Saturday 18 February 2012

Breaking the chains

February 17th 2012

IRELAND ENSLAVED

                We are an enslaved people, our function to provide funds for the major European and world financial institutions. As slaves, and in common with the people of Greece, another enslaved nation, we have no rights, we have only uses. People wonder why it is that greater production is expected from us than from Greece; it’s because at the moment we are stronger than Greece, at the moment we are healthier. We will be fed just enough to keep us strong enough to keep producing enough; when we’re no longer able to produce enough, we’ll be discarded.

OUR MASTERS
                Our masters are the ECB and the EU, the IMF as lesser partners. Their major interests are their banks, vast edifices which because of their own poor decisions were threatened with collapse. We are being used to provide the funding to try to prevent this from happening.

OUR OVERSEERS
                Our overseers come from among us – Kenny, Gilmore, Noonan, Rabbitte, Varadkar, Sherlock, all the others, they are the ones cracking the whips, they are the ones who will ensure that every last ounce of effort is squeezed from us, and they will draw blood from the recalcitants. Their own motivations vary - fear, cowardice, greed, ignorance, but no matter. They have their orders, they have their whips, and feeling secure in their own elite little group, they flog us and will keep flogging us, getting fatter and fatter themselves in the process.

HOW WE WERE CAPTURED
                The crash of the Irish economy a few years ago left us very suddenly with a huge budget deficit, an annually increasing national sovereign debt. In the years since then, we – the people of Ireland – have been saddled with an additional massive burden, the failed private bank debt. We were never consulted, we weren’t asked; our overseers were weak, badly informed, poorly equipped, succumbed to the threats of our powerful new masters, and gradually, inexorably, that additional burden is being wrapped around our own burden, til eventually the two will become one. When that happens, we are crushed.

HOW WE ARE KEPT COWED
                Threats, lies, misinformation and disinformation, all the classical weapons when you want to subjugate. There is the straight threat from the ECB, the financial bomb going off in Dublin spoken of by Overseer Varadkar – pay up or else; there is the apocalyptic picture painted by the media minions of what will happen if we don’t pay; there is the blatant ignoring of any discussion on the fundamental issue – what right has the ECB to use its financial muscle, what right has the EU powerful pairing of Germany and France to use its political muscle, to force a small and weakened member state to accept a debt that is not its own?

THE PROSPECTS
                The prospects are not good – how do we know? Because we’ve been here before. People aren’t dying in their millions but in so many other respect this is the 1840s all over again. People are going hungry, people are leaving in their hundreds of thousands; just as the food-relief ships coming into Irish harbours then met fully-laden food ships leaving for our then-masters in Britain, so it is that any inward investment is met by billions of euro leaving the Irish economy to feed the institutions in Germany and France, in other such institutions world-wide. €1.25bn paid on January 25th in one failed bank bond; over €1bn in two failed bank bonds this week; €19bn in failed bank bonds this year; €55bn in failed bank bonds over the coming four years, all bled from the people. One major difference with the 1840s, however; bad as the British government was in its overseeing of the genocide they didn’t actually destroy vast quantities of food – on March 31st last year, on March 31st this year, and on March 31st every year for a decade and more to come, following the instructions of the ECB our own Central Bank will oversee the destruction of 3.1bn of Irish money, real Irish money, the Anglo Promissory Notes.

WHAT WE CAN DO
                We can resist, we can fight, we can overthrow these new masters and their homegrown overseers; that too we know we can do, that too is in our history. Understand this; the €3.8bn austerity Budget 2012 isn’t the end of it, nor will be the €3.5bn austerity Budget mandated for 2013, nor the €3.1bn austerity budget for 2014, the €2bn in 2015. Put those together and the cumulative effect is a total of €12.4bn (3.8 + 3.5 + 3.1 +2) in cuts and taxes in the budget of 2015. Austerity? We ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. And for what? Throw their lies back in their faces; with the billions being paid in those failed private bank bonds, with the destruction of the €3.1bn on one day alone next month, it’s crystal clear that this enforced austerity isn’t to assist us out of the hole we’re in, it’s to enable the payment of those bonds, even if in the process the hole we’re in gets deeper and deeper. 

OUR OWN REFERENDUM
                In Iceland their own overseer government was going to  do exactly as ours has done but their President did what ours didn’t, refused to sign the bill. The people got a referendum, they rejected the lies, threats and misinformation, they voted against their own government, and now, just a couple of years later, Iceland is on the road to recovery. We are on the road to ruin, but we can turn. One of the money-making methods the ECB/EU/IMF have demanded that our overseers implement is a Household Charge. To enable this we are ordered to register by March 31st; don’t do it. Let this be our referendum, let this be your opportunity to stand and fight – DON’T REGISTER, DON’T PAY. March 31st is also the date the Promissory Note €3.1bn is due to be destroyed – demand now that this should not happen, march with us in Ballyhea on our weekly Bondholder Bailout Protest on Sunday, March 4th at 11.30am, the first anniversary of our first protest march. It’s time to break the chains.

Regards
Diarmuid O’Flynn