Our Enemy, The State: 1, How The State Tyrannizes Its People

by

Gabriel Donohoe

[This is the first of two articles on how ‘The State’ subjugates and swindles its own people by imposing austerity, fear, and fraud upon them. The first article propounds that ‘The State’ is a criminal enterprise which accumulates unwarranted power and wealth by suppressing the Natural Rights of the People. This essay focuses on the Irish State but it could equally apply to almost any State in the world.

The second article is titled, “Our Enemy, The State: 2, How The People Can Smash State Tyranny.” It explores how a nation’s credit is systematically stolen and re-cycled by the banks and what the People can do to take back their own inherent power and defeat the tyranny of ‘The State’ in all its virulent forms.]

In 1935, Albert J. Nock published “Our Enemy, The State”, his classic treatise on how successive governments conspire to increase the power of the State by stealthily decreasing the power of the People. Nock bluntly describes the State as the common enemy of all industrious and decent men, a controlling bully that operates through deception and threats. This is a damning observation, even more true now in 2016 than it was 81 years ago.

In Ireland today, it is becoming more and more apparent that the State is not a benevolent matriarch who cherishes all her children. Far from it. The Irish State, according to James Joyce, is “the old sow that eats her farrow.” The State is contrived to devour the wealth of its people and to stifle their freedoms and individual sovereignty. The outcome of this great villainy is austerity, poverty, servitude, suicide, eviction, emigration, bank bailouts, unnecessary taxation, and myriad injustices and hardship, all leading to compromised health and early death for many people.

But who or what exactly is “The State”?

‘State’ and ‘Government’ are terms often used interchangeably but this is not entirely accurate. ‘State’ is more an abstraction, a nonphysical entity, while ‘Government’ is a collection of people.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘State’ as: “an organized political community under one government; a commonwealth; a nation.”

Max Weber describes ‘The State’ as: “a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory.”

Yet Murray Rothbard forthrightly defines the ‘State’ as “the organization of robbery systematized and writ large”. In other words, the State is a huge mafia organization and the government is its ‘wiseguys’ – hoodlums who are paid to enforce a plethora of ‘laws’ and to steal as much from the people as they can. The State, through the muscle of government, is but a glorified ‘protection racket’ run by the few to fleece the many.

So, if the government merely functions as mafia ‘wiseguys’, who then are the godfathers?

The godfathers are a small but all-powerful cabal of international banksters operating in the shadows behind the façade of the State. While governments may come and go, these omnipotent crooks are always in the background, scheming, grasping, and controlling. They maintain their ‘death grip’ on the people by directing the activities of subservient governments. Those politicians whom they cannot bribe or cajole, they threaten, blackmail, or destroy.

While the government ‘wiseguys’ go about the business of looting the nation, they are aided and abetted by willing State whores in the judiciary, senior civil service, police, mass media, churches, academia, entertainment, and other spheres of influence. It seems that the State has no trouble finding corrupt individuals in the highest and most respectable echelons of society, unprincipled men and women whom it can manipulate and control.

The despotic State is quite a monster, a colossus of great power and wealth. Yet for all its power and wealth, it must be understood that the State has no power of its own, no wealth of its own. It must obtain these things from the people. But the public in general seems to have forgotten this important fact, i.e., that the State depends on them for its existence – not the other way round.

Nock says of the State:

“All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn.  Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.”

And Nock warns us of a chilling truism:

“In proportion as you give the State power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.”  (Emphasis not in original.)

On State money, Nock says:

“Another strange notion pervading whole peoples is that the State has money of its own…The State has no money. It produces nothing. It existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say, by forced levies on the production of others. ‘Government money,’ of which one hears so much nowadays, does not exist; there is no such thing.”

The Invisible Government

Only the most naïve believe that the government actually runs the country, and runs it in the interests of the people. The fact is that government works perpetually in the interests of a shadowy elite who controls the State. We know this for a fact because politicians, popes, presidents, and prime ministers have told us so down through the years. Here are just a few random quotes…

“A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks.” – John C. Calhoun, U.S. Vice President (1825-1832) and U.S. Senator.

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881).

“It [Freemasonry] bends governments to its will sometimes by promises, sometimes by threats. It has found its way into every class of Society, and forms an invisible and irresponsible power, an independent government, as it were, within the body corporate of the lawful state.” –Pope Leo XIII, 1902.

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.” — Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States, “Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography” (1913).

“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” – Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States ‘The New Freedom’, 1913.

“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson [1828- 1836].” – A letter written by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Colonel House, November 21st, 1933.

“We have a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state… It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government… This ruthless power-seeking elite is a disease of our century… This group…is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.” – Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech.

“The Rockefellers and their allies have, for at least fifty years, been carefully following a plan to use their economic power to gain political control of first America, and then the rest of the world. Do I mean conspiracy? Yes, I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.” — Congressman Larry P. McDonald, November 1975. (Died along with 268 other passengers when Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down over Russia in 1983.)

And here is an often quoted gem, almost 100 years old, which could be so easily applied to Ireland today…

“The real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen….At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually runs the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both political parties.” – New York City Mayor John F. Hylan, 1922.

What the ‘invisible government’ certainly does not want is a free-thinking, educated, and affluent populace. Such a people cannot be controlled or manipulated. The State godfathers want a brainwashed, gullible, and debt-laden society that is easy to fleece and control. To that end they have devised a sophisticated mind control programme, running stealthily and extensively today, that regiments the behaviour of the serfs and governs their every thought and deed.

Many of these mind control programmes can be traced back to Edward L. Bernays, the father of spin doctors and black propaganda. Bernays was a PR guru and a nephew of famed psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud. He had many spectacular successes in propaganda operations such as the overthrow of democratically elected Arbenz Guzman in Guatamala (while Bernays worked for the United Fruit Company and the U.S. Government) and in convincing the American public that the fluoridation of water was not only safe but beneficial to health as well (on behalf of ALCOA, the Aluminum Company of America).

In his 1928 book, “Propaganda,” Bernays wrote:

“Those who manipulate [the organized habits and opinions of the masses]…constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country….We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of….In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

It is not difficult to see how Bernays’s devious programmes have been used effectively over the last nine decades, especially in the Ireland of today. It is only now that a growing number of people are becoming more and more aware of “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” This ‘invisible government’ directs the actions of the visible government; this is true of Enda Kenny’s pathetic administrations, Brian Cowen’s wretched coalition, and all governments since the founding of the State.

Government By Criminals

Still doubt that Irish governments are operated by criminals?

Think of the infamous bank guarantees of 2008 and the reprehensible bank bailouts that followed… Think of the shadowy dealings of NAMA and its collusion with foreign financial vultures… Think of the notorious ‘Eviction Bill’ which eased the way for banks to evict tens of thousands of families and seize their homes… Think of the great give-away of our fish and our oil and gas fields worth billions upon billions of euro…

And think of the dogged, conspiratorial attempt to steal our water, our most precious resource, through the sly privatization of a monster called Irish Water… And think of the countless number of other plots and schemes by the black-tie thugs who “pull the wires” of our government puppets.

And reflect on the qualities or otherwise of numerous politicians in whom we trusted to run the affairs of the nation with probity and integrity: Charlie Haughey, Bertie Ahern, Michael Lowry, Ray Burke, Liam Lawlor, Denis Foley, Ivor Callely, ‘Pee’ Flynn, John O’Donoghue, Willie O’Dea, Ray MacSharry, Seán Doherty, to name a few.

Albert Nock was familiar with Bernays’s work. No doubt it appalled him. Nock’s vision for society was one free from the influence of the political State. At the time of his writing in the 1930s, Nock saw F. D. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ – a series of laws passed by Congress and presidential executive orders – as merely a pretext for the federal government to increase its control over society.

Nock was horrified at FDR’s grab of unprecedented power which he described as a veritable coup d’état. He saw that the State constantly seized new powers for itself which penetrated to every act of the citizen, however secret. He observed that the agents of the State had elevated themselves as a separate and superior caste “with their thumbs in every pot”. This led Nock to describe the State as that which “claims and exercises the monopoly of crime”, a shocking indictment indeed.

In the Ireland of today we wonder what Nock would have thought of Fine Gael & Labour’s grab for power in Enda Kenny’s faithless government of 2011 – 2016? Or further, of Kenny’s second government, the current minority administration of Fine Gael supported by a patchwork of enticed Independents and by the collusion of Fianna Fáil who squat with one opportunistic foot in government and the other in opposition.

Originally, the Irish Constitution called for government of the country to be carried out by all TDs in the Dáil. Nonetheless, the voice of opposition TDs was soon brushed aside, effectively disenfranchising all those citizens who had voted them into office. And the voice of backbench government TDs was also stifled by imposing the party whip on them, forcing them to vote as directed by the party mandarins. There would be no loose cannons in the controlled and lucrative business of government.

The decision-making power of the Cabinet was next to be brushed aside with the formation of the so-called Economic Management Committee, aka the ‘Gang of Four’. All key decisions would be made by four ministers in the 2011-2016 government: Kenny, Burton, Noonan, and Howlin. In effect, just four people took it upon themselves to run Ireland. All laws and decisions made by them alone would be presented to the Cabinet as a fait accompli. No discussion, no debate, no dissension. Thus the self-serving schemes of four State mercenaries came to undermine the best interests of the Irish nation.

This seizure and consolidation of power is a blatant side-stepping of the democratic authority of both the Cabinet and the Dáil. It is totally unconstitutional. But regard for the Constitution has not been one of the Kenny government’s priorities, especially when we consider that the widespread evictions and bank seizures of people’s homes is in direct contravention of Article 40.5 of said Constitution.

Another repressive practice indulged in by the Kenny Government more than its predecessors is the guillotining of bills before the House. Guillotining means abruptly ending discussion or debate on a bill and denying deputies the right to speak or question its contents. By use of the party whip and superior voting numbers the Government can guillotine any bill by calling for a vote before the bill is properly scrutinized. Thus the government bulldozes its way over the Opposition and enacts bills without proper examination, debate, or objection. With the use of the guillotine, the Kenny Government has reduced the national parliament to the status of a rubber stamp for decisions made by a handful of oligarchs.

The Executive, Legislature, and Judiciary are meant to be independent elements of government and free from the dominance of one over the other. The originally conceived checks and balances to prevent interference are no longer in effect. The Executive, or rather an elite element of it, has rendered the Legislature powerless and irrelevant and has also compromised the independence of the Judiciary by the inordinate amount of political appointees to the bench.

Thus has democracy in Ireland has been thoroughly subverted. What we now have is a de facto fascist State.

(As a side-note, in 2004 the leader of the Opposition complained that Bertie Aherne’s government’s overuse of the guillotine rendered the status of the Dáil as “little more than nuisance value.” Who was the leader of the Opposition? A Mayo TD called Enda Kenny, the very same man who now as Taoiseach has willfully embraced the guillotine as virtual government policy. How’s that for political hypocrisy?)

