you searched for:  hell



25
Jun 2013

Where’s Hell when you need it?

I almost wish the religious fundamentalists were right. I almost wish there was a hell in which the evil burn for eternity.

The reason I (almost) wish this, of course, is because we have created a society where the evil face no retribution so long as they have money or political influence. A society where people like John Bowe and David Drumm can giggle, sing and sneer while they rip the heart out of the country. The most vulnerable people in Ireland are being subjected to a death by a thousand cuts. And yet the Agents of Mammon who brought us to this precipice simply jet off around the world to find the country with the most lax bankruptcy laws so that they may emerge from the disaster they created relatively unscathed.

Hell, many of them don’t even need to do that. John Bowe, head of capital markets at Anglo Irish Bank, was made a director of the IBRC. This is the man who can be heard laughing and singing Deutschland Uber Allies on the recently released Anglo Tapes. The man who can be clearly heard conspiring to defraud the Irish people of yet more money even after he’d helped sink the economy (or in the words of Simon Carswell in The Times, “[seeking] to hoodwink the State into getting [Anglo Irish Bank] a bigger bailout than it let on it needed”). Yet he’s one of the guys our government paid to deal with the mess.

HilariousAnd the politicians who appointed this man to help deal with the mess? They are no better. One Labour TD has resigned from the party in disgust as they inflict yet more pain on those least able to bear it. The rest of them should just apply to join Fine Gael and be done with the tasteless charade that they are somehow a party of the ordinary people. Just like Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, the Irish Labour Party represents the rich and powerful. It is one leaf in our trinity of Bankers’ Parties.

The religious fundamentalists are wrong about the evil burning in hell. But I almost wish they were right. Because the vile excuses for human beings that inhabit the upper echelons of our political and financial institutions will never be held accountable for the damage they inflict on the rest of us. Bankers and politicians worked hand-in-glove-puppet to bleed Ireland dry. Then, when they’d done as much damage as they possibly could, they appointed one another to well-paid positions in the clean-up operation. And, as the Anglo Tapes reveal, this clean-up operation was simply viewed as yet another opportunity to unleash their bottomless greed.

I don’t know who our next government should be. But let me say this now, as loud and clear as I can… if at the next election, dear reader, you vote for Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or Irish Labour, then you are also complicit in the destruction of this country. There can be no more excuses. I only hope that none of them dare knock on my door when canvassing for votes, because frankly I’m at the final straw stage – and I could do without having to face an assault charge in the courts. Our politicians and bankers need to be replaced immediately. And most of them should be imprisoned for their complicity in the subversion of the Irish constitution.

6 comments  |  Posted in: Opinion


1
Mar 2006

Hello Ireland

Just what the world needs right? Another new blog.

But at least in this case, the world isn’t getting another new blogger. I used to blog at cloud23.net, then more recently I had a blogspot blog, and now I’m back at my own domain.

“Numero 57” is a George Orwell reference by the way; “The Quiet Road” is from a Talking Heads song. And although “The Quiet Road” neatly sums up where my head’s at just now, I’m hoping that “Numero 57” doesn’t also become an appropriate choice rather than merely a powerful image.

But what’s “The Quiet Road” going to be about?

Ah, the question on everyone’s lips.

Accepting, of course, that you define “everyone’s lips” as the lips of the three people reading this.

In truth it’s going to be “more of the same”. So all those who are familiar with my previous blogs should feel free to mutter “So it’s just a trumped-up redesign then!” The rest of you should feel free to remain none the wiser.

It’s a cruel world and no mistake.

My recent move from London to Dublin will shift the emphasis of my political writing a little. Though probably not as much as one might expect. From an historical perspective Britain has always punched above its weight politically (so to speak). Clearly the actual power possessed by that small industrial nation has waned considerably since the days of Empire. Nonetheless, much of Britain’s influence still remains.

Part of this can be attributed to its absurdly disproportionate military power for its size. With a tiny handful of exceptions, the British armed forces could effectively reduce any nation to a smouldering pile of rubble should the order be given. And even that tiny handful wouldn’t fare well against the British nuclear submarine fleet.

And part of it can be attributed to the silly idea of having five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Five nations who can veto any decision made, and who – by and large – dictate the terms of any debate on the world stage. Incidentally, it is no surprise that the other four permanent members of the Security Council also have fleets of nuclear-missile-bearing ships patrolling our oceans. Little gangs of genocidal terrorists.

