Bradley Manning trial ends:

                                                       Bradley Manning, major threat to "US security"

BRADLEY MANNING
CONVICTED:

Punishment for those who
reveal crimes; immunity for
those who commit crimes:

Shame of US Military "Justice":

The verdict of the military judge in the Bradley Manning trial in convicting the

former Army officer on a long list of charges of "espionage" is another brazen example of the hypocritical stance of the criminal Washington elite in trying to cover up its war crimes by persecuting anyone who reveals these crimes to the American public and the world. Held for months in solitary confinement and harassed by brutal guards, Officer Manning, a slightly built and quiet individual, withstood the tortures of a criminal Empire and gave inspiration to many around the world who struggle daily for Peace, human rights and the ending of the aggressive wars waged by the US Military against the civilian populations of the countries it has invaded.

On Wednesday, the day after the conviction of Bradley Manning was handed down by the military judge, the Washington Post published an article under the headline, “Manning’s Conviction Seen as Making Prosecution of WikiLeaks’ Assange Likely.” The Post noted that the prosecutors—that is, the Obama administration—specifically tailored their case against Manning to implicate the founder of WikiLeaks.

“Military prosecutors in the court-martial portrayed Julian Assange as an ‘information anarchist’ who encouraged Manning… And they insisted that the anti-secrecy group cannot be considered a media organization that published the leaked information in the public interest,” the Post wrote. The prosecution continually sought to present Assange as a co-conspirator.

Other articles sounded a similar theme, including one by the Associated Press stating that Manning’s conviction “gives a boost to the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of people it believes have leaked national security secrets to the media.” In addition to Assange, the AP noted that “the government’s case against National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden” will likely be “similar to the Manning prosecution.”

This is further evidence that the kangaroo-court trial of the young whistle-blower Manning is part of a ruthless government campaign to criminalise all exposures of government criminality. The prosecution of Manning, who faces a maximum sentence of 136 years in prison, is intended as an example and a precedent. Whistle-blowing, the government is declaring, amounts to espionage and treason.

The Obama administration has already opened up a grand jury investigation into Assange and WikiLeaks, and there are reports that a secret indictment has been filed. It has submitted charges against Snowden under the Espionage Act for his actions in exposing illegal government spying programs. If either Snowden or Assange is captured by the United States, there is no doubt that he will face a fate equal to, or worse, than Manning’s. Obama, along with top officials in the military and intelligence apparatus, is acutely aware that the actions taken over the past decade violate innumerable laws and constitutional

provisions.

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, under the pretext of the “war on terror,” the American ruling class, first under Bush and then under Obama, has engaged in wanton criminality, only a small portion of which has been exposed by the revelations of Manning and Snowden. Washington is responsible for torture centers all over the world, domestic spying on an unparalleled scale, illegal rendition, the assassination of US citizens, and secret anti-democratic laws drawn up by secret courts.

On Wednesday, the  British "Guardian" reported on yet another surveillance program, XKeyscore, that allows NSA analysts—contrary to the testimony of government and intelligence officials—to comb through “vast databases containing emails, online chats and browsing histories of millions of individuals” without a court order.

All of these crimes flow from the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Manning himself was moved by the atrocities he witnessed in Iraq in a war based on outright lies. Hundreds of thousands have been killed. Entire cities have been destroyed. The wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have been followed by other war crimes, with the US government now operating a fleet of drones that rain death on peoples throughout the world. Manning is to spend decades in jail, if not his entire life, for helping to expose these crimes, while those who carried them out walk free or occupy plush offices in the White House.

Of particular concern to the ruling class is that individuals like Manning and Snowden, utilizing the power of the Internet, have been able to bypass the stranglehold of the American media, which has aided and abetted every government conspiracy against the population. The New York Times in particular played an indispensable role in propagating the lies used to launch the war in Iraq and has utilised its pages to carry out a smear campaign against Assange and Snowden. In a two-faced editorial Wednesday, the Times declared, “There is no question that Private Manning broke laws.” This—a cowardly statement worthy of scoundrels—was published as Manning faces life in prison for exposing government illegality!

