Global Wealth Distribution Pyramid

While 0.5% of the worlds population have over 1 million dollars 68.4% have less than 10,000 dollars.

Source: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook

Freedom Waves

Emergency Demonstration
Support the Freedom Waves ships to Gaza
End the Siege of Gaza

Friday 4th November
6pm, The Spire
O'Connell Street
Dublin 1

At 7.30pm tonight (Thursday) the Irish Ship To Gaza shore team were informed that Israeli warships were seen 6 miles from the Irish (MV Saoirse) and Canadian (Tahrir) ships attempting to break the siege of Gaza. The ships are currently in international waters around 200 miles from Gaza. Israeli spotter planes were also observed flying overhead according to Fintan Lane, who is on board the Irish ship Saoirse. Crew and passengers on the boats fear being boarded tonight.

The Irish Ship To Gaza campaign calls on people to mobilise to call for an end to the illegal Israeli siege of Gaza and to support the #FreedomWaves ships by attending this demo tomorrow at 6pm at the Spire in O'Connell Street Dublin 1.

Organised by the Irish Ship To Gaza campaign - http://www.irishshiptogaza.org/

Please also send a message to TDs calling for support for the #FreedomWaves - Email Campaign to Protect Irish and International Citizens Sailing to Gaza

Web: http://www.ipsc.ie/event/dublin-emergency-demo-in-support-of-freedomwaves-end-the-siege-of-gaza
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=286858534667867&context=create
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ipsc48/status/132192757455400961

KKE: Elections Now!!!

No to the blackmail of the people with the referendum

Down with the government

Elections now

The government yesterday carried out the most naked and open blackmail and ideological intimidation against the people, in relation to the agreement for the management of the state debt, by announcing a referendum. At the same time the government of PASOK requested a vote of confidence from the Parliament.

The Press Office of the CC of the KKE made the following statement:

“Down with the government. Elections now. No to the naked blackmail and ideological intimidation against the people. The blackmail will not succeed. The announcement of the Prime Minister concerning the referendum means that a vast mechanism to coerce the people is being set up, through which the government and the EU will use every means, threats, provocations in order to subdue the working class and the popular strata, to snatch a yes for the new agreement.

The referendum is going to be carried out with a new reactionary law, lumping together the positions of the KKE with that of ND and the other parties, despite the fact that they are diametrically opposed, while the strategy of the government is identified with the strategy of ND, LAOS and their other stooges. Elections now. The working class and the popular strata must impose them and welcome them with mass mobilizations all over the country. With their activity and vote they must strike hard against the bourgeois political system, to pave the way for the overthrow of the anti-people political line, the power of the monopolies.”

latest from MR

The below is the editorial from this months edition of Monthly Review.

It is a sign of the seriousness of the current economic malaise that more and more establishment commentators today are turning to Marx for answers. Thus a September 14, 2011, article in Bloomberg Businessweek, entitled “Marx to Market,” acknowledged:

The Bearded One has rarely looked better. The current global financial crisis has given rise to a new contingent of unlikely admirers. In 2009 the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, published an article praising Marx’s diagnosis of income inequality…. In Shanghai, the turbo-capitalist hub of Communist-in-name-alone China, audiences flocked to a 2010 musical based on Capital, Marx’s most famous work. In Japan, Capital is now out in a manga version…. As misguided as Marx was about many things…there are pieces of his (voluminous) writings that are shockingly perceptive. …. Marx has gotten an attentive reading recently from the likes of New York University economist Nouriel Roubini and George Magnus, the London-based senior economic adviser to UBS Investment Bank…. In an Aug. 28 essay for Bloomberg View, Magnus wrote that “today’s global economy bears some uncanny resemblances” to what Marx foresaw….

Consider the particulars. As Magnus notes, Marx predicted that companies would need fewer workers as they improved productivity, creating an “industrial reserve army” of the unemployed whose existence would keep downward pressure on wages for the employed…. It’s hard to argue with that these days…. The condition of blue collar workers in the U.S. is still a far cry from the subsistence wage and ‘accumulation of misery’ that Marx conjured. But it’s not morning in America, either. (http://businessweek.com)

Bloomberg Businessweek seems unaware that Marx viewed the reserve army of labor as applicable not just to developed countries like the United States, but also to labor throughout the globe. It is this question of the global reserve army that is addressed in the Review of the Month in this issue. Not only do we find that a majority of the world’s workforce today is living at close to subsistence level, due to the enormous downward pressure exerted by the massive global reserve army of labor, holding down wages, but it also remains true, as Marx wrote in Capital, that “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.”

During the weekend of September 9–11, Fred Magdoff was in Ireland to participate in the Desmond Greaves School, an annual event. In addition to a talk on the economic crisis in the United States, Fred also participated in a Sunday panel discussion about where capitalism is headed. He met with people in the labor movement, a variety of socialists, and members of the Communist Party of Ireland. One of the organizers of the event, in thanking Fred, wrote the following: “We regard [Monthly Review] as one of the most important sources of Marxist theory and analysis about contemporary capitalism. The concepts of imperialism, monopoly capitalism, and financialisation are not in wide use here, so Monthly Review is vital to our efforts to understand what is happening in the economy and society. Without these concepts and this analysis, it is impossible to understand the crisis or think about where we are going and what we should be doing.” We hope at MR that this new connection with Irish socialists is only just a start, in what will be a continuing relationship.

http://monthlyreview.org/2011/11/01/november-2011-volume-63-number-6

Unsecured bondholders paid!

Stop bankrupting the Irish people!

1 November 2011

Stop bankrupting the Irish people!

The decision of the present Government to continue to pay all the debts incurred by the Irish banks that the previous Government socialised is a scandal beyond belief.

While in opposition the then opposition parties, Fine Gael and the Labour Party, rightly criticised the Government for paying unsecured bond-holders, as it was hurting the old, the sick, children, and those depending on social welfare.

Yet over the next day or so they will hand over $1 billion to unsecured bond-holders. These secondary bond-holders—“ground feeders”—have purchased these bonds at a small fraction of their value and will now receive in payment the full amount outstanding.

This is a sum that could build and fit out the new children’s hospital. It would also go a long way towards developing our natural resources under public ownership and control.

This transfer of wealth from the people to banking corporations and individuals must end now.

The people must be given the same right as the people of Greece. We demand a referendum on the bank bail-out!

Repudiate the debt campaign

We demand referendum on bank bailout

31st October 2011

We demand referendum on bank bailout

Let the people have their say

It is now time for the Irish Government to follow the example of the Government of Greece and call a referendum on the bank bailout. A decision that has plunged our country into decades of debt. This odious debt is not the responsibility of the people and is simply unpayable and is causing extreme hardship among our people and will inflict great suffering for decades to come.

The decisions of the EU over the last number of years have lead to a permanent debt structured relationship between the peripheral member states and the centre, and a permanent transfer of wealth from the peoples to financial corporations.

We have to end this transfer of this wealth from the people to private banks and parasitic bond holders. The Irish people must be allowed to have a vote, as they are the ones being forced to pay a debt not of their making.

Repudiate the debt campaign

www.nodebt.ie