Enough Already

Your brain may shut down at words like ‘bondholders’ and ‘bail-out’, but I urge you to stay with me a moment. The enemy is at the gate. We’re all feeling it, with swingeing cuts of one kind or another having increasingly dramatic effects on Irish people at every level of society.

The most frightening cut for me personally is the one hitting the special school that my autistic son attends. By next September, the education and therapy that he and 23 other kids receive will have been drastically reduced. But this is just one cut among thousands. Across the country, wages are being savaged and hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs. Mortgage repayments are falling behind, social welfare is being hacked, businesses are failing. There’s mass inability to pay bills, entire families joining soup queues – and the frightening return of wholescale emigration, the bane of this country since the Famine.
The well-being of ordinary Irish people – and the welfare of our children and of our children’s children – is in grave jeopardy right now. Here is my attempt to tell the story of the deepening crisis that is engulfing all but the very wealthy elite in our society, and what we need to do to stop it.

LOANS TO PAY DEBTS TO
PAY LOANS TO PAY DEBTS….
To fund the massive bail-out of the banks, who had been allowed to engage in ruinous lending against property all over the world, the Irish government hit us with wave after wave of draconian cuts, attacking social welfare, health and education budgets. The economy went into recession and our debt grew. Irish banks owed British and German ­­banks hundreds of billions. The European Central Bank (ECB) feared that Ireland would default on these loans, and thus trigger the collapse of other European banks. In an attempt to avert the threatened default, the ECB poured money into Irish banks to shore up the system, despite the fact that the prospect of getting their money back depended on mortgage repayments on what was now vastly over-valued property.
The ECB then insisted that Ireland take out another €85 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund/European Union (IMF/EU). Ireland was to use most of this loan to recapitalise Irish banks and thereby to protect the bondholders (people who loaned money to Irish banks). And who are the bondholders? The majority are in fact international banks and professional financial speculators. In other words, the Irish public is being compelled to take on responsibility for the private debts of big financial gamblers. Why? Stay with us...
Since the global financial crisis began in 2008, there has been an international campaign to socialise private debt – that is to get ordinary citizens to take on the losses of banks and speculators. Around the world, taxpayers are experiencing the same injustice, whereby debts and losses of financial institutions are being heaped onto Governments and States. Ireland is one of the worst cases.
In March of this year, it was revealed that a further loan of up to €24 billion will be required to shore up Irish banks. The interest rates on these loans are so punitively high that, by 2013, Ireland’s national debt repayments are projected to rise to €9 billion per annum. This means that Ireland, per capita, is now the most indebted country in the EU, with a deficit of 32%

“SHARING THE BURDEN”
I don’t mean to be alarmist, but the truth is this: every man, woman and child in Ireland is now walking around with a debt over their individual heads of such massive proportions, it is simply off the radar. We’re all being dragged into paying back a debt that is not and never was our responsibility. In an outrageously unjust act of grand larceny, the wealth of the great majority of ordinary Irish people – for generations to come – is in the process of being stolen, so that a minority of Irish and international financial speculators and bondholders don’t lose their money.
If this state of affairs is allowed to persist, our children are likely to be faced with three choices: (1) stay here, impoverished on woefully inadequate social welfare; (2) if you’re lucky enough to have a job, pay massive taxes for shitty services; or (3) get the hell out of here.
It’s impossible to justify robbing the many for the benefit of the few. Hence we’re doused with propaganda that says we have no choice and if we don’t go along with it, all hell will be unleashed. But as we shall discover in Part 2 of this investigation in the next issue of Hot Press, recent experiences in Iceland prove that the economic appropriation currently underway in Ireland need by no means be accepted as a fait accompli.
The question must be asked: Who is making our ruling politicians – first Fianna Fáil and the Greens, and now Fine Gael and Labour – foist what amounts to economic enslavement on their own people?

