For Lefties too Stubborn to Quit
As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.
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RTE is shite. A couple of quotes from last night’s shows:
“I have character, he doesn’t” – Ian O’Doherty, commenting petulantly near the end of “now It’s Personal”, a programme about his anti-Muslim prejudices.
“It’s not so bad out there, things are starting to look up” – Craig Doyle and his panel on his new chat show “The Social”.
Awful stuff. I know, I should have been improving my mind instead…
It’s a pity about Doyle – such a pretty face, such an empty space. Mind you if I was raking in big bucks for trumpeting the national party line I’d think things were looking up as well. Where’s my property supplement?
Ian O’Doherty’s piece was something else. One of those in it made the entirely reasonable point – I thought – that given that O’Doherty’s stock in trade is insulting others it seemed odd how thin-skinned he was.
The Emer O’Kelly one the previous week was no more lovable. If ever I saw a case of projection of the personal onto the general it was it, ie women have to work outside the home to repay the state. SO many assumptions in there, first and foremost that it’s only women who work in the home, that work in the home isn’t really work, and the people she talked to were almost exclusively middle-class, bar a few comments about less well off women forced to work nothing at all of an interaction with working people.
OWS joke -
Police occupy Zuccotti Park!
Question: What are their demands?
OWS protestor observation during eviction: “If only they enforced bank regulations like they do park rules, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Has there been any discussion here on the movement? Here denoting this website.
Not much. The main online outlets for discussion about the Irish incarnation of the movement seems to be facebook, in particular the ODS facebook page and Helena Sheehan’s page. Andrew Flood’s blog has some thoughtful posts about it, from an anarchist perspective.
Only a bit. I’ve been over a few times to take a gander and there’s some impressive stuff happening, but I don’t feel close enough to it to offer anything that others wouldn’t be able to say better and with greater insight. And to be honest there’s been so much else to cover that there’s only so much time in the day.
On that topic this is from Slate today in the wake of the eviction in NYC…
I got the same take from Rich Yeselson, a labor organizer who’d been optimistic about the protests when they started. “It should not be a priority to take back the park, or any other public spaces in cities around the country,” Yeselson said. “If the movement can’t exist without occupation, then it wasn’t really a movement in the first place. It was merely an episode with some significant rhetorical and political impact.”
I think that neatly sums up both the weaknesses and the strengths of OWS, etc…
I’ve never understood this tactic. The first rule of guerilla politics is surely not to try to hold territory.
There’s a decent bit of writing here – http://knaves.posterous.com/one-for-the-masters (his piece ‘Process of Collective Gorgoning’ is a must read).
This fella has been writing up a sort of daily diary – http://www.boomingback.org/
Some more here – http://lusciousblopster.blogspot.com/
More skeptical take here – http://circumlimina.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/preoccupied-on-dame-street/
Thanks a million Alan. You kind of rightly point up an omission on the part of the CLR.
Thanks Alan – some of those went in my RSS reader.
I have to say a picture of banksters-moll Eamon Ryan being attentively listened to in an Occupy-University made me wonder (and increased the blood pressure by a couple of points.)
I guess it’s appropriate that the only interesting sources of information and opinion should be in the ‘blogosphere, rather than the conventional meeja.
If anybody is interested we (DCTV and various others) have been trying to document some of this.
http://vimeo.com/31849781 and http://vimeo.com/31907899 is the Eamonn Ryan talk popeepopt mentions.
http://vimeo.com/31912641 is the 2 hour assembly last Monday where the motion to work with the DCTU was blocked.
http://vimeo.com/31301133 is the assembly where the motion to work with the Enough campaign was blocked.
And if these seem like very long videos to watch (especially given the deja vu that anybody involved in left wing politics in Dublin must feel watching the last video) – at least you weren’t standing by the side of the road listening to the meetings
“In its honesty and insight, Hill’s heartfelt novel unwittingly provides a critical counterpoint to the praise currently gushing the occupiers way.”
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_preview/11568/
Interesting if somewhat sneering take on the Occupy movement…
DSG has what seems to me one of the best analyses of the Occupy phenomena (they differ according to country or even region).
A couple of paragraphs are worth quoting:
Just when you thought the scumbags couldn’t get scumbaggier.
I suppose I should have been aware of the cashing in by vulture funds of debts of the poorest nations whenever they show signs of lifting their heads a little.
Jersey it says but I wonder if the IFSC is in the loop?
The New York Post reports that Goldman Sachs and Veritas Capital plan to make a good profit on their investment in Global Tel Link, the largest provider of phone services in prisons. Goldman Sachs makes that profit from prisoners and their families, who often are poor or middle class.
