19 August 2011
The much-heralded recovery from the 2007–08 economic crisis has proved short-lived, and the policies pursued by the Obama administration of “quantitative easing” and the European Union’s continuing attempts to prop up a collapsing financial system have been shown not to provide any long-term solution. The Irish Government pathetically follows the orders coming from the European Union.
Throughout the developed capitalist system there are vast sums of capital swilling about, with no productive avenues for investment open to them, because of the deep crisis of oversupply and the stagnation in the productive economy. The strategy of austerity is not designed to rejuvenate the economy but instead to squeeze enough capital from working people to transfer it to finance houses to try and “shore up” the system’s last investment avenue: finance.
The American economy is now sliding into a recession on the back of a massive increase in state debt, a feature that is common to the EU and this Irish state. The political establishments here in Ireland, in Brussels and Berlin or across the Atlantic have no answers nor solutions other than to continue to undermine and roll back workers’ rights, wages, and working conditions. We now face the prospect of growing mass unemployment, mass poverty, and the repossession of family homes.
Working people, the poor and the sick will be made to pay the price for a system that is now caught up in a spiral of irreconcilable contradictions. There can be no lasting solution to the structural and systemic crisis at its very heart.
The trade union movement must break free and shake off its petrified stupor and take courageous action to defend Irish workers and our nation as a whole. Resistance will instil courage to fight for a better way forward than that presented by the current Irish Government and its EU masters.
