Workers Solidarity Movement

The government recently published a draft memorandum that will give legal effect to the negotiations between the EU/IMF and Ireland (see here). Essentially the draft details, by quarter of each year, how the government intends to implement an incredibly far-reaching austerity program to help get us back on our feet.

Despite freezing temperatures, an estimated one hundred thousand people were on the streets of Dublin today to take part in the ICTU demonstration against the draconian four year plan, which is raising taxes on low paid workers, slashing wages, social services and cutting social welfare.  The WSM took part in the demonstration with the 1% Network, highlighting the wealthy 1% of the population who own 34% of the wealth, and pointing out that only a general strike can force them to back down from making us pay the full costs of the crisis.

Anarkismo.net has announced that a demonstration is being held in Paris, France tomorrow to coincide with the ICTU demonstration in Dublin under the slogan of 'Solidarity with the Irish people'.  The demonstrations called by 8 French organisations will be taking place at the European Union offices of bld Saint Germain, the organisers include the WSM's sister Anarkismo group in France, Alternative Libertaire.

While the state continues to be rocked by the result of devastating effects of 10 years of rampant capitalism crashing the focus has been conveniently been shifted from the serious problems within our health service. A common belief is that before things get better they must get worse and under the 4 year plan they are about to get a lot worse. In the case of a health service this couldn’t be further from the truth. The obvious result of a worsening health service is higher national morbidity and mortality. Are we prepared to allow this to occur?

With the IMF in Ireland, a WSM member has written a song of 'welcome', a recording of which and the lyrics of which are below.  For international readers "céad míle fáilte" means "A Hundred Thousand Welcomes" and is a traditional greeting now strongly associated with the tourist industry.  You can read WSM articles about the IMF intervention and the economic crash that led to it in our Capitalist Crisis article listing.

Céad míle fáilte - To the IMF 
We hope we meet you on the streets - To fight you to the death. 
And we know how you got here - Back room deal and open arms 
As you try to suck the life from us - With your structural reforms

Why is the director of the IMF complaining that the rate of progress of the IMF negotiations in Dublin is going too slowly? What's wrong with this picture? The answer is nothing, so long as you understand that the IMF are not the driving force in these negotiations.

Despite the newpaper headlines, what is happening is not an IMF bailout. This is a European debt restructuring process in which the IMF are playing a merely supportive role as consultants. This is a Eurozone process and although the political masters of the Eurozone, through their EU Commissioners, have the final say on passing or vetoing the final agreement, the true driving force behind this process is the ECB.

It's now official, the Irish state is in talks with the EU and the IMF about a so called 'rescue plan' to bail out the Irish capitalist class from the disaster created by the international crash of the capitalist economic system. A crisis that was magnified in Ireland by the corruption of local crony capitalism on the one hand and the dependency of the economy on 'globalization' on the other. Trapped between such a cast of crooks and idiots it is perhaps not surprising that many in Ireland hope things will be improved when the running of our lives will be handed over to those who many hope might have a clue.

The markets have spoken and the verdict is that Brian Lenihan's 6 billion euro package of public sector cuts and extra taxation on ordinary workers is not going to work. The confidence in Ireland's future in the international money markets is reflected in the yields in Irish sovereign bonds. These bonds are the IOUs the government issues to borrow the money to plug the shortfall from income to spending. They vary from 2 to 14 years in duration before the money borrowed has to be repaid, the 10 year being the one most closely followed by market watchers. The yield on a bond is the interest rate the state has to pay the lenders. In these last few days increasingly urgent stories in the business pages of the papers have been warning about the dangers of increasing bond yield spreads.

On Sunday May 18th Argentineans went to the polls and elected Nestor Kirchner - widely considered a puppet of the former populist president Eduado Duhalde. Yet on December 19/20th 2001 Argentineans "churned through 3 presidents in a row" as thousands poured into the streets. Their slogan: "que se vayan todos" (everyone must go). Yet quite clearly "everyone", in the shape of an old school populist president, is back. This begs two questions. Firstly how did such a formidable protest/popular movement evolve, and secondly where is it now?