Marian Price is just one of several Irish people currently politically interned in British Occupied Ireland during which time lawyers have not been allowed to see any of Britain's ‘alleged’ evidence.
• She has been kept in solitary confinement in a ‘male’ high security prison • She is effectively interned without a trial, sentence, or release date. • She has not been given any timescale for any investigation. • She has not been allowed to see the evidence that the state claims to have • Her release has been ordered on two occasions by judges. However, on both occasions the British Vice royal has overruled those decisions. • The Vice royal claims they ‘revoked Marian’s license, ’despite Marian never being released on license. She was given a Royal Pardon. • Marian’s Royal Pardon has ‘gone missing’ from the home office (the only time in history). The British Vice royal has taken the view that unless a paper copy can be located – it must be assumed that she does not have one. It is generally agreed that MI5 shredded her majesty's pardon. • Despite no ‘license’ existing for her release from prison in 1980, it is the non-existent licence that is being used to keep her in prison. • She can only be released by Theresa Villiers the current Vice royal responsible for Marian's internment.
A Time for ‘Sublime Madness’ By Chris Hedges
January 21, 2013 "Truthdig" - - The planet we have assaulted will convulse with fury. The senseless greed of limitless capitalist expansion will implode the global economy. The decimation of civil liberties, carried out in the name of fighting terror, will shackle us to an interconnected security and surveillance state that stretches from Moscow to Istanbul to New York. To endure what lies ahead we will have to harness the human imagination. It was the human imagination that permitted African-Americans during slavery and the Jim Crow era to transcend their physical condition. It was the human imagination that sustained Sitting Bull and Black Elk as their land was seized and their cultures were broken. And it was the human imagination that allowed the survivors in the Nazi death camps to retain the power of the sacred.
It is the imagination that makes possible transcendence. Chants, work songs, spirituals, the blues, poetry, dance and art converged under slavery to nourish and sustain this imagination. These were the forces that, as Ralph Ellison wrote, “we had in place of freedom.” The oppressed would be the first—for they know their fate—to admit that on a rational level such a notion is absurd, but they also know that it is only through the imagination that they survive. Jewish inmates in Auschwitz reportedly put God on trial for the Holocaust and then condemned God to death. A rabbi stood after the verdict to lead the evening prayers.
African-Americans and Native Americans, for centuries, had little control over their destinies. Forces of bigotry and violence kept them subjugated by whites. Suffering, for the oppressed, was tangible. Death was a constant companion. And it was only their imagination, as William Faulkner noted at the end of “The Sound and the Fury,” that permitted them—unlike the novel’s white Compson family—to “endure.”
The theologian James H. Cone captures this in his masterpiece “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” Cone says that for oppressed blacks the cross was a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.” Cone continues:
That God could “make a way out of no way” in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the “troubles of this world,” no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.
Reinhold Niebuhr, as Cone points out in his book, labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.” Niebuhr wrote that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”
Niebuhr’s “sublime madness” permits the rest of us to view the possibilities of a world otherwise seen only by the visionary, the artist and the madman. And it permits us to fight for these possibilities. The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, asAbraham Heschel wrote, were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.”
Primo Levi in his memoir “Survival in Auschwitz” tells of teaching Italian to another inmate, Jean Samuel, in exchange for lessons in French. Levi recites to Samuel from memory Canto XXVI of Dante’s “The Inferno.” It is the story of Ulysses’ final voyage.
“He has received the message,” Levi writes, “he has felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular.” Levi goes on. “It is vitally necessary and urgent that he listen, that he understand … before it is too late; tomorrow he or I might be dead, or we might never see each other again.”
The poet Leon Staff wrote from the Warsaw ghetto: “Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all.”
It is only those who can retreat into the imagination, and through their imagination can minister to the suffering of those around them, who uncover the physical and psychological strength to resist.
