Workers Solidarity Movement

Zombie developers….. Vampire bankers….. Ghost estate creators….. Black holes that swallow tens of billions of Euros…. They sound like characters from a particularly eerie Hallowe’en tale of horrors. However while they might be spooky, there’s nothing fictional about this array of characters. They stalked our land during the era of the recently-departed Celtic Tiger. But now they’ve gone to ground. They’ve disappeared, they would have us believe. And if they themselves haven’t actually physically disappeared, then their wealth most definitely has.

A CSO report from 2009 revealed that Irish residents own 1251 billion euro worth of foreign stocks and bonds. Over 300 billion of this is invested in the US and 240 billion on Britain. These figures are for stocks and bonds only, they don't include other wealth that Irish residents hold abroad, for instance in the form of property. (Image: from the CSO report).

A couple of hundred people took part in the 1% Network's tour of the Golden Circle in Dublin 2 and 4 on Saturday. The tour visited the townhouses of Dermot Desmond, Johnny Ronan & Tony O'Reilly as well as the HQ of IBEC, the new Anglo Irish Bank HQ, the HQ of Treasury Holdings and some of the the private banks and clubs in the area.

Video from the tour is also online

Anglo Irish Bank Boss, Alan Dukes, called for the immediate imposition of a Water Tax on every household in the country, in an RTE interview at the weekend. Dukes enjoys a TDs pension of €45,500, a ministerial pension of €55,000 on top of his undisclosed salary of over €100,000 as bank boss. When asked recently would he give up these pensions in the countrys' interest as he has a extremely well paid job, he answered no.

Last night in Dublin former US president Bill Clinton told an invited gathering of 575 of the richest 1% of Ireland's population that they were the greatest problem facing the world. They paid over 2500 a head to hear this as they chomped down on "Atlantic salmon, Connemara lamb and lemon posset, washed down with Chablis Domaine de la Mandeliere 2007 and Chateau Les Roches Gaby 2001."

Dublin jewellery shop Weirs know the recession isn’t hitting most of the rich.  The Grafton Street business is currently taking orders for a limited edition Patek Phillipe watch that costs more than €250,000.   This summer Weirs sold one watch for €454,000.

The rich remain rich and the rest of us are supposed to keep them that way. That’s why we get pay cuts, health cuts, education cuts, job cuts. It’s not as if dipping into the pockets of PAYE workers is the only way to foot bills.

In the WSM we're often asked why we spend so much time talking about the working class. Even the title of our paper, Workers Solidarity, seems a bit odd to some - why are we talking so much about workers? Isn't anarchism for everybody? And aren't we all middle class now?

This book sets out to show that unequal societies are bad for everyone in them. It does this by collating decades of research in the areas of health, crime, trust, mental health, obesity, education, teenage pregnancy and social mobility, all of which demonstrate statistically the connection between social inequality and social problems. The authors explain that, in hierarchical societies that are unequal in wealth and status, our social class affects all aspects of our lives. From an Irish perspective, one of the most interesting points they make may be about the connection between inequality, levels of trust in society and corruption.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett commented on the US financial crisis that “it’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked, and Wall Street now looks like a nudist beach.” Well when it comes to Ireland, the receding tide of the global economy has revealed that not only were our business and political elites swimming naked, they were engaged in a great big orgy as well.