Global Tel Link has had many complaints about overcharging prisoners for calls. According to Prison Legal News, firms like Global Tel Link have extracted $152 million out of the pockets of prisoners’ families, most of whom live on low or moderate incomes and are paying kickbacks to state correctional departments.
http://www.soxfirst.com/30394498/goldman_sachs_gouging_the_poor.php
There will be insidious Joan Burton waffling today.
Bet it will be ‘musical chairs’ for tenants; but always, always,
somehow, money to ……… investors and landlords.
Golem XIV has an excellent summary of where we are with socialised debt and risk and how we got there.
A concluding paragraph:
It’s us or them. General default is the only way to break their power. I’m not really interested in any movement or party that demands less than that.
Eugene CPI
On Morning Ireland this morning Pat Rabbitte gave a very strong hint that this government is prepared to hand over further fiscal and budgetary power and controls to the EU that is to Germany and France.
They will back Merkel’s proposals and have a quick referendum calling for a yes vote. The sweetner will be relief on €30 billion of promissory notes to Anglo-Irish Bank and the Irish Nationwide now a merged entity known as the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation that is private debt. This is what Enda will be talking Merkel during their talks today.
This €30 billion is only a drop in the ocean to the mountain of debt that this state has taken responsibility for. The Debt Audit estimate that the Irish national debt and exposure to debt by the this state is in fact €371.1 billion.
They are prepared to hand over what is left of budgetary decision making to the ECB – to Germany – which in reality is to hand even greater power to monopoly corporate interests. Politicians will be reduced to mere lobbyists among many other lobbyists and interest groups.
As the CPI political statement issued 12th Nov.
……”The virtual coup d’état by German monopoly capital has secured the ousting of two already compliant governments, replacing them with even more compliant governments headed by technocrats: the former vice-president of the European Central Bank, Loukás Papadímos, in Greece and the former EU commissioner Mario Monti in Italy. These individuals’ loyalties are to the ECB and European monopoly capital rather than to the citizens of their countries.
This development has exposed one of the many falsehoods that have been constructed, that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. The setting aside of their democratic processes has opened up a new field in the struggle against the European Union and reaffirms the long-held view of Irish communists regarding the anti-democratic nature, values and strategy at the core of the EU integration process.
The assaults on the democratic will of the Greek and Italian people are among the first public manifestations and a real expression of the EU corporatist state now under construction. The reality that bourgeois democracy will be truncated to meet the needs of capital when in crisis is becoming more open and visible.
The solutions presented by the EU and by the Irish and British governments are for rescuing capitalism as a system, attacking the trade union movement and rolling back the advances made by the working class during the twentieth century. The ruling class want their austerity measures to be permanent and irreversible.
The drive for privatisation is to narrow the influence and role of public capital and to open up new investment opportunities for a stagnant global economy in the interest of private corporate capital. …………….
Workers must not only struggle to defend the economic and social gains made in the twentieth century but must now also be the defenders of democracy and national independence………….”
Research on Money and Finance is a leftist economic think tank including Costas Lapavitsas. Its latest report, Breaking Up? A Route Out of the Eurozone Crisis is available to download at
http://www.researchonmoneyandfinance.org/
“The credit of the ECB has been arbitrarily deployed to protect the interests of large banks, bondholders and enterprises, even by-passing the ECB’s own statutes. Social power has been undemocratically appropriated by an elitist institution subsequently
to be placed at the service of large capital in Europe. But the capacity of the ECB to relieve the pressures of crisis is limited because it is has been asked to play a fiscal role for which it was not designed. Moreover, the EMU is hampered by the absence of a state to back up its liabilities and solvency.”
Not an easy read but, for me at least, a necessary one
Now it will be interesting to see what sort of fuss comes of this – or to what extent it is hushed up.
The UniCredit Ireland whistleblower has gone public in a documentary by ABC. He was a risk manager who was ordered by his bosses at UniCredit to cover up their blatant breaking of existing bank regulations as ‘system errors’. Four years ago, and eventually went to the Financial Regulator to blow the whistle. David Norris brought it up in the Senate. And what happened? Precisely nothing.
He describes it as being like, and I paraphrase, “walking into a police station covered in blood, holding a knife and confessing to a murder, and being told not to do it again and being sent on his way.”
This is an offence for which he and his superiors could (theoretically – when has a banker ever gone to prison in this juristiction?) get five years in prison, he says.
So much for regulation and a change of regulator. Global default and destruction of he banks is the only way to deal with systematic corporate crime.
The ABC programme.
The Golem XIV post.