Manning, Assange and Snowden have put their lives at risk to expose to the American people the secret actions of a military-intelligence apparatus that operates without constraint and above the law.

In its contempt of legal norms, the attitude that prevails in the corridors of power in the United States is not fundamentally different from that of Hitler’s Germany. Laws exist solely for the purpose of advancing the interests of the ruling class that controls the state. They can be violated by the executive at will, receiving, if it is convenient, the endorsement of the courts and a servile Congress. Exposure of these violations, carried out in the public interest, is by definition illegal because it violates the secrecy demanded in the name of “national security.” The crimes of the Hitler regime—including the mass internment and execution of political dissidents—have yet to be replicated in the United States. However, the logic of dictatorship is the same—a logic that is driven by the irreconcilable antagonism between the interests of a parasitic financial aristocracy and the vast majority of the population.

There is immense popular sympathy for Manning, Snowden and Assange. The measures that they have exposed are unpopular, which is why the ruling class must conceal them. This sympathy must be translated into a conscious political movement, one that connects the defence of democracy with the overthrow of the corrupt economic and political system that prevails in the United States and around the world.

 

 

Nato's Arctic Expansion:

Swedish troops exercise in the far North

 

NATO  expands Arctic

military activities:

With the complete collaboration of the right-wing Swedish Government, the NATO aggressive military alliance has been allowed to expand its activities to military controlled areas in the North of Sweden although Sweden is officially a neutral country. Many Swedes are concerned that their country's neutrality is being deliberately undermined and Sweden being co-opted into NATO's global aggression and military interventions in various countries. Likewise in neighbouring Finland, pro-NATO propaganda is on the increase in recent months raising concerns by Russia that the NATO alliance is building up a confrontation military grouping on Russia's borders.

 Russia cannot see NATO expansion towards its borders as positive, as under certain circumstances the possibility of military confrontation remains, the Russian Prime minister has said at the Euro-Arctic Council’s forum. When a reporter asked Dmitry Medvedev how the balance of forces in Europe will change if Sweden and Finland decide to enter NATO, the Russian Prime Minister answered that his country would have to react to such developments:

“This is their own business; they are making decisions in accordance with the national sovereignty doctrine. But we have to consider the fact that for us the NATO bloc is not simply some estranged organisation, but a structure with military potential,” the head of the Russian government said, adding that under certain unfavourable scenarios this potential could be used against Russia. “All new members of the North Atlantic Alliance that appear in proximity of our state eventually do change the parity of the military force. And we have to react to this,” Medvedev noted.

Although Sweden and Finland officially state that they are not actively seeking membership, both nations cooperate extensively with NATO and have openly debated the possibility of joining. Speculation over Sweden mounted after it warned earlier this year that its defence capabilities were alarmingly limited. It was embarrassed in April when it could not respond to Russian military jets nearing its border, according to media reports.

NATO ... has a military potential which can be used against our country in certain cases," Medvedev said, as Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen and Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt looked on. "The fact that Norway is a member of NATO has not had any negative effect whatsoever on the development of cooperation in this part of the world," Sweden's Carl Bildt said in response.  These statements notwithstanding, Peace organisations in Sweden and Finland have stated that they expect an official invitation to both countries to join NATO will be issued from the next NATO Summit in 2014.

 

In June this year, International Peace activists responded to developments in Sweden with a conference at Kiruna, northern Sweden, the nearest large town to the areas under discussion and issued the following declaration:

 

THE KIRUNA STATEMENT

PROTECTING THE HIGH NORTH, DEMILITARISING OUTER SPACE AND REMOVING THE THREAT OF NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION

The International Conference on the High North and International Security was held in the city of Kiruna, Sweden, on 28-30^th June 2013. Representatives from a wide spectrum of civil societies and public movements from a number of Scandinavian, European, Asian and Latin American countries, Russia and the United States of America attended and agreed the following:

Conference members recognise:

That we are facing major threats to our survival through the continued pretence that security can be obtained through aggressive foreign policies and military action;

That the ultimate consequences of these policies is the continued development and threatened use of nuclear weapons and the exploitation and militarization of environments that should be protected for the benefit of all humankind - such as the Arctic and outer space;

