OCCUPIED IRELAND'S BRUTISH TERROR STATE

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OCCUPIED IRELAND'S BRUTISH TERROR STATE

Bob Dylan and the Newry Highwayman

The Oxford Dictionary defines the word dissident as being PROTESTANT.


Click HERE for Urban Dictionary definition of the word Baggot;



The newly appointed Brit headboy of the British police in the north of Ireland is Martin McGuinness's mate, Matt Baggot. He went to Dublin last week to speak at a press conference to criminalize republicans who will not take the Queen's shilling to become thugs, to enforce British law in Ireland.

Baggott, speaking in Dublin said of the "PROTESTANT" liberation movement.

"I think it's very helpful to see it as a criminal enterprise," he said.



Maybe Flann O'Brien from Strabane when he wrote "The Third Polceman" had a premonition of the arrival and statements of the illegal Brit headboy, when he wrote the following;

"Because a man can have more disease and germination in his gob than you'll find in a rat's arse,"


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One of Ireland's best known dissidents was Bobby Sands, whom the British also tried to criminalize.

Bobby Sands was twenty-seven years of age and was sixty-six days on hunger strike when he died in the H Blocks of Long Kesh concentration camp, on the 5 May 1981. The young Volunteer spent the last nine years of his short life in this concentration camp. He became known world-wide by the time he died, having been elected to the Brit parliament, having withstood political torture to abandon his protest at criminalization by the British and their henchmen.

The hunger strike was aimed at rebutting the British government's attempts to criminalize the struggle for Irish freedom by changing the status of Sands and his fellow comrades from political to criminal status.

While behind bars, Sands secretly wrote on toilet paper and cigarette papers with the refill of a cheap pen that was hidden inside his body. These writings were then smuggled out of prison.

With humour, in prose and poetry, he wrote to preserve his identity against freezing cold, unimaginable filth, appalling beatings and numbing boredom. He conjures up vividly the enclosed hell of Long Kesh concentration camp, the harassment, and the humiliatingly invasive searches. Bobby Sands and his comrades were gripped by an iron system that held them at torture-point and yet their courage never faltered. He gave his life along with his comrades as political prisoners.

Despite a so called peace process, Irish political prisoners are still beaten savagely today while in prison without trial while their families are being terrorized by McGuinness's thugs as they do what families of Irish political prisoners have always done, gather support for their loved ones in British prisons.
Here is what Bobby Sands wrote just before he died -
"They will not criminalise us, rob us of our true identity, steal our individualism, depoliticise us, churn us out as systemised, institutionalised, decent law-abiding robots. Never will they label our liberation struggle as criminal.
I am (even after all the torture) amazed at British logic. Never in eight centuries have they succeeded in breaking the spirit of one man who refused to be broken. They have not dispirited, conquered, nor demoralised my people, nor will they ever.
I may be a sinner, but I stand — and if it so be, will die — happy knowing that I do not have to answer for what these people have done to our ancient nation.
Thomas Clarke is in my thoughts, and MacSwiney, Stagg, Gaughan, Thomas Ashe, McCaughey. Dear God, we have so many that another one to those knaves means nothing, or so they say, for some day they’ll pay.
When I am thinking of Clarke, I thought of the time I spent in ‘B’ wing in Crumlin Road jail in September and October ‘77. I realised just what was facing me then. I’ve no need to record it all, some of my comrades experienced it too, so they know I have been thinking that some people (maybe many people) blame me for this hunger-strike, but I have tried everything possible to avert it short of surrender.
I pity those who say that, because they do not know the British and I feel more the pity for them because they don’t even know their poor selves. But didn’t we have people like that who sought to accuse Tone, Emmet, Pearse, Connolly, Mellowes: that unfortunate attitude is perennial also…
I can hear the curlew passing overhead. Such a lonely cell, such a lonely struggle. But, my friend, this road is well trod and he, whoever he was, who first passed this way, deserves the salute of the nation. I am but a mere follower and I must say Oíche Mhaith."

Some small minded fucker has taken down the Dylan version which I think is the best. This according to YouTube is the Dubliner's version but its a long tome ago since I heard this song sung properly, as there doesn't appear to be any singers in Ireland at the minute who can sing it properly with a bit of passion like ! Is there any nature left in people anymore ?




THE NEWRY HIGWAYMAN



Botanic Gardens Belfast, 19. 6. 1998
Traditional




In Newry town where I was bred and born
In Stephen's Green now I lie in scorn.
I served my time there to the saddlers' trade
And I always was a roving blade.

At seventeen I took a wife,
And I loved her dearer than I loved my life
And for to keep her both fine and gay
I went a-robbin' on the king's highway.

