James Connolly meets the modern Labour Party

Taken from Dole TV…

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard | Workers of Europe unite, you’ve only euro chains to lose

We’re all swivel-eyed eurosceptics now!

Note the outburst last week by Pedro Nuno Santos, socialist vice-president in Portugal’s Assembleia. “We have an atomic bomb that we can use in the face of the Germans and the French: this atomic bomb is simply that we won’t pay. Debt is our only weapon and we must use it to impose better conditions. We should make the legs of the German bankers tremble,” he said.

The sacrosanct 40-hour week is being stretched to 42 hours in Portugal. Manuel Carvalho da Silva, head of the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers, said pay-cuts for public workers under successive austerity packages will amount to 27pc.

This is an “internal devaluation” of epic proportions.

Much has been written in recent weeks of Europe’s swing to the far Right, of the rise of Geert Wilders in Holland, or Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France, or - quite different - the black-shirt Garda Magyar of Hungary’s Jobbik party. The echoes of the 1930s are loud, and will become louder as combined monetary and fiscal contraction entrench depression.

Yet there is another parallel of equal resonance: the election of the Front Populaire in France with Communist support in May 1936, the cathartic rejection of deflation policy. Whether or not Leon Blum privately wanted to leave the Gold Standard - that inter-war replica of Europe’s unemployment union - the logic of his policies forced the outcome. Orthodoxy was overthrown.

The question for today’s Left is whether it is in their interests to keep apologising for an EU monetary regime that has pushed the jobless rate for youth to 49pc in Spain, 45pc in Greece, 30pc in Portugal and Ireland, 29pc in Italy and 24pc in France - yet 8.9pc in undervalued Germany - and that offers no credible way out of the slump for the Southern half.

Comrades across Europe, come over to the eurosceptic side. You have only your euro chains to lose.

Must We Adore Vaclav Havel? | Michael Parenti

Michael Parenti wrote about Vaclav Havel in 1997 in order to bring some balance to the hagiographies of the ‘great democrat’. Now that Havel has popped his clogs it’s necessary to republish it to provide a much needed counter-balance to the fawning tributes

In 1992, while president of Czechoslovakia, Havel, the great democrat, demanded that parliament be suspended and he be allowed to rule by edict, the better to ram through free-market “reforms.” That same year, he signed a law that made the advocacy of communism a felony with a penalty of up to eight years imprisonment. He claimed the Czech constitution required him to sign it. In fact, as he knew, the law violated the Charter of Human Rights which is incorporated into the Czech constitution. In any case, it did not require his signature to become law. in 1995, he supported and signed another undemocratic law barring communists and former communists from employment in public agencies.

The propagation of anticommunism has remained a top priority for Havel. He led “a frantic international campaign” to keep in operation two U.S.-financed, cold war radio stations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, so they could continue saturating Eastern Europe with their anticommunist propaganda.

Under Havel’s government, a law was passed making it a crime to propagate national, religious, and CLASS hatred. In effect, criticisms of big moneyed interests were now illegal, being unjustifiably lumped with ethnic and religious bigotry. Havel’s government warned labor unions not to involve themselves in politics. Some militant unions had their property taken from them and handed over to compliant company unions.

Solidarity March for the Undocumented 17th December 2011

Hundreds of undocumented migrants, their families and supporters marched by candlelight to Dáil Éireann this afternoon on the eve of UN International Migrant to highlight the plight of the estimated 30,000 undocumented migrants living in Ireland. The march was led by a giant banner with ‘Justice for Undocumented’ written in Christmas lights and marchers holding giant stars saying ‘Santa is Undocumented too!’ The march was organised by the Justice for the Undocumented Campaign which is calling on the Irish Government and Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, TD, to introduce an Earned Regularisation Scheme which would give those who are undocumented in Ireland the opportunity to legalise their immigration status.

“Undocumented people live in under tremendous fear of deportation and have taken a great risk to be here today,” said Edel McGinley, Campaign Co-ordinator with the MRCI. “We are calling on the Government to provide a solution similar to the one the Irish government has been advocating for the Irish undocumented in the US. It’s time the government put its money where its mouth is and showed the same commitment in solving the undocumented crisis here.”

Dublin City Councillors were also recognised during the march for their recent December 6th motion to support undocumented migrants which the Council passed unanimously.* Councillor Rebecca Moynihan, the proposer of the DCC motion stated, “It would be disingenuous of us to support a similar campaign for Irish undocumented in the US while not extending the same consideration to undocumented migrants living in Ireland.”