That the High North is being used by an expanding NATO as a military practice ground in which to rehearse future war fighting strategies and to test and develop new killing technologies;

That the US has established a satellite ground station in the Svalbard islands in Norway which is used by the military and therefore violates the Svalbard or Spitzbergen Treaty that requires that the archipelago is not used for military purposes;

The rapidly increasing deployment of space based military systems and the global network of ground based stations (including radars, downlink and surveillance facilities) that support and supplement them;

that the uncontrolled and irresponsible use of outer space has resulted in that environment being littered with debris that could eventually render it impenetrable;

The destabilizing effects that the deployment of space based, ground based and sea based missile defense systems have on undermining international stability and that they are risking the possibility of reaching further agreements on nuclear disarmament;

That all states who have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty should honour its Article VI and “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control”;

The negative consequences stemming from the stationing of US tactical nuclear weapons in a number of European nations;

That US President Obama’s focus on his “pivot to Asia”, the sending of missiles and warships to the region and the encouragement of the construction of support bases in the region (such as the one threatening the lives of the Gangjeong villagers on Jeju Island, South Korea), is aimed at containing China and is increasing international tension.

We therefore call on all governments, political parties, and members of civil societies and public movements all over the world to share these concerns and urgently request them to call upon:

The leaders of the Permanent members of the United Nations Security Council to arrange an urgent meeting on the revival of stalled arms control processes and to embrace all key areas, including nuclear weapons, missile defense and conventional weapons stationed on the ground, at sea, in the air and in outer space;

The members of the United Nations to firmly work towards the adoption of a Nuclear Weapons Convention, leading to nuclear disarmament,  and we call upon the nuclear weapon states not to obstruct the discussion of the Nuclear Weapons Convention in the General Assembly of the UN;

All nations possessing or about to possess missile defense components should recognize their destabilizing nature and seek instead, through diplomatic processes, to reduce international tensions and work towards a situation where cooperation, mutual trust and understanding;

All space-faring nations should engage immediately in high level talks on the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space and the adoption of outer space as a de-militarized zone;

All states to respect and renew their commitment to protect the unique and vitally important regions of the Earth, such as the Arctic and Antarctic, and reconfirm that they are not the property of any one nation, and never should be, but are to be protected as a common heritage for all humankind and never used for military purposes.

The money and material assets that will be gained from the above steps and other arms control and disarmament measures should not then be redirected to other military projects but used instead to help convert our militarized societies to peaceful ones that work for the betterment of the social and economic wellbeing of all people – for human rather than state security – and for dealing with our common problem of climate change.

As declared at the conference in Kiruna, Sweden, 29^th June 2013.

 

No to War - No to NATO

 

Anti-Drone Protests in Britain:

British Peace Groups mount
protests against new
Drone Warfare RAF Base:

Britain has been controlling its armed drones in the skies over Afghanistan from a US base in Nevada until now; however, from later in 2013 (like much to do with Britain’s drone wars, the exact details are being kept secret) it will begin operating drones directly from the UK at the new British home of drone warfare, RAF Waddington.

On Saturday April 27, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Drone Campaign Network, Stop the War Coalition, and War on Want are organising a march to RAF Waddington near Lincoln to say a loud and clear ‘No to Drones’.  A march will proceed from Lincoln station to the main gate at RAF Waddington – a distance of about 4 miles. At Waddington a rally will be held and key speakers will protest  on the growing use of drones and remote warfare.

This year, the UK will double its number of armed Reaper drones in Afghanistan and these will be run from the Waddington base.Over the past four years the US has launched hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, with reliable reports showing thousands of people have been killed, including hundreds of children.

In Afghanistan where the US and UK have launched over 1,500 drone strikes, it is simply not known how many people have perished in these strikes. In Gaza too, many Palestinians have been killed by Israeli drone strikes. Drones have become the latest weapon of choice in the so-called war on terror. Drones make it much easier for politicians to launch military intervention and assassinate suspects anywhere in the world. Drones are making the world a much more dangerous place.