"… [T]he people noticed that Crazy Horse was queerer than ever,” Black Elk said in remembering the final days of the wars against the Indians. He went on to say of the great Sioux warrior: “He hardly ever stayed in the camp. People would find him out alone in the cold, and they would ask him to come home with them. He would not come, but sometimes he would tell the people what to do. People wondered if he ate anything at all. Once my father found him out alone like that, and he said to my father: ‘Uncle, you have noticed me the way I act. But do not worry; there are caves and holes for me to live in, and out here the spirits may help me. I am making plans for the good of my people.’ ”
Homer, Dante, Beethoven, Melville, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson and James Baldwin, along with artists such as the sculptor David Smith, the photographer Diane Arbus and the blues musician Charley Patton, all had it. It is the sublime madness that lets one sing, as bluesmanIshman Bracey did in Hinds County, Miss., “I’ve been down so long, Lawd, down don’t worry me.” And yet in the mists of the imagination also lies the certainty of divine justice:
I feel my hell a-risin’, a-risin’ every day; I feel my hell a-risin’, a-risin’ every day; Someday it’ll burst this levee and wash the whole wide world away.
Shakespeare’s greatest heroes and heroines—Prospero, Anthony, Juliet, Viola, Rosalind, Hamlet, Cordelia and Lear—all have this sublime madness. As Theseus says in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”:
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact.
“Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it,” wrote James Baldwin. “Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.”
Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
How Soon Do Empires Forget The Lessons of History!
The 67th Anniversary of the Victory over Nazi-Fascism
By Fidel Castro
May 11, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- No political event can be judged outside of the era and the circumstances in which it took place. No one even knows one percent of the fabulous history of Man; but thanks to history, we know about occurrences that go beyond the limits of the imaginable.
The privilege of having known persons, even the locations where some of the events related to the historic battle took place, augmented the interest with which I awaited the anniversary this year.
The colossal deed was fruit of the heroism of a group of peoples that the revolution and socialism had united and intertwined to put an end to the brutal exploitation that the world had been putting up with throughout the millennia. The Russians were always proud of having headed that revolution and of the sacrifices they were capable of in bringing it to fruition.
This very important anniversary of the victory could not be understood under the colours of a flag or a name other than the one that presided over the heroism of the combatants of the Great Patriotic War. Without a doubt, something untouchable and unforgettable remained: the anthem whose unforgettable notes accompanied millions of men and women to challenge death and to crush the invaders who wished to impose a thousand years of Nazism and holocaust on all humanity.
With those ideas in mind, I enjoyed the hours I dedicated to the most organized and martial procession I could ever imagine, whose protagonists were men formed in the Russian military universities.
The Yankees and the blood-thirsty NATO armies could not imagine that the crimes committed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, the attacks on Pakistan and Syria, the threats against Iran and other Middle Eastern countries, the military bases in Latin America, Africa and Asia could take place with absolute impunity, without the world becoming aware of the unusual and crazy threat.
How soon do empires forget the lessons of history!
The military technology exhibited in Moscow on May 9th demonstrated the impressive capacity of the Russian Federation to provide a proper and varied response to the conventional and nuclear resources of imperialism.
It was just the ceremony we were waiting for on the glorious anniversary of the Soviet victory over fascism.
Fidel Castro Ruz - May 10, 2012
Is The United States An Accidental Empire? By The Globalist
May 10, 2012 "Information Clearing House" -- The United States was born out of a struggle against an imperial power. Beginning in the 1840s — seven decades after its founding — it embarked on a succession of "wars of choice" that were profoundly at odds with its founding principles and left it with an empire of its own. This inaugural "Thomas Paine" column looks at how American changed — and how its empire is handicapping its future.
Our present predicament didn't happen overnight. It was a long time in the making. Along the way, America changed. We forsook our birthright, we deceived ourselves and, ever so slowly, our loadstar changed from liberty to force. When it was all over, we woke up and had an empire.
The United States broke with the foreign policy of its Founders in three wars of choice. We used guns to annex two-fifths of Mexico. We used guns to remove Spain from its colonies in the Caribbean and the Philippines. We used guns to replace Germany as the leading military power in Europe.
In the seven decades between the start of the Mexican-American war in 1848 and America entering World War I in 1917, the die was cast.
We didn't go to war with Mexico, Spain and Germany to defend ourselves. President James Polk proclaimed it was our Manifest Destiny to redraw our southern border to include almost half of Mexico. Likewise, President McKinley thought it was our Manifest Destiny to replace Spain as a colonial power in Cuba and the Philippines. In World War I, President Woodrow Wilson repackaged Manifest Destiny as saving the world for democracy.
War no longer needed to be justified as defending our country. War was now justified as promoting democracy around the world. Americans were now a force for good in the world.