THE IMF ARE ECONOMIC HIT-MEN
The IMF ­– whose bail-out loan has been accepted by our political leaders ­on our behalf – tends to present itself as a neutral arbiter, stepping in to weed out cronyism and corruption, with the ostensible aim of rejuvenating economies in crisis. But this is far from the whole story. According to ex-IMF/World Bank employee, John Perkins ­– author of Confessions Of An Economic Hit-Man – any country misfortunate enough to find themselves dealing with the IMF has every reason to be fearful. Perkins gives the IMF what Standards and Poor might call a D rating.
“In each case where countries have gone along with IMF policies, it’s caused tremendous disruption,” says Perkins. “In the Asian economic crisis in the late 1990s, for example, those countries that bought into the IMF all had terrible financial problems as a result, while those that refused the IMF programmes did quite well.”
Perkins describes how organisations like the IMF have managed to create the world’s first truly global empire.
“I spent many years working for the IMF,” he recounts. “And it was all about subterfuge, to gain control over populations so you can gain power over their resources. In effect, it’s a secret empire, because it hasn’t been created by armies; it’s been created by economic hit-men. One of the most common ways we work is to arrange huge loans to countries whose resources our multinational corporations covet. The people are left holding such a big debt, they can’t possibly re-pay it. At that point, we feel we have you. We say, ‘You can’t pay your debt, so give us a pound of flesh’ – by selling your country’s resources really cheaply to our companies, for example.
“We’ve managed to create our empire in this very subtle way, so that you and your country become part of the empire. But you’re not occupied by military force; you’re occupied by economic forces – by debt.”
In our media, the IMF arrive in town wearing suits, carrying briefcases. But, according to this former employee, their innocuous appearance doesn’t make them any less dangerous.
“The IMF is an extremely brutal organisation,” says Perkins. “It comes from a background of economic exploitation, of taking control of people and economies for very selfish reasons – to serve this secret empire. And who’s the emperor? It’s a group of people who run our biggest corporations. This is not a conspiracy theory – these people don’t have to come together to conspire to do anything illegal. But they do in fact control most of the politics in the world, and most of the media.”
Perkins is scathing about the IMF’s motives.
“This empire is extremely vicious,” he insists. “It keeps people below the poverty level intentionally, as a way of controlling their resources. People starve because of this empire; AIDS spreads because of it.”
Perkins is not alone in his concerns. According to UNICEF, over 500,000 children under the age of five die each year in developing countries as a direct result of IMF policies.

THE SMALL PRINT IN OUR EU-IMF DEAL
Again I don’t mean to be alarmist but it is important to understand what is going on here. In return for a bail-out loan that’s impossible, or next to impossible, for us to re-pay ­– no matter how tightly our population gets squeezed – our leaders have given away our sovereign control over a huge swathe of our monetary and fiscal policies to the EU-IMF. This includes final say on everything in the banking sector. The EU-IMF deal copperfastens the continuing and if necessary endless recapitalisation of the banks.
This will mean a devastating €15 billion package of cuts in health, education and social welfare; property and water charges; and – a potential key issue – a programme of privatisation and sell-off of our State assets and resources. Currently, the Greeks ­– who are also under siege by economic hit-men, but are fighting back – are being told to start selling their beaches and islands to private companies.
Selling off our public assets is, in fact, robbing the country of precisely what we need to get out of this economic mess, according to Richard Boyd Barrett TD. He is spearheading the call for a referendum on the EU-IMF deal.
“Selling them will provide a once-off payment and is not a solution to the problem,” he asserts. “It makes no sense to give away, in many cases highly profitable, State assets that have the capability to get revenue and employment going, which is precisely what is needed for sustained economic growth.”
Combined with what amounts to theft of resources rightfully owned by the population of Ireland, the EU-IMF’s programme of “pauperisation” will destroy our public services and our living standards.
“You need to send the IMF packing,” advises ex-economic ‘hit-man’ John Perkins. “Do you really want companies from other parts of the world controlling your resources and economy? It’s an exploitative deal.”
Perkins pulls no punches, relating how, in the developing world, if the economic hit-men fail, military invasion often follows. He accuses the IMF as an organisation of remorseless cruelty and amorality.
“The leaders of every country that comes into contact with the IMF have to be aware that there are brutal, menacing people in the background,” he resumes. “If they don’t co-operate with the system, there’s a risk. That’s why resistance really has to come from the people. We can’t look to our political leaders to have the courage, or even the ability, to force change.
“Yet we don’t have to allow this to happen. There are movements around the world that are beginning to understand how the empire operates. We’re seeing a revolution in Latin America, for example, where in the last few years, 10 countries – representing 80% of the population of South America ­– have democratically and peacefully voted in Presidents who are saying, ‘No more of this. We’re not going be servants to the IMF. We’re not going to sell our resources to the lowest bidder. Instead the profits from our resources will go to our own people.’”
Two years ago, Iceland was the first country in the developed world to be economically ‘hit’ by the IMF. The population were left trying to service an impossible debt. But last month the Icelandic people ­– having forced their government to hold a referendum – voted to repudiate their debt burden. Icelandic MP Lilja Mósesdóttir was actually in Dublin recently, arguing that Ireland should follow Reykjavik’s lead.
In the next issue of Hot Press, we will examine what Irish people can learn from the Icelandic revolution.