My only problem with this is that it’s not a single bank, or the failure of an individual regulator. It’s systemic. It’s how the system operates.
Mapping Financial Secrecy – Ireland
http://www.secrecyjurisdictions.com/PDF/Ireland.pdf
Not Irish, but check out http://newyork.platypus1917.org/crisis-of-the-left/
Paul Berman debating a Maoist? Interesting times…
No
Hmmm?
Two uninteresting entities do not make one interesting one
Pontificating on this thread on another (less informed) political website is one of the SF party’s leading “intellects” – gives context to debates on SF.
http://www.politics.ie/forum/history/175520-communist-party-ireland-stalinism.html
Seanie Lemass
As for Stalin proposing a unified Germany, and reducing tensions, more nonsense. Stalin had been faced down in Berlin and Korea and by 1951 was despperately encouraging the ‘peace’ movement in the west to give him time to prepare Soviet nuclear capabilitiy.
Many more gems like the above…
And I’d forgotten why I don’t follow politics.ie, life is too short…
I see the Guardian has a “Top 10 Dublin bar secrets”…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/aug/06/dublin.bars?CMP=twt_gu
Are all of the Giardian’s top ten still serving?
Only seeing the date now!!!
Crikey.
Mark Ames has a worrying article over on Naked Capitalism about a member of the new Greek government. I can’t reproduce the phot he refers to in his opening paragraph, but the text says enough:
And I bring you his excellency EU President Herman Van Rompuy on a speech given in Florence, Italy on 11-11-11. “We need reforms not elections,” Is our first EU full time president laying the basic foundations for our nascent empire?
video below (2 mins):
Article in the {London) Independent:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/what-price-the-new-democracy-goldman-sachs-conquers-europe-6264091.html
bjg
Thanks for the article line bjg. The article is well worth the read, and it only mentions goldman sachs. I’m sure the global golden circle includes many more corporate financiers than just sachs.
All I can say is – bloody hell.
The graphic seems to be missing a couple of lines at the bottom (I was about to post it on Twitter but that made me hesitate).
I see that Aodhan O’Riordain has been bringing shame on his family and friends by opening his mouth again. This time he’s been condemning the INTO for their lamentable failure to cooperate with the government’s scheme to “employ” unpaid teachers under the jobbridge slave labour scam.
http://www.labour.ie/press/listing/13215508059353614.html
Now, I know things are bad. Today’s spam begins:
I am Mr. Said Ibrahim, the Auditor General of a financial institution in
Dublin, Ireland.
Uh-oh…
Supposedly this fella is an ex-captain of the Philadelphia police department who was arrested at OWS. He’s fairly articulate and seems to know the power structure of police departments, but statements like support for the working class issue forth from his lips! Can he be real?
video link ( 6 mins and worth watching it all):
Retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis has returned to Zuccotti Park after being arrested yesterday morning during protests for Occupy Wall Street. Mr. Lewis told us police released him from custody last night around 9:00 p.m. and said that he had been treated well.
http://www.observer.com/2011/11/retired-police-captain-ray-lewis-alive-and-well-back-at-zuccotti/
I see in the paper that there is a biography of Tony Gregory being launched (or was launched).
http://www.obrien.ie/book909.cfm
anyone read it?
Had a flick through, now reduced in Easons I think €9.99, out a few weeks now.
Should read €19.99 it is on the 3 for 2 list at the minute.
There’s an interesting paper here which explains just how grossly inequitable VAT is in this country: http://www.esr.ie/vol42_2/06 Tol article_ESRI Vol 42-2.pdf
The crucial graph is on p228, which shows that increasing VAT by 2% will mean the poorest 10% pay 17% of their disposable income in tax (up 1%), while the richest 10% will continue to pay less than 0.1% Imagine if they did that with income tax!
I would add that it will increase cross border shopping. There is no escape from income tax but that would upset FG voters. We need at least a new top rate and it should be enough to pay for capital investment
Very interesting interview with Yanis Varoufakis speakimg about the roots of the euro-mess by Doug Henwood at henwood’s podcast page
http://leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html
Unconnected but … Irreligiosophy is the best atheist podcast ever, funny and educational. The two guys who ran it -both ex-mormons from Utah – recently had a falling out and it looks like it’s over but the back catalogue remains. Don’t go there if you are easily offended. Do go there if you want to know more about the bible, mormonism and gay penguins.
http://www.irreligiosophy.com/
John Bridge aka Jack Conrad CPGB on the current crisis
http://vimeo.com/31500994
Getting Excited! my union NASUWT 82% of a 40%+ turnout vote for strike on the 30th. Not been on strike since 1989. Bring it on Mr Cam!