The U.S. Constitution was subverted in the wars against Mexico, Spain and Germany. Yes, Congress declared war in the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War and World War I. But the legitimacy of the congressional declaration was undermined by Presidential lies:
Americans weren't attacked on American soil, as President Polk claimed. In fact, volunteer American soldiers were attacked on Mexican soil.
The Spanish didn't sink our ship in Havana, as President McKinley claimed.
The Germans sunk our ship, but President Wilson didn't mention the American guns on board which violated our declared neutrality. Wilson's Secretary of State resigned in protest.
Each of these presidential lies was an impeachable offense. There were no impeachment proceedings. We just looked the other way.
These three wars of choice redefined American exceptionalism into something very different from what the Founders intended. We were no longer exceptional because of our unique form of government. The federal government no longer existed to protect the sovereignty of the individual.
The government now existed to promote democracy abroad. Never mind that the American republic was never a democracy. (The Constitution established a republic. The Founders rejected democracy because it didn't protect the individual from the tyranny of the majority.)
Each war of choice made the next one easier. President Polk's decision to take the country to war against Mexico made President McKinley's decision to go to war against Spain seem less unreasonable. It is hard to imagine President Wilson taking the country to war against Germany if Polk and McKinley hadn't gotten their wars.
Now the Constitution was turned upside down. We were set on a trajectory that turned the government against citizens. Wilson tolerated no war dissent and severely limited civil liberties.
We could have turned back to the foreign policy of the Founders. Mexico was no existential threat to the United States. But the war was popular and Polk gave the people what they wanted and made the country richer. We could have stopped there.
The little war with Spain was avoidable, too. But that war was also popular, cost-free and journalism became an accomplice in war. We could have stopped there. But wars of choice had become a habit for ambitious Presidents — and Wilson was ambitious.
Wilson's decision to take the country to war against Germany was far-reaching. The rapid rise of Germany was a reality that the major powers in Europe had to recognize. The Germans built an economy greater in size than the combined economies of France, England and Russia. Rather than let the Europeans find their own solution, Wilson decided to enter into an "entangling alliance" against Germany.
Unlike the two earlier wars of choice, World War I became unpopular at home. Fifty-thousand Americans gave their lives to fight the Kaiser. Clemenceau and Lloyd George ran circles around Wilson at the Versailles peace conference. Wilson lost the peace and the Versailles Treaty was rejected by the U.S. Senate.
World War I made World War II inevitable. Wilson's war of choice created Roosevelt's war of necessity. The French and English demanded onerous reparations from Germany. The ensuing inflation destroyed the Germany economy. Hitler rose to power by exploiting the political backlash inside Germany. The Second World War was a continuation of the unfinished business of the First.
World War II laid the foundation for an American empire. Six million Jews and 30 million Russians perished. This led to the creation of Israel and the outbreak of the Cold War. The United States took over British bases around the globe, and our forward presence gave impetus to bin Laden, 9/11 and the permanent war on terrorism.
The 120 million who perished in these 20th-century conflicts died mostly because of the failure of the existing major powers to accommodate the new strength of Germany on the European continent.
The solutions to yesterday's problems create today's problems. We live with the choices made by those who went before us. Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was the worst President in American history: His intervention in the First World War was the equivalent of a European power coming to the United States during the Civil War and saying South wins, North loses.
Now the Germans are back in the driver's seat in Europe. The Germans are once again dominating the economy of Europe. The United States is sidelined by the weakness of our economy and our staggering debt. We have lost our way and don't know how to get out of the empire business.
Ordinary people hardly need to be told that times are tough. Irish living standards have been absolutely decimated over the last four years and now we have the statistical evidence to prove it.
According to the Central Statistics Office Survey on Incomes and Living Conditions (SILC) for example, around 250,000 Irish people are now living in consistent poverty.
This is up by over 50% from the 160,000 deemed to be in absolute poverty in 2009 as a combination of welfare cuts and service reductions take their toll on the most vulnerable.
Alongside absolute poverty, around 1 million Irish people (23%) now experience some form of deprivation.
Deprivation occurs when someone has a lack of basic necessities at least once during the course of a year.
This can happen across the board, but children are particularly vulnerable with one in five kids going to school hungry on a consistent basis.
Perhaps the most shocking statistic to come out of the SILC report concerns the growing gap between rich and poor.
The elites in this country have been very good at pleading poverty.
But the SILC report tells a very different story, with the top 10% of Irish households actually increasing their disposable income by 8% since 2009 at the same time as the poorest 10% lost 26% of their disposable income.