Let Kate Have The Final Word | Tom and Sally Ann Fitzgerald

Kate Fitzgerald’s parents Tom and Sally Ann Fitzgerald writing on Broadsheet.ie about their attempts to deal with the Irish Times. To get Kate’s words put back into the public record, to get an apology for redacting what were her last words or to get them to retract the statement that part of her article was not ‘factual’. They refused.
“We do not advise Ireland’s Taoiseach and the Fine Gael party. We do not chair Ireland’s national broadcasting authority. We do not offer PR advice to the princes of the Catholic Church. We do not have daily access to talk shows and newspapers. In short, we are not influential.
When the Irish Times found itself between a rock and a hard place, it chose to go against us and our dead daughter.
We spoke to Kate almost every day for the last weeks of her life.  What she told us in those conversations supports her final article.”

Reach-Me-Down Romantic | Terry Eagleton

This post has turned into links to various comments on the passing of Christopher Hitchens. Apologies.

Great opener from Terry Eagleton writing about Christopher Hitchens’ writing about George Orwell…

He was the son of a servant of the Crown from a well-heeled South of England background, who shone at prep school but proved something of an academic flop later on. A passionate left-wing polemicist, he nonetheless retained more than a few traces of his public-school breeding, including a plummy accent and a horde of posh friends. He combined cultural Englishness with political cosmopolitanism, and detested political personality cults while sedulously cultivating a public image of himself. From a vantage-point of relative security, he made the odd foray into the lives of the blighted and dispossessed, partly to keep his political nose to the ground and partly because such trips furnished him with precious journalistic copy. Coruscatingly intelligent though not in the strict sense an intellectual, he had the ornery, bloody-minded streak of the independent leftist and idiosyncratic Englishman, as adept at ruffling the feathers of his fellow socialists as at outraging the opposition. As he grew older, this cussedness became more pronounced, until his hatred of benighted autocratic states led him in the eyes of many to betray his left-wing views altogether.

Such, no doubt, is how Christopher Hitchens will be remembered. The resemblances to George Orwell, on whom Hitchens has written so admiringly,[*] are obvious enough, though so are some key differences. Orwell was a kind of literary proletarian who lived in dire straits for most of his life, and began to earn serious money from his writing only when he was approaching death. This is not the case with Hitchens, unless Vanity Fair is a lot meaner than one imagines.

Also worth reading Richard Seymour’s unsentimental take on Hitch, the ‘very conventional thinker’ and Alex Callinicos‘ who knew him in Oxford where he alternated between a donkey and a dinner jacket. Alexander Cockburn’s should not be missed either:

I can’t count the times, down the years, that after some new outrage friends would call me and ask, “What happened to Christopher Hitchens?” –  the inquiry premised on some supposed change in Hitchens, often presumed to have started in the period he tried to put his close friend Blumenthal behind bars for imputed perjury. My answer was that Christopher had been pretty much the same package since the beginning — always allowing for the ravages of entropy as the years passed.

As so often with friends and former friends, it’s a matter of what you’re prepared to put up with and for how long. I met him in New York in the early 1980s and all the long-term political and indeed personal  traits were visible enough. I never thought of him as at all radical. He craved to be an insider, a trait which achieved ripest expression when he elected to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen by Bush’s director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. In basic philosophical take he always seemed to me to hold as his central premise a profound belief in the therapeutic properties of capitalism and empire. He was an instinctive flagwagger and remained so. He wrote some really awful stuff in the early 90s about how indigenous peoples — Indians in the Americas — were inevitably going to be rolled over by the wheels of Progress and should not be mourned.

And Dennis Perrin…

Christopher –

I hoped it wouldn’t come to this. Writing to you after you’ve died. As you know, I’ve reached out to you since a mutual friend told me of your illness. Ceased my attacks and critiques. Not that I changed my mind about your pro-war position, but my feelings ran deeper than partisan rifts.

J Woods, from Gort an Choirce, Dun nGall on not paying the household charge

Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan, on introducing the household charge, described it as a mere palatable €2 per week. It’s very easy for him to count so little on €2 (he’s on €160,000-plus a year).