Corporatism And Statism = Fascism

Today, the Fine Gael party has re-embraced its extreme right-wing roots. Fine Gael was founded in 1933 from its support base of the ‘Blueshirts’, a fascist group that admired both Mussolini and Hitler and which later sent a brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil War on the same side as the Nazis.The first leader of Fine Gael was Eoin O’Duffy, who, during World War II contacted Adolf Hitler and offered to send him a brigade of Irishmen to fight communism alongside the Nazis. Thankfully, Hitler turned him down. Incidentally, the current leader of Fine Gael, Taoiseach Enda Kenny, also supports thuggish governments. Kenny has called for sanctions against Russia, the only country in the world standing up to the U.S., Britain, France, and NATO for their criminal war-mongering in Syria.

The aim of the fledgling Fine Gael Party under O’Duffy was to create a corporatist United Ireland within the British Commonwealth. Today we see the fruits of this policy with the cosy bonhomie between the Irish Government and the international bankers and corporatists. O’Duffy’s corporatist policy of the 1930s clearly came from the influence of Il Duce whose chief political aim was to promote corporatism in Italy. In fact, Mussolini is quoted as saying:

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

It is precisely this “merger of state and corporate power” that has devastated Ireland today and impoverished and dispossessed a great majority of the Irish people. On the other hand, the corporate State has swelled the coffers of the international banksters to overflowing and filled the pockets of their hirelings in government and other apparatchiks.

Corporations Larger Than Countries

A startling fact today is that of the world’s 100 largest economies, 51 are corporations and only 49 are countries. For example, General Motors is bigger than Denmark, Poland, Norway and more than 20 other countries. And 16 corporations are bigger than Ireland, including AXA, Royal Dutch Shell, General Electric, Mitsui, Exxon Mobil, and Wal-Mart, just to name a few. (Sources: Sales: Fortune, July 31, 2000. GDP: World Bank, World Development Report 2000.)

In a more recent listing, Apple computer is coming in at Number 20 in the top economies of the world with a market value of $710 billion. This is greater than the GDP of countries like Switzerland, Sweden, Poland, Argentina, Belgium, Norway, Austria, and many, many others… (IMF data for 2014.) And Apple’s market value represents three times Ireland’s GDP, which is the equivalent of 238 billion U.S. dollars.

Some readers will be aware of the recent brouhaha about Apple being instructed by the European Commission to pay Ireland some €13 billion in back taxes which Apple tried to avoid paying, in collusion with the Irish Revenue Commissioners. The full amount owed to Ireland may come to €19 billion with interest. Incredibly, the Irish Government does not want to take the money. More incredibly, the Government has spent some €670,000 in legal fees in trying to prevent Apple paying this money.

This should be more than enough to demonstrate to all doubters exactly for whom our politicians and top civil servants are working.

Apple’s transgression may only be the tip of the iceberg. It has recently been revealed that Kellogg, the breakfast cereal giant, has paid zero tax for the past two years. And it’s come to light that a vulture fund, Mars Capital, only paid a miserly €250 on revenues of €14,000,000! Now we’re hearing that Zara, a clothing giant, has avoided taxes to the tune of hundreds of millions of euro.

On the subject of vulture funds, the Irish Government has allowed these predators to buy up thousands of mortgages en bloc for a fraction of their value. (E.g., Ulster Bank sold off €2 billion of its ‘Project Clear’ portfolio for €500 million – a 75% write-down.) Yet the Government has refused to extend this generous write-down consideration to house and business owners for whom they supposedly work. Consequently, the vulture friends of the government make huge profits while the hard-pressed mortgagors suffer.

Thus it is clear that the current Irish Government and its predecessors have succumbed to the diktats of the banksters, the invisible power behind The State. Government officials have aided these unconscionable criminals to amass great prominence and standing and use it to accumulate huge wealth and power for themselves.

As Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset frankly declared in “The Revolt of the Masses” (1930),  “The State’s rapid depletion and seizure of social power is the greatest danger that today threatens civilization.” That was 86 years ago, but it is even more chillingly true today.

A SUMMARY of what we have postulated so far…

• ‘The State’ is not the Government;
• ‘The State’ is not the People
• ‘The State’ is in fact a tiny group of wealthy opportunists, a Power Elite, who pull the strings of government and exploit the People
• This Power Elite is comprised of imperious banksters & corporatists who control all finance and trade among the nations of the world
• Like almost all other global states, the Irish State falls under the sway of the Power Elite whose currency is fraud and deception
• The Irish State is a de facto criminal enterprise
• Successive Irish governments willingly serve as the bully-boys of the oppressive State
• The clandestine task of government is to transfer the inherent powers of society  into the grasping hands of the State
• The Irish Government manipulates the legislature, the judiciary, and the police to threaten and coerce the people
• The Irish Government, in collusion with the judiciary and the mass media, strives to hold the people in ignorance, poverty, and servitude
• Democracy in Ireland is a pretense whereby ALL political parties are controlled & regulated by mercenary party mandarins
• Irish Mass Media has been subverted to become a propaganda tool of the State
• The merger of State and corporate has led to rule by tyrants
• ‘The State’, through its cudgel of government, is the greatest danger to the liberty & prosperity of the people

These realities are so important, so outrageously evident, that they need repeating:

1. THE IRISH STATE IS A CONSTRUCT SET UP TO DECEIVE AND EXPLOIT THE IRISH PEOPLE.
2. THE IRISH STATE IS CONTROLLED BY A COTERIE OF INTERNATIONAL BANKSTERS.
3. THE IRISH GOVERNMENT SERVES AS A WILLING TOOL OF THESE RAPACIOUS BANKSTERS.
4. THE IRISH GOVERNMENT BETRAYS THE SACRED TRUST PLACED IN IT BY THE IRISH PEOPLE.
5. THE IRISH GOVERNMENT IS, BY DEFINITION, GUILTY OF TREASON.
6. THE IRISH GOVERNMENT IS THE AVOWED ENEMY OF THE IRISH PEOPLE.

Today, the Irish Nation is in the throes of serious difficulty and distress. The Government, like the ‘Judas goat’ in an abattoir , has led the people to deliberate economic slaughter. The lot of the people has scarcely been worse since the so-called Famine of the 1840s. This government, and its predecessors, has failed abysmally in its job. It has broken faith with the people and has acted in a ruthless, unconscionable manner.

Many of the activist groups which have emerged from the great social collapse talk of change and reform. They talk of reform in government, reform in banking, reform of the judiciary, reform in politics, reform in everything that has contributed to the ruination of the Irish Nation.

But, if truth be told, the entire system is unreformable. It is completely unfit for purpose.

For years, scientists have pursued a Theory of Everything, a single theory that would explain everything in the universe, how and why everything works and fits together. They haven’t yet succeeded.

With regard to the corrupt institutions of State, some people wonder if there is a Theory of Everything, a single root cause that permits or encourages such widespread injustice and thievery. Is there a single action that we the people can take to end tyrannical government and bring freedom, justice, and prosperity?

Yes. There is. Absolutely!

That will be the theme of the next article, “Our Enemy, The State: 2, How The People Can Smash State Tyranny.”

Massacre At Wounded Knee

by Gabriel Donohoe

Today, the United States is universally condemned for killing and maiming untold numbers of innocent civilians in drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and other countries.

This is not a recent phenomenon. Since its foundation in 1776, the U. S. has systematically slaughtered, persecuted, and impoverished its own indigenous peoples in a genocidal programme of stealing native lands and natural resources. It has been estimated that the death toll of American Indians from the arrival of Columbus in 1492 to the time of Wounded Knee was around 100 million souls. In 1890, only 250,000 remained.

Therefore, it is fitting that on this day, December 29^th, 2015, we remember the brutal slaughter of some 300 Lakota Sioux Indians – mostly women and children – by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek on their own reservation in South Dakota exactly 125 years ago.

The ill-fated Indian band, led by Big Foot (also known as Spotted Elk), was fleeing its winter encampment, alarmed at increased military activity on Sioux reservation lands after the assassination by Indian police of Lakota spiritual leader and holy man, Sitting Bull, barely two weeks before.

Frozen Body of Big Foot

The army entered the reservation in force to stamp out ‘Ghost Dancing’, a religious ceremony indulged in by the vanquished Sioux by which they vainly hoped to bring back the ‘good old days’ of a happy nomadic life, an abundance of buffalo, and the departure of the malevolent white man.

Ranchers and settlers in Nebraska and the Dakotas became alarmed at the Ghost Dance ‘craze’ and feared an Indian uprising. They called out to the Government for protection. Whether spurred on by white hysteria or by a desire to steal even more reservation land, the government promptly sent in the army.

Unfortunately, the military force selected for the job was the reconstituted Seventh Cavalry, a regiment all but obliterated by the Sioux and Cheyenne 14 years previously, in June, 1876, on the banks of the Little Bighorn River, Montana Territory. Custer’s old outfit, now under the command of Col. J.W. Forsyth, had a score to settle with the Sioux.

Little Bighorn, June, 1876

On the morning of December 29^th, 1890, Forsyth began to confiscate the hunting weapons of Big Foot’s band of some 350 men, women, and children who had been take prisoner the day before. According to the army, a deaf Lakota warrior, who didn’t understand what was going on, refused to hand up his valuable rifle and a struggle ensued during which a shot was fired.

The Seventh Cavalry immediately opened fire on the mostly unarmed mass of Lakota prisoners with .45-70 caliber Springfield carbines and four 42mm Hotchkiss mountain cannon. Men, women, and children were cut to pieces in the murderous enfilade, including many soldiers caught in their own crossfire.

Soldiers With Hotchkiss Guns

The surviving Lakotas fled in the freezing snow but were pursued for three miles or more and ruthlessly butchered. Among the dead was the band leader, Big Foot, who was ill with pneumonia at the time and whose corpse was later found frozen in a half-reclining position. One soldier told how it took him several shots to kill a toddler who was running around the body of its dead parents. Another told of seeing a baby trying to suckle the breast of its dead mother, lying in her own blood in the snow.

For their “bravery”, twenty Medals of Honor were awarded to the soldiers. For years now, Indian activists have been trying to have these medals rescinded. To date, they have not been successful.

Collecting The Lakota Dead

Scattered Bodies at Wounded Knee

The Indian bodies were left to lie in a blizzard for 4 days or so. When an army burial party arrived back at the slaughter site they found a 7 month old girl, frost-bitten but alive, under the frozen corpse of her mother who had tried to shield her from army bullets. The child was named little Lost Bird and was adopted by a Nebraska National Guard general, without permission or approval from the Lakota people. She lived to be 29 years old and her story of abuse and racism at the hands of her “rescuers” is a poignant one.