This truly is a case of the rich getting rich at the expense of the poor and a second study carried out by Social Justice Ireland has found similar results.
The headline figure in the Social Justice report found that there are over 700,000 Irish people in poverty.
This is defined as having less than €10,000 for a single person or €24,000 for a family of four, and it comes in the same month as the Sunday Times Rich List revealed that Ireland’s richest 300 people increased their wealth by €12,000 million over the course of two years.
From an average of around €165 million per person each of these people now has around €210 million.
Every cut to schools, hospitals and welfare could have been avoided if these incredibly rich people had been forced to contribute to the welfare of society.
Instead our children’s futures are daily being sacrificed so that the mega rich can continue to accumulate.
The great only appear great because we are on our knees.
Let us rise.- Connolly - Eirigi !
It is worth remembering that both the influence of Connolly and the part that Labour played in the Irish National Revolution ensured that the Democratic Programme of the Irish Republic, agreed at the first sitting of the first D·il (Irish Parliament) on January 21st 1919, read:
We declare in the words of the Irish Republican Proclamation the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland...we declare that the nation's sovereignty extends ..[to] all its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth-producing processes within the Nation, ... declare it is the duty of the Nation that every citizen shall have opportunity to spend his or her strength and faculties in the service of the people. In return for willing service, we, in the name of the Republic, declare the right of every citizen to an adequate share of the Nation's labour...
It shall also devolve upon the National Government to seek ... a standard of Social and Industrial Legislation with a view to a general and lasting improvement in the conditions under which the working classes live and labour...
We declare and we desire our country to be ruled in accordance with the principles of Liberty, Equality, and Justice for all...
If this seems radical the draft democratic programme was more so. It included the passage:
It shall be the purpose of the Government to encourage the organisation of the people/citizens into Trade Unions and Co-operative Societies with a view to the control and administration of the industries by the workers engaged in those industries.18
These passages from one of the founding documents of the Irish Republic give an indication of the revolutionary intentions of many republican activists during the Irish National Revolution, a revolution that involved widespread working class militancy with Soviets being declared in Cork and Limerick and workers frequently seizing their workplaces. All this when 5 years previously the seeds of a socialist movement scarcely existed in Ireland!
This shows how close Ireland came to the Social Revolution that Connolly dreamed of and gave his life for. This revolution can't be achieved by means of a lobby, or a parliament or a coup d'etat. This revolution will only be achieved when the ordinary people of the world, us, the working class, get up off our knees and take back what is rightfully ours; namely, everything.
(1) Evict the corrupt Fianna Fáil/Green Party/Progressive Democrat Government!
(2) Stop the bail out of the banks. Let them go bankrupt and let the depositors secure what they can of their savings. The duty is on government to protect the small investors.
(3) Jail those who got us into this situation. That includes bankers and property sharks irrespective of which of them is a relative or a friend of a politician.
(4) Instead of bailing out banks invest the money in productive industry under either public or communal management.
(5) Purchase the property on the bank books at minimal cost or seize it outright and give it to local authorities to meet housing need.
(6) Announce a national emergency and get communities to organise now for food security and to agree carbon descent planning.
(7) Nationalise the Corrib and all carbon reserves and invest heavily in Wind Energy production units along the northwest coast.
(8) Employ unemployed construction workers in building canteens in all Irish schools and infrastructure to deal with the coming environmental crisis.
(9) Harmonise VAT on an all-Ireland level to prevent distortions in the national economy – this will be likely revenue neutral.
(10) Raise a wealth tax to pay for any shortfall in public finances and plan towards paying off the national debt altogether.
Does this appear eminently sensible? It is. It's not an explicitly marxist solution but that is not what is needed right now and cannot be promoted among the people. The reason that even the left are not proposing this minimum programme is their innate right opportunism, their adaption to neoliberalist economic theory and their cooptation within the structures of power.
“There is no doubt whatsoever about who Fianna Fáil and the Greens are serving with this rotten Bill. It is a bailout for the greediest and the most corrupt in Irish society – the bankers and the speculators whose boundless avarice has devastated the Irish economy.
“Throughout the Celtic Tigers years, Fianna Fáil-led Governments pampered this elite group. They allowed them to benefit from massive tax breaks at unknown cost to the State. They allowed them to determine the State’s housing policy – a policy which was no policy but to let the market drive everything. And boy did that market drive. It drove property prices to unreal and unsustainable levels.