I never robbed any poor man yet
Nor tradesman I caused to fret
But I robbed lords and their ladies at night
And carry all home to my heart's delight.

To Covent Garden I yook my way
With my dear wife for to see the play
Lord Fielding's men did me pursue
And taken was I by the cursed crew.

My father cried, "My darling son."
My wife she cried, "I am undone."
My mother tore her white locks and cried
That in the cradle I should have died.

When I am dead and in my grave
A flashy funeral pray let me have
Six highwaymen for to carry me
Give them broad swords and sweet liberty.

Six pretty fair maids to bear my pall
Give them grey ribbons and green garlands all
When I'm dead they will speak true
He was a wild and a wicked youth.

In Newry town where I was bred and born
In Stephen's Green now I lie in scorn.
I served my time there to the saddlers' trade
And I always was a roving blade.

MONEY TALKS AND DEMOCRACY WALKS IN IRELAND

So two thirds of the Irish free state voted for the Lisbon treaty and what will be a European superstate to mirror the USA. So what will "DEMOCRACY" in the United Snakes of Europe be like. Well this is the actual type of US democracy, being exported with war crimes and torture at the moment.

The average cost of a successful campaign for the House of Representatives in the US is almost $1.4 million. Most House seats don't change hands, because in the American 'democratic' system of the twenty-first century, incumbents don't lose, they retire or die.

In 2008, 403 incumbents ran for seats and 380 of them won. As for becoming a Senator? You need some really good buddies in pharmaceuticals or health care ($236,022,031 in lobbying in 2008), insurance ($153,694,224), oil and gas ($131,978,521). A winning senatorial seat costs a cool $8,531,267, a losing seat $4,130,078 in 2008.

So you want to be president of the EU? In that case, just to be safe next time, you probably should consider raising somewhere in the range of one billion Euros. After all, the 2008 campaign in the US cost Barack Obama's team approximately $730 million. Of course, it helps to know the right people. Last year, the total lobbying bill, including money that went out for electoral campaigns and for lobbying Congress and federal agencies, came to $3.3 billion and almost 9 months into 2009, another $1.63 billion has already gone out without an election in sight.

Want to overturn a referendum of the people of a small European free state like Ireland, no problem if you've got the money, as the revised Lisbon Treaty result in Dublin proves yesterday.Its not so much a case of the ballot paper in one hand and an armalite in the other, as money talks and democracy walks.Want to complain about it, your kidding right as if the corporate media will allow it. Doesn't leave you many options, does it comrade??.

What Have We Done to Democracy?

Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos, and a New Cold War in Kashmir
By Arundhati Roy
While we're still arguing about whether there's life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By "democracy" I don't mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.

So, is there life after democracy?

Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defense of democracy. It's flawed, we say. It isn't perfect, but it's better than everything else that's on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: "Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia... is that what you would prefer?"

Whether democracy should be the utopia that all "developing" societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn't meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It's meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy -- too much representation, too little democracy -- needs some structural adjustment.

The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?

Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly -- our nearsightedness?

Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost. It would be conceit to pretend I have the answers to any of these questions. But it does look as if the beacon could be failing and democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would.

A Clerk of Resistance

As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry.

Something about the cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound, "apply-through-proper-channels" nature of governance and subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me. My only excuse is to say that it takes odd tools to uncover the maze of subterfuge and hypocrisy that cloaks the callousness and the cold, calculated violence of the world's favorite new superpower. Repression "through proper channels" sometimes engenders resistance "through proper channels." As resistance goes this isn't enough, I know. But for now, it's all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for poetry and for the feral howl.

Today, words like "progress" and "development" have become interchangeable with economic "reforms," "deregulation," and "privatization." Freedom has come to mean choice. It has less to do with the human spirit than with different brands of deodorant. Market no longer means a place where you buy provisions. The "market" is a de-territorialized space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling "futures." Justice has come to mean human rights (and of those, as they say, "a few will do").

This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalize their detractors, deprive them of a language to voice their critique and dismiss them as being "anti-progress," "anti-development," "anti-reform," and of course "anti-national" -- negativists of the worst sort.

Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, "Don't you believe in progress?" To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs, and whose homes are being bulldozed, they say, "Do you have an alternative development model?" To those who believe that a government is duty bound to provide people with basic education, health care, and social security, they say, "You're against the market." And who except a cretin could be against markets?

To reclaim these stolen words requires explanations that are too tedious for a world with a short attention span, and too expensive in an era when Free Speech has become unaffordable for the poor. This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing.

Two decades of "Progress" in India has created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it -- and a much, much vaster, desperate underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts, and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines, and Special Economic Zones. All developed in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.