It’s a simple fact that the longer those fleets are out there waiting for the order to murder hundreds of millions of people, the more likely it is that the order will be given (in anger or in error). That the human race sees fit to take such an enormous risk with its future is probably all the evidence that the Climate Change lobby needs to pack up and go home. By backing up political power with the threat of human extinction we have undeniably entered an age of deep nihilism.

Those of us who warn of Peak Oil or Climate Change or Unsustainability just can’t compete with a system threatening to murder us all if it doesn’t get its way.

Which isn’t to say that local Irish politics will be pushed aside by the Big Global Issues. Sometimes the apparently “small” stories can be illustrative of important points. Points that get obscured by the bombastic fog of International Affairs. And let’s not forget that British politics are actually very important here in Ireland. After all, they still occupy a quarter of the country (ooooh… see how I, not so subtly, set out a broadly Republican stance through my use of the word “occupy”? You have to watch out for bias like that in the media. Absolutely scurrilous.)

Interestingly, just as Britain has long puched above its weight, politically speaking; so Ireland has done the same culturally. And for almost exactly the opposite reason. Britain’s political influence was wrought with economic and military dominance. Ireland’s cultural influence was a product of oppression and economic hardship.

Thanks to a millennium of occupation by our nearest neighbour, the Irish gained the dubious gift of having just as much ownership of the global language as the English, or later the Americans. Then a rich literary tradition, geographical proximity to the cultural centre of the world (London), and the economic hardship that created global emigration combined to allow even average Irish writers to gain far wider audiences than the best Belgian or Swiss or Danish ones. It’s no surprise then, that when Joyce or Beckett or Yeats came along, they would shake the world of literature to the core.

Which is not to say that I intend to deliberately shift focus from politics to culture because of my change of city. I shall – as always – merely continue to tackle those things that inspire me to write. Though I do intend to be more disciplined about it, and try to post a bit more regularly.

Well, here’s hoping…

5 comments  |  Posted in: Announcements


2
Jun 2017

President Trump and the Paris Accord

I watched Trump’s inauguration with a mixture of disbelief and dismay. It was a strange event and occasionally even a little alarming.

At one stage a TV evangelist (Cate Blanchett will play her in the movie) recited a prayer that wove biblical verse and US Manifest Destiny into a heady brew of Blessed Exceptionalism. I briefly toyed with the image of her stepping back from the podium as two flunkies wheeled the Ark of The Covenant on stage… retrieved from that big warehouse at the end of Raiders of The Lost Ark. She defied my expectations on that, but she was immediately followed by a choir that appeared to be deliberately alluding to The Omen movies.

OK, so I enjoy hyperbole as a rhetorical device perhaps a little too much for my own good, but in reality I tend to be a good deal less alarmist than the stuff on this blog might suggest. I see our civilisation as ultimately doomed of course. So there’s that. But I also see it for the leviathan it is. We’re like a supertanker, and our colossal momentum propels us forward even though the engines have been on fire for a few years. I kind of expected it to continue that way for a bit longer.

The Irish banking fiasco, Brexit, the Syrian crisis… some of these events may be symptoms of an ongoing collapse, others just episodes in history’s unfolding tapestry whose origins will be argued and speculated though perhaps never understood. But none of them are going to usher in the end times, right?

Which brings us back to President Trump. This is — to use the parlance of our times — not a good guy. He’s a bad guy. A Real Bad Guy. The worst. THE worst. Sad.

I promise that’ll be the last time I lampoon Trump’s oration in this post. It’s a little too easy. I confess, I’ve never read “Art of The Deal” (note to self: I really should). But I feel certain there’s a chapter in there discussing public speaking and it includes nuggets of wisdom like “Use short, simple words” and “Repetition can be effective”.

Anyway, here’s the thing. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me on this, but I think we’re past the point where Trump is a weird joke, we’re past the point where he’s Americas’s problem, we’re even past the point where he is an annoyance or a hindrance on the world stage. The United States, under President Trump, has become a very serious and very pressing problem for the entire world. Pulling out of the Paris Accord is an act of such… gah!

… I want to use words like “existential threat” or “clear and present danger”… but those phrases pop up and people think you’re being unnecessarily hyperbolic.