“It drove a frenzy of greed for profitable property, inducing many who could not afford to do so, to borrow to buy in the grossly inflated market. It drove debt to levels previously unknown in this country. It was fuelled by cheap loans supplied by a banking system corrupted by the culture of greed that saw massive salaries, bonuses and perks lavished at all senior levels in the financial institutions. And finally the locomotive was driven into a wall and we are now left to deal with the train wreck that is the Irish economy.
“Who are the biggest losers in all of this? Not the bankers and the property speculators who did the crime because they will never do the time. Not the politicians who facilitated them because no-one in Fianna Fáil or the PDs and now the Green Party ever admit any responsibility for anything and they are never made to pay the price for their disastrous policies and disastrous management.
“No, the real losers in all of this are over 400,000 unemployed people in this State, they are the families saddled with massive mortgages, many of whom are being evicted from their homes, they are the people who never had the chance of a decent home during the Celtic Tiger years, they are the weaker sections of the community who are about to be punished most by the savage Budget cuts now in preparation.”
“Nationalisation is preferable to repeated recapitalisation, which is excessively costly for the taxpayer yet leaves the government with no real say over how those banks are run. It also deals with any potential losses that could be incurred by the taxpayer, having left the banks in private lands and bought the bad loans off their balance sheets.
“If recapitalisation of a state bank or the nationalised banks is required this could be funded through national bonds which (unlike bank bonds) would be guaranteed. EBS, Irish Nationwide and Irish Life and Permanent must be examined to see if they can function with recapitalisation and the State taking a stake alone or need to have their business wound up and/or transferred to the other two banks.” ENDS
I want to begin by urging the Fianna Fáil/Green Government to do its duty to the people and to make a commitment here and now that if this legislation is passed by the Houses of the Oireachtas it will support a Petition to the President under Article 27 of the Constitution to put the NAMA Bill before the people in a referendum.
by the Houses of the Oireachtas if it “contains a proposal of such national importance that the will of the people thereon ought to be ascertained”. If ever there was such a Bill then this is definitely it.
So here now is the real challenge to Fianna Fáil backbenchers and the Green Party. If the Government will not put this Bill to the people and if you, the backbenchers and the Greens, are as exercised as you claim to be about this Bill then go to the country – either in a referendum on NAMA or pull the plug on this disgraceful, discredited and bankrupt Government and allow the people to vote in a General Election.
The people are watching this debate and they are watching how those they elect are serving them – or if they are serving them at all.
But there is no doubt whatsoever about who Fianna Fáil and the Greens are serving with this rotten Bill. It is a bailout for the greediest and the most corrupt in Irish society – the bankers and the speculators whose boundless avarice has devastated the Irish economy.
Throughout the Celtic Tigers years, Fianna Fáil-led Governments pampered this elite group. They allowed them to benefit from massive tax breaks at unknown cost to the State. They allowed them to determine the State’s housing policy – a policy which was no policy but to let the market drive everything. And boy did that market drive. It drove property prices to unreal and unsustainable levels.
It drove a frenzy of greed for profitable property, inducing many who could not afford to do so, to borrow to buy in the grossly inflated market. It drove debt to levels previously unknown in this country.
It was fuelled by cheap loans supplied by a banking system corrupted by the culture of greed that saw massive salaries, bonuses and perks lavished at all senior levels in the financial institutions.
And finally the locomotive was driven into a wall and we are now left to deal with the train wreck that is the Irish economy.
Who are the biggest losers in all of this? Not the bankers and the property speculators who did the crime because they will never do the time. Not the politicians who facilitated them because no-one in Fianna Fáil or the PDs and now the Green Party ever admit any responsibility for anything and they are never made to pay the price for their disastrous policies and disastrous management.
We said that ultimately the banks should be nationalised so that the Irish people would be the true beneficiaries. We also proposed an increase in Corporation Tax for Irish retail banks with resulting tax funds earmarked for community and local development projects in the most disadvantaged areas throughout the State.
Of course, instead of this, we saw bank profits continuing to soar, a belated, limited and short-lived bank levy, successive banking scandals which ripped off the customers and the taxpayers and, as we now know, collusion between the banks and the property speculators as they inflated the property bubble.