(See a video of Lost Bird’s story here)

Mass Grave

When a wagon load of wounded arrived at Pine Ridge 4 or 5 days later a white congregation emerged from a church to shout abuse at them. The church was still decorated with Christmas slogans of “Peace On Earth” and “Goodwill To All”. The good ‘Christian’ reverend shook his fist at the desperately injured and frost-bitten women and children and yelled, “Bandits!”

The former Indian Agent at Pine Ridge, Irishman V.T. McGillycuddy, was disgusted at the unwarranted slaughter.  He wrote:

“…[U]p to date there has been neither a Sioux outbreak or war. No citizen in Nebraska or Dakota has been killed, molested or can show the scratch of a pin, and no property has been destroyed off the reservation.”

The dream of a noble and beautiful people died at Wounded Knee.

Let us remember the great injustice that happened there…

General Colby with Little Lost Bird

Lost Bird (Zintkala Nuni)

Lost Bird’s Reburial in 1991

The author’s granddaughter, Lauren, then aged 5, placing her “Ireland” cap on Lost Bird’s grave as a mark of respect

 

An Irishman is last army survivor of the atrocity at Wounded Knee

Ben Gilroy….Love him or Loath him….he is filling a void that undoubtably exists

Ben Gilroy is a stalwart Irishman indeed… But the author of this piece, Austin Byrne, is also a true Irishman who has helped many people too. His modesty won’t allow him to say that.

“Dear Plonker” (Book Review – Humour)

by Gabriel Donohoe

If you are not one to laugh out loud when you are reading, here’s a book guaranteed to provoke a belly laugh.

But be careful where you settle down to read it. Loud guffawing may bring you unwelcome stares on the bus or train, or it may get you thrown out of your local municipal library. And most of all, don’t read it in the courtroom as you await your case to be called – especially not in Judge Leonie Reynolds’s court in Trim, not if black and blue is a skin tone you’d prefer to avoid.

“Dear Plonker” is written by King Aidan, or Aidan Killian as he undoubtedly appears in the secret files of the clandestine State agencies charged with keeping us safe from truthtellers, water protesters, ISIS, and satirical comedians with an attitude.

As an avid reader since my pre-teens, this is the first book I’ve read in a long, long time to cause me to laugh out loud. Not since “Puckoon” (Spike Milligan), “Catch-22” (Joseph Heller), or “Tortilla Flat” (John Steinbeck) have I come close to falling out of bed in convulsions of laughter.

Yet, it’s difficult to know what genre this book should be filed under. ‘Humour’ it most certainly is. But it could equally be found on the ‘Self-Improvement/Personal Development’ shelf or on the front rows of ‘Secrets The Banks and Corporations Don’t Want You To Know’.

“Dear Plonker” is a collection of letters and emails to and from banks, solicitors, Eflow, phone companies, and other debt collectors. It is deliciously funny, witty, informative, and sardonic. It strips bare the humourless facade of officialdom and exposes ‘Big Corpo’ for the greedy, heartless, blackguard that it is.

King Aidan directs informed questions to the formidable institutions of bureaucracy, cloaked with disarming humour and sarcasm. But these scoundrels are unable to answer him, because to do so truthfully would destroy them. They can only resort to bluster and bullying, and that only serves to demolish their own credibility.

Thus, Aidan reveals that what seemed to be a terrifying fire-breathing dragon is nothing more than a whimpering pup. “Dear Plonker” shows you how to lose your fear of the ‘beast’ and how to stand up in your own power. Bullies, when confronted, show their true nature and turn tail. You will learn how to beat this dragon and pull his teeth.

And the wealth of information in this book is invaluable. Just to find out how to deal with banks, debt collectors and other corporate bullies is worth the price alone.

There is also a spiritual aspect to this book. Aidan Killian could have ranted and railed against the evils and injustices of the banks, the debt collectors, and their ilk and he would have been justified in attacking them and heaping scorn and vitriol upon them.

But no. Aidan charitably treats their frontmen as human beings. He is aware that we ALL are spiritual beings currently trying to cope with a human existence. We are ALL walking a winding road hoping to get to an agreeable destination. And it’s not easy for most of us.

Aidan’s awareness only comes with spiritual enlightenment. I suspect that Aidan Killian, the soul-being, has been here many, many times before. Perhaps he is back again for one final hurrah! and to give us a laugh or two on our own arduous journey. In his book, Aidan reminds us that maybe we are taking life too seriously.

A quote from Shakespeare comes to mind:

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts…”

Speaking of the stage, if you get a chance you should also go to see Aidan Killian doing his stand-up comedy routine. He is a powerful social critic and satarist. His social commentary, like all home truths, is most effective and scathing when dressed in humour. Aidan is destined to join the ranks of the greats, like Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, and a few others. His show is highly recommended.

Book launch is in The Hampton Hotel, Donnybrook, Dublin 4, on Friday night, 4^th September, 2015, at 7pm.

More details from www.DearPlonker.com

or from Aidan Killian’s FB page, https://www.facebook.com/aidankillian?fref=ts

The Lusitania: Another Bankster Outrage?

by Gabriel Donohoe

(Re-posted from a blog one year ago)

On this day 100 years ago, May 7th, 1915, a German U-boat sunk the RMS Lusitania off the southern Irish coast with the loss of 1,195 lives, including 128 Americans. 94 children perished, 31 of them mere babes-in-arms. This incident became the major catalyst for drawing a reluctant America into the European slaughter pens of World War 1.

But was the sinking of the Lusitania one of those unfortunate acts that occur randomly during war or was there a more sinister and deliberate hand at work?

In a disputed incident like this, one often gets to the truth of the matter by asking the question, “Cui bono?” “Who benefits?” After a detailed examination of the facts, one can only come to the conclusion that it was the banksters who benefitted, and grossly at that.

The RMS Lusitania was one of the world’s biggest ships and the pride of the Cunard Line at the time of her demise. “RMS” stands for “Royal Mail Steamer” which meant that the Lusitania was certified to carry the mail, earning her owners an annual fee of some £68,000.

At the time of her final voyage, leaving New York for Liverpool on May 1^st, 1915, Europe was embroiled in war. Germany had declared the seas around the United Kingdom to be a war-zone and German U-boats were wreaking havoc on enemy shipping.  300,000 tons of Allied shipping were sunk every week and one out of every four steamers leaving Britain never returned. Britain was virtually cut off from her allies and her waters were fraught with danger.

U-boat

In contravention of the rules of war at the time (the Hague Conventions and the Cruiser Rules) the RMS Lusitania was carrying a considerable amount of ammunition, explosives, and other war matériel for the armies of England and France. As G. Edward Griffin wrote in The Creature From Jekyll Island, “…she [The Lusitania] was virtually a floating ammunition depot.” This meant that she wouldn’t have the status of a non-military ship and could be fired upon without warning. It was widely known that the Lusitania was entered into the Admiralty fleet register as an armed auxiliary cruiser and was so listed in Jane’s Fighting Ships and in The Navy Annual.

The Germans knew that The Lusitania was carrying military supplies bound for Germany’s enemies on the Western Front. The German embassy in Washington even took the precaution of placing an advertisement in 50 U.S. newspapers warning civilians not to sail on the Lusitania. Due to the intervention of the State Department most of the notices were not published. However, the Des Moines Register carried the following advert which was placed beside an ad for the Lusitania…

“NOTICE!

“TRAVELLERS intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travellers sailing in the war zone on the ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.

“IMPERIAL GERMAN EMBASSY

“Washington, D.C., April 22, 1915.”

J. P. Morgan

In the early stages of the War, England and France had borrowed heavily from American investors and had selected J P Morgan & Co, front man and partner of the Rothschilds, to act as sales agent for their bonds. Morgan bankers were also selected as purchase agents to buy war materials when the bond money was returned to the States. J.P. Morgan & Co was in the happy position of receiving lucrative commissions in both directions, which, in the case of England and France amounted to some $30 million. That’s not counting commissions on hundreds of millions of dollars of business done with Russia, Italy, and Canada.

Furthermore, through holding companies, the House of Morgan directly owned many of the manufacturing firms receiving production contracts for military goods from England and France. (Undoubtedly these firms were the foundation of the ‘military-industrial complex’ later referred to by President Eisenhower.) Soon, J P Morgan became the largest consumer on earth, spending up to $10 million per day. Morgan was in the privileged position of being buyer, seller, and producer and amassing profits from all sides.

However, when the War began to go badly for England and France, Morgan & Co found it impossible to get new buyers for the Allied war bonds. There was a real fear in Whitehall at the time that England was about to lose the war. If the Allies were to default, Morgan’s large commissions would come to an end and its investors would suffer gigantic losses (some $1.5 billion). On top of that, Morgan’s war production companies would go out of business. Something needed to be done urgently.

As the RMS Lusitania departed Pier 54 in New York on May 1^st, 1915, Morgan surmised that if the cruiser were to be sunk by a German submarine, the resulting furore would certainly bring America into the War on the side of the Allies. Not only would Allied bonds be in great demand but Morgan’s war production companies would have to go into overdrive to outfit over four million American soldiers who would be mobilized for the European War.

(The author’s grandfather, an immigrant from Co. Cavan, became a doughboy in 1917 when he was inducted into the 364th U.S. Infantry, served in France, and was wounded in action.)

Six days later, on the afternoon of Friday, May 7^th, 1915, the Lusitania approached within 12 miles of the southern Irish coast. Winston Churchill, the Lord of the Admiralty, knew that German U-boats were operating in the area after three ships had been sunk in the previous 2 days. Not only did Churchill not come to the assistance of the Lusitania but he ordered her planned escort, the destroyer Juno, to return to Queenstown harbour. Earlier, the Lusitania had been ordered to reduce speed by shutting down one of her four boilers (ostensibly to save coal). She was a sitting duck and the entire Admiralty knew it.

Winston Churchill

At least one of Churchill’s officers, Commander Joseph Kenworthy, was disgusted at the cynicism of his superior. In his 1927 book, The Freedom of the Seas, he would write: “The Lusitania was sent at considerably reduced speed into an area where a U-boat was known to be waiting and with her escorts withdrawn.”

At 2.10 in the afternoon of that fateful Friday, Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger of U-boat U-20 spotted the Lusitania and gave the order to fire one torpedo. The torpedo struck the Lusitania on the starboard bow, just beneath the wheelhouse. A few moments later, much to everyone’s surprise including the watching Germans, a second huge explosion took place within the hull and the ship began to founder rapidly. 18 minutes later, the Lusitania disappeared beneath the waves.

Irish rescuers sailed out from Cork, over 11 miles away, and plucked some 764 survivors from the cold waters.