The hoary institutions of Indian democracy -- the judiciary, the police, the "free" press, and, of course, elections -- far from working as a system of checks and balances, quite often do the opposite. They provide each other cover to promote the larger interests of Union and Progress. In the process, they generate such confusion, such a cacophony, that voices raised in warning just become part of the noise. And that only helps to enhance the image of the tolerant, lumbering, colorful, somewhat chaotic democracy. The chaos is real. But so is the consensus.

A New Cold War in Kashmir

Speaking of consensus, there's the small and ever-present matter of Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir the consensus in India is hard core. It cuts across every section of the establishment -- including the media, the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia, and even Bollywood.

The war in the Kashmir valley is almost 20 years old now, and has claimed about 70,000 lives. Tens of thousands have been tortured, several thousand have "disappeared," women have been raped, tens of thousands widowed. Half a million Indian troops patrol the Kashmir valley, making it the most militarized zone in the world. (The United States had about 165,000 active-duty troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The Indian Army now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed militancy in Kashmir. Perhaps that's true. But does military domination mean victory?

How does a government that claims to be a democracy justify a military occupation? By holding regular elections, of course. Elections in Kashmir have had a long and fascinating past. The blatantly rigged state election of 1987 was the immediate provocation for the armed uprising that began in 1990. Since then elections have become a finely honed instrument of the military occupation, a sinister playground for India's deep state. Intelligence agencies have created political parties and decoy politicians, they have constructed and destroyed political careers at will. It is they more than anyone else who decide what the outcome of each election will be. After every election, the Indian establishment declares that India has won a popular mandate from the people of Kashmir.

In the summer of 2008, a dispute over land being allotted to the Amarnath Shrine Board coalesced into a massive, nonviolent uprising. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people defied soldiers and policemen -- who fired straight into the crowds, killing scores of people -- and thronged the streets. From early morning to late in the night, the city reverberated to chants of "Azadi! Azadi!" (Freedom! Freedom!). Fruit sellers weighed fruit chanting "Azadi! Azadi!" Shopkeepers, doctors, houseboat owners, guides, weavers, carpet sellers -- everybody was out with placards, everybody shouted "Azadi! Azadi!" The protests went on for several days.

The protests were massive. They were democratic, and they were nonviolent. For the first time in decades fissures appeared in mainstream public opinion in India. The Indian state panicked. Unsure of how to deal with this mass civil disobedience, it ordered a crackdown. It enforced the harshest curfew in recent memory with shoot-on-sight orders. In effect, for days on end, it virtually caged millions of people. The major pro-freedom leaders were placed under house arrest, several others were jailed. House-to-house searches culminated in the arrests of hundreds of people.

Once the rebellion was brought under control, the government did something extraordinary -- it announced elections in the state. Pro-independence leaders called for a boycott. They were rearrested. Almost everybody believed the elections would become a huge embarrassment for the Indian government. The security establishment was convulsed with paranoia. Its elaborate network of spies, renegades, and embedded journalists began to buzz with renewed energy. No chances were taken. (Even I, who had nothing to do with any of what was going on, was put under house arrest in Srinagar for two days.)

Calling for elections was a huge risk. But the gamble paid off. People turned out to vote in droves. It was the biggest voter turnout since the armed struggle began. It helped that the polls were scheduled so that the first districts to vote were the most militarized districts even within the Kashmir valley.

None of India's analysts, journalists, and psephologists cared to ask why people who had only weeks ago risked everything, including bullets and shoot-on-sight orders, should have suddenly changed their minds. None of the high-profile scholars of the great festival of democracy -- who practically live in TV studios when there are elections in mainland India, picking apart every forecast and exit poll and every minor percentile swing in the vote count -- talked about what elections mean in the presence of such a massive, year-round troop deployment (an armed soldier for every 20 civilians).

No one speculated about the mystery of hundreds of unknown candidates who materialized out of nowhere to represent political parties that had no previous presence in the Kashmir valley. Where had they come from? Who was financing them? No one was curious. No one spoke about the curfew, the mass arrests, the lockdown of constituencies that were going to the polls.

Not many talked about the fact that campaigning politicians went out of their way to de-link Azadi and the Kashmir dispute from elections, which they insisted were only about municipal issues -- roads, water, electricity. No one talked about why people who have lived under a military occupation for decades -- where soldiers could barge into homes and whisk away people at any time of the day or night -- might need someone to listen to them, to take up their cases, to represent them.

The minute elections were over, the establishment and the mainstream press declared victory (for India) once again. The most worrying fallout was that in Kashmir, people began to parrot their colonizers' view of themselves as a somewhat pathetic people who deserved what they got. "Never trust a Kashmiri," several Kashmiris said to me. "We're fickle and unreliable." Psychological warfare, technically known as psy-ops, has been an instrument of official policy in Kashmir. Its depredations over decades -- its attempt to destroy people's self-esteem -- are arguably the worst aspect of the occupation. It's enough to make you wonder whether there is any connection at all between elections and democracy.