Now the same corporate criminals are to be bailed out by this Government using the people’s money. That’s what NAMA is in a nutshell. It is supposed to address the crisis caused by a corrupt system but NAMA itself may well turn out to be the source of the next decade’s tribunals.
Higher taxes are coming, something the establishment parties have railed against for years - but they won't be to pay for better public services. They will be disappearing into the NAMA black hole created by a Government refusing to take the obvious step of nationalisation to address the banking problem.
The basic concept of NAMA is flawed and this legislation to introduce it is flawed through and through.
The focus point for most commentators has been the price NAMA will pay for toxic loans it transfers from the banks onto the taxpayers' balance sheet. This is the argument around what discount NAMA should get on the €77 billion worth of bad loans on the banks' balance sheets.
Will the Minister advise the House how much of that €77 billion was used in the actual purchase of sites and land banks and employed in actual development works? In other words how much of this €77 billion is accrued unpaid interest?
The legislation says that for these loans NAMA will not pay current market value - what would be repaid to the banks if the properties the loans are on were sold immediately. Instead it will come up with estimates based on 'long-term economic value'. The moves by ACC Bank against the developer Liam Carroll have actually done the Irish taxpayer a huge service. After being dragged to the courts, Carroll had to admit that if forced to repay his loans he would only be able to repay a quarter of their worth. That is based on the fire sale of his properties at their current market value.
Whatever price is paid for the bad loans, risk will transfer from shareholders and creditors to the taxpayer. This transfer of risk creates a real danger of 'moral hazard' in the future - that is, the banks engaging in risky lending behaviour because there are no consequences.
NAMA is incapable of meeting the twin objectives of achieving the best value for the taxpayer and exposing the taxpayer to the least risk possible. The debt to which NAMA is exposing the taxpayer is €54 billion - a third of our GDP, and that’s before we re-capitalise. And make no mistake about it these financial institutions will need to be recapitalized.
The Irish taxpayers’ expense far exceeds the bank-related debt taken on by Sweden in its bad loan management in the '90s - 8% of its GDP. This will have implications for our sovereign credit rating - we have already been downgraded by several ratings agencies - and will incur increased debt servicing costs, potentially in the region of billions annually.
This legislation contains numerous problems. These include a reliance on the banks acting in 'good faith' to give all the information on the loans to NAMA. The Minister for Finance is to have sole power to appoint NAMA board members. NAMA will be empowered to 'work with developers' to finish projects, potentially lending them taxpayers' money to do so. NAMA will also have compulsory purchase order powers to help developers complete projects if there are so-called 'ransom strips' or contested land in the way. Power is given to the Minister for Finance to overturn 'independent' valuations of loans made by NAMA.
And then there are the operational concerns. NAMA won't have the expertise to reclaim debts, as it is not used to working in this sphere and the staff it recruits may still be loyal to their former bank employers. There is the prospect of developers’ loans being nursed for decades while ordinary loan-holders are forced to pay back their debts or face repossession. NAMA will be another huge Government cost at a time when other organisations of significant public importance are being amalgamated or abolished. As for the notion that a levy will be introduced on the banks if NAMA makes a shortfall - we don't know how a 'shortfall' will be defined, much less what the levy would be.
The Government has put forward NAMA as an alternative to nationalisation but almost all commentators are agreed that even after NAMA, nationalisation might still be the outcome. That is because even after the loans are taken off the books of the banks, there is nothing to guarantee against more loans becoming impaired as interest rates increase. Further liquidity problems may arise, so the State will go down the route of equity capital shares that may be so large that banks are nationalised by proxy.
The Government claims that cleaning out the banks via NAMA will bring about a return to normal bank practice and lending. We are told we need NAMA for the economy to return to normal and anybody anti-NAMA is either politically and economically naïve, anti-patriotic, or both. But this rests on the assumption that private bankers are committed to restoring our economy through providing credit and that they will place this above the interests of bank shareholders. Will banks lend when they manage to get their hands on cash via the NAMA-issued transfer bonds?
A code of conduct for banks covered under the State guarantee scheme on lending to small and medium enterprises was published by the Financial Regulator last February and took effect in March - but SMEs say the banks continue to deny loans and credit.
It's not certain what 'normal' is when it comes to banks' lending practices, but it is certain that banks do not fulfill the role of public investment. Historically banks lend too much and too easily in booms and lend too little and too cautiously in recessions.