And I’m not for a moment suggesting that the Paris Accord would have “fixed the problem”. Even if it was strictly adhered to — which it probably wouldn’t have been. It would not have averted Climate Change (a multi-century process already underway). But it formed a platform. A reminder that collective agreement could be reached, and a template for future attempts at it. It was a minimum point at which the entire planet could gather. A base-camp from which to forge forward. If the dude who owns most of the tents and the cooking gear decides to go home in a sulk? Well, you may as well cancel the expedition.

I have no idea how that metaphor got to where it did. Makes no bloody sense by the end. Still, my point is effective action to limit Climate Change must now be put on hold. At least until the Americans rejoin civilised society and/or consensual reality. Not saying those two always overlap, but either will do right now.

We can imagine best-case scenarios where the rest of the world continues onward — even redoubling our efforts to compensate — and America swiftly rejoins us after Trump’s impeachment in December.

But we can also imagine the next few months and years being punctuated by announcements from Saudi Arabia, Russia and the Philippines, that after careful consideration they too have decided to withdraw. This provokes a complete breakdown of faith in the agreement and it’s another decade before we even get everyone around the same table on this issue. By which point the militarisation of southern and eastern Europe has begun in a desperate response by populist governments to the tens of millions of Africans and Central Asians fleeing the devastation of the places that once sustained them (Climate Change is going to hit those places first and hardest — places that have been politically and economically screwed for the past century are about to be given a whole other sort of kicking). Meanwhile topsoil depletion, drought and catastrophic land management decisions in China force a massive State of Emergency and tripartite tensions between China, India and Pakistan result in… … …

Well. See that’s the thing about Climate Change. Words like “existential threat” or “clear and present danger”? There are issues where they aren’t hyperbole. This is one of them.

Climate Change is no longer a binary possibility. It’s happening and it’s become a question of how much? How severe? Even small differences in the answers to that question can equate to huge amounts of human suffering. International cooperation is surely the best way to minimise that suffering… to adopt a united front against a problem that faces us as a species… as a biosphere.

And so. To turn your back on that is a grossly profane act. Whatever the hell the word “immoral” means; if it doesn’t cover this, it’s not a useful concept.

In a sane world, the United States would be hit with an active trade embargo until it returned to the fold. This sovereign individualism go-it-alone schtick only works when you’re not shitting in the village well. So long as you do that, you’re everyone’s problem and you need to be made aware of that. Trump should have his personal assets seized, just as we would do if it was a Liberian or Angolan president threatening the stability of others. He should be prevented from all foreign travel and all diplomats should be withdrawn from the US. All US embassies should be closed. The United Nations should collectively relocate to Beijing or Berlin (or wherever we think it would most annoy Trump) and we should send one bloke to sit in the UN building in New York with a pen and a copy of the Paris Agreement.

Soon as we get a signature, it all goes back to normal.

Sure sure, most Americans, even the liberal ones, will bristle at that suggestion. How dare anyone tell us what to do! US culture insidiously promotes exceptionalism to the extent that it’s a part of the fibre of anyone growing up in America (just like Catholic guilt burrows to the heart of every Irish person even if they’ve never gone to church, and the most militant British anarchist still unconsciously views the world through the prism of class stratification). It’s just in us because it’s the water we’ve spent our entire lives swimming through. We can’t help it.

But in this case, dear Americans, you can shove your exceptionalism right where you think this sentence was going to end. You’re shitting in our goddamn well. Stop it right now!.

2 comments  |  Posted in: Opinion


8
May 2017

Again with the lesser of two evils

Let’s be clear, I’m ecstatic that Le Pen lost. Thank you France — you did a great thing. And if I’d been in France (and eligible to vote) then I too would have cast my ballot for Macron. I would not have abstained; but nor would I have felt entirely happy about it. Certainly he would not have been my choice in the first round (or if Macron had been in the final round with almost anyone else). But compared with Fascist Frexit-loon Le Pen? It really wasn’t a choice.

And again, let’s be clear… I adore the little Climate Change video that Macron made…

There’s a lot to like about him. Certainly when you compare him with many of the other politicians astride our global stage here in darkest 2017. And yes that’s a pretty low bar — but it’s the one we’ve got right now, so whaddyagonnado? He seems, on the surface at least, to be semi-rational. And he’s not entirely unintelligible. These shouldn’t be praiseworthy things for the newly-elected leader of a major nation. But heigh-ho. We are where we are.