Many researchers today believe that the second explosion was caused by some of the 600 tons of pyroxyline explosive, 6 million rounds of .303 bullets, 1248 cases on shrapnel shells, plus an unknown quantity of munitions that filled the holds on the lower deck.

Ever since, the British Government have endeavoured to keep the Lusitania’s cargo a secret. As late as the 1950s the Royal Navy used the wreck of the Lusitania for target practice by dropping depth charges in order to destroy any evidence that the ship breached Cruiser Rules of war or the Hague Conventions.

Lusitania Dead, Co. Cork

After the sinking, the British ordered an official enquiry under the direction of Lord Mersey. The Admiralty manipulated Lord Mersey to find the master of the Lusitania, Captain Turner, at fault for the disaster. Lord Mersey complied with the Admiralty’s wishes but, in a crisis of conscience, refused payment for his services and requested that henceforth he be “excused from administering His Majesty’s Justice.” Mersey’s only comment in later years was: “The Lusitania case was a damn dirty business.”

The sinking of the Lusitania was a major catalyst for America’s later entry into the World War, 23 months later. Total deaths from the War are estimated between 9 and 15 million souls; American casualties of dead and wounded were in excess of 300,000.

But the House of Morgan, House of Rothschild, and other banksters were thoroughly pleased at America’s entry into the War. It meant that they continued to benefit hugely from the wholesale slaughter and misery of millions of programmed human beings.

When one thinks of Pearl Harbour, Gulf of Tonkin, 9/11, and other false flags it seems that some things never change. The lessons of history are quickly forgotten. The gullible public has always been willing to swallow government propaganda, hook, line, and sinker.

But thanks to the Internet and social media, that is all now beginning to change…

http://fortune.com/lusitania-gregg-bemis-legal-battle/ 

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/allwarsarebankerwars.php#axzz3ZS7iIiyC

REQUIEM FOR AN M.P.

(A Sonnet In Commemoration of Bobby Sands, M.P., who died while on hunger-strike on this day, May 5th, 1981.)

By

Gabriel Donohoe

He sinks, brain addled, into his waterbed
Not moving, lest the brittle bones should crack.
Before the dawn his fading pulse shall ebb;
The eyes are sightless now, the tongue is black.
How can one embrace ideals so cherished
To permit one’s living flesh to melt away?
What chimera drives a man to perish
When England’s heartless will remains unsway’d?
Is he not a gunman whose blooded hand
Deserves him naught but death and biting scorn?
What right has such to take a martyred stand?
‘Midst nature’s sublime blossoms he’s but a thorn.
But the uncommitted fail to comprehend
How deeply august thoughts inspire some men.

Copyright © 1981, 2015 Gabriel Donohoe

(Originally written in May, 1981, when the author lived in Fermanagh/South Tyrone, a constituency represented in the U.K. Parliament by hunger-striker Bobby Sands, M.P.)

Andrew Jackson: The Man Who Killed The Bank

by Gabriel Donohoe

200 years ago today, January 8^th, 1815, the 17 day battle for the strategic port city of New Orleans ended in a decisive victory for the American forces under the command of General Andrew Jackson.

It is difficult to recall a more ignominious defeat for the British. The swamplands around Chalmette were strewn with 2,000 dead and wounded redcoats, including their youthful commander, Major General Sir Edward Packenham. Jackson’s casualties were a meagre score or so dead and wounded.

Thus ended the War of 1812.

This war, like almost all wars, was a bankers’ war. It is believed that Nathan Rothschild threatened President Madison in 1811 with a “most disastrous war” if Congress did not renew the charter of the privately controlled central bank, the First Bank of the United States. Knowing that the central bank had almost ruined the U.S. economy while vastly enriching the bankers, Congress refused to renew the charter.

This prompted Rothschild to declare, “Teach those impudent Americans a lesson! Bring them back to colonial status!”

Rothschild money and influence worked to provoke a war with the Americans. However, the British Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, opposed a war in North America; he was assassinated in May, 1812, the only British Prime Minister to be murdered while in office. Under Perceval’s successor, Robert Banks Jenkinson (with an ironic middle name), the Americans were goaded into declaring war on Great Britain in June, 1812.

Despite the American victory, the War of 1812 achieved Rothschild’s objective. The fledgling republic was deeply in debt and monetary chaos reigned across the land. Madison and Congress had to back-pedal and in 1816 felt compelled to offer a new 20 year charter to another private central bank, The Second Bank of the United States.

The bankers took up from where they had left off in 1811 and continued to loot the American people. Then, in 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected president. ‘Old Hickory’, as Jackson was affectionately known by his former troops, easily won the popular vote and the electoral vote. Having routed the British Army at New Orleans, ‘Old Hickory’ decided he would do the same to the British controlled central bank.

Andrew Jackson was born in the Carolinas in 1767 shortly after his family migrated to North America from Co. Antrim in Ireland. The Jacksons were Ulster Presbyterians, a religion that was discriminated against and persecuted by the British almost as much as Catholics.

As a young teenager, Andrew was active on the American side in the Revolutionary War. When the 14 year old Jackson was captured by British Dragoons in South Carolina, a British officer demanded that he clean the officer’s boots. Jackson told the officer where he could stick his boots and received a nasty sabre gash across the arm and forehead for his insolence. Jackson bore these scars to his dying day but made the British suffer terribly at New Orleans for their gratuitous violence.

As Jackson’s first term in office ended (1828-32), the president of the Second Bank of the United States, Nicholas Biddle, decided to apply early for renewal of the bank’s charter which would expire in 1836. He felt Jackson would be vulnerable in the re-election campaign and would eschew anything controversial.

Biddle got it dead wrong. Rather than avoid controversy, Jackson based his entire re-election campaign on destroying the central bank. His election slogan was “Jackson And No Bank”.

Jackson once berated a delegation of bankers with these words:

“Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States…You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, I will rout you out!”

Just before the re-election campaign began in earnest, Congress passed a bill into law to allow the Second Bank of the United States to renew its charter for a further 20 years. But Jackson vetoed the bill. He outlined his reasons in a message to the American people, a populace long sceptical of central banks and bankers.

As the presidential campaign progressed, Biddle and his bank heavily funded Jackson’s opponent, Henry Clay, a highly respected Kentucky senator and former Speaker of the House of Representatives. But ‘Old Hickory’ won the election by a landslide.

Although the bank had 4 more years of its charter to run, Jackson set about hammering nails into its coffin. He ordered Secretary of the Treasury McLane to pull all government funds out of the central bank and deposit them in state-chartered banks. Secretary McLane refused and Jackson fired him. He appointed William Duane as Treasury Secretary and ordered him to remove deposits from Biddle’s central bank. When Duane dragged his heels, Jackson fired him too. The third appointed Secretary, Roger B. Taney, complied and the bank was in serious difficulty.

Biddle attempted to turn Congress and the people against Jackson by causing a recession in 1834. The bank demanded that all existing loans be repaid immediately; it deliberately refused to make new loans. A nation-wide recession ensued.

Jackson, under pressure, declared, “The bank is trying to kill me – but I will kill it!”

Actually, the bank came close to literally killing Jackson when a would-be assassin, Richard Lawrence, believed to be in the pay of the Rothschilds, attempted to murder Jackson in January, 1835, but both his pistols misfired. ‘Old Hickory’ began to thrash Lawrence with his cane and had to be physically restrained from beating his attacker to death.

With blame for the recession travelling backwards and forwards, Biddle’s huge ego became his own undoing. He was heard to boast in public that it was he who had caused the recession. The people and Congress turned against him. The bank’s charter was not renewed. In fact, it would take 77 years before another central bank would appear on the scene – the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913.

When asked what was the greatest achievement of his career, Jackson replied, “I killed the bank!”

Political leaders of the world, take note.

Preserving Capitalism? Or Emancipation Through Power Of The People?

[This is an excellent, thought-provoking article taken from the FaceBook page of Frank Hayes, with the author’s permission — Fools Crow.]

by Frank Hayes

PRESERVING CAPITALISM?

The 2015 Budget for the Irish Capitalist State has been described by some mainstream economists as an exercise in smoke and mirror obfuscation, a do-nothing budget where the coalition’s cautious ‘give and take’ con-job protects the miraculous ‘economic recovery’ which they say they have managed to conjure out of the detritus of the 2007/8 crash. It is not!

Joan Burton, Tanaiste

Gently interviewed on RTE’s Morning Ireland, Labour Party leader and Tanaiste, Joan Burton offered statistics and hinted at better times in the future for the working poor who toil for less than a living wage, and the thousands whom her government have rendered jobless. Tame journalists refuse to press for the truth about the artifice in the Noonan/Howlin trick of the loop. The interviewer even suggested, amazingly, that The Troika dictators were ‘no longer in charge’. So who gave the instruction to end ‘The Double Irish’, so obsequiously complied with?

First things first, once again, when assessed in its functional outcomes, this budget takes money from poor people and gives it to the rich! Nothing new there! And the anti-social coalition partners retain their common hostility towards public service provision across the board. Even ‘social housing’ provision – the great feather in the cap of the ‘Labour’ Party, turns out to be a small form of grant aiding private profiteering builders, and will contribute nothing in terms of housing provision for the working poor (those whose wages have been cut and cut again to try restore profitability) or those on inadequate welfare payments, the tens of thousands on housing lists everywhere.

The loudest fanfare is for the Christmas Bonus. But this also, will not really be restored – but replaced by a small sop payment to the poorest of the poor – a social group created by the government’s deliberate policy legacy as instructed by the ECB/IMF/EU Troika. We should not, however, be surprised.

THEY’RE ONLY OBEYING ORDERS

The task assigned to Burton and Kenny is to preserve the status quo where human needs must be predicated on the ability of bond-holders to skim a few quid off every human activity. James Connolly described the varied apparatus of the capitalist state as a management committee for the owners of capital – the 1%. And his general analysis is confirmed yet again with this most recent budgetary strategic intervention by the Merrion Square administrative mandarins and their political frontmen. For them, system survival is the ultimate aim.

However, a great deal has changed since Mr Connolly coined his truism. A century ago, a rampant capitalism, typified by William Martin Murphy and his Dublin Employers Federation were in possession of a system of economic, social, and political rule which was still expansionary in its motion, and which could drive human social development – however cruelly – as its real profit growth potential was realised. That is no longer true today.

The Irish economy is just one small part of the whole global economic function of the capitalist mode of production. No matter what Howlin and Noonan and their mandarin ‘wise men’ come up with, their plans confront a globalised economy which has – in real terms – ceased growth. Regardless of the appearance of an exponential increase in the numbers used to express ‘growth’ in the national economies of nation states, or their much discussed and misleading statistical comparisons, the awful truth is that the only real thing they express is an increasing indebtedness.