The Department of Finance's Guide to NAMA exposes the fundamentally flawed thinking behind NAMA. Frequently Asked Question no. 2 reads: "How can you justify this further bail-out of the banks for assets and not prevent banks from increasing mortgage rates?"
The answer:
"It is true that the banks in most instances will not be paid the current market value but will be paid a price which is in accordance with the long-term economic value of each asset. With regard to mortgage rates, the interest rates reflect commercial market realities as banks must pay more to access funds in wholesale retail markets. The Government has no role to play in the commercial day-to-day operation of banks here and believes that it is important that the banking sector has a market presence and operates within market discipline and constraints."
Surely if banks were operating in normal market conditions with discipline and constraints they would not be under a blanket state guarantee and in the middle of shifting all their bad loans off their books onto the taxpayers' heads at a bargain price for themselves?
One of the most incredible aspects of NAMA is that it is outsourcing the property management aspect to private development firms. Had it been used as a property management company, the State could have used land seized on defaulted loans for vital infrastructure, social housing provision or tourism development.
We now have the crazy situation where people throughout the country are sitting in homes and business premises in negative equity, and worse, are being evicted as their property is repossessed. The property managed by NAMA should be available to local authorities to house people evicted as a result of banks moving against them. However, the NAMA-owned property, paid for by taxpayers, is to be managed by private development companies - tenders have already been put out to attract such companies. This revelation is highly suspicious and will lead many to believe that the taxpayer is again being deceived and robbed by the Government, banks and developers.
Nationalisation is preferable to repeated recapitalisation, which is excessively costly for the taxpayer yet leaves the government with no real say over how those banks are run. It also deals with any potential losses that could be incurred by the taxpayer, having left the banks in private lands and bought the bad loans off their balance sheets.
If recapitalisation of a state bank or the nationalised banks is required this could be funded through national bonds which (unlike bank bonds) would be guaranteed. EBS, Irish Nationwide and Irish Life and Permanent must be examined to see if they can function with recapitalisation and the State taking a stake alone or need to have their business wound up and/or transferred to the other two banks.
The issue of ordinary bank shareholders is a sensitive matter. While many of these shareholders benefited quite well during the boom period for the banks, many reinvested dividends in order to secure their future and have lost much of their pensions. However, the interests of the taxpayer/public shareholders cannot be held hostage to the interests of private shareholders. The most appropriate way to protect vulnerable shareholders/pensioners is to ensure that no cuts take place to State pensions or other social protections and that the State pension is increased. In doing so you protect equally those who have lost life savings through risky investments and those who never had the money to make investments or build up a private pension in the first place.
We believe that the Public Accounts Committee should be tasked with carrying out a full investigation of malpractice in the Irish banking system over the last decade. Its findings should inform better regulation of the banking sector. Malpractice and even criminality by the banks led to this crisis. Yet there have been no arrests, no fines, no admissions or findings of guilt. All those responsible must be investigated and prosecuted where the evidence warrants.
The Minister for Justice must disclose to the Dáil if there are current investigations being undertaken by either Gardaà or the Criminal Asset Bureau and the public must be kept informed of criminal proceedings being taken against those guilty of corporate malpractice. Those at the highest level of the banks over the last number of years and suspected of culpability in mismanagement and fraud must be removed from their positions and new management installed in the nationalised banks.
Other measures should include:
Whistleblowers legislation to cover workers in the financial services and banking sectors.
Intensify regulation of the banking sector and make it independent.
Enhance the role of credit unions through reform of legislation to allow them to expand their work as community-based not-for-profit services supporting social and economic development.
Legislate for the right to a bank account, as has been done in the Netherlands, France and other states, to enable people without a bank account to open an account at a financial institution of their choice.
Enable An Post to provide basic banking services, including a basic bank account. Basic bank accounts are simple, low cost, 'no frills' current accounts designed for those who are financially excluded.
Provide greater support to MABS to deal with the increase in personal debt and those seeking help in addressing personal financial crises.
Emergency action on banking is required. But it is emergency action to rescue the peoples' economy, not a rescue for the bankers and developers who have devastated it. Providing fresh capital is only part of the solution. Even more important is providing new leadership at the banks, leadership which puts the public interest first. We need a banking system that serves the people.
NAMA has nothing to do with improving Irish society. The ultimate point of it is to socialize debt and privatize profit. This Bill should be rejected. This Government should be rejected. Let the people have their say.