See information PDF here:

http://dronewarsuk.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/the-2012-drone-wars-briefing/

How to get there:

Transport for the demonstration at RAF Waddington is being arranged from all over the UK, and already plans are in place for coaches from London, Birmingham and Manchester, and to confirm details of travel from further towns and cities in the coming days, further information is available on the transport page on the Stop the War website here: http://bit.ly/ZufNFB

Londoners can buy their coach tickets online now (cost is £17 return) from the link above, or by calling the Stop the War office. Anyone who can help arrange group transport to Lincoln from their own area can get in touch with the organisers on 020 7561 9311.

Spread the petition: call on the British Government to abandon the use of drones as a weapon of war:
In just a week nearly 2,000 people have signed the petition calling on the Government to cease using drones -- including former UN Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday. Supporters can add their names and help spread the petition here stopwar.org.uk/drones.

US increases reliance on Drones

 

The Pentagon's and the CIA's massively scaled-up use of drone aircraft around the world is highlighted by Medea Benjamin in her book Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. In 2000, the Pentagon had less than 50 drones; ten years later, that number is 7,500 - an increase of huge proportions. In 2003, the U.S. Air Force was flying a handful of round-the clock drone patrols every day; by 2010 that number has increased to 40 per day. "By 2011, the Air force was training more remote pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined" explains Benjamin, citing Mark Maybury, Chief Scientist of the Air Force who said in 2011 "Our number one manning problem in the Air force is operating our unmanned platform".

The reasons for the explosion in the use of drones to wage wars around the world are obvious enough. Training drone pilots is faster, less grueling and cheaper compared to traditional pilots. It takes two years to prepare an Air Force recruit for deployment as a pilot, but only nine months to train a drone operator. And, of course, the consequences of drone operator error are no more than the price of the drone itself. As Benjamin writes:

There’s no pilot at risk of being killed or maimed in a crash. No pilot to be taken captive by enemy forces. No pilot to cause a diplomatic crisis if shot down in a “friendly country” while bombing or spying without official permission. If a drone crashes or is shot down, the pilot back home can simply get up and take a coffee break.

But more important is that the use of drones to carry out missions in far-flung countries has enabled the Obama administration to avoid any formal declaration of war while raining down lethal force from the skies–a clear attempt to skirt both U.S. and international law regarding war. As Nick Turse writes in The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases and Cyberwarfare:

"The American war in Pakistan–a poster child for what might now be called the Obama formula, if not doctrine. Beginning as a highly circumscribed drone assassination campaign backed by limited cross-border commando raids under the Bush administration, U.S. operations in Pakistan into something close to a full-scale robotic air war, complemented by cross-border helicopter attacks, CIA-funded “kill teams” of Afghan proxy forces, as well as boots-on-the-ground missions by elite special operations forces".

The U.S. has now deployed drones armed with lethal force in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. Some 60 bases throughout the world are directly connected to the drone program–from Florida to Nevada in the U.S., from Ethiopia and Djibouti in Africa, to Qatar in the Middle East and the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean.

According to Turse, for the last three years, Xe Services, the company formerly known as Blackwater (infamous for its criminal activities in Iraq), has been in charge of arming the fleet of Predator drones at CIA clandestine sites in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Obama administration’s aggressive use of drone warfare is yet further confirmation that Barack Obama’s policies represent the continuation rather than the repudiation of the U.S. government’s militaristic foreign policy of the Bush years.

The withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq–after failing to renegotiate the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government–occurred on Obama’s watch, but the U.S. still plans to keep thousands of “non-combat” personnel in Iraq. Meanwhile, Obama carried out a troop surge into Afghanistan that doubled the number of U.S. soldiers in that country.

All along the way, the use of drones has accelerated–especially during Obama’s presidency, as this infographic effectively illustrates. They are seen as the ideal solution for a military that is overextended after 10 years of occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq–without achieving a decisive victory, but at enormous economic, political and diplomatic cost. Drones, by contrast, have a “lightweight footprint,” allowing them to operate behind a veil of secrecy. They provide intelligence, lethal force and global reach on the cheap, while simultaneously giving U.S. military strategists plausible deniability to avoid accountability for their actions.

