Sharing the pain?

national | worker & community struggles and protests | feature Monday November 09, 2009 03:38 by Mairtin MacMaolain - ASTI

Govt needs a good fisting

Since when does sharing the pain equate to someone not being able to afford their mortgage on a foreign property and someone not being able to afford rent and childcare? Listening to the media is something which should be done with a health warning. We are in the middle of a propaganda war for the hearts and minds of the people living on this island. The question for the ruling classes is how far can they push the ordinary working and unemployed before it spills over into civil unrest? The question for the workers and unemployed is how to reclaim the unions from the 09 Mercedes class running them, get solidarity among all the workers of this country and figure out creative solutions to sharing the wealth, dismantling the dominative violent enforced power of the state and creating a society where it is easier for people to do good.

Problem:
The Irish Government to a large degree can be deemed corrupt. Self-serving politicians who pander to ensure the interests of the social and financial elite of this country are looked after, are not engaged in the democratic business of ruling for the good of the people of Ireland, despite all their noises to the contrary.

Solution:
It requires nothing short of a revolution, a change of mind, a repentance and a vision of a society where it is easier for people to do good. We need to create conditions were companies with ethical considerations at the heart of their philosophy aren't forced to close. We need to teach solidarity in our schools. Solidarity not only in good times but in bad times as well. We need to educate our children not in the ways of capitalist accumulation, but that it is in sharing that we find our security, not in hoarding.

Corruption can be defined as a person or thing that does not fulfil the moral purpose for which it was intended. Given this, the Irish Government to a large degree can be deemed corrupt. Self-serving politicians who pander to ensure the interests of the social and financial elite of this country are looked after, are not engaged in the democratic business of ruling for the good of the people of Ireland, despite all their noises to the contrary. How this is even challenged and how we hold these people to account is corrupt. We scapegoat one or two for the sins of the many, give them a royal rough time in the media for a few weeks and then convince ourselves that we are tackling political and economic corruption head on. If only it was so. In scapegoating we miss the wider issue, indeed we fail to spot the massive elephant in the room. We think that by re-arranging a few chairs on a sinking ship that everything will be fine, but in doing so, we ignore the stark reality that the ship is sinking, indeed it was never designed to float for very long in the first place. Reforming our government or reforming the economic model in which we find ourselves is an exercise in the highest futility. Only a complete overhaul and new alternative can lead to a situation where truly happier times can be envisaged without entering into the optics of illusion.

Put simply, the economic model in which we operate, which our government maintains, and which we are taught to obey from the cradle, is unsustainable. The average secondary student would be able to figure that one out. Above all else, it is the motivating factor behind the economic model, to accumulate material wealth and capital, in other words, profit, that makes it glaringly unsustainable. This profit at all costs motivates economic activity even at the expense of people's lives. It is a global phenomenon because it has a global reach today. On any typical day the average person in Ireland will use and consume goods that have travelled tens of thousands of miles to get into their possession. Globalization is inescapable and so are its consequences which include climate change, wars for ever scarce resources, increased terrorism both state and non-state, increasing global poverty fuelled by inequality leading to increasing levels of violence at all levels of society.

Of course it's not all bad. The small percentage of the world who benefit from this model, benefit tremendously in material terms. In the case of Ireland an economic boom can even seep downwards to benefit the poorest sections of Irish society and the illusion of infinite material wealth accumulation at no cost becomes more and more real. The problem is though that while the good times may roll for those in rich countries, the flip side of this is an increase in human misery not just in the poorest areas of the world where slavery is ever present, but even in the so-called rich countries themselves. The Celtic Tiger which promised to address all the ills of a country brutalised for centuries under the imperialist burden of its closest neighbour, proved to be a dangerous illusion. While the Guinness flowed, thousands of new millionaires were created and even the poor got jobs to fund foreign holidays and buy endless amounts of marketed rubbish, the unsustainablilty factor eventually brought the whole thing to an abrupt end, meaning tens of thousands of job losses, huge levels of personal debt, and a huge array of financial corruption to be cleaned up.

We are being told now by our government that we all need to make sacrifices to get us back on the road to economic prosperity and the good old times of the Celtic Tiger. I have to disagree Mr. Taoiseach. Indeed I am morally obliged as a human being to disagree Mr. Taoiseach. The idea that we all should have to make sacrifices to bring this country around is one I'd be delighted to support even though I did not benefit nor cause the financial crisis. The reason why I will actively resist any attempts to pass a burden of financial hardship onto those who struggle financially to get by from week to week is because I do not share the end goal envisioned by those driving the current "solutions".