The trouble is that Kashmir sits on the fault lines of a region that is awash in weapons and sliding into chaos. The Kashmiri freedom struggle, with its crystal clear sentiment but fuzzy outlines, is caught in the vortex of several dangerous and conflicting ideologies -- Indian nationalism (corporate as well as "Hindu," shading into imperialism), Pakistani nationalism (breaking down under the burden of its own contradictions), U.S. imperialism (made impatient by a tanking economy), and a resurgent medieval-Islamist Taliban (fast gaining legitimacy, despite its insane brutality, because it is seen to be resisting an occupation). Each of these ideologies is capable of a ruthlessness that can range from genocide to nuclear war. Add Chinese imperial ambitions, an aggressive, reincarnated Russia, and the huge reserves of natural gas in the Caspian region and persistent whispers about natural gas, oil, and uranium reserves in Kashmir and Ladakh, and you have the recipe for a new Cold War (which, like the last one, is cold for some and hot for others).

In the midst of all this, Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young among India's 150 million Muslims who have been brutalized, humiliated, and marginalized. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

There is no doubt that the Kashmir dispute ranks right up there, along with Palestine, as one of the oldest, most intractable disputes in the world. That does not mean that it cannot be resolved. Only that the solution will not be completely to the satisfaction of any one party, one country, or one ideology. Negotiators will have to be prepared to deviate from the "party line."

Of course, we haven't yet reached the stage where the government of India is even prepared to admit that there's a problem, let alone negotiate a solution. Right now it has no reason to. Internationally, its stocks are soaring. And while its neighbors deal with bloodshed, civil war, concentration camps, refugees, and army mutinies, India has just concluded a beautiful election. However, "demon-crazy" can't fool all the people all the time. India's temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun), have magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers.

Is Democracy Melting?

Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds and temperatures that dip to minus 40 degrees Celsius. Of the hundreds who have died there, many have died just from the elements.

The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war -- thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents, and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly.

While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high-altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with the military standoff than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They're good people who believe in peace, free speech, and in human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the U.N. Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan… it's a long list.)

The glacial melt will cause severe floods on the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. That will give us even more reasons to fight. We'll need more weapons. Who knows? That sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life -- and the glaciers will melt even faster.

Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. Her new book, just published by Haymarket Books, is Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. This post is adapted from the introduction to that book.

Copyright 2009 Arundhati Roy

WHITE IRISH NIGGERS and LISBON

WHITE IRISH NIGGERS and LISBON


The No campaign has been accused of being paranoid about the Lisbon Treaty, which Ireland last year rejected, in an expensive nationwide rederendum. It is a rambling text meant to deliberately confuse ordinary working people. Almost 500 pages filled with details on just about everything.


One of the most important provisions would create a EU president, a continental foreign policy and eliminate the requirement of unanimity for the EU to act on major issues. While the consolidation still would not be as complete as say the U.S. yet, Brussels would emerge significantly strengthened well on the way to absolute and total control over working people in countries like Ireland.

The transformation of the Common Market which started as the European Coal and Steel Community, into the European Union has gone far. Not far enough, however, for the continent’s new elite ruling class, imbued with a pan-European philosophy to control the various national policies. Thus the campaign to further consolidate control through the Lisbon Treaty, over working people, over banking, over the cannon fodder for a unified military partner for US neo-colonialism.


The EU has evolved from a tool to expand markets for profit, into an ever more distant regulatory bureaucracy over working people's lives. Like Washington DC in the US, popular resistance is also growing to transferring anymore local powers to Brussels.


Despite opposition from just about everyone, a treaty evolved, christened the “Lisbon Treaty” which only required parliamentary approval in most countries. Polls show that voters in more than half of the EU’s member states would reject the agreement. They did not receive an opportunity to vote however, except in Ireland, who had already won that right through, the many sacrifices of its revolutionary dead, creating a constitution to protect citizens interests from centuries of being conscripted cannon fodder for their eternal colonial wars of imperialism.


The skids were well greased however by corporate and banking money, to slide the treaty through the various parliaments, irrespective of popular opinion in Europe. Then, on June 12 last year Irish voters, "the white niggers of europe", had the audacity to say no.


Anger and gnashing of teeth filled the corridors of power throughout the European continent, after the Treaty's death. However all the politicians started immediately, to scheme to get around the Irish vote. Ideas included allowing Ireland to opt out, were considered. A few politicians secretly suggested ramming the treaty through Ireland’s Dail, the lower house of parliament, but it was eventually agreed that the Irish vote again.