Following the collapse (or negation) of the Bretton Woods arrangements in 1971 (itself an expression of the hidden and inherent contradiction between currency inflationary process and real value deflation, an aspect of Marx’s axiom, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall), the 1% had to turn to the creation of fictitious capital to facilitate the continuity of function in profit-taking as the mode of existence of capitalist production etc. Inspired by the devious creativity of Milton Friedman and his likes, the end of history was confidently announced, the era of unending ‘growth’ was proclaimed, and year on year, the numbers got bigger and bigger.

There were even a few crumbs (in the form of sub-prime lending) tossed to the hoi polloi to keep us onside. We took it because we had no choice, that was how the new world order operated, and we had no other functional options, being immersed within it. But it was seldom if ever, a willing embrace of this system of inequality and exploitation, even though the bourgeois media daily put such words in our mouths. And eventually, as Marxists had predicted, the whole rotten façade came tumbling down.

TIME AND UNEVEN CHANGE

It took forty years for the contradictions of this new moment of economic history to process from their initial unity to the fracturing of that unity marked by the Lehman Brothers and ensuing financial busts. What we now face is a new negation – a new set of contradictions which are emerging out of the new tipping point we are arriving at. A new situation, inaugurating new relativities within the 99% and between us as a class and the so-called 1% class whose economic system has now failed historically.

Rampant over-production resulting from the for-profit production mode, which has been the principle characteristic of the post-Bretton Woods period of capitalist history (in particular now, over-production of capital) has not just resulted in the abstraction from human society of a virtual and unimaginable quantity of fictitious capital, the huge mountain of debt destroying its own systemic function; It has also created unprecedented social inequality and the destruction of communities across the globe; And engendered an ecological crisis in which mankind immediately confronts the degradation of the living environment to such an extent that species survival may be threatened.

The truth is that continued growth of profits (no matter that their form and content self-contradict in debt) now stands in the most extreme contradiction against the social, political, and economic needs of 99% of humanity. The old ways don’t work and a new roadmap for social emancipation must be embraced. Political interventions fashioned for the old conditions are now redundant. For this reason, correct education and training in the theory and method of Materialist Dialectics becomes a vitally necessary step towards identifying and creating the scientific and democratic alternative to collapsing capitalism.

IN THE THIEVES KITCHEN

Last Thursday (9th October 2014) ECB chief Mario Draghi spoke at the Brookings Institution, Washington, founded in 1916 with the object of becoming “the first private organisation devoted to analysing public policy issues at the national level”. Mr Draghi is worried. And he is not alone. The IMF (part of the un-departed Troika) said there’s a significant chance the Eurozone is about to fall into renewed recession, with real GDP virtually stalled and investment by private capital stubbornly stuck 20% below pre-crash levels.

Even the capitalists don’t see profit recovery as a possibility, and they won’t risk losing their shirts while net returns stick at a 20-year low. No investment means no new jobs for the millions ‘let go’ in the crash, and unemployment is at a 20-year high (the only area of real growth). Those who desperately want a job can’t get one, and youth unemployment in particular is alarming at 22%+. Burton and Kenny’s use of the term ‘job seeker’ is insulting in this context. They have victimised the jobless their system creates and now demonise their victims.

I have mentioned on several occasions that there will be no Germanic white horse riding to the rescue. August saw Argentina default, and a 4% fall in German industrial production, a five year high in the collapse rate. Even UK Tory Chancellor George Osborne admits “the Eurozone risks slipping back into crisis, and Britain cannot be immune from that – it’s already having an impact on our manufacturing and exports … we are not immune from what’s going on in the rest of the world”. So too, of course, for Ireland! Meanwhile, China would seem to be approaching the limits of its internal debt contradictions.

REMEDIES FAIL

Quantitative Easing clearly has not worked, as easy money has spawned financial speculation rather than job creation to improve consumption and restart real economic growth. Japan sees recession again as ‘Abenomics’ fails, the US Fed dithers, not knowing which way to turn next. The IMF worries “there is a serious risk … that the Eurozone is heading for recession again. … But … if the right policies are decided, if both surplus and deficit countries do what they have to do, it is avoidable”. What Christine Lagarde means by this is unclear, but no doubt it will involve renewed transfers of money from poor people to the rich as usual.

Draghi is a little more decisive. For him, ‘structural reform means further ‘deregulating’ labour markets and creating an even less-controlled ‘free market’ (driving down wages even more, abolishing employee rights, replacing humans with new technology, removing rent and price controls, etc.) The very same neoliberal Austerity programme which has made things worse for workers and capitalists alike. The fact is that the system is broken, productivity is stalled, raising real profitability is unattainable, (although Draghi would be satisfied with bigger fictitious numbers).

That is why the ability to make a new scientific analysis of this new situation is so important. We must prepare for construction of the viable alternative to the failing profit motive, as the driving force of human activity. And that emancipation can only be achieved when the 99% become clearly conscious of their own real and existing power to make and remake the world. We do not need the profit-takers. In fact, they are clearly now an obstruction to human progress.

Neither do we need the failed recipes of social democracy in its many forms nor those of others who still insist ‘labour must wait’, who wish to fix and preserve capitalism.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Last weekend, perhaps as many as one hundred thousand people assembled and marched in Dublin to reject the latest water charge robbery plans of the Merrion Square capitalist state. In two by-elections, the capitalist state establishment parties – including Sinn Fein (the last chance saloon for the capitalist state) were rejected as an urban Socialist and a rural Community activist, both pledged to challenge the status quo were elected to the Dail. They will enter an undemocratic institution which is part of the problem, a tool of the Troika dictatorship!

However, a new generation is waiting in the wings, a generation globally connected as never before, a living network untainted by the exhausted limitations of twentieth century responses to the historic crisis of the capitalist system. As they embrace the need for system change, our task is to encourage their new, transparently democratic and mutually fair and honest approach. They have not been sullied by the manipulative dishonesty of old elitist self-interest, by the corruptions of clique and crypto-leftism.

They can and will, if provided with the correct theoretical foundation for their political and philosophical development, create a renewal of the great revolutionary tradition in this new century, to freshly examine, analyse and grasp the reality of human social motion, and to enable the collective and unfettered construction of that new and open democracy of the people which will bring progressive resolution to the massive contradictions we face.

We must learn to co-operate openly and prepare for system change. There is not a moment to lose, and those who refuse to learn will soon become irrelevant in the coming struggle. fh 15/10/2014

If Michael Collins Were Leader Today – A Blueprint For Freedom And Prosperity

by Gabriel Donohoe

(This is a tribute to Michael Collins on the 92^nd anniversary of his death and a speculation of what he might do if he were leader of Ireland today. It is a little long for the casual reader but the author hopes it stimulates discussion and debate as we try to find a way out of tyrannical governance towards a more equitable and benevolent way of living in this great land of wealth and abundance.)

“But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble,

the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight…”

Terence McKenna, American writer and philosopher.

Ireland’s last three ‘leaders’, Kenny, Cowen, and Ahern, have steered the country into an abyss of desolation, debt slavery, and unpardonable loss of sovereignty. They have delivered the Irish people into poverty and ruin at the behest of the banksters while they themselves continue to profit from their duplicity. These so-called ‘leaders’ could be aptly described as corporate ‘Judas goats’, treacherous beasts who have betrayed their country for personal reward.

(Judas goats are animals that are specially trained to lead nervous sheep to the slaughter pen while their own lives are spared and they enjoy a pampered existence.)

Today, Irish people feel a rising contempt for these so-called leaders who have led society backwards into the same wretched feudalism that plagued Ireland nearly two centuries ago. The people are appalled at the retrograde movement back to 18^th century totalitarianism where the rights of the individual count for nothing and the tyrannical State brutalizes its people with excess taxation and bankster-inspired legislation. The State demands compliance with threats of force.

The people are angered at the perceived lack of integrity in the three ‘leaders’ named above and in the self-serving political party system that spawned them. The Irish people, like many other peoples around the world, have come to despise all party politicians for their hypocrisy, greed, and deceit.

Having been so utterly betrayed by spineless, mercenary leaders, some Irish people wonder how the country might fare if a true leader of proven integrity like Michael Collins were in charge. Having once given his life for the nation he loved, would the young martyred hero, if he were alive today, lead his people to a freer, happier, and more prosperous Ireland?

That’s an interesting thought. But first, a quick review of some of the devastation inflicted upon the people by the three recent ‘leaders’ of Ireland. Then a look at how Michael Collins, if he were in charge today, might do things differently?

Bertie Ahern

Bertie Ahern served as Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland from 1997 to 2008. He will go down in history as the man who presided over the Celtic Tiger property bubble that laid the foundations for the current destruction of the Irish economy. Ahern will also be remembered as the man who secretly took large sums of money from businessmen and was implicated in a bribery scandal over tax designation of development lands at Quarryvale in Dublin.

Ahern could not account to the Mahon Tribunal (an enquiry into corrupt payments to politicians) for certain sterling and dollar lodgments to his personal account and failed to explain the origin of the equivalent of some €200,000 that passed through accounts connected with him. Ahern resigned in disgrace in May, 2008, his reputation in tatters.

Ahern was once described by his mentor, Charlie Haughey, as the “most devious, the most cunning of them all.” And Haughey would know;  after all, didn’t Haughey himself ‘misappropriate’ huge sums of taxpayer money for his own personal benefit, as well as some €1.7 million in ‘donations’ from wealthy businessman, Ben Dunne. The shameless Haughey even stooped so low as to steal money from an account that was to pay for a liver transplant for his sick pal, Brian Lenihan, Senior.

And so, as cunning and devious as Bertie Ahern might have been, his avarice finally tripped him up in the end.

Brian Cowen

After Ahern’s fall from grace, Brian Cowen, Ahern’s Minister for Finance, took over the mantle of Taoiseach in May, 2008. As Minister for Finance, Cowen had been fast asleep while the property bubble inflated alarmingly. Now, as Taoiseach, his entire government snored, including a dozy Financial Regulator who was paid handsomely to keep a close eye on the liquidity and solvency of the banks.

Cowen was an embarrassment of  a Taoiseach. As a national leader this short, over-weight, bespectacled endomorph, with heavy jowls and thick lips, certainly cut no Kennedy-esque figure but looked more like the Rick Moranis character in “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids”. His love of a pint was legendary and drunken photos of him appeared in papers and magazines across the globe, including one featured on Jay Leno’s ‘NBC Tonight’ show during which Leno described Cowen as a “drunken moron”.

On another occasion, RTE Radio’s ‘Morning Ireland’ conducted an embarrassing interview with a semi-drunk or hung-over Cowen in which he slurred his words and confused the ‘Croke Park Agreement’ (an agreement with public sector unions) with the ‘Good Friday Agreement’ (a major development in the Northern Ireland peace process).

Cowen was widely known by his nickname of “Biffo“. Hardly a term of endearment, BIFFO was an acronym for “Big Ignorant Fucker From Offaly“. According to certain international diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, many U.S. politicians agreed with this unflattering sentiment.