Incidentally, the way he pronounces “engineers” in that short video is awesome and doubtless will cause a chuckle or two. But I still maintain that… in his non-native tongue, he managed to deliver an eloquent and coherent message in a way that two minutes of Donald Trump or Theresa May speaking, in their native language, generally fails to do these days.

And yet, he’s still a guy I would only have voted for as (much) the lesser of two evils. Despite his ‘upstart’ image, he remains firmly a centre-right, free-market, capitalist, business-as-usual, establishment politician. Of course that’s better than a bloody fascist and anyone who says otherwise needs to rounded up, starved for several months and then gassed.

See what I did there?

I don’t really think that should happen to anyone of course. And it pains me that I need to explicitly state that. But if we are to have concentration camps, then I do think they should be filled exclusively with people who vote in favour of concentration camps. Everyone else gets a pass.

But all the same, I personally don’t think a centre-right, free-market, capitalist, business-as-usual, establishment politician is what we really need right now. Macron and Le Pen would both be part of the general global tendency towards driving our collective society off the edge of a very tall ecological cliff. Sure, I’d much rather spend the journey in Macron’s bus, but ultimately they both end in a flaming pile of twisted metal and sinew.

As it happens, in my heart-of-hearts, I don’t think we’re going to apply the brakes at this late stage. Hell, we may already be over the edge and just not aware of it yet.

And yet, my hope — do I still have one? — is that the French Left somehow use this to galvanise support. “Let’s not boil it down to a choice between a banker and a fascist next time!” Translate that into French and put it on a million leaflets. And I hope they join with the left-wing and the greens and the anarchists and the pacifists and the quakers and the scientists and the poets and the holy ones… across all Europe. I believe we need to develop a truly pro-European and pan-European alternative to the economic inequalities that face our society. Isolationism, Brexitism, MAGAism, nationalism… these are not the answers. Leastways, they’re not the ones I’m looking for.

But nor (certainly in the long term) is the brand of unsustainable corporate capitalism that ultimately has led to a situation where fascists are polling 34% in France.

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18
Jul 2016

Haters gonna hate (allegedly)

I know nothing about Taylor Swift. I’m familiar with the song “Shake it Off” because — let’s face it — it’s difficult not to be. It isn’t quite up there with that Bryan Adams song from the early 90s, but it was still pretty damn impossible to escape. Having said that, I have nothing against the woman. She is a tremendously successful pop singer and although I am partial to a good pop song at times, I am clearly not her target demographic. Which is fine.

I was intrigued, though, to read today that Swift feels that she does not get the artistic credit she deserves for her songwriting because of the sexism of the music industry. She is quoted as saying…

If someone has studied my catalog and still doesn’t think I’m behind it, there’s nothing I can do for that person. They may have to deal with their own sexist issues, because if I were a guy and you were to look at my catalog and my lyrics, you would not wonder if I was the person behind it.

At the risk of being accused of mansplaining again, can I just point out that — while I acknowledge there are people out there who will question the abilities of a woman to write a song purely because she is a woman; those people exist, they are called “asshats” (amongst other things) — I myself was mildly surprised to learn that Swift writes her own songs. But not because she is a woman… no, it’s because she’s a photogenic young pop-star.

That doesn’t preclude a person from also being a songwriter of course. And my surprise was only “mild”… I’m not refusing to believe it or anything. Thing is, I would be just as surprised to discover that One Direction write their own stuff (do they?) It’s not sexism; it’s just cynicism about the modern music industry. If you’re young, good-looking, polished and highly-successful then my initial assumption — male or female — is that you’re essentially the product of a marketing algorithm. As I say; cynicism not sexism.

Milli Vanilli

photo by Alan Light

And it’s not just the “young and good-looking” bit (though that is fairly prevalent). It’s more the “polish”, the genuine difficulty I have discerning a modern pop video from an advert for a trendy clothes store… I never for a moment doubted that Patti Smith wrote every syllable of every song (well, except the cover versions obviously!) Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega, Stina Nordenstam, Siouxsie Sioux, Joni Mitchell… women can write incredible songs. And the flip-side is also true… Jason Donovan sold millions of records singing songs written by Stock, Aiken & Waterman. Milli Vanilli didn’t even do their own singing!

So yes; there are probably some asshats out there who think “Taylor Swift didn’t write that — she’s a girl!” But most of us, I suspect, were thinking “Taylor Swift probably didn’t write that — it’s 2016 and she’s a pop star”. That assumption — it turns out — is plain wrong. But it’s not sexist. No more than the growing scepticism surrounding Milli Vanilli in 1989 was racist.