I am a teacher with a 14 month old son and a working wife. We were living in a 2 bed apartment in the Dublin northside until the spring of this year when the toll of the pension levy and the income levy, which affected us both, made it impossible for us financially to live by ourselves. When we paid for rent, childcare, bills, food, and car we were scraping the bottom of the barrel each month and getting ourselves into debt, relying on friends to lend us money just to get by from week to week. Ireland is an expensive country. It must be. Here we were living a modest existence and finding it nigh impossible to make ends meet financially. I wouldn't mind if we could point to expensive foreign holidays, nights out in expensive restaurants and the sort of things those with "disposable" income can do, but we were trying to live simply. Not in Ireland though, and especially not Dublin, oh no. So we have moved into a house sharing with a couple which has halved our rent expenditure and we get by a bit better. Savings though, we have none and all thoughts of mortgage remain simply that, thoughts. We are the lucky ones though. Blessed are we who do not have a mortgage. If we had listened to the "experts" during the financial boom, we should have bought something, anything, at a price which would have proved subsequently to have been highly exorbitant. The tales of people now who are defaulting on mortgage payments, even teachers still in employment but on reduced hours and reduced pay, send a shiver down my spine every time I hear their plight. That could have been us. Forced into a life of wage slavery to pay a debt fuelled by greedy speculation and immoral rates of interest.

Faced with the prospect of more pay cuts, not just this year, but the year after and the year after that, I shudder to think what type of Ireland those who govern expect us to live in. Cutting vital public services such as health and education, not even mentioning the wage cuts of those working in the sector, will drive the wedge of inequality much deeper into Irish society, already marked by those who have much and those who don't. I wouldn't even mind if reduced wages and public services were to be experienced for a short while in preparation for a society based on a new dispensation of social justice and accountability, but it's not. The government's trying to make us swallow these highly inequitable sacrifices with the promise that it will see us back to the good old days of economic prosperity. I wonder about this and I doubt it.

To want to go back to living in the economic model responsible for most of the human misery in the world, is simply flawed thinking. The practice of maximising profit for shareholders led to a hardening of the traditionally warm Irish spirit to one where time was money and workers and customers were treated as a means by which to make money for shareholders. The money may have flowed but so did the traffic jams, so did the numbers on the housing list increase, so did the prisons fill up, so homelessness increased and so the rate of suicide increased, not to mention the increased levels of environmental destruction. Money did roll, but the capital driving it remained in the hands of a few and while the individual value of people grew less, our lives were encouraged to become more and more individualist. Happiness lay in buying more. The more you contributed to the golden arrow of consumerism, the happier you would become. Never mind the accumulation of rubbish and the environmental destruction involved, more is better. Fulfilment lay in protecting our consumer goods and our security lay in financial security. We became a people involved in a competitive struggle for credit and goods. While solidarity diminished, wars were being fought in the holy name of our economic/political system in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we stood by and let it happen. The Irish Government still today invite the US military to use Shannon airport as a stopover on their way to inflict horrific slaughter and oppression on peoples of the world who deserve our active support against such illogical aggression. Through it all, we never noticed that the bankers and developers and politicians were busy swindling fortunes, amassing millions that today we are told we need to pay back. Go figure.

So what is the alternative to this depressing future where the rich tell us we are in recession, they talk about sacrifice and that we are all suffering? Short term we need to tax the wealthy 1% of this country who own obscene amounts of wealth and get this money flowing back into society. Long-term it requires nothing short of a revolution, a change of mind, a repentance and a vision of a society where it is easier for people to do good. We need to create conditions were companies with ethical considerations at the heart of their philosophy aren't forced to close. We need to teach solidarity in our schools. Solidarity not only in good times but in bad times as well. We need to educate our children not in the ways of capitalist accumulation, but that it is in sharing that we find our security, not in hoarding. When we share our gifts, talents, time and money, we are guaranteeing our future on this planet as the ethic of giving means no one should go hungry or suffer a lack of life's basic necessities. Rather than looking at our neighbours as economic competitors, we should teach our children to treat their neighbour as themselves, see the potential of humanity in everyone we meet in all corners of the world and embrace our differences, not use them as excuses to divide us. We need to invest more money not in ensuring the profitability of banks but ensuring goods and services become better and endure to the point where they lift everyone out of poverty. Rather than supporting the "war on terror", we should declare a new "war", one on poverty and climate change. We could use the money that is spent on the arms industry, the biggest single industry on the earth, and use it to solve every single social problem and disease that affects human kind. Non-violence or violence is not the choice we face, it is non-violence or non-existence. We need people of vision at this hour to lead us to the survival of our people and planet. To go back to the unsustainable economic model and pretend it can deliver for all humanity is a dangerous lie, but sadly believed and valued by most. The argument for a different course is neither popular nor easy but it is possible. Communism in Poland did not collapse by a miracle in 1989. It collapsed because a handful of people met in a basement nine years previously and dared to organise a movement which would see the political system toppled. It took vision, courage and hard work. This is type of sacrifice we should be called to. Anything else is folly and must be resisted. Trade Unions take note.