Then, under Cowen’s watch, a night of infamy and ruination for Ireland! On that night, September 29^th, 2008, a number of brazen-necked banksters crept into Government Buildings under cover of darkness. They met with Taoiseach Cowen and his Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan, Junior, and alarmed them with tales of woe and the imminent collapse of the Irish banks. The banksters bewailed the dire financial situation which they themselves had brought about and demanded that their private businesses be bailed out with public money – for the good of the country, they said. They spooked (or enticed) Cowen and Lenihan into offering a blanket guarantee for all deposits and debts of Irish banks, exposing the Irish people to an outrageous and unsustainable risk of some €440 billion.

Writing about this shameful incident in a February, 2011, edition of the Sunday Independent, Daniel McConnell said:

“There is now no doubt whatsoever that that particular Monday will always be remembered as the day the Irish people were tricked into the greatest swindle in the history of this State.”

On that infamous night, Brian Cowen sold out the Irish people with one stroke of a pen and doomed future generations of Irish children to a lifetime of debt, a debt not of their own making but the debt of reckless banksters whose private gambling liabilities were unjustly and criminally foisted upon them.

On top of this, despite eleventh hour protestations to the contrary, Cowen tamely surrendered Ireland’s proud national sovereignty when he called in the International Monetary Fund and its rapacious partners, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, collectively known as the Troika. The Troika wanted Ireland’s insolvent banks bailed out so that they (the banks) could repay their huge debts to the Troika’s bankster pals in Germany, France, and the U.K. The Troika wouldn’t loan this money directly to the Irish banks because they mightn’t get it back. They wanted the Irish Government to borrow the money and then bail out their own bust banks. That way, the Irish public would be on the hook for the private liabilities of reckless banksters.

As the enormity of the loss of national sovereignty began to sink in, and the concomitant amount of unpayable debt stunned the Irish people, Brian Cowen became reviled across the land as one of the greatest traitors in all of Ireland’s history. His personal popularity dropped to record levels and the support for his party, Fianna Fáil, the proud creation of Eamon De Valera, plunged from being the largest party in the State to nearly the lowest with only 14% public support. In the ensuing general election of February, 2011, Fianna Fáil was routed, losing 51 of its 71 seats and its partner in crime, the Green Party, was obliterated, losing all of its  6 seats. It was the worst defeat of a sitting government in the history of the State.

Enda Kenny

Now enter the present Taoiseach of Ireland, Enda Kenny, whose party, Fine Gael, swept into power by a huge majority along with coalition partners, Labour, with a combined 113 seats out of 166. The new government owed not its success to any particular confidence or acclaim from the electorate but to abject anger and loathing for Brian Cowen’s outgoing government. In short, Kenny’s government came into office by default.

In three and a half years as Ireland’s leader, Enda Kenny has failed to impress. He is described by some as the most ineffectual head of state since Nero fiddled as Rome burned to ashes around him. Kenny’s government are all equal non-achievers, some of whom know more about fiddling than the decadent Nero ever did. (Just read the Irish papers about politicians’ fraudulent expenses claims, cosy arrangements with bankers over personal mortgages, inflated pensions and hidden golden handshakes, and all sorts of lucrative conflicts of interest.)

Kenny is seen by many as a man of no vision, no integrity, and no charisma. It is whispered in political circles that whenever Enda Kenny is alone in a room, the room is empty. Lacking natural presence, Kenny’s public performances are wooden and simulated, like that of a puppet clown with a painted grin who bounces around erratically on his puppet strings.

Some time ago, Senator Marc MacSharry caused a storm in the Seanad (Irish Senate) when he referred to Enda Kenny as a clown who embarrassed the Nation by “clowning around Europe…acting like a clown,” and making a “circus ring of Government and the office of Taoiseach.”

MacSharry’s remarks arise no doubt from Kenny’s toadying behaviour at EU Council meetings where he is seen as a backslapping flunky when interacting with other heads of state. Irish TV viewers have cringed with embarrassment to see their national ‘leader’ having his hair patronisingly ruffled by the dwarfish Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of France. Or seeing him trying too hard to be one of the gang by mock shoulder punching with Jose Manuel Barroso. Or seeing him licking the jowls of Angela Merkel like an eager-to-please Shih’ Tzu.

A primary school teacher by profession, Enda Kenny is totally out of his depth at managing the affairs of a country, albeit a small country like Ireland. His critics would say that he is more qualified to instruct junior infants in potty training than to steer a ship of state. After some 41 months in office he is already being given the dubious distinction as the Greatest Non-Leader in Irish history.

Kenny currently presides over a nation devastated by unemployment, emigration, and an austerity programme that has driven millions to poverty and despair, including shockingly high rates of suicide. More than 1,000 young people a week now leave our shores to find new opportunities in other countries. The morale of Ireland is in ruins and the spirit of its people utterly broken. The level of debt is unbearable and unpayable and is calculated to cripple Ireland for at least the next two generations.

Kenny’s government would claim that it inherited this mess from the outgoing government, and there is certainly some truth in that. However, Kenny and his cronies insinuated themselves into power through pre-election promises of change, justice, and complete transparency. They promised to undo all the wrongs of their predecessors and teach the banksters a lesson, such as jailing wrong-doers, capping bankster pay, refusing to pay unsecured bondholders, and so on. There was much bluster about “not another red cent” for the banksters and it’s “Frankfurt’s way or Labour’s way.”

But it was all lies.

Liars!

Pat Rabbitte, the previous Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, shamelessly admitted on national television that it was all right for politicians to lie in order to get themselves elected to power. That speaks volumes about the integrity of these charlatans to whom we entrust the running of our country. But the big problem with these liars is that they don’t know when to stop. (Some very angry people are talking about privately suing these lying politicians for breach of promise, finagling public office through fraud, and false pretences.)

Consequently, the plight of the Irish people is much worse now than the hardship inflicted upon them by Brian Cowen’s outgoing calamity of a government. And yet Kenny’s perfidious new government continues to add to the nation’s misery with household taxes, property taxes, septic tank taxes, water taxes, broadcast taxes, and any other taxes the bankster barons care to push in front of them. Wholly oblivious to the economic hell and stress of the Irish people, Kenny jumps at every opportunity to serve the wishes of the de facto rulers of Ireland, the untouchable banksters and the corporate godfathers.

Kenny’s faithless cabinet is well exemplified by its finance minister, Bilderberger Michael Noonan. Noonan, against a wealth of expert advice both domestic and foreign, unaccountably persisted in paying billions of euro to unsecured bank bondholders. The Irish people were outraged and protested vociferously. But Noonan bald-facedly ignored the dissent of the electorate; he was obviously working on behalf of someone other than the Irish people.

Michael Noonan, Ireland’s Latest Bilderberger

Noonan was also behind a late night sitting of the Dáil (Irish Parliament) which pushed through the liquidation of IRBC (formerly Anglo Irish Bank) and hastily converted controversial Anglo promissory notes for €30.6 billion into national sovereign debt. The standing and legality of these dubious promissory notes might have been successfully challenged in Europe but Noonan inexplicably passed on the opportunity and instead loaded this questionable debt onto the backs of the already struggling taxpayers.

But more recently, the Kenny Government’s most despicable action against the people who elected them was to close a loophole in the law that prevented the banks from seizing family homes en masse.  Now, with the passing of a new bankster-friendly Eviction Bill, “The Land And Conveyancing Law Reform Bill, 2013”, Kenny has unleashed predatory banks to fall upon the people like hungry wolves and repossess family homes by the thousands. To any remaining sceptics out there, this act of treachery, more than anything else, demonstrates quite clearly just who these political whores are working for.

Ahern, Cowen, and Kenny are the last three taoisigh, or should we say ‘three stooges’, to have led Ireland over the past 17 years. When we look for essential leadership qualities of vision, integrity, competence, communication, inspiration, and patriotism, they each fail the test miserably. These three impostors have presided over an economic and social collapse not seen in this country since the so-called ‘Famine’ of some 169 years ago.

When we look back down the years to the formation of the state in 1922 we examine a list of those taoisigh who sat in the driving seat before our three latest misfits: Bruton, Reynolds, Haughey, FitzGerald, Lynch, L. Cosgrave, Lemass, de Valera, Costello, and WT Cosgrave. None of these leaders stand out like 20^th century notables such as Mandela or Kennedy or Gandhi or Ataturk. Mostly, they were an adequate bunch who put in a workmanlike effort, but nothing spectacular or anything above your common, everyday garden variety taoiseach.

Certainly some of them have had their moments, like de Valera’s War-time response to Churchill over the latter’s threat to re-invade Ireland in order to get his hands on Irish ports, but generally they were an uninspiring lot as taoisigh. How many young people today remember any of them but the most recent?

A True Irish Leader

Therefore, we have to go back almost 100 years, as far back as the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) to find someone who meets all the criteria of a true leader, a real statesman. And in that war for national independence we find such a man, a man who stands head and shoulders above all the rest, literally and figuratively – the formidable Michael Collins, known, loved, and admired as “The Big Fellow”.

Most people in Ireland, and quite a few abroad, are familiar with Michael Collins. This familiarity comes from stories handed down by those who fought at his side, newspaper & magazine articles, and books by Rex Taylor, Frank O’Connor, Margery Forester, Ryle Dwyer, Tim Pat Coogan, Meda Ryan, and others. And who hasn’t yet seen Neil Jordan’s 1996 film, “Michael Collins”, with Liam Neeson playing the eponymous hero? Or the excellent, controversial documentary by Kenneth Griffith, banned by the IBA in 1973, “Hang Up Your Brightest Colours”.

In his short life of less than 32 years, Michael Collins was a TD (Teachta Dála, or Member of Parliament) representing Cork South in the First Dáil of 1919, Director of Intelligence for the IRA, Minister for Finance, and latterly Chairman of the Provisional Government and Commander-in-Chief of the Irish National Army. Also, as President of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, he automatically became the de jure President of the new Irish Republic.

The Rising And War Of Independence

As a young officer of the Irish Volunteers, Collins fought alongside Patrick Pearse and Joseph Plunkett in the General Post Office in the Easter Rising of 1916. When the rebellion was put down by the British, Collins was arrested and came close to being executed along with Pearse and Plunkett and Connolly and the others.

During the War of Independence which followed the Rising, Collins risked his life daily in the prosecution of the war against the British. There are many stories of his audacious behaviour and of hair-raising close encounters as he cycled openly around Dublin. Collins was the ‘most wanted’ man in Ireland, with a huge price on his head, yet he brazenly rubbed shoulders with British soldiers, Royal Irish Constabulary, and the notorious Black and Tans as he directed a guerrilla war against the Saxon oppressors.