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6
Oct 2015

Launching airstrikes from a glass house

Vladimir Putin is a dangerous, authoritarian despot. This fact is illustrated both by current Russian domestic policy (towards minorities, opposition groups and free-thinkers) and foreign policy (in Ukraine and now Syria).

It seems likely to me that Russian intervention in Syria will have a fairly disastrous outcome. Putin’s military will almost certainly kill and maim many thousands of Syrian civilians in an attempt to prop up the vicious local dictator, Assad, who also routinely kills and maims Syrian civilians. It is a hideous state of affairs.

I don’t claim to know exactly what’s best for Syria and its people; but I am 100% convinced that turning it into Guernica writ large is not the solution. So I – and I hope all right-thinking people and governments – unequivocally condemn Russian policy in this case.

Get the hell out of there, Russia!

That said; the faux-outrage emerging from the United States government and media is nauseating. Any global condemnation of Putin is effectively undermined when the American government joins the chorus. So long as the US military is bombing hospitals in Afghanistan and providing active support to the murderous Saudi Arabian campaign in Yemen, their government should shut the hell up.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own?

2 comments  |  Posted in: Opinion


23
Apr 2015

Dermot Gleeson renews his apology

Over the past few years the citizens of Ireland have, collectively, been plunged into crippling debt likely to last generations. This was done, ultimately, by a fairly small group of politicians, bankers and property speculators. Our response has been fascinating. With the singular exception of the water privatisation* issue (which has sparked protest and may yet prove a rallying point for a broader “anti-austerity” movement**) we’ve pretty much accepted it with a reluctant shrug. There’s been plenty of anger, don’t get me wrong. But it tends to be seething and grumbling and the narrowing of the eyes with us (rather than riots and petrol bombs and voting for socialists).

I could write at length about why the Irish collective psyche has reacted this way, but I’ll leave that for another day. For now I just wanted to highlight the weird way in which powerful establishment figures involved in the financial crisis occasionally pop up in the media ostensibly to “apologise” (or in this case “renew their apology” – how weird is that!?) but actually seem to be insulting the very people they have completely screwed over. What other explanation can there be for former Allied Irish Bank chairman Dermot Gleeson’s testimony in front of the Oireachtas Banking Inquiry today?

I feel confident in saying that every person reading this post had learnt and understood, by the time they were 10 years old, that “but everyone else was doing it” does not constitute a legitimate justification for doing something. Parents and grandparents will ram the point home with questions about hands in the fire and jumping off cliffs. We knew, as children, that doing something wrong because “the others were doing it” is bullshit plain and simple.

So I feel no hesitation in shouting “Bullshit!” when Dermot Gleeson acknowledges that yes, absolutely, AIB was indeed engaged in:

lending that was ‘expansive’ at a time of excessive risk taking on the back of a construction and property-fuelled boom

but that no single lender could have done anything about it. Because:

“if AIB had stopped lending, their competitors would have happily stepped in to satisfy the demand”

Dermot GleesonIt’s hard to believe, I know, but that really is the former head of Ireland’s second biggest bank telling a government committee that because all the other banks were running up huge unsustainable debts that would one day collapse the economy, it was OK for his bank to do it too. More than that, it was the government’s fault for not stopping him.

The regulator was “hopeless” he claimed. I can’t be the only person made furious by that, right? The man was in a powerful position with a huge amount of public responsibility… but he didn’t comprehend that the point was not to see how many insane things he could do without falling foul of the regulator. We clearly need regulators (not least because of eejits like this guy) but if you’re in charge of a bank deemed of national importance and structurally vital to the stability of the public finances and you’re playing a game of chicken with the regulators. Then you’re doing it wrong!

The heads of our major banks should not be tasked with seeing how close to the edge they can bring the institution in the name of ever increasing “shareholder value”. These banks, sadly, are too damn important to us – the people – to act in so reckless a manner. Or be allowed to. And if we’re still employing that kind of fricking idiot to run our big institutions (hint: we are, because absolutely nothing has changed in that respect) then we need to stop right now.

That said, Gleeson is correct in implying that the government are far from blameless… everyone involved should be writing their memoirs in jail. But as the head of the second biggest bank in the country it was at least part of Gleeson’s job not to run the bloody thing into the ground and the country with it. It’s not acceptable for the head of AIB to steer the institution in whatever reckless direction he fancies so long as he manages to find a way around government regulation and oversight.

