Within hours of announcing that the real cost of the Anglo bailout was going to be 30 billion plus rather than the 1.5 billion first estimated the government was revealing its plan for further cuts in our pay welfare, and public services to pay for this. The bank bailouts, not totalling 45 billion, will push the budget deficit to 32% of GDP, the government has the intention of continuing to attack the living standards of workers in Ireland until this is reduced to the 3% required by the EU.
30 September in Dublin former US president Bill Clinton told an invited gathering of 575 of the richest 1% of Ireland’s population that they were the greatest problem facing the world. They paid over 2500 a head to hear this as they chomped down on "Atlantic salmon, Connemara lamb and lemon posset, washed down with Chablis Domaine de la Mandeliere 2007 and Chateau Les Roches Gaby 2001."
On the morning of Wednesday 29th September we awoke to the news that a cement triuck covered in anti-government slogans relating to the bank bailout had been rammed into the gates of the Dail (Irish parliament) almost running over the police guarding the entrance. It turned out that some of this was true, some of it lies and that the alleged driver of the truck was the strangest of anti-bank campaigners, an outraged developer. This piece written for the WSM site takes apart some of the spin.
In the aftermath of the summit protests many on the libertarian left followed a set of tactics which concentrated on marginal workers in insecure employment. From the strategic point of view, it would seem to make more sense to imagine a wave of organization that starts with workers who are concentrated into larger workplaces and whose strikes have some real social power.
The ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is a trade agreement being negotiated by the Obama administration through the United States Office of the Trade Representative. The trade agreement is particularly interesting on a number of points.
yal Dutch Shell, Statoil, Exxon Mobil and other global corporations will be taking billions of euro out of the country in the next couple of decades. In other countries they would have to give the majority of this money to the State, but not in Ireland. In 1987, then Minister Ray Burke, later jailed for corruption, abolished the State’s 50% share and all royalties.