In short, democracy is fine in the EU, as long as it yields the correct outcome. This time they are bullying it through with innuendos of blackmail, fear, threats and disinformation or barefaced lies. So the Irish government in having another vote is brushing the last nationwide vote aside with disdain. The Irish public has been watching its politicians scheming in public ever since the last NO vote. So they can see that the con is firmly on.

The new European elite and fat cat Irish politicians agree more on process than substance, most obviously their interests merge on the right of the elite to make all the important decisions on exploiting working people to the maximum, though their may be disagreement on the shareout of the spoils and power.


The outrage of Mary Frances McKenna, director of the Business Alliance for Europe is an insight into the fascist nature of the new European elite.


"What type of democracy is it that says one country can dictate to 26 countries? What type of democracy is it where one country demands that others respect its vote, but refuses to respect the vote of the other 26 countries? What type of democracy is it that one country tells 26 countries how to ratify its laws? It’s not a democracy at all. What it really is, is dictatorship masquerading as the voice of the dispossessed."


If the Lisbon Treaty proponents are so concerned about respecting the democratic will of the European people, then they should embrace the proposal for an EU-wide referendum, suggested by Declan Ganley, who is an important part of the Treaty's opposition in Ireland.


The business alliance believes democracy is preventing people from deciding. McKenna believes that the 495 million Europeans, or the people of the other 26 countries, should be able to decide through a few thousand highly paid priviliged Eurocrats, spread across national parliaments, the EU bureaucracy, large corporations, institutional allies and the corporate media.


The Irish result is so threatening, because last time the people seized back control. The gap between the European elite and mass European opinion, is so great that it “prompts a more troubling question. Why, across Europe, have the political classes become so disengaged from the citizens they represent?” said the British Independent newspaper.


Irish people do not want to get dragged into a war with nuclear-armed Russia or Afghanistan and deapite strict neutrality laws, its government has arrogantly already sneaked Irish soldiers in there, because a distant and largely unaccountable elite in Europe and the US has ordered it, which has demonstrated its utter disdain for what the Irish people vote and decide that war is necessary?


Some Americans believe a more powerful EU would provide a more effective partner for the U.S. government. Perhaps, even a consolidated Europe implementing Brussels policies might just as well oppose American interests and create the windfall of an arms race for the securocrats and their friends in the armament idustries But the theory doesn’t matter its the power and money that matters.


Maybe with the brutal history of imperialism in Ireland and the sacrifices made by its republican resistance and working class citizen's armies paranoia is quite healthy after all.









“I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country,” he wrote in a letter to his wife. The apparent racial inferiority of the Irish was made more shocking for Kingsley by their superficial similarity to the English: “If they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.” By the time he described the Irish in “The Water Babies,” Kingsley had regained a measure of judgment. There they are “good-natured,” but still “untrustable” and “wild.”

In recent years, Irish writers have taken up the idea of racial difference themselves, turning it into an empowering distinction. Think of the white working-class musician in Roddy Doyle’s 1987 novel, “The Commitments,” whose identification with American soul music leads him to conclude that the “Irish are the niggers of Europe.” “Say it loud,” he tells his band, “I’m black and I’m proud.”



























Art. 48 TEU: The Treaties may be amended in accordance by an ordinary revision procedure or by simplified revision procedures

Art. 1 TEU: "The Union shall replace and succeed the European Community"

Art. 47 TEU: The Union shall have legal personality.

Art 37 TEU: "The Union may conclude agreements with one or more States or international organisations in areas covered by this Chapter."

Art. 21.2.h TEU: "promote an international system" and "global governance"

26.4 TEU:" The common foreign and security policy" will use "national and Union resources."

Art. 42.3 TEU of the Lisbon Treaty: "Member States shall undertake progressively to improve their military capabilities."

Art. 42.3 TEU: "Member States shall make civilian and military capabilities available to the Union for the implementation of the common security and defence policy"

EU President: Art. 15 TEU: The European Council shall elect its President, by a qualified majority, for a term of two and a half years, renewable once.

Since EU membership, we estimate European vessels have taken up to €200 billion worth of fish out of our waters - Mr Ebbie Sheehan, Irish Fishermens Organisation. Ireland received €60 Billion. Conned out of €140 billion, more if processing is included.

Bureaucrat quote: Day said the treaty will give the EU the power to "speak with one voice in helping to shape THE new world order."
(Irish Times, 7 Sept 2009) - Catherine Day, Secretary-General of the European Commission.