Mind you, you kind of have to admire the way he so succinctly illustrates the central attitudes of capitalism with his every utterance.

Also let’s be very clear about something… if the second largest bank in Ireland had actively tried to put the brakes on during the run-up to the collapse; while it clearly would not have prevented the crash, it’s not unreasonable to imagine the country would be in slightly better shape today… a few billion less in debt at least.

And because that equates to a few billion less for the salaries of doctors and nurses and teachers and policemen and the coast guard… well, let’s just say that Gleeson’s failure to learn a lesson most of us grasped as children has caused a great deal of suffering and maybe even cost a few lives. But hey, he’s sorry. So leave him to his wealth. We will condemn him to the inconvenience of appearing before committees every year or two – that’ll surely deter future bankers from destroying the financial system.

* But it’s not privatisation, I hear you object. To which I say “Feck off!” And loudly at that. I’m well aware that this first step does not represent privatisation, but it takes a special kind of naive to think that the ideologues who forcefully rammed this current system down the throats of a defiantly unwilling electorate do not have privatisation as an ultimate endgame. We have been forced to borrow money to install a system at our expense that is perfectly designed to control, monetise and profit from our water usage. Even if the current gombeens in government aren’t aware of it, they’re setting that up to be sold off down the line as a nice little earner for the shareholders of Global Water Inc. (registered office: Cayman Islands). Why the hell else oppose – even in principle – a constitutional amendment on public ownership?

And let’s not go on about water being a scarce resource and metering being necessary to curtail usage. Study after study has shown that water-metering produces a short-term drop in usage followed by a return to previous levels over the course of a relatively small period of time. The same amount invested in infrastructure repairs produces a larger saving over a much longer period of time. Also… in global terms, yes. In global terms water conservation is a huge problem. In Ireland though, it’s just an infrastructure thing. We’ve got all the water we need falling from the sky and draining off the island into the sea. All the bloody time. The raw resource is there to be used and is effectively renewable so long as the Atlantic Ocean stays roughly where it is. With a growing population and plenty of money, governments over the past 20 years could have invested in a modern water collection, storage, treatment and distribution system and there simply would not be an issue today. They could have done that. But they didn’t. Instead they gave massive tax breaks to already wealthy people and proceeded to somehow allow the banks to magically create and destroy tens of billions of euro doing god only knows what, high on coke and spreadsheets, and saddling bus-drivers, hair-dressers and pensioners with the bill.

Now we’ve gone and spent another fortune, on tick, not to upgrade the system and fix the leaks and dig a reservoir or two… oh no, we’ve decided to add water-meters to every property in the country. Seriously folks… that’s only the kind of decision you make if privatisation is the endgame. It doesn’t make any sense otherwise (though maybe I’m giving this thing too much credit when I assume it makes sense on any level at all).

As a final thought, can I also point out that at a symbolic level, “charging the poor for water” has got to be one of the most singularly unchristian things I can think of. I’m not suggesting religion should play a part in public policy (it shouldn’t). I’m just suggesting that when someone betrays even the best, most enlightened, most cherished core values of their faith in the name of economic ideology… they probably can’t be trusted to take care of anything of real value.

 

** I put “anti-austerity” in parentheses there because I don’t entirely like the phrase. Firstly because I don’t necessarily think “austerity” is always a bad thing. Indeed it may well be appropriate for western societies to take a more austere approach to resource consumption in general. And how we do that should be the subject of informed and rational discussion (like that ever happens when it comes to important subjects). Secondly though, because I don’t think what we’re seeing right now is austerity – certainly those actually pushing and promoting the policy don’t seem to be living any more austere a lifestyle than they were prior to it. So while “anti-austerity” is a useful label because most people pretty much understand what you mean by it… it’s actually a little misleading.

1 comment  |  Posted in: Opinion


21
Apr 2015

Syriza demands war reparations

For a little while now the Leftist government in Greece, led by Syriza and most visibly represented by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, has been raising the issue of “German war reparations” whenever the Greek financial crisis is discussed. Up until now however, they had not proposed a figure. A few days ago they got down to brass tacks and suggested €279bn might be fair.

