Calm Down, Luv. It’s Only the Nationalising of Anglo Irish Bank
Following on from last night’s news that the Irish Government have decided to nationalise Anglo Irish Bank Mick Fealty of Slugger O’Toole got Michael Taft, of Notes on the Front blog, and Irish Left Review, Stephen Kinsella, Economics Lecturer in UL, blogger and recent ILR contributor and Gerald O’Neill, an economist who also blogs at Turbulence Ahead to try and calm the nerves of the online nation.
Mick tells us that the contributors came to the joint conclusion that the government should:
…let [Anglo Irish] collect all the toxic assets of the other Irish banks, then tow ‘out to sea’ and sink it in a box for thirty years and then deal with it when this current economic cycle is a mere detail of modern Irish history…
Calm down Luv its only a recession: slugger live podcast
To listen to the interview click the Play button above or visit BlogTalkRadio here.
Mick also supplies the key quotes:
Stephen:
“Yesterday the shares were trading at 22 cent when they were stopped, which means the markets where essentially valuing Anglo Irish on the value of its computers and buildings”
Michael:
“Whatever the process, whether through an instrumental nationalisation or niot, it is clear that the State has to step in, and actually reconfigure the banking architecture. We need to have one bank which is public ownership. There are five other banks that should be collapse into two, so that we have two strong healthy banks. The dubious assets that are going to drag down these banks and raise the possibility of a Japanese, Zombie Bank system for years to come, those should be put into Anglo Irish; a bad bank, a bad debt depository. And then as a next step a third public enterprise banking system should be established on the model of the United States’ Community Development Banks; a third force in retail banking. But we need to bite the bullet and do this up front, otherwise we are just going to get a drip, drip, drip of capitalising banks of which we have very little knowledge about the state of their balance sheets.”
Gerard:
“I have some sympathy with the Minister of Finance. It’s like defusing a bomb when you are not sure whether to cut the red wire, the green wire or the blue wire. You’ve not just got a banking crisis here, you’ve got a property bubble that’s imploding. So you’ve got a number of these huge uncertainties to manage; each of them capable of triggering an explosion in the economy. It is phase one. We need to sort the banks as a first phase and then get to the real economy afterwards.”
Photo of Donal O’Connell addressing shareholds at Anglo’s AGM in the Mansion House, Dublin today courtesy of the Irish Times.
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Comment by: Paddy Hackett
Sep 2nd 2009 at 09:09
For the working class the debate over whether to nationalize Irish banks or support NAMA is a false debate. It is a debate that has been whipped up by the bourgeois media and a substantial component of the bourgeois political establishment together with sections of the radical left. Neither NAMA nor nationalisation can serve the class interests of the working class. Either policy is essentially bourgeois in character. Consequently the debate is really a debate within the bourgeoisie as to what option best suits its class interests. Much of the Irish Left support nationalization. Some with the qualification of nationalization under workers’ control. But such qualifications make little difference to the essential nature of the policy of nationalization as a bourgeois policy. Under capitalism the workers can never control the banks. It is a contradiction to suggest that banks can be controlled by the working class. By definition workers can never nationalise the banks under workers’ control. They can only annihilate them by destroying capitalism without which banks cannot exist.
The planned march for the month of September against NAMA is an attempt to organize the working class around the wrong issues –an issue from which the working class have nothing ultimately to gain. It is similar to organising a march against the Fianna Fail party and for the Fine Gael party. The left that promotes this march are playing the working class right into the hands of capitalism by rallying the workers around an issue that is about the class interests of the bourgeoisie and thereby against the class interests of workers. There is a strategy afoot by People before Profits and the Socialist Party to misdirect the working class into a struggle against itself. The prospective NAMA march is just this. Mass marches should have been held months ago against the income levy –admittedly there was the odd isolated protest in the absence of the general active support from the trade union leadership as a whole. The ICTU and other elements within the labour movement successfully obstructed attempts to organise a mass strike and demonstration. This was a decisive piece of treachery. It has seriously weakened the working class struggle. There need to be rallies and other forms of mass activity against the cut back in the living standards of the working class. A gigantic rally is needed to express popular opposition to the forthcoming slash and burn budget. Protests, rallies and strikes need to be linked into each other to create a continuum of struggle culminating in mass opposition to the forthcoming budget. Slogans expressing the class interests of the working class are needed.
If old age pensioners can “successfully” organize against the abolition of the free medical cards for OAPs swiftly then the labour organizations can surely organize at least as swiftly against the income levy and many other class issues. So far the Irish state and its bourgeoisie have had an easy run. There has been minimal resistance to the crassly anti-working class policies of Fianna Fail and the Greens. If anything the bourgeois left have been at most fertilising the conditions for alternate capitalist parties gaining power –Fine Gael and Labour et al.
Paddy Hackett