So when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) recently blurted out in late February that U.S. drone strikes had killed 4,700 people, the military establishment no doubt shuddered. Graham was speaking to the Rotary Club in Easley, South Carolina, and was the first government official to provide a figure for the number of casualties in the drone wars–his number was around one-and-a-half times greater than unofficial estimates based on press accounts and other eyewitness reports.

Graham wasn’t bemoaning the high death toll–he was enthusiastic about it. Graham went on to say that he approved of the U.S. targeting of American citizens abroad and even the use of drones on the U.S.-Mexico border. Of Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S. citizen killed in a drone strike in 2011, Graham said, “He’s been actively involved in recruiting and prosecuting the war for al-Qaeda. He was found in Yemen, and we blew him up with a drone. Good.” “I didn’t want him to have a trial,” he continued. “We’re not fighting a crime, we’re fighting a war. I support the president’s ability to make a determination as to who an enemy combatant is.”

Opinion polls show that many Americans aren’t as enthusiastic as Graham about drones. According to an article by Joan Walsh at  Salon.com:

http://www.salon.com/2013/02/19/targeted_killings_ok_if_obama_does_it/

While 56 percent of respondents support using drones against “high-level terrorist leaders,” only 13 percent think they should be used against “anyone suspected of being associated with a terrorist group.” And only 27 percent supported using drones “if there was a possibility of killing innocent people.” Another 13 percent opposed the drone program entirely.

Given that only a minority of those killed by drones to date are “high-level leaders”–the New American Foundation estimates it’s as low as 2 percent–Americans may be more sceptical of the policy the more they learn about it.

Still, the military establishment has a secret weapon in the public relations battle to preserve support for its favorite secret weapon–Barack Obama himself. Polling done by political scientist Michael Tesler found that significantly more whites “racial liberals” (a pollster category for liberals who are liberal on questions of race) supported the policy of targeted killings once they were told that the Obama administration had carried out this policy. As Walsh writes: Only 27 percent of white “racial liberals” in a control group supported the targeted killing policy, but that jumped to 48 percent among such voters who were told Obama had conducted such targeted killings. White “racial conservatives” were more likely than white racial liberals to support the targeted killing policy overall, and Obama’s support for it didn’t affect their opinion. The Obama administration is thus the perfect mouthpiece for reestablishing the military’s prestige among a war-weary public–and drones are the perfect vehicle.

In this respect, Obama is bringing U.S. military strategy full-circle. In 2001, U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld began his “revolution in military affairs,” steering the Pentagon toward a military-lite model of high-tech, agile forces. The concept came to a grim end in Iraq’s ruined cities. A decade later, the last vestiges of its many failures continue to play out in a stalemated war in Afghanistan…in the years since, two secretaries of defence and a new President have presided over another transformation–this one geared toward avoiding ruinous, large-scale land wars, which the U.S. has consistently proven unable to win.

Drones are really a symptom of the reorientation of U.S. foreign policy away from the cowboy imperialism of the Bush years. The U.S. has by far the most lethal and technologically advanced military force on the planet, but, with its treasury drained and the rapid rise of global competitors, especially China, the "Obama Doctrine" employs different strategies to achieve the same goals: fewer tanks, more spies and special forces; fewer invasions, more secret bases and drones; and whenever possible, offloading direct responsibility for fighting onto proxy forces and friendly (to U.S. interests) well-armed dictators.

In the  world capitalist economic system built around competition and the maximisation of profit and control of resources, this competition compels nation states to arm themselves for military conflict–or be overrun. And it’s the U.S.–which spends as much as the other countries in the top 20 military spenders combined–that does the lion’s share of overrunning.

So, while it’s essential to oppose drones and the various imperial adventures they enable with horrendous human casualties and suffering, the economic system that gives rise to military conflict must also be challenged.