SyrizaOn facebook feeds and web forums I’ve seen a surprising number of people suggest that this somehow represents a “distasteful” strategy. That it’s somehow “below the belt”. So-called moderate leftists have been tut-tutting this apparently shameful behaviour and suggesting Syriza need to retreat to the centre, agree to EU/IMF instructions and calm the hell down. And it’s not just on social media you hear this… the bloody Guardian is full of these “moderate leftists” attacking Syriza. Going so far as to wonder aloud as to whether Greece’s Left is falling under the spell of Moscow. Yes, that is Britain’s flagship “left of centre” newspaper whispering “reds under the bed!” ominously in your ear. God only knows what the Mail and the Telegraph are up to.

There are two things to be said about left-wingers who call for Syriza to return to the centre… firstly, they are totally misreading the situation in Greece which is on a real knife-edge. And secondly, they are – unwittingly – calling for a course of action likely to produce a sharp swing to the far right in southern Europe. At best it’s an ignorant centre-right position. At worst it’s a bit more sinister than that. It’s certainly not “left wing”.

There is genuine concern among many Greeks about the volatility of politics there right now. By and large no modern democracy actually wants to be in a position where they are forced to vote for “a radical solution”. That almost always means something has gone terribly wrong and the safe, conservative, quiet middle ground is no longer working for some reason. And that’s the situation in Greece right now. The country is on the verge of economic collapse (in the sense of there being no money in the banks and no bread in the shops; not in the sense of middle class Greeks being unable to afford a second holiday this year). And the reason for this is two decades of centrist corruption, coupled with the subsequent European banking crisis.

If you’re one of the army of unemployed graduates in Greece right now, you’ve lived your entire life under a centre-left/centre-right political class which actively falsified national accounts at the behest of wealthy oligarchs who refused to pay tax. What’s more… pretty much everybody knew it was happening. Corruption was endemic and both the far left and the far right were shouting about it. But so long as the status quo permitted the Greek government to generate ECB credit; it was ECB policy to encourage it to continue.

And then, surprise surprise, the whole thing collapsed. The European financial institutions acted shocked (just as they did when the Irish property bubble burst… because that was never going to happen, right?) and demanded that the people of Greece be punished for the sins of their corrupt government. Try to remember… it was ECB policy to offer limitless credit to idiotic Irish property developers based on absurdly inflated valuations. And it was ECB policy to offer limitless credit to a corrupt Greek oligarchy (via the Greek Central Bank). I find it mystifying that so many people have bought into the idea that the citizenry of those countries be held responsible for the reckless debts and corrupt behaviour of a few private individuals and institutions.

And that, of course, is the point being made by Tsipras when he demands German reparations. This seems to have gone over the heads of many (or else they are wilfully ignoring it). He’s a pretty smart guy and he knows he’s not going to get any war reparations. He’s merely publicly highlighting a vast discrepancy… how the German people were supported after their government betrayed them, and yet the Germans (who are the principal drivers of European financial policy) are demanding the Greeks be treated entirely differently. It is not distasteful to point out a very relevant double-standard.

When a government betrays its people and rips the nation apart, the international community can offer a Versailles Treaty or a Marshall Plan. It was literally the single most obvious lesson of 20th century history, and we – quite staggeringly – appear not to have learnt it. (Hint: The Marshall Plan turns out better for absolutely everyone involved)

Tsipras and Varoufakis are walking a tight-rope. The IMF/ECB intervention was not working in Greece. The situation didn’t need “adjusting”, it needed a new approach. In Ireland austerity is biting very hard, but the fact is – life in Ireland today is still considerably better than it was for most of the past half century, so people have adjusted. It rankles that we’ve accepted this debt with so little resistance, but that’s how it went.

In Greece though… circumstances are very different and the country has been decimated by the policies imposed by the troika. In 2005 Greece had the lowest suicide rate in Europe. Today it has the highest. Let that statistic sink in. Seriously. Think about how radically a society must have changed for that to have happened… think about how socially damaging the policies of the troika have been to result in that outcome. Nobody can be happy when unaccountable international financial institutions are laying waste to their society. And nobody can be happy when all of their mainstream political parties have accepted this situation and speak almost casually of “a further 10 years of austerity”. Those are precisely the circumstances in which nations are stirred to seek “radical solutions”.

So of course the Greeks have looked for an alternative. To do otherwise is literally suicidal.