(In contrast to Collins’s front line activities, de Valera spent most of the war in the United States on a money raising tour. This is not to suggest that de Valera was a coward. He certainly wasn’t, as is evidenced by his exploits as commander of the rebel forces at Boland’s Mill in 1916. De Valera’s battalion inflicted half the British casualties of the Rising and de Valera was later sentenced to death, but this was commuted to imprisonment because of his status as an American citizen. In this contrast between de Valera and Collins we see the former as an astute, calculating political animal and the latter as a direct, guileless unswerving servant of the people.)

The Treaty

When the British suddenly offered a truce, de Valera, President of the Republic at that time, sent Collins and others to London to negotiate a treaty while de Valera stayed at home. The Irish delegates were invested with plenipotentiary powers, i.e., they were authorized to make binding decisions on behalf of the Irish Government. De Valera, the wily old fox, knew that the Irish delegation would never achieve its objective of a 32 county Republic and if there were to be any recriminations or blame handed out in the aftermath no one could point the finger at ‘Dev’.

Collins reluctantly went as a delegate to the Treaty negotiations saying that he was a soldier, not a statesman. Besides, he said the British would now know what he looked like if hostilities were to break out again.

De Valera’s caginess soon proved well-founded and, after a marathon session with the best negotiators the British Empire could produce, all that the Irish delegates could get was a 26 county ‘Free State’ with 6 Northern counties to remain under British rule. The new Free State was to be a Dominion with allegiance to the English king while Northern Ireland would be a partitioned autonomous entity within the realm of the United Kingdom.

The news was greeted with anger and dismay in Ireland. Collins, however, felt that the Treaty would give Ireland the “freedom to achieve freedom”. When the British had handed back the Irish ports and vacated all their garrisons, then would Ireland be in a much stronger position to declare a 32 county Republic. Furthermore, it had been agreed that a Boundary Commission would give an opportunity to large Nationalist areas like Fermanagh, Derry, South Tyrone, South Armagh, South Down to opt out of Northern Ireland and join the Free State. Collins and the others believed this would render the remaining Unionist controlled pockets unviable as an economic entity.

Civil War And Death Of Collins

But de Valera rejected the very treaty he had personally empowered his plenipotentiaries to negotiate. Dev himself led the chorus for “32 counties or none!” The country became bitterly divided, with even family members at each other’s throats. Collins, Chairman of the Provisional Government, tried desperately to unite the ‘Anti-Treaty’ and ‘Pro-Treaty’ factions of Sinn Féin, but to no avail. Inevitably, a vicious Civil War broke out at the end of June, 1922.

Collins gave up his responsibilities as Chairman of the Provisional Government and became Commander-in-Chief of the National Army. Just a mere 7 weeks into the Civil War, General Collins travelled to Cork against the advice of his colleagues, declaring flippantly, “They wouldn’t shoot me in my own county.” It is believed that the reason Collins journeyed to Cork, which was largely held by Anti-Treaty forces, was to meet secretly with Republican leaders in order to bring the Civil War to an end.

Tragically, on the evening of 22^nd August, 1922, Collins’s party was ambushed at Béal na mBláth, the ‘Mouth of Flowers’, and the “Big Fellow” was shot dead. His body was taken back to Dublin where it lay in state for three days in City Hall. His funeral was attended by 500,000 people, about one fifth the population of Ireland at the time.

After Collins’s death, attitudes on both sides hardened and the Civil War descended into a bloody cycle of slaughter, reprisals, and atrocities. The Free State authorities began executing Republican prisoners at an alarming and sickening rate. One of those executed was Erskine Childers, secretary-general of the Anglo-Irish Treaty delegation. His crime? He had in his possession a Spanish .32 calibre semi-automatic pistol given to him by his good friend and former comrade, Michael Collins.

Two weeks after the Childers execution, on December 8^th, 1922, the Free State executed four Republican prisoners, heroes from the War of Independence; Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Richard Barrett, and Joe McKelvey. Minister for Home Affairs, Kevin O’Higgins, signed Rory O’Connor’s execution order despite them having been good friends and O’Connor having been best man at O’Higgins’s wedding the previous year. The following March in Ballyseedy, Co. Kerry, the depravity of the Free State troops reached a new low when they tied nine Republican prisoners to a landmine and detonated it. They then machine-gunned the badly wounded group, killing eight of them.

There are many who believe that had Collins been alive he would never have allowed any of these vile executions. Throughout his life he was utterly dedicated to winning freedom and self-determination for the Irish people, and latterly to unifying the factions split by a bitterly divisive Treaty. His driving vocation and passion was to serve the greater good of all the people of Ireland, and to this end he sacrificed his young life.

Michael Collins As Irish Leader In 2014

The Civil War and War of Independence are now behind us and the questions of these bloody conflicts are left to historians and students to debate. But there are certain questions that one hears with growing frequency these days: “What would Michael Collins make of Ireland’s present slide into austerity and financial slavery? How would he feel about our despicable politicians tossing away our national sovereignty, the holy grail for which he fought and tragically gave his life?”

These are indeed enigmatic questions.

Let’s suppose that we could travel by time machine back to 1922 and teleport Michael Collins back to our present time. And let’s suppose the Irish people gave him an unconditional mandate to turn around the country from the hardship and desolation that our present leaders have inflicted upon us.

What would the Big Fellow do?

The first thing Collins would do is to study all available information on Irish affairs since 1922, paying special attention to the financial crisis and its origins in the last decade. He would be particularly fascinated by 21^st century technology, especially the Internet. We know that Collins would absorb the information rapidly, evidenced by his development of an Intelligence network that proved much superior to that of the British during the War of Independence.

And he would gather advisers around him, independent experts in fields of economics, law, health, education, agriculture, energy, engineering, and so on.  These would be people with no ties to corporations or special interests, people of integrity and proven ability, and individuals willing to think ‘outside the box’.

The second thing he would do is to shed his general’s uniform and gun. He would know that unlike the war with the British, Ireland’s current enemies would not wear uniforms and speak in foreign accents. The majority of them would be home-grown and they would be working from within to undermine their country.  They would enjoy positions of power within the apparatus of the state and they would be working not for the people but for the Money Power and its subordinate special interests.

Michael would be well aware of the writings of Roman philosopher and politician, Marcus Tullius Cicero, thanks no doubt to his ardent headmaster, Denis Lyons, and might well have the following quotation foremost in his mind:

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”

Collins is quoted as saying in “Michael Collins In His Own Words” (edited by Francis Costello, Gill & Macmillan, page 99):

“Our strength as a nation will depend on our economic freedom, and upon our moral and intellectual force. In these we can become a shining light to the world.”

And, on page 102:

“The strength of our nation must be the strength of the whole people. We need a political, economic and social system in which our material, intellectual and spiritual needs and forces will find the fullest expression and satisfaction.”

The paragraph above would be the theme of Collins’s leadership. And, as would be his modus operandi when he were last alive, the Big Fellow would throw himself into his work with great energy and dedication.

Collins Takes On Ireland’s Powerful Enemies

All his life, Michael Collins was a man of action. And he would act immediately if given the job of taking Ireland out of its present morass and returning the country to contentment and prosperity. His first declared action would be to confront the greatest and most ignominious enemy that ever preyed upon Ireland and its people.

No doubt many of Michael’s advisers and staff would ‘helpfully’ direct him to the homes or workplaces of the directors of the commercial banks who were in positions of authority before and during the banking collapse. But Collins would shake his head and say that although these miscreants were high on his list they were not Public Enemy Number One.

His staff and advisers would then nod their heads and cough politely and say that they would provide transport and security personnel if he wished to arrest and question the key political transgressors, in past and present governments, who were largely responsible for Ireland’s woes. Again Collins would shake his head and say that while these malefactors must be answerable for their actions there was a much larger and more sinister villain he would need to deal with first.

The villain he’d have in mind is the one responsible for virtually all of Ireland’s ills and whose furtive position of power must be ended post-haste.  This villain is responsible for operating private money systems for public use, for imposing debt slavery on the entire nation, and for unlawfully controlling the government, the courts, the media, and academia by stealth and deceit. In fact, this villain has long had its corrupt, controlling finger extended into every pie imaginable.

Who is this arch villain?

The Central Bank of Ireland… And its governor and senior staff.

Predatory Bank

The Central Bank of Ireland (CBI) is professed to be owned by the Minister for Finance on behalf of the Irish people.  But this is a distortion of the truth. The CBI, along with almost all central banks in the world, is owned or controlled by a handful of powerful international bankster families. We have this from many sources, including the famous insider, Professor Carroll Quigley, who spilled the beans in his book, “Tragedy And Hope”.

We also have an impressive video presentation by the late Joan Veon, an international journalist of high repute, “When Central Banks Rule The World,” which can be found within this Fools Crow article,  Click here

One of the world’s biggest central banks, the U.S. Federal Reserve, has now been exposed as a private corporation owned by the stockholders of the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks and their member banks. In fact, the ‘Fed’ was actually declared a private corporation by Judge Poole in the case Lewis v. United States, 680 F.2d 1239 (1982).  See details  and   Ellen Brown’s article   and more    and more

As for the Central Bank of Ireland, it came into being as a result of the Central Bank Act of 1942. During the 5^th Stage debate of the Central Bank Bill (July 17^th, 1942) Deputy J M Dillon asked some very pertinent questions that were swept under the carpet by Frank Fahy, the Ceann Comhairle (Speaker of the Lower House), and Seán T. O’Kelly, the Minister for Finance.

Dillon asked why the liabilities of the Central Bank should fall upon the people of Ireland when the credit money issued by the Central Bank would become the private property of the merchant bankers. Dillon objected to this arrangement and, on behalf of the Irish people, claimed ownership of the credit money issued by the Central Bank. He was overruled. In a disgraceful vote, with only 5 deputies present in the Dáil, the Bill was passed. (Note the huge parallels here with the passing of the U.S. Federal Reserve Act in the dead of night, on December 23^rd, 1913, with only a handful of congressmen present.)

Consequently, today, all the credit money issued by the Central Bank of Ireland is the private property of the joint stock banks, the merchant banks. This is a secretive and criminal arrangement to which the government and the law courts are willing parties. See “Who Owns The Central Bank of Ireland?”

Undoubtedly, Collins’s first act would be to proceed immediately to Dame Street in the centre of Dublin. He would march up the steps of the Central Bank of Ireland and stride all the way straight to the Governor’s office, brushing aside secretaries and security personnel who might try to stop him.

Collins would lean over the desk of the startled Governor, look him directly in the eye, and tell him that he was under arrest and would be questioned about financial crimes of mass destruction against the Irish nation. Collins would also insist that the Governor make a phone call to his de facto boss in the House of Rothschild in Frankfurt and inform him that the Irish people would no longer be their debt slaves, that they were now taking back control of their own economic destiny. A similar call would be made to the President of the European Central Bank.