MORON GOMBEEN IRISH LIARS, CHANCERS, SPOOFER POLITICIANS - LISBON (htt

Link

GOMBEEN POLITICIANS

The mountain people come and go
For wool to weave or seed to sow,
White flour to bake a wedding cake,
Red spirits for a stranger's wake.
No man can call his soul his own
Who has the Devil's spoon on loan.
And so behind his web of bales,
Horse halters, barrels, pucan sails
The gombeen like a spider sits,
Surfeited; and for all his wits,
As poor as one who never knew
The treasure of the early dew.
-- Joseph Campbell

Ireland's Famine gombeen men and women, originally were Irish fixers, loan sharks, enablers who did the dirty work of absentee landlords and the British priviliged establishment in Ireland while millions starved of hunger and died. Politicians, cute hures, journalists, economists, bankers, etc.. The island is still plagued with them today.

Generally, "gombeen" is now often used as an adjective, referring to the mindset possessed by those engaged in leech like activities such as profiting from their neighbour's misfortunes. In Irish politics, its definition has become less precise and it can also imply pettiness and close-mindedness.

Cute hures on the otherhand, does not just refer to the overweight fat imbeciles at the top of the Irish political tree or their obese female version of gombeen man. It was born out of the compliance of a certain class of people, such as politicians, journalists, economists, etc., only too willing to lick arse for money and facilitate the exploitation of ordinary people, principally by banking today, for which they receive rich commissions (bribes).

Today we have another gombeen Taoiseach, who has said spending cuts in Ireland, are the only way to ensure that international bankers will lend the Govt the money needed to run the country. He's a liar and so are the other 90 per cent of the politicians in the country,including the fake opposition, who pretend to debate it. Oh yes, he and his ilk will get well paid to facilitate a drip down banking financial loan system, with nothing left for the people of no property but hardship, hunger and early graves.

Below is an article of just one alternative, for real recovery and a quality life for all.

Why Capitalism Fails

The man who saw the meltdown coming had another troubling insight: it will happen again

By Stephen Mihm

September 14, 2009 "Boston Globe" -- Since the global financial system started unraveling in dramatic fashion two years ago, distinguished economists have suffered a crisis of their own. Ivy League professors who had trumpeted the dawn of a new era of stability have scrambled to explain how, exactly, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression had ambushed their entire profession.

Amid the hand-wringing and the self-flagellation, a few more cerebral commentators started to speak about the arrival of a "Minsky moment," and a growing number of insiders began to warn of a coming "Minsky meltdown."

"Minsky" was shorthand for Hyman Minsky, a hitherto obscure macroeconomist who died over a decade ago. Many economists had never heard of him when the crisis struck, and he remains a shadowy figure in the profession. But lately he has begun emerging as perhaps the most prescient big-picture thinker about what, exactly, we are going through. A contrarian amid the conformity of postwar America, an expert in the then-unfashionable subfields of finance and crisis, Minsky was one economist who saw what was coming. He predicted, decades ago, almost exactly the kind of meltdown that recently hammered the global economy.

In recent months Minsky's star has only risen. Nobel Prize-winning economists talk about incorporating his insights, and copies of his books are back in print and selling well. He's gone from being a nearly forgotten figure to a key player in the debate over how to fix the financial system.

But if Minsky was as right as he seems to have been, the news is not exactly encouraging. He believed in capitalism, but also believed it had almost a genetic weakness. Modern finance, he
argued, was far from the stabilizing force that mainstream economics portrayed: rather, it was a system that created the illusion of stability while simultaneously creating the conditions for an inevitable and dramatic collapse.

In other words, the one person who foresaw the crisis also believed that our whole financial system contains the seeds of its own destruction. "Instability," he wrote, "is an inherent and inescapable flaw of capitalism."

Minsky's vision might have been dark, but he was not a fatalist; he believed it was possible to craft policies that could blunt the collateral damage caused by financial crises. But with a growing number of economists eager to declare the recession over, and the crisis itself apparently behind us, these policies may prove as discomforting as the theories that prompted them in the first place. Indeed, as economists re-embrace Minsky's prophetic insights, it is far from clear that they're ready to reckon with the full implications of what he saw.

In an ideal world, a profession dedicated to the study of capitalism would be as freewheeling and innovative as its ostensible subject. But economics has often been subject to powerful orthodoxies, and never more so than when Minsky arrived on the scene.

That orthodoxy, born in the years after World War II, was known as the neoclassical synthesis. The older belief in a self-regulating, self-stabilizing free market had selectively absorbed a few insights from John Maynard Keynes, the great economist of the 1930s who wrote extensively of the ways that capitalism might fail to maintain full employment. Most economists still believed that free-market capitalism was a fundamentally stable basis for an economy, though thanks to Keynes, some now acknowledged that government might under certain circumstances play a role in keeping the economy - and employment - on an even keel.