The policies currently being imposed on Greece today are very similar to those imposed on Yugoslavia in the 1980s by the IMF (under the behest of a rabidly anti-socialist Reagan administration). Are we really dooming ourselves to walking that grim path again? Golden Dawn are unlikely to ever gain a popular mandate the way Syriza did… but the Greek people will not quietly trudge back to the centre ground if Syriza fails. They can’t afford to. And if Syriza fails, if the current government collapses, it is very possible that a right wing coalition will find themselves requiring the tacit support of Golden Dawn in order to hold power. And once you let fascists into government, even in an unofficial capacity, it can be pretty tough to get them out again.

I believe that Tsipras has one card – and one card only – he needs to somehow stall the EU and the IMF until the Spanish elections and hope (against hope) that Podemos somehow do in Madrid what Syriza managed in Athens. If that happens, it’s just about possible that a leftwing bloc within Europe, strong enough to demand policy change, could emerge. Very unlikely but it’s really their best bet (and I suspect they know it). Hence all the delays and stalling and missed meetings and “promises to review”. Also hence the demands for war reparations. It’s a stalling tactic*, but one with bite, and one with a real point to make.

Those calling for Syriza to fail in Greece (and right now, a call for a return to the centre ground is a call for their failure) are either hoping for a hard-right government or – at best – another decade of the Greek people watching the elderly kill themselves because they can no longer afford their medicine, and young men kill themselves because they see no future in a country where youth unemployment has now passed 50% and is still rising. The Greek people don’t deserve what’s happening to them. It’s crushing them. And it’s business-as-usual centrists… moderates… that are doing it and insisting upon years more of it. So the only real choice facing Greece right now is “left” or “right”?

Those who want the left to fail should – in this instance – be very careful what they are wishing for.

* I also think the logistics of a rapid switch to the New Drachma take a while to put in place so every day they can stall is an extra day of preparation (if Tsipras hasn’t got a warehouse full of newly-printed banknotes and a fleet of trucks on stand-by, he’s not as smart as I think he is).

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25
Mar 2014

There’s still money in mediocre coffee

For almost three years the façade stood bare. An empty shell of a building where once beat – symbolically at least – the dark heart of the Celtic Tiger. But the ephemeral nature of consumer capitalism means even the mausoleums are fleeting. A pause for reflection. But not too long, there’s still money to be made and we wouldn’t want to dwell, would we? We’ll always have the photo-montage I suppose… a reminder of how banal it all ended.

And so it was that the building that once housed Anglo Irish Bank lay empty for three years. Lurked more than lay. An unhappy reminder every time you were on Stephen’s Green of what happens when you gather all the greed and all the stupidity into one building and bizarrely hand them the reins of power.

But three years is a long time for Stephen’s Green real estate to lie fallow. I mean, decorum is one thing but wantonly throwing money away? Tch tch tch.

And so it was that earlier today someone captured a photo of the new tenants having their façade installed. Someone should tell Zizek, he’ll love this…

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9
Sep 2013

Today I Thunk: Mac Vs Windows

“Today I Thunk”… kind of like “Thought For Today” but with less gravitas.

Mac Vs WindowsScanning through my twitter feed this morning I encountered not one, not two, but three separate tweets insisting (using clever little analogies) that Apple Mac Computers are better than Windows Computers. “My computer is better than yours!” they wailed (I’ve always felt Mac users protest a little too much, to be honest, but that’s another discussion).

Are these people children? Or have they reached adulthood without managing to grasp the notion of personal preference? For the vast majority of people, they are most comfortable using whatever computer they first spent time with. Mac? Windows? It makes no difference.

I can do literally everything (I need to do) on a Windows system that an Apple user could do on their Mac. More than that, years of use have made me comfortable with Windows and not with Macs, so if you were to ask me to do the same thing on a Mac I would take twice as long because I’d be struggling with a system I’m unfamiliar with. But I’m pretty sure I could do anything I need to do on a PC in roughly the same time as someone familiar with Macs could do it on their system.

The need of some people to tell the world how much better their computer is to your computer or my computer is a need rooted in playground insecurity. It’s weird, it’s adolescent and people should really get the hell over it. I use Windows because I’ve used Windows for 20 years now. It is the best system for me. When I hear someone tell me that actually their system is better, I picture that person running up to a concert pianist and insisting that the guitar is a better instrument for making music.

Seriously, that’s how much sense you’re making with this weird computer one-upmanship you’ve got yourself involved in. Put an end to it now and embrace the adult realisation that other people don’t feel exactly the same about everything as you do. Sheesh.

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