Big Business Out to Buy a 'Yes' to Lisbon

by Image Maker - No to Lisbon Sat Aug 29, 2009 13:23

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You'd have to be a spacer to Vote Yes

Only Cowboys are Voting Yes

Still Voting No to Lisbon

Axis of Eejits for Lisbon

by li'l lulu Sat Aug 29, 2009 13:42

There was a time when we used RuinAir, before we were fully aware of the shameful way they treated disabled passengers, the degrading exploitation of workers, and climate change. Possibly the tipping-point was the extortionate hidden extra charge (€10- 'development charge') to leave Knock Airport, which affected many pilgrims to Knock, some elderly and with medical conditions. If RuinAir are for it, be sure that there are hideous hidden conditions that mean us no good...

by Michael Gallagher - Photographer Sat Aug 29, 2009 16:07 libertypics at yahoo dot ie

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National Remembrance Day - Dublin, 2006. pic © Michael Gallagher - poster free to use. Please credit the pic (where possible) to photographer if used.

by Old Codger - pensioner Sun Aug 30, 2009 10:51

The Irish people say NO NO and NO again
how many times do we have to say, LISBON TWO AMEN
They ignore our voting rights and treat us like puppets
But we will be heard, we wont be led by muppets
THE IRISH PEOPLE SAY NO WE HAVE ALREADY SAID
NO MEANS NO MEANS NO
THE LISBON TREATY IS DEAD.

by Jobs? Sun Aug 30, 2009 14:23

Curious. Matt Cooper interview with MOL (rynair) wants us to vote YES Fair enough no problem with that, but my question is: When Matt asked him why yes?, he said simply "jobs in IIreland". Fair enough with that, but is he talking about employing irish? anyone know..

by Granarchist Sun Aug 30, 2009 18:00

'Jobs in Ireland' - the magic carrot to get our votes for Lisbon. As though a job, however trash it is, justifies selling out our rights. If we're to have jobs, they have to be proper jobs, with proper pay & conditions - not quite what Mr O'Leary wants.

by iosaf Mon Aug 31, 2009 10:27

February 24th 2005 Ryanair signed a deal with Boeing worth 4.5billion€ fora a new fleet of aircraft. That proved three things :
* a clear commitment to the arms industry and war economy of which Boeing is a central player.
* an utter disloyalty to the European project by choosing to buy US made aircraft which could have been produced in Europe.
* a clear preference for non-unionised workforces. Ryanair waited till Boeing had broken its trade union laying waste to the working classes of Seattle. Between 2003 and the cutting of the deal with Ryanair, over 70,000 workers were laid off by Boeing. Then Ryanair used RTE to pretend that its deal would create 2,500 jobs in Seattle. http://www.rte.ie/news/2005/0224/ryanair.html

Ryanair doesn't create jobs it offers paid places on cabin crew courses it runs, advertised as leading to a training qualification which will be recognised globally. Despite the fact that only Ryanair recognise the certificate. In January of this year I couched a young woman who wanted to be an air hostess in Barcelona. She had studied tourism and was familiar with the two main computerised booking systems but wasn't sure what she should say at the selection interview for a well publicised "recruitment drive" in the Spanish state. I got her to learn a load of lines which I reckoned would go down well at an interview relishing the responsibility to safeguard the security of passengers under all eventualities. (Perhaps I had been watching too much of the TV series "Lost" at the time). Anway - she got selected out of an initial group of 1,400 applicants which had seen hopefuls fly into Girona from as far away as Italy. (Obviously those girls hadn't caught the eye of Berlusconi and werent getting into to TV).

Then the fun started. This young woman had to relocate from Barcelona to Girona at her own expense without any assistance and find lodging so she could do a 12 hour 5 days a week course. She paid for the first month under the constant duress that only the lucky few and best of the best would make it all the way . One weekend I got to see the confidential Ryanair training handbook. It's a hefty tome which explains amongst other things that is Ryanair's policy to never negotiate with terrorists and helpfully offers a profile on the sort of people who might hijack aircraft. Apparently they come in three easy to define types: religious nuts, the psychologically unbalanced looking for attention & more old fashioned terrorists who just want their mates out of prison. The poor unfortuanates who had paid for this course and had for the majority moved themselves to the city of Girona from all over Catalonia or the Spanish state would learn each Friday which one of their number wasn't being invited back to class the following Monday. Not a single failed trainee gets a refund on the training course payment . By the end of the first month the young woman (let us call her in the finest journalistic tradition "Ms A.") had not been dunked in a seacrash simulator or taught how to persuade a cabin load of passengers to put on their life jackets or put on an oxygen mask. Ms A. was invited to continue her training for a further month at an additional cost of training fees, tuition costs, living expenses and nutritious sandwiches. The co-ordinators tempted Ms A. with the delightful prospect of working as a ground crew member for the finest budget airline on Earth in either Dublin or London. By this stage she had not satisfied the ryanair tutors that she could make the grade on make-up or cosmetics and they were beginning to frown on her habit of going to classes in normal shoes. That weekend she returned to Barcelona and bought her first pair of high heel shoes. I had no problem in telling her that I thought she was one of the saddest idiots I had ever couched for a job application. Sure you could be talking about "the farm" as CIA Langley's training ground is known. At the end of the second month, complete with new shoes and wonderful advice on how to spot potential hijackers in airports (the local security authorities distribute photographs of these types which ought be examined regularly), the wonderful company Ryanair, which subverted the national symbol of Ireland dropped the bombshell.