Economists like Paul Samuelson became the public face of the new establishment; he and others at a handful of top universities became deeply influential in Washington. In theory, Minsky could have been an academic star in this new establishment: Like Samuelson, he earned his doctorate in economics at Harvard University, where he studied with legendary Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, as well as future Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief.

But Minsky was cut from different cloth than many of the other big names. The descendent of immigrants from Minsk, in modern-day Belarus, Minsky was a red-diaper baby, the son of Menshevik socialists. While most economists spent the 1950s and 1960s toiling over mathematical models, Minsky pursued research on poverty, hardly the hottest subfield of economics. With long, wild, white hair, Minsky was closer to the counterculture than to mainstream economics. He was, recalls the economist L. Randall Wray, a former student, a "character."

So while his colleagues from graduate school went on to win Nobel prizes and rise to the top of academia, Minsky languished. He drifted from Brown to Berkeley and eventually to Washington University. Indeed, many economists weren't even aware of his work. One assessment of Minsky published in 1997 simply noted that his "work has not had a major influence in the macroeconomic discussions of the last thirty years."

Yet he was busy. In addition to poverty, Minsky began to delve into the field of finance, which despite its seeming importance had no place in the theories formulated by Samuelson and others. He also began to ask a simple, if disturbing question: "Can ‘it' happen again?" - where "it" was, like Harry Potter's nemesis Voldemort, the thing that could not be named: the Great Depression.

In his writings, Minsky looked to his intellectual hero, Keynes, arguably the greatest economist of the 20th century. But where most economists drew a single, simplistic lesson from Keynes - that government could step in and micromanage the economy, smooth out the business cycle, and keep things on an even keel - Minsky had no interest in what he and a handful of other dissident economists came to call "bastard Keynesianism."

Instead, Minsky drew his own, far darker, lessons from Keynes's landmark writings, which dealt not only with the problem of unemployment, but with money and banking. Although Keynes had never stated this explicitly, Minsky argued that Keynes's collective work amounted to a powerful argument that capitalism was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse. Far from trending toward some magical state of equilibrium, capitalism would inevitably do the opposite. It would lurch over a cliff.

This insight bore the stamp of his advisor Joseph Schumpeter, the noted Austrian economist now famous for documenting capitalism's ceaseless process of "creative destruction." But Minsky spent more time thinking about destruction than creation. In doing so, he formulated an intriguing theory: not only was capitalism prone to collapse, he argued, it was precisely its periods of economic stability that would set the stage for monumental crises.

Minsky called his idea the "Financial Instability Hypothesis." In the wake of a depression, he noted, financial institutions are extraordinarily conservative, as are businesses. With the borrowers and the lenders who fuel the economy all steering clear of high-risk deals, things go smoothly: loans are almost always paid on time, businesses generally succeed, and everyone does well. That success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, "Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure."

As people forget that failure is a possibility, a "euphoric economy" eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers - what he called speculative borrowers, those whose income would cover interest payments but not the principal; and those he called "Ponzi borrowers," those whose income could cover neither, and could only pay their bills by borrowing still further. As these latter categories grew, the overall economy would shift from a conservative but profitable environment to a much more freewheeling system dominated by players whose survival depended not on sound business plans, but on borrowed money and freely available credit.

Once that kind of economy had developed, any panic could wreck the market. The failure of a single firm, for example, or the revelation of a staggering fraud could trigger fear and a sudden, economy-wide attempt to shed debt. This watershed moment - what was later dubbed the "Minsky moment" - would create an environment deeply inhospitable to all borrowers. The speculators and Ponzi borrowers would collapse first, as they lost access to the credit they needed to survive. Even the more stable players might find themselves unable to pay their debt without selling off assets; their forced sales would send asset prices spiraling downward, and inevitably, the entire rickety financial edifice would start to collapse. Businesses would falter, and the crisis would spill over to the "real" economy that depended on the now-collapsing financial system.

From the 1960s onward, Minsky elaborated on this hypothesis. At the time he believed that this shift was already underway: postwar stability, financial innovation, and the receding memory of the Great Depression were gradually setting the stage for a crisis of epic proportions. Most of what he had to say fell on deaf ears. The 1960s were an era of solid growth, and although the economic stagnation of the 1970s was a blow to mainstream neo-Keynesian economics, it did not send policymakers scurrying to Minsky. Instead, a new free market fundamentalism took root: government was the problem, not the solution.

Moreover, the new dogma coincided with a remarkable era of stability. The period from the late 1980s onward has been dubbed the "Great Moderation," a time of shallow recessions and great resilience among most major industrial economies. Things had never been more stable. The likelihood that "it" could happen again now seemed laughable.