Austerity is not inevitable:

Paul Dillon at the recent launch of Campaign for Labour Policies in Dublin

 

 



 

Austerity is neither

inevitable,  or new:

 

By Paul Dillon:

 

Austerity is neither inevitable, accidental nor natural, or new. It is in fact a return to a very old policy, from before the vote was won, before the trade unions made the giant gains we still enjoy today: austerity is the policy of using the state to protect those at the top, limiting the share of the economy going to workers pay and the public purse. It must be understood that austerity did not fall from the sky 6 years ago when Brain Lenihan, then Fianna Fail finance Minister, introduced the first austerity budget and implied it would be all over before we knew it, and the we were told, laughably now, not to talk down the economy. If austerity is about, and it is about, the transfer of resources upwards, then this trend became well entrenched during the "Celtic Tiger" years.  In 1987, workers share of the national income was 52%, capitals 48%. By 1998, workers share was 42% and Capital's share was 58%.

And the consequence of this was widening inequality. At the height of the boom, Ireland ranked second to bottom in the OECD league table for poverty and inequality. Contrary to all lies, myths, Ireland's spending on social protection was half the EU average at the height of the apparent boom. Alongside this, trade union density and power fell rapidly during the Celtic years, meaning that by the time the crisis arrived, the labour movement was severely weakened. Trade union membership was 55% of the workforce in 1980, 38% by 1988 and 30% by 2010. And all this occurred in an international context where the share of the economy going to employers, over workers or the public purse has increased hugely. The high amounts of debt which so many of us carry, is a consequence of this decline in ordinary peoples share, and of course the debt which so many people have, is a huge contributory factor in holding back resistance to the effects of the crisis.

Alternatives

 There is a vast gap between what austerity provides, and what citizens desire and that is where an enormous space emerges for an alternative policy. By 2015, the unemployment rate in Ireland will stand at 13%, according to the Government's own figures. This is why when you hear them say that they are working to provide jobs, that employment is the way out of the crisis, they are being somewhat economical with the truth, when they know by their own figures, that their policies sustain unemployment. Unemployment keeps wages down, it disciplines the Labour market. The purpose of slashing the public sector pay bill is to allow for similar readjustment in the private sector. Austerity cannot provide jobs, nor is it intended to. Jobs are not created by tax breaks, jobs are created by demand and investment.

A massive job creation programme needs to run in tandem with an attempt provide for the social needs of our people -we need to stop slashing the public sector -we need to take leash off public enterprises -and we need to start talking about co-operatives and worker controlled industry. There are endless bailouts for banks and those who speculated with them, but none for workers or communities. Why couldn’t the state, in the case of Waterford Crystal, have bailed out the workers, buying the patent for Waterford crystal, handing it over to the workers in Waterford who could run the place with blindfolds on, as an alternative? An investment strategy is the alternative to the cuts:24 billion steep since the crisis began. But, we ought to be very clear; when we demand investment and jobs, we must distance ourselves from those employments, in private and public sector, which downgrade terms, conditions, for young workers, and displace long term better paid jobs. The nurses unions boycott of 2,000 nursing positions, on much poorer pay terms and conditions than these workers deserves, has resulted in just a handful of applications. This has been a tremendous show of solidarity, driven from the grassroots up by young nurse, making the scheme unworkable. The Health Minister has said he wants to extend a cut price programme for other health workers, and that is why it is essential that the nurses maintain this boycott and win. They deserve our full support.

 

Privatisation

In the name of austerity, huge chunks of our public services are being outsourced and privatised. Nowhere is this clearer than in the area of healthcare. The programme for Government between Fine Gael and Labour, allows for the full privatisation of care for the elderly. Other areas will be up for grabs, like administration in the HSE. Coupled to this, we are to move to full on private health insurance, where a handful of global multinationals will compete to make profit, subsidised massively by the public purse.The home help workers know what this is about, when they experienced the cut in wages, of 25% when care services were outsourced. The most disadvantaged communities in the state know what this is about, as they await the provision of primary care, while the state enters into partnerships with developers who can no longer profit from housing, but who are now being subsidised to build primary care centres where they can profit most.