She could have a job after one more month as promised (the third month) in either Dublin or London but would be contracted and thus paid from Catalonia, meaning Ryanair would pay just above the average minimum wage for the service sector in a state whose average wage and cost of living is less than a third of either Dublin or London . They offer no assistance in finding lodging in either Dublin or London but expect (obviously) their employees to be at their posts whenever their shift begins.

If you're coming out after tax and deductions for uniform etc. the princely budget sum of 800 euros a month, how do you find a cheap room in Dublin and get to its airport at 5am every morning? Do you have enough left over for sandwiches? It's probably just as easy as finding digs in Luton or Stanstead.

Ms A. finally gave up on Ryanair and learnt that their recruitment policy is as shit as their advertising which is as shit as their worker relations (witness their lawcases in Belgium and the conflict with the Irish pilot's association). Ms. A, won't even use the word Ryanair now and has happily worked in a hotel for the summer and is now beginning a masters thesis in the history of tourism. She wasted almost 3,000 euros on the scam and sham which is Ryanair's pretence to create jobs. Because Ryanair would have pretended that her job, that she would have paid for, was one created in the Spanish state as well as one created at whichever desk they had put her - Dublin or London.

It's like O'Leary's legendary taxi-meter in his car, put there so he can use the bus and taxi lane and get quicker through Dublin's traffic.

I suppose he created a job there too.

stars in your eyes, hoods on their heads & bombs in the air

by boater Tue Sep 01, 2009 16:34

Maybe one of the images from these comments would be better as the front page illustration instead of those big corporate logos?

Michael O'Leary of Ryanair backs the Lisbon Treaty- how do Labour Party supporters sleep at night?

by Super High IQ Intel Worker. Tue Sep 01, 2009 18:33

"Intel stands to profit handsomely from Lisbon's militarisation drive.

Intel in particular stands to profit from the further militarisation of Europe which Lisbon drives along. Intel is a manufacturer of key components of military hardware including deadly missiles and guidance systems."

The chances are good that Intel's gadgets are INSIDE the computer on which THAT was written.

Intel represents RATIONAL SCIENCE and RATIONAL TECHNOLOGY,the super high IQ of the Information Superhighway of the Twenty First Century.

Not forgotten and long discredited Marxist wishful thinking.......written down using Quill Pens during the Nineteenth Century.

P.S.

The reason we in the West,the Free World, build such fearsome defense weapons is BECAUSE Marxists have a "Hidden Articles Bin".......for those who don't agree with their wishful thinking .

It's called FREEDOM OF SPEECH.

Not much chance of THAT on Indymedia.....where viewpoints are carefully "harvested" in accordance with the "Party Line".

I know...........YOU have the Hidden Articles Bin for this.

But................WE build the fearsome computerised weapons...with.... "Intel Inside."
.

by Me Tue Sep 01, 2009 22:48

Brilliant IQ at work there.

by iosaf Wed Sep 02, 2009 09:34

I believe Karl Marx wrote that with an early version of a fountain pen & not with a plume or "quill". By the time Marx was scribbling, the Dickensian notion of quills was already beginning to go out of fashion. But it is worth noting that nobody bothered to patent a fountain pen though many versions were available till later in the century and the development of idea property based capitalism . So an Intel worker boasting a high IQ indeed (how does such a bod suffer the mediocre sameness of day to day working corporate life?) has informed us that inside our computers lurk Intel parts and our opposition to Lisbon is thus daft to say the least in the most polite way.

Why I too had that idea, I remember seeing the telly adverts of the Inteluber-technician bunny peoplein their silver or shiney jumpsuits prancing around a microchip to the repetitive beats of house music sometime back in the 20th century. very passé. very yesterday.

At the end of that century the EU met up in Lisbon and laid out the groundwork for the Lisbon Process which would they told us guarantee several things :

* a union of European states without disparity of income or quality of life.
* a union of European states with near complete employment
* a union of European states which would have achieved all that within ten years by promoting a knowledge based labour market.