Need to organise Trade Union Defence Committees across the UK for the 30th and beyond. Will we?
Good for them. Looks like an interesting couple of weeks ahead.
I hope. Lets bring this rotten Tory government down. I’ll be on the main march in London. Keep you informed! Workers Unite!
Am I right in thinking that our host reads German? I ask because I understand it may come in handy for reading future budget proposals.
The Central Bank is going to court over the Occupy Dame Street camp after a wooden hut was erected last week.
“Occupy Dame Street has today learned from media organisations and An Garda Síochána that the Central Bank of Ireland plans to seek a Court Order tomorrow morning in an attempt to stop the legal, legitimate and law abiding protest taking place. We have at all times sought to engage the banks in constructive dialogue ab…out our concerns about the plight of the Irish people and society and remain ready to do so. It is our understanding that Order 56A , S.I. No. 502 of 2010, Rules of the Superior Courts (Mediation and Conciliation) 2010, came into effect on 16th November 2010 whereby a High Court judge may now adjourn legal proceedings to allow the parties engage in an alternative dispute resolution (ADR) process. We believe that this means mediation is not only approved by the High Court, but consistent with the EU Mandate on Mediation, it is the preferable and binding means of resolving disputes prior to legal proceedings being taken, with the Courts having the ability to impose a costs sanction for those who fail or refuse without good reason to participate in an ADR process. Therefore, Occupy Dame Street reached out to dozens of mediators and will propose Miceal O’Hurley of Munster Mediation Services (www.munstermediationservices) to work with Occupy Dame Street, the Central Bank of Ireland an, if appropriate, An Garda Síochána to resolve this matter forthwith.”
https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDameStreet/posts/324951794188183
Must say fair play to them for the fast and efficient job in building the new kitchen.
What are they doing for washing, toilet etc? I see Congressman Peter King was denouncing the New York occupy for being ‘dirty’ etc. No judgement from me, just asking.
I noticed a plumbed-in sink in the new kitchen this morning – the same sort of) question occurred to me: what’s it connected to? People were sitting down having breakfast though, so it seemed rude to barge in with sanitation related queries.
For the lavatory most people AFAIK use a hotel nearby which doesn’t mind.
Not entirely sure about washing. Most people do it in shifts – might do one or a few days on camp and one or a few days off for example. I myself just do an early morning 4 hour security shift.
Should add there is a group who are there permanently. I think it leads into a waste bucket.
“The growing support for Occupy Wall Street suggests that the American people are more interested in substance and real economic issues than with cheap shots about drum circles, long hair and hygiene.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lincoln-mitchell/occupy-wall-street-and-th_b_1069490.html
You can’t beat the Heavy Gang. Just shows where their loyalties lie.
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/retired-gardai-to-honour-ric-2940192.html
Thanks lot of dedication. The Occupy I mean, not the Guards.
The PRTB.ie Published Register – should a printed copy of each County’s landlords be available at Local Council offices; as, the local authorities themselves just do not seem to have the housing.
mhtml:https://www.prtb.ie/public_files/html/wicklow_HTML.mhtml
mhtml:https://www.prtb.ie/public_files/html/dublin_HTML.mhtml
mhtml:https://www.prtb.ie/public_files/html/waterford_HTML.mhtml
Or – PRTB.ie, then Published Register, then click on map.
Interesting, Xianhasa.
‘Interesting’ WbS ? – It’s a disaster.
Just check http://www.PRTB.ie; then Published Register, then click on part of map that you want to check.
Wicklow has 164 pages – and with about 28 per page, that is 4592 Wicklow landlords.
Waterford, 179 pages : 5012 landlords.
Meath, 176 pages : 4928 landlords.
Kildare, 266 pages : 7448 landlords.
Wexford, 172 pages : 4816 landlords.
Galway, 456 pages ! : 12,768 landlords.
Dublin (not sure if this
is all Dublin : 551 pages : 15,428 landlords.
The question is : with no public housing available, should these Registers be available at the local authority offices.
(Personally, I think the State itself should appropriate in a dedicated way, the housing needed).
Another query about the Published Register (on http://www.PRTB.ie) might be that these County registers do not indicate at all just who these landlords are. They are screened behind Management companies and agents. They are virtually controlling areas and yet no-one knows who they are.
Why must we all hang about the word of a person? A person. One person – Phil Hogan. What is wrong with us?
Surely there must be some few investors at the moment that might agree, autonomously, to let some ‘out of work’ people buy directly from the investor. It could be part-ownership. Does the State have to be involved in every transaction?
Just one thing.
The courage and tenacity of the Egyptians in Tahrir square puts us to shame.
Very true.