Yet throughout this period, the financial system - not the economy, but finance as an industry - was growing by leaps and bounds. Minsky spent the last years of his life, in the early 1990s, warning of the dangers of securitization and other forms of financial innovation, but few economists listened. Nor did they pay attention to consumers' and companies' growing dependence on debt, and the growing use of leverage within the financial system.

By the end of the 20th century, the financial system that Minsky had warned about had materialized, complete with speculative borrowers, Ponzi borrowers, and precious few of the conservative borrowers who were the bedrock of a truly stable economy. Over decades, we really had forgotten the meaning of risk. When storied financial firms started to fall, sending shockwaves through the "real" economy, his predictions started to look a lot like a road map.

"This wasn't a Minsky moment," explains Randall Wray. "It was a Minsky half-century."

Minsky is now all the rage. A year ago, an influential Financial Times columnist confided to readers that rereading Minsky's 1986 "masterpiece" - "Stabilizing an Unstable Economy" - "helped clear my mind on this crisis." Others joined the chorus. Earlier this year, two economic heavyweights - Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong - both tipped their hats to him in public forums. Indeed, the Nobel Prize-winning Krugman titled one of the Robbins lectures at the London School of Economics "The Night They Re-read Minsky."

Today most economists, it's safe to say, are probably reading Minsky for the first time, trying to fit his unconventional insights into the theoretical scaffolding of their profession. If Minsky were alive today, he would no doubt applaud this belated acknowledgment, even if it has come at a terrible cost. As he once wryly observed, "There is nothing wrong with macroeconomics that another depression [won't] cure."

But does Minsky's work offer us any practical help? If capitalism is inherently self-destructive and unstable - never mind that it produces inequality and unemployment, as Keynes had observed - now what?

After spending his life warning of the perils of the complacency that comes with stability - and having it fall on deaf ears - Minsky was understandably pessimistic about the ability to short-circuit the tragic cycle of boom and bust. But he did believe that much could be done to ameliorate the damage.

To prevent the Minsky moment from becoming a national calamity, part of his solution (which was shared with other economists) was to have the Federal Reserve - what he liked to call the "Big Bank" - step into the breach and act as a lender of last resort to firms under siege. By throwing lines of liquidity to foundering firms, the Federal Reserve could break the cycle and stabilize the financial system. It failed to do so during the Great Depression, when it stood by and let a banking crisis spiral out of control. This time, under the leadership of Ben Bernanke - like Minsky, a scholar of the Depression - it took a very different approach, becoming a lender of last resort to everything from hedge funds to investment banks to money market funds.

Minsky's other solution, however, was considerably more radical and less palatable politically. The preferred mainstream tactic for pulling the economy out of a crisis was - and is - based on the Keynesian notion of "priming the pump" by sending money that will employ lots of high-skilled, unionized labor - by building a new high-speed train line, for example.

Minsky, however, argued for a "bubble-up" approach, sending money to the poor and unskilled first. The government - or what he liked to call "Big Government" - should become the "employer of last resort," he said, offering a job to anyone who wanted one at a set minimum wage. It would be paid to workers who would supply child care, clean streets, and provide services that would give taxpayers a visible return on their dollars. In being available to everyone, it would be even more ambitious than the New Deal, sharply reducing the welfare rolls by guaranteeing a job for anyone who was able to work. Such a program would not only help the poor and unskilled, he believed, but would put a floor beneath everyone else's wages too, preventing salaries of more skilled workers from falling too precipitously, and sending benefits up the socioeconomic ladder.

While economists may be acknowledging some of Minsky's points on financial instability, it's safe to say that even liberal policymakers are still a long way from thinking about such an expanded role for the American government. If nothing else, an expensive full-employment program would veer far too close to socialism for the comfort of politicians. For his part, Wray thinks that the critics are apt to misunderstand Minsky. "He saw these ideas as perfectly consistent with capitalism," says Wray. "They would make capitalism better."

But not perfect. Indeed, if there's anything to be drawn from Minsky's collected work, it's that perfection, like stability and equilibrium, are mirages. Minsky did not share his profession's quaint belief that everything could be reduced to a tidy model, or a pat theory. His was a kind of existential economics: capitalism, like life itself, is difficult, even tragic. "There is no simple answer to the problems of our capitalism," wrote Minsky. "There is no solution that can be transformed into a catchy phrase and carried on banners."

It's a sentiment that may limit the extent to which Minsky becomes part of any new orthodoxy. But that's probably how he would have preferred it, believes liberal economist James Galbraith. "I think he would resist being domesticated," says Galbraith. "He spent his career in professional isolation."

Stephen Mihm is a history professor at the University of Georgia and author of "A Nation of Counterfeiters"