From his study of the current ‘banking crisis’, Collins would be well aware that it was the Governor of the Central Bank who undermined the Fianna Fáil/Green Government when he announced on national media that Ireland would be getting an IMF ‘bailout’  of tens of billions of euro – before the government itself had apparently come to a decision. Finance Minister Lenihan admitted on BBC Radio that the European Central Bank (through its Irish stooge, the Central Bank of Ireland) had forced the bailout on Ireland.

Further, the Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland was accused by leading economist Morgan Kelly of making the “costliest mistake ever made by an Irish person” and is the man singularly responsible for Ireland’s economic disaster. Kelly goes on to accuse the Governor of deftly slicing off Finance Minister Lenihan at the ankles.

Now isn’t that awesome power for an unelected pen-pusher? Michael Collins would be well aware of the identity of this puppet master orchestrating events behind the curtain.

Collins Takes Control

Collins would close the Central Bank and take all senior Central Bank officers into custody for questioning, as well as previous Governors. Also, he would round up colluders in the Department for Finance, ministers and senior civil servants, and collaborators elsewhere in government. All bank assets would be seized on behalf of the people as well as assets belonging to individuals found guilty of treason or of defrauding the Irish people. This would include the operating of government, government departments, law courts, and other public bodies as private corporations trading for profit.

In place of a central bank, Collins would set up a National Bank which would issue money debt-free and interest-free, based on the value of goods and services provided by the people of Ireland. This bank would offer interest-free house loans in order to provide every family in Ireland with a home of their own. Terms could be extended to 50 years or more and no one would be evicted. The National Bank, acting for the people of the nation, would hold an interest in the house until it was finally paid off.

Monetary reform would be along the lines proposed by the American Monetary Institute and which was put before Congress by Representative Dennis Kucinich as the NEED Act 2011 (HR 2990)

Most of the apparatus of government would be dismantled. Social services would be largely abolished; instead of dole, sickness benefit, etc., a dividend would be paid to every Irish adult and child so that they would have a regular, basic income to cover mortgage/rent, food, heat, and energy. This derives from the ideas of C H Douglas and his system of Social Credit.  See here

Political parties would be abolished. The current party whip system has the appearance of democracy but is designed to handpick and control which individuals get elected. The party whip compels them to give their first allegiance to the party rather than to the people who elected them.

Collins would suggest that communities elect representatives who would act under the terms of a binding contract. These representatives would have to vote in accordance with the wishes of the community that elected them. If they voted against the wishes of the community, or failed to properly fulfil their function, they could be recalled by the community immediately and replaced with another representative.

Policy would be set by the people, acting from the ground up, and not have it foisted upon them from the top down. All important decisions such as bailouts, wars, and so on would be decided directly by the people. In this high tech age of the Internet we can easily have instant communication and the people can make their views felt at short notice.

In further restoring full sovereignty to Ireland, Collins would have the people vote again on all treaties and involvement with the EU. The idea would be to end EU laws from superceding Irish law and to take back control of our own lands, seas, and a fishing industry that was devastated by venal politicians.

Collins would also look upon the First Dáil of 1919 as the legitimate system of government for Ireland.

Sweeping reforms would include the following:-

• All judges to be dismissed and only those of proven integrity to be re-appointed. All judges, barristers, and solicitors to be educated in Natural Law, Common Law, Brehon Law.
• The original Irish Constitution would be restored to eminence.
• Gardai would re-train as “peace keepers” and would no longer be statute enforcers or revenue collectors for the banks.
• The dealings of the Land Registry in their bias towards the banks would be investigated. Also, a return to allodial title for property owners would be initiated.
• Income tax and most other taxes would be abolished as they would be unnecessary under the new monetary system.
• The pharmaceutical industry would come under scrutiny and its ties/bribes to individuals and public bodies would be investigated. Alternative health modalities would be encouraged and given a level playing field.
• Innovative engineers and scientists would work on ways to tap into Free Energy which is abundant and infinite in the world. The works of Tesla, Keshe, and other pioneers of free energy would be unearthed and studied. Coal, oil, gas, fracking, and drilling would become redundant.
• Local communities would be encouraged to grow their own food, using permaculture, aquaponics, and other organic methods. GMO products and experimentation would be banned. Any planes caught spraying or laying chemtrails would be intercepted by the Irish Air Force and forced to land or be shot down.

Committees and advisers would look at other areas including, but not limited to, Education, Media, The Cosmos, Space Travel, Man’s Spiritual Nature, Technology, and The Arts.

If we all desire these things enough, and are willing to put sufficient effort into achieving them, then we can all bring forth a new, happy, prosperous land, a veritable land of milk and honey.

We may not have Michael Collins in the flesh to show us the way, but he is very much with us in the Spirit.

General Michael Collins at Portobello Barracks

Phil Hogan & Irish Water, As Clear As A Septic Tank

This is a comment by Thomas Kiely that appeared recently on the FaceBook Page of “Awaken Ireland: A People’s Forum For Ireland’s Future”.

I thought it was well written, well researched, and extremely thought provoking and that it should have a wider audience and be re-posted in news groups, forums, etc. all across Ireland.

(Fools Crow)

By Thomas Kiely

Minister Phil Hogan said on The Evening Echo, 10/06/’14, that “there is now clarity on water charges and that it’s now time to remember the benefits of reform for Cork.” The cambridge dictionary defines clarity as “the quality of being clear and easy to understand” and the word reform as “to make an improvement”.

The minister says there is likely to be a charge of €240 per household. In the interest of clarity I thought we should look at that figure. Annually, €1 billion comes out of the pockets of every man, woman and child in this state to provide for domestic water and waste water treatment. You have paid already . It’s not free. The government, through your taxes, has been managing the collection, treatment, storage and delivery of water services up until now. The responsibility for providing these services has been handed over to a new commercial state company, “Irish Water”. The government has made a commitment to the Troika to recover the cost of supplying this most fundamental human right, initially through collecting €500 million (half the cost) and going forward to full cost recovery of €1 billion.

In 2nd class we learned about division, 500 million divided by 1.35 million (number of homes in Ireland) = an average charge of €370 per annum, per household. And to be very, very clear, full cost recovery is double that, €740 per annum. Clearly, a company such as “Irish Water” will have expenses, advertising, installing radio frequency meters, hiring of consultants, exorbitant salaries, laughing yoga courses etc. These costs will need to be to be passed on to the water user also. The minister is keen to talk of clarity but not transparency. The Freedom of Information Act does not apply to “Irish Water”. You do not have a right to question any activities of that company. Commercial sensitivity is the excuse but “Irish Water” does not have any competitors. Who then are they sensitive to, perhaps you?

On top of the billion YOU have already paid through your taxes, “Irish Water” has been gifted approximately €11 billion euro in infrastructure, given €500 million from the property tax receipts, €250 million from the pension reserve fund, €42 million from the Dept. of Social Protection plus the original start up cost of €80 million. You are also expected to pay again through metered water charges. Clearly a lot of money. Not one penny is to be spent to fix the leaks. Around 40% of water is lost through leakage. We see it every day, flowing down our hills and dells. Generally, the leaks are not on private property but out on the street. Are we to believe that this first-fix-free will do anything to stop the waste, clearly not. “Irish Water” intends, after 2016, to go to the markets for the money to fix the leaks. So, after we plough all that money into this insane company and collect a back-breaking charge from the families of this state, then we borrow and pay back capital plus interest to fix the leaks.

Is this the reform he spoke about???

Minister Hogan says he wants to protect those facing affordability issues. When we consider that there are 277,000 people living in consistent poverty in Ireland today. Over 1,000,000 people are now suffering deprivation and 32% of the population are at-risk-of-poverty . Clearly, there are affordability issues, over a million of them. Those in receipt of the households benefits package can get €100 euro off their yearly bill and it will be possible to apply for an “exceptional needs payment” from a welfare officer. Just as the minister likes clarity, i’m sure welfare officers do too, and details. The choice for people vulnerable people with issues like bowel/bladder problems and poorer menstruating women will be to go and clearly give a detailed explanation as to why they needed those extra flushes and unsanctioned showers and hope they get a favorable response. For the 400,000 people are on the live register, there will be absolutely no help whatsoever for these people as the government feels this would be a disincentive to work. Is this reform?

Speaking of work, in his article Minister Hogan clearly wants us to know about all the temporary call-center jobs being created. He neglected to mention that “Irish Water” intends to lay off 1200 permanent workers. When the people of Ireland are forced to pay charges for water and sanitation we will see another €1 billion diverted out of our pockets. The knock-on effect of this will be job losses, the barman/woman, the local shopkeeper, the butcher and baker and candlestick maker will pay, they will pay with their jobs. Thousands of jobs will be lost in the creation of this monstrous cash-guzzling quango. Presumably, the billion already paid through taxes will be diverted to pay the gambling debts of bankers and developers.

The Water Services Act establishes “Irish Water” as a commercial, state, revenue producing company. A company without competition, a monopoly. Under European Law, it is illegal for a country to operate a commercial state monopoly. The market must be liberalised. We will be forced to privatise our water services. Where water has been privatised, prices has risen, investment has not taken place, water quality has diminished and vast sums of money have flowed into the pockets of private operators and their shareholders. The privatisation of water always fails the people. The government is quick to assure us that they have no intention of privatising water. But but but, the Dept. Of the Environment is telling us we must get a new water treatment plant in Cork and it must be built, owned and operated by a private company. If it walks like a duck… All across Europe, governments have been forced to remunicipalise water because the privatisation agenda clearly does not work. Is this the reform the minister talks about, to take a proven failed system and implement it in ireland.

Poverty should never be seen as a conservation measure. Poverty is when we are deprived, deprived of food, deprived of shelter, deprived of heat, deprived of participation in society. Poverty is not a choice. Are we now to suffer water poverty???? Or should we be considered conservationist? The most vulnerable in society are to be rationed, rationed flushes, rationed hygiene, rationed in how we prepare our food and rationed in how we bathe our babies. It’s not all doom and gloom, the government has committed to tax cuts for higher earners, this will nullify any burden from water charges so it won’t affect them. You are to carry the burden for them!

In July 2010, the United Nations declared water and sanitation a Human Right. Water charges will disproportionately affect women, the sick, the elderly, the poor and the working poor. Does the Irish government think that only the rich have rights? Do you??

The ministers idea of clarity and reform appears to erroneous. We have paid, every child in a sweetshop is paying for public services, every citizen who collects a pay-slip is paying, every pensioner who pays their ESB bill and everyone who uses luxuries like loo paper pays VAT, we have paid. We will clearly not be paying again.

Water is a human right, water is a common good. It is the source of all life, nothing exists without it. It is too important to ever be handed over to a company where money is the bottom line.