This health system -private, for profit, outsourced- will be more expensive. That’s the experience in the United States, where more public money is spent per head than anywhere else in the world, the experience also in this Dutch model Ireland is to follow, where health spending has gone up, when private insurance came to dominate. State subsidies for drugs and private insurers who profit from illness, should be replaced with a system that invests in prevention and treating everybody equally. We may be bottom of the league at so many things, but we are top of the tables when it comes to which state pays out most for drugs and medicines. In almost every other sphere, pubic services invested in by us for decades, are up for grabs. Look at CIE: where, if the Minister for Transport gets his way, private companies are to be offered routes on our public network, and where more public bus routes will be privatised.

The pattern is always the same: starve services of investment, thrash the public sector trough the mass media, weaken the unions internally, privatise the services, followed by huge paycheque for CEOs and investors, and inevitably, as we have seen in Britain with the privatisation of their trains, a poorer service, a more dangerous service. The privatisation of Telecom Éireann reveals what privatisation means. Eircom was worth, in today’s money, €8.4 billion at the time of its privatisation and was debt free. By early 2012, it was on its way into examinership, with net debts of almost €4 billion. It had shed all but 5,500 of its 13,000 jobs, and we have one of the worst  broadband systems in Europe.The alternative voices on this and on other public services have hardly been heard. But austerity inevitably means privatised public services-there is obvious huge public support for decent health and education services, which austerity can no provide, and that’s a further opening for the space for the alternative argument.

Democracy

What austerity does to democracy is that it hollows it out. The list of social rights that have been lost during this austerity period is long: The right to dental care funded by PRSI payments, the right to state funded masters for students on grants, then there are labour rights that have been reduced. In each of the areas where social rights have been lost, citizens are forced to rely on the market, where we become consumers with rights depending only on how much we spend, rather than citizens. This transfer of provision has been accompanied by a transfer of democratic responsibility into group and bodies which we cannot elect and cannot remove. The national roads authority, NAMA, the HSE all operate beyond any accountability, despite the fact that they control vast public resources.

Austerity clashes with these seeking tom advance democratic demands. The demand for more democracy not less as a response to privatisation, mass consumerism will invariable bring clashes with those who seek to restrict democratic rights. As we fight austerity we must nail a few lies and mistruths, which have been peddled constantly as this crisis has developed. Yes, there are the resources in Ireland to introduce a wealth tax. The top 1% of adults own over 125 billion. A French style wealth tax would bring in 500 million a year, according to the Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, himself.

Economy

Yes, there are enough resources off our coast to provide an enormous economic dividend; 750 billion worth, according to SIPTU. Is there a better example of the neo-liberal mess we are in than the situation regarding our natural resources? In 1975, licensing terms which allowed for a 50% State holding,royalties and a 50% tax on profits accruing from an oil or gas find and development. In 1987 royalties and state participation were abolished by Fianna Fail and in 1992 the corporate tax rate was reduced from 50% to 25%.

Yes, the debt that we all carry, must be thrown off our backs, and there are mechanisms to do that, which will, of course, clash with the interests of our own banks and wealthy individuals, and the Government's move last week, put belt and braces on their liabilities. Mobilising for these demands for jobs, public services and democratic rights will invariably cause clashes with power and established interests that exist. The previous Government and this Government, including the Labour Party, are committed to austerity. The space for an alternative to the policy of this government and the last is vast, when you consider that the aspirations of people can’t be satisfied by austerity.

But, we ought to be fully honest. The phrase "austerity isn’t working" isn't the whole truth-  it is working for those for whom it is designed to work. Every cent of the bogus bank debt will be repayed. The top 10% of citizens in Ireland have enjoyed an increase in their income during the crisis. The major corporations, aided by our tax haven status boom, like TESCO's, returns profits like never before, while tagging the workers who make this possible.

None of the things which people desire -full employment, decent health and education- can be provided by austerity or those who support austerity. That is where the space lies. But, this will require an upsurge in organisation, politicisation and solidarity. And if the establishment has returned to an old policy of austerity, it is worth saying, maybe we should return to an old policy which could be made very modern again. When Connolly wrote letters overseas to unions seeking support during 1913, the letters were headed with the slogan "each for all, all for each". There cannot be meaningful social action without an increase in solidarity between people, and it is up to us to make Connolly’s message resonate now, as an alternative way of dealing with one another, more strongly than ever.