I believe that Intel and other corporations who entered the idea patent stage of capitalism delighted in the benefits of that and for those reasons many uber-technicians had jobs created for them in Ireland.

Now you tell me -

with only one year left to go on the promise list of the Lisbon process without even directly touching the Treaty named after the same city :-

do you think we have an EU with less disparity of income, quality of life than 9 years ago especially considering it has expanded from the Atlantic to the Urinal in the meantime?

do you think we have an EU of near complete employment, why I whose super high IQ has never helped me get nor keep gainful employment let alone get out of bed to don the yoke of mediocrity hazard to comment that there are even less uber-technicians in employment in Ireland now. Perhaps they have put their uber-technicians silver Pentium jumpsuits in cold storage or donated them to the third world where most Intel parts end up regardless of their toxicity. I doubt either fountain pens or quills were so ecologically unsustainable. To the point until Monsieur Bic gave us throw away biros I doubt we really had entered so deeply into the plastic eternity of the instruments of writing's history.

Now before I finish airing my thoughts and leaving an early morning carbon footprint of useless froth, let me end my ramblings where I began.

Regardless of whether Marx wrote "The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people." with a plume or a non-patented fountain pen - we have passed through the idea property patent stage of capitalism most recently applying it to genes and sharing of date or information to the current stage of capitalism which is the supposed human resources / labour market .

I may never be an uber-technician nor an uber-anything but I do know every morning in my anarchist heart (not Marxist) that I am neither a resource nor a commodity to be traded. I am a worker who: needs a job, who loses jobs, who finds jobs, who keeps jobs, who bores of jobs. But I am neither a HR unit nor a "thing" to be bought and sold, trained or formed under either the Ryanair or Intel model of late capitalism which has nothing more to offer me and my working peers than the systematic stripping of much of the progress made in labour rights since only the literate wrote with plumes or even chalk. How many hours a day did those uber-bunny technicians work? Did they get health care too?

Vote No!

if only because as a jolly smart and intellectually rigorous uber-worker you remember that the first integrated circuit or microchip technology was shared globally not hidden behind silver jumpsuits and patent infringement law.

Bruno asks you "are Intel bunny people uber technicians IN oder AUS?"

by Glock Wed Sep 02, 2009 13:27

So Intel and Ryanair are calling for a yes vote.

Libertas did the same in reverse (and undoubtably had some impact) first time around.

Point is, there are dodgy characters (stand up and take a bow, Coir) on both sides of the debate. Criticising one side because of some fellow travellers is not going to get us anywhere.

by Ray Thu Sep 03, 2009 16:25

It's okay for for our Government to keep on having referendums until they produce the answer our Government wants.

"This is democracy working at its most fluid." according to Mr Justice McKecknie.

See at http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0903/eulisbon1.html for RTE's report on today's High Court hearing.

Pull the other one Justice: "This is plutocracy and despotism working at its most fluid" -- that's what I'd say.

by Image Maker Fri Sep 25, 2009 23:22

Distribute Widely Please

by Eurocracy Sat Sep 26, 2009 14:18

the executive is without control - the parliament is weakweak und the judicative depends from the executive. Is this democracy?

The buisness-lobbyismus-capital is Brüssel. Here ist the powerful executive ... Think for yourself.

by MsCread Tue Sep 29, 2009 17:03

Today in the Irish Examiner Pfizer another multi national company decided to jump into the Lisbon debate saying that a no vote would hit US job creation.

Pfizer recently aquired Wyeth which employ quiet a lot of people in Ireland. Once again the question needs to be asked "What exactly are these businesses doing getting involved in the Lisbon debate?"

by MyCoxOnFire Tue Sep 29, 2009 22:48

He is in bed with pfizer amongst others. See this great "expose"
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/94173&comment_limit=0&c...60075

In fact he's in bed with so many dodgy business interests ( read: acting against the interests of us, his employers, and we don't pay minimum wage either! ) That it's really a wonder his political "Cox" not rotted off. ( Although I'm certain his business friends are helping him keep it up! )

He's also getting lots of facetime on RTE lately.

read the article before listening to anything this bastard or anyone from pfizer has to say on "democracy"

Europe is going off the rails and heading in a bad direction. Help put it back on the right track VOTE NO on friday.
Not because you are against Europe. But because you are truly for Europe.

by Concerned Citizen Sun Oct 04, 2009 01:35

Hey guys,

I really respect the campaign the left ran-particularly the socialists and anti war movement, however Intel employs over 5,000 people in Ireland...how many do indymedia and the left? Bar a handful in Connolly Books I doubt many.

I understand where ye guys are coming from-don't get me wrong the likes of Michael O' Leary and Brian Cowen celebrating this gives me the shivers.

Good work lads 32% of the electorate STILL agree on NO and that is a big chunk,
Shane