Invitations to attend the meeting went out to all the local politicians to give them a chance to explain their stance on these charges. Pearse Doherty was the only TD to attend, along with Independent councillor John Cambell. The members of the austerity parties who were invited didn’t reply, never mind attend. But it was well noted by the crowd present.

Michael McDowell, when he was justice minister, paid an astronomical price using taxpayers’ money for a prison site. They’d better start building quick, because there won’t be enough prison space for all the poor people who cannot pay these indiscriminate and unfair taxes. - Is mise,

What price the new democracy? Goldman Sachs conquers Europe

Old news now perhaps, but a useful reference for Michael Youltan’s piece on the front page.

Picking up well-connected policymakers on their way out of government is only one half of the Project, sending Goldman alumni into government is the other half. Like Mr Monti, Mario Draghi, who took over as President of the ECB on 1 November, has been in and out of government and in and out of Goldman. He was a member of the World Bank and managing director of the Italian Treasury before spending three years as managing director of Goldman Sachs International between 2002 and 2005 - only to return to government as president of the Italian central bank.

Mr Draghi has been dogged by controversy over the accounting tricks conducted by Italy and other nations on the eurozone periphery as they tried to squeeze into the single currency a decade ago. By using complex derivatives, Italy and Greece were able to slim down the apparent size of their government debt, which euro rules mandated shouldn’t be above 60 per cent of the size of the economy. And the brains behind several of those derivatives were the men and women of Goldman Sachs.

UK-US ’special relationship’ is alive and well - it runs from City of London to Wall St. | Nick Shaxson

Wisdom abounds that one of the many outcomes of Cameron’s Veto over the EU Summit Treaty was that not only did it isolate the UK in Europe, but it also occurred without the safety net of a special relationship with the US to fall back on. Oh for heaven’s sake wake up, says Nick Shaxson, that relationship, which is effectively between Wall St and London, is not going anywhere.

In essence, London offers itself as an offshore escape route for Wall Street, a source of loopholes to get around U.S. financial regulation (see my last blog, for yet another shocking, appalling example of that.) The relationship began in the mid 1950s just as the British Empire crumbled (read Treasure Islands to know more about this) when the City of London discovered that it could rebuild itself by hosting offshore “Eurodollar” trading. What happened was that banks wishing to trade in this market were ‘deemed’ to be offshore by the Bank of England, and therefore outside the purview of regulation.

This market was, in effect, regulated nowhere. It grew explosively, and created the platform for Wall Street to grow far faster than the rest of the economy, eventually rebounding back into the United States to capture the political process there and bring the economy to its knees in an orgy of libertarian excess. The market spread widely, and had similar effects in other countries too. For over 50 years now, the Special Financial Relationship between the City and Wall Street has been going from strength to strength.

This relationship is pure poison, for both countries.

It is a purely financial relationship whose cross-border nature means it is extremely hard to tax or to regulate. It is thus directly at odds with democracy, and fosters giant inequality, in each country. Bring Britain’s spider’s web of Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies into the equation - which include some of the world’s biggest tax havens and are umbilically connected to the City of London - then the size of the threat begins to become apparent. A giant zone of transatlantic impunity for some of the world’s wealthiest citizens and corporations.

Depression and Democracy | Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman says that the current ‘depression’ and turmoil in Europe is aiding and abetting the rise of authoritarian rule in Europe. He points to the anti-democratic actions of Fidesz in Hungry, a party he refers to as ‘Centre-Right’. People should  stop using this ‘centre’ stuff as there is nothing ‘moderate’ about what is going on. While everything he describes here is true, it’s a little odd that there is no mention of a far right party fascist being appointed Minister for Infrastructure in Greece in a technocratic government appointed by the ECB, or about a future EU treaty would make any alternative to expansionary fiscal contraction illegal in Europe.

The details are complex. Kim Lane Scheppele, who is the director of Princeton’s Law and Public Affairs program - and has been following the Hungarian situation closely - tells me that Fidesz is relying on overlapping measures to suppress opposition. A proposed election law creates gerrymandered districts designed to make it almost impossible for other parties to form a government; judicial independence has been compromised, and the courts packed with party loyalists; state-run media have been converted into party organs, and there’s a crackdown on independent media; and a proposed constitutional addendum would effectively criminalize the leading leftist party.

Taken together, all this amounts to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule, under a paper-thin veneer of democracy, in the heart of Europe. And it’s a sample of what may happen much more widely if this depression continues.