Tens of thousands of public employees, trade union members, indignados and many other Spaniards protested yesterday, July 19th, in 80 Spanish cities to protest the latest batch of cutbacks approved by the government.

The ruling conservative Popular Party used its majority in parliament to push through the measures last Thursday to mass opposition. They include a rise in sales taxes and a wage cut for public sector workers.

The right-wing economist responsible for proposing the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) has recommended that the government now sell of some, or all, of the organisation.

Peter Bacon made these proposals in a document commissioned by Treasury Holdings Ltd, a major NAMA debtor, supposedly with the aim of contributing to ‘the debate on national economic recovery.

Treasury Holdings is jointly controlled by Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett and is currently involved in three high court cases centring on the almost €2 billion it owes to NAMA.

As Ireland takes another step towards an austerity union, socialist economist, Brian O’ Boyle, lays out an alternative strategy for workers which involves the repudiation of all bankers debts and a massive redistribution of Ireland’s wealth.

Introduction

Ireland took another step toward economic ruin this week with the signing of a ‘fiscal pact’ that aims to lock in austerity forever.

In modern society, there is such a surfeit of information that, paradoxically, important information is often missed. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s report is a case in point. In this dry-as-dust official report is contained a wealth of revelations about how the elite rob and control our society.

Crisis returned to the Eurozone this week and this time the focus was not on Greece but on Ireland. The panic relapse has caught European Central Bank officials by surprise. Having cobbled together a bailout package for Greece last Spring as well a broader rescue fund of €750bn much of which was spent buying up Eurozone debt over the Summer months, they did not expect such levels of fear and uncertainty to continue to haunt.

In a recent report on Ireland, the International Monetary Fund expressed a concern that the population might be experiencing ‘contraction fatigue’.

The implication was that while the government had been successful in imposing savage attacks in the past two years, the IMF worried that the population might not accept much more.

A similar opinion was echoed by Dan Boyle, the would-be sage of the Green Party who claimed that the government’s target of cutting the budget deficit by 2014 might not be ‘politically feasible’.

A further  rise in unemployment last month suggests Northern Ireland is still in the grip of a deep recession, which is only set to get worse.

‘It is no longer  a question of contagion; contagion has already happened. This is like Ebola: when you realize that you have it, it is almost too late! You have to cut your leg off to survive’.

The recipe for economic recovery in Ireland, peddled by politicians and bosses’ organisations, has three main ingredients: beef
up the banks to get credit flowing again; cut state spending to the bone
to stabilise the public finances; and cut workers’ wages and conditions
to regain competitiveness.

‘Ireland’s suffering offers a glimpse of Britain’s future
under the Tories’. This was a recent headline in the Guardian newspaper
written by its economics editor, Larry Elliot.