Anarchist Writers

The NAMA bailout of the property speculators bank, Ango Irish Bank, is now costing the rest of us 25 billion euro.  Twenty five billion euro is a figure that is almost meaning less to almost all of us.  A worker earning the minimum wage would have to work for 1.4 million years to earn 25 billion (before tax).  The economist Ronan Lyons listed 100 things that 25 billion could have been spent on in, some flippant but others which give a real sense of just what the real cost of the 25 billion that the richest 1% have robbed off the rest of the population through NAMA is.

In what was described ahead of time as the most "important bond auction of the year" the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) sold 1.5 billion in bonds, a result which may steady the international markets at whose whims workers in Ireland have discovered their employment and living standards are subject to.  There was nervousness ahead of the sale due to the rise in the cost of servicing Irish debt in bond sales last week.  Meanwhile thousands of bank workers are losing their jobs.

These three articles chart the continued resistance to Shell in Erris in the west of Ireland where over the last couple of weeks Shell has been drilling 80 test holes in the Sruwaddacon bay Special Areas of Conservation.  I spent the June bank holiday at the Solidarity camp before this latest round of construction started and swam in Broadhaven bay on a surprizingly warm Sunday morning at the start of June

Technical Engineering and Electrical Union (TEEU) members at St James were on strike yesterday against management breaking agreed procedures in out sourcing work that includes the resetting and repair of fire alarms.  The electricians have already held two half day stoppages with todays actions following the failure to reach agreement at the Labour Relations Commission last week.

Canada has a reputation as a liberal/lefty sort of place in the US and Europe chiefly I suspect because of the comparison with its nearest neighboor.  However as the suppression of the G20 protests in Toronto this weekend shows this is far from the case.  In fact outside of Quebec there is little far left opposition to the Canadian state, so apart from the First Nations, who do indeed come under state attack, there is little to suppress.  This blog consists of three pieces, two which I wrote around the FTAA summit while in Ontario and the third which I just finished on the G20 Toronto protests this weekend.

Shell to Sea campaigner Maura Harrington was once more jailed Friday.  At the protest I noticed that the secret police were observing us from the far side of the road and about five minutes after leaving two of them drove a car in front of my bike in order to stop me for questioning. I've included the report I wrote for indymedia on the protest below but this blog is more about the conversation with the branch and the conversation that followed it with John Zerzan.

The last two years in Ireland have been dominated by the massive assault launched on the working class as our rules have successfully forced us to pay for the crisis in their system.  Tens of billions have been used to bail out the property developers, speculators and bankers, money that has been generated by the slashing of public services and the imposition of a massive pay cut on public sector workers. The response of the left has been weak and highly fragmented, reflecting in part the massive hold neo liberal ideology has on the working class but also a left that was in no way prepared for the coordinated assault that fell on workers in Ireland. WSM had its six monthly conference in May and as you might expect this topic took up a good chunk of the agenda.

Last Monday I did a talk on the political use of social media like Facebook and individual security concerns for RAG (Revolutionary Anarcha Feminist Group).  The text I based the talk on and the audio recordings of the talk (which had four other speakers and 40 minutes of discussion) are with this blog post.  I ranged fairly widely as I think these questions can only be understood in the balances revolutionaries have always had to strike between effective communication and personal security.

For several years the presence of the US war company Raytheon's plant in Derry has been a focus for anti-war protests in that city including direct actions. Raytheon makes the Patriot, Tomahawk, Cruise and Sidewinder missiles, the small Derry plant didn't manufacture the weapons but rather was part of the process of producing the software that made them function.  Rather oddly this was sometimes used to defend the company, as if the assembly line worker attaching fins to a rocket was somehow more responsible for the children it killed when dropped on a house that the software programmer who wrote the code that guided it to its destination.

Last week a friend on Facebook was complaining that she was getting Youth Defence ads.  Youth Defence are a virulently anti-choice organisation in Ireland, probably comparable to the likes of Operation Rescue in North America.  Anyway I was curious and asked her to do a screen capture if it re-appeared which it did.  I then realised this was a parallel campaign to the one they were running in the newspapers and that it all related to the ABC case in the European courts so I wrote up the article below for the WSM site to put it into context.