Workers Solidarity Movement

Recession is just another word when you are rich. Google bosses, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have just spent €17.6 million on a 60-seater Boeing jet for their “personal use”. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen splashed out €140 million to buy the world’s eighth largest yacht. It comes with two helicopters, two submarines, eight smaller boats, a basketball court, swimming pool, a crew of 60 and running costs of about €15 million a year.

The Stormont administration is at a critical juncture, with the Executive not having met in several months. It seems an eternity since Paisley and McGuinness chuckled their way through meetings and joint events.

AS we continue to bear the brunt of the recession and our politicians stabilise the interests of the rich and fat cats, the 1960s provides us with an example in the necessity for struggle and social revolution. Sinn Fein and the Social Democratic and Labour Party, pillars of the establishment continue to squabble over the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement they all share one thing in common when it comes to defending the status-quo and attacks on workers rights and conditions.

September-October issue of WSM's freesheet.

• The system works...for the rich
• Why can’t all the socialists get together?
• TV Review: The Wire
• Capitalism & war in the Caucasus
• The DUP and creationism
• Hamas, the left and ‘liberation’ in Palestine
• The Recession and housing
• Uncovering fraud where none exists 
• Capitalism and the exploitation of women 
• WTO trade negotiations 

According to World Bank's 2008 World Development Report, 2.1 billion people live on less than US$2 a day. 880 million of these live on less that US$1 a day

Oil giant Exxon Mobil made a profit of $11.68 billion between April and June, breaking its own record for the highest quarterly profit by a US company.

Foreign Affairs magazine reported that in 2005 six hedge funds managers pocketed €2.15 billion dollars between them

The Health Services Executive in Cork is spending nearly four times as much giving work that used to be done by a HSE employee to private profiteers. A worker in the Environmental Health Unit (which deals with everything from transport to pest control) used to get a maximum of €700 a week until he retired this year. Now the same work is being given to a private firm, who charge €2,625 a week.

While the rest of us are slaving away to make end’s meat and facing the brunt of the ‘credit crunch’. We are continually told by our political rulers to be ‘competitive’ for the bosses waiting for the promised ‘trickle-down effect’ that never arrives. Staggering rises in energy prices above the rate of inflation, imposition of un-wanted water charges while hundreds of people die every year due to ‘fuel poverty’ it seems the North elite rich club have never had it so good according to the latest Sunday Times rich list. There is now a record of 61 people from the north among Ireland’s richest 250 and they are getting richer! Last year their wealth increased to a combined £10.7 billion! On top of the list like every year is Fermanagh’s Sean Quinn worth about £3.7 billion, who does allot of dealing in insurance and property market. Alright for some eh?

This is an extraordinarily detailed exposition of how the modern media functions. The author, veteran Guardian journalist Nick Davies, along with a team of researchers from Cardiff University, spent several years monitoring the British media and tracing the sources of the stories that they carried. The results were pretty shocking, even for somebody who already has a very low opinion of the corporate and state media.

The war may be long over and our political rulers have finally decided to get it together but there has been no ceasefire in the class war against working-class people both locally and globally despite the promises of ‘prosperity’. With the onset of economic ‘recession’, continued decimation of our manufacturing industry and public services, increase in the cost of living (energy costs such as heating and electricity have risen by over 30% since 2006 never mind 1998), lack of affordable housing combined with the lowest wages in the UK and highest level of people on incapacity benefits in the UK, the wee ‘North’ isn’t a bed of roses that our rulers are keen to promote. Sectarian divisions institutionalised under the voting system at Stormont, and racist attacks are more evident and visible now more than ever as the ‘peace-walls’ have got higher and there are more of them.

Last year, the EU Constitution was defeated in referenda in France and the Netherlands. Europe’s governments quickly got together and rewrote the constitution as an incredibly complicated list of amendments to existing treaties. Together these amendments make up the “Treaty of Lisbon.” Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the president of the Convention on the Future of Europe which did much of the ground work in drafting the constitution, has concluded that “the difference between the original Constitution and the present Lisbon Treaty is one of approach, rather than content”.