socialist Workers Party and if they're not 'lefty' no one is
My problem with the EU is not with how it stands now – I would much rather Ireland grow more like Berlin/Stockholm than Boston/Washington. I'd quite like some form of rent control and banking regulations and I found the credit driven consumerism where Irish people had as a big a carbon footprint as the Americans shaming to say the least. I think we should learn to save not borrow.
My major problem with the EU is where it is going. The Lisbon Treaty (or Dictat) paves the way for a neoliberal Europe, presumably with the intention that Europe will then come to rival China and the US. I think it is about a desire for power on the part of the unelected Euro Elite that is not matched in any way by a similar desire in the majority of the EU populace. And I think the treaty was also about ensuring that these issues would never have to be put before that populace either in terms of debate or decision making. That is why I and most people I know vote No. It wasn't xenophobia or a reluctance to provide aid to Eastern Europe- it was a horror at what was being done to derail democracy and aid the rise of corporatism within that treaty.
That may sound a little paranoid but I actually don't beleive its any more paranoid or crazy than the scheming and planning that goes on in Brussels, Washington and the Pentagon.

The Fianna Fail/Progressice Democrats alliance presided over the entire run away housing boom and the creation of the Wild West of Euro Finance at the IFSC Dublin. They are about as far left as you can go in Ireland.
Mary Harney (of the PDs) talked constantly about Ireland being 'nearer to Boston than Berlin.'
Bertie Ahern (FF Taoiseach) told 'lefty' commentators and politicians who urged the Government to prepare a soft landing for the housing boom, or who questioned the rampany credit fueled consumerism that they would be better off 'commiting suicide'. Charming Non.
Ireland was the poster child for neo-liberalism when we were doing well and now we're broke we're lefty/socialist? How does that work, unless you work for Fox News?
Or else you mean that if there was no social safety net there'd be no deficit and we could give the banks absolutely everything and problem solved?
For which I'd refer you to America crime costs and the cost of her 'war on drugs'.

An interesting thing to consider in Ireland's case is the trouble the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty caused the first time around, and how it was imposed eventually, how the whole campaign was run (and what such an aggressive campaign costs). Irish policy of military neutrality is also relevant I think. It's the Irish constitution that's troubling the EU, which is funny in the context of "Merkel's demand for voting rights to be withdrawn from member states that fail to meet strict eurozone fiscal rules".