Banks must be confronted; Capitalists’ greed must be curbed

Earlier this week President Trump had the biggest win of his first year in power.

New laws mean a $1.5tn tax cut which, the Democrats insist, will benefit the rich but disadvantage most Americans. If the Democrats are right this is just the latest in a long list of regressive measures that have reduced living standards for millions of workers in societies, including this one, that imagine themselves fair, decent and independent.

Mr Trump’s reallocation of the star-spangled cake seems a grand gesture in the accelerating concentration of wealth — or class war as the older textbooks called it. This week Dublin District Court ruled on one of the many smaller, everyday skirmishes in this war.

That court granted an injunction to six tenants whose landlord tried to evict them after they resisted attempts to, apparently, increase their rent by more than twice the permissible 4%. It is alleged the landlord, at Christmas, changed locks and cut off electricity. None of the tenants are Irish — they are from France, Germany, the United States or Brazil — which tells its own story about who we perceive the system protects.

Would Irish tenants have been confident that the court might offer them such protection? The laws are the same for everyone but not everyone has the same faith in them. That case reflects our housing crisis, which the old textbooks warn is a symptom of class war. Those texts would have a very strong view on the tracker mortgages scandal, views far more forthright than any expressed to date. At the early stages of this story we were told that 12,000 or so people were involved but on Wednesday the Central Bank confirmed that figure had reached almost three times that — 33,700.

Fianna Fáil TD John McGuinness, chairman of the Oireachtas PAC, so hardly a Sendero Luminoso sleeper, spoke yesterday in a way that reflects public opinion. He declared that the mistreatment of tracker mortgage customers will continue until a banker is arrested and faced consequences. He also asserted that the Central Bank is protecting banks rather than citizens. He told Newstalk that it was “absolutely a crime” that homeowners were wrongly taken off tracker mortgages. His accusation that the CB is protecting banks is given credence by the fact that the CB has said that the scandal did not justify criminal prosecutions.

This nothing-to-see-here fob is hard to reconcile with the Criminal Law (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001 which says simply enough: “A person who dishonestly, with the intention of making a gain for himself or herself or another, or of causing loss to another by any deception induces another to do or refrain from doing an act, is guilty of an offence.” This seems a pretty accurate summation of the tracker mortgage scam, yet the State’s justice system looks on as if it had nothing at all to do with it.

The 2008 €64bn rescue package for our banks was built on a simple mantra: They are too big to fail. That seems to have evolved into they are too big to control. This cannot pass and our democracy must reassert its authority in what has become the class war of our time — how to control capitalism’s unrelenting and immoral greed. And preferably before those old, red textbooks are back on the bestsellers’ list.