Oligarchs escape austerity, but not common citizens

‘Billionaires san frontiers’, the international financial oligarchy in charge of this world, make a mockery of so-called concepts of ‘right’ or ‘left’ wing politics.

Is it any wonder that disaffected voters can find no ‘traction’, for taking a stand against the latter-day feudal system dominating all our lives?

The debate in Ireland about the Fiscal Treaty cannot occur with any degree of seriousness unless we set up some intellectual ‘markers’ to help us find our footing.

Rather than trying to see our politics in terms of twentieth century ‘left-right’ norms, we need to look further back to the Middle Ages perhaps, to get a sense of how we are ruled and what lies ahead for us.

When we are told “the markets” won’t lend to us, in reality we are talking about the sovereign wealth funds of a tiny number of countries and the vastly wealthy individuals who are too rich to tax and too politically connected to regulate.

We are being asked to accept stringent rules, with sanctions aplenty if we put a budgetary foot wrong, but the oligarchs funding the economies of the world are ‘rule-less’, unregulated and invisible.

Today we still don’t know who the bond holders are in the banks that brought such destruction to this community.

So-called ‘market sensitivity’ prevents us knowing who we are enthralled to for a generation.

They, the billionaires without borders, get to peek under our skin if they want, but we cannot even know the names of the people whose reckless gambling put us into penury. This Government’s honeymoon was spent in the ‘Disneyland of denial’ built by Brian Cowen and Co.

The financial imperatives facing Ireland are stark. We remain riddled with debt and denial in equal measure.

Over 10% of mortgages are not being serviced. We have the highest level of personal indebtedness in the world and growth prospects wholly linked to other fragile economies.

The answer to all of this is not austerity, but austerity is what the oligarchs demand of us, and the agents they control in the European and Irish parliament.

In short, fiscal compact my arse.

Declan Doyle

Lisdowney

Co Kilkenny