“A low rate of corporation tax on export-orientated activity has been a cornerstone of our industrial policy since the 1950s and the 12½% rate is now part of our international ‘brand’. The contribution from  the corporate sector will be made through the maintenance and creation of high value employment.”

So said the National Recovery Plan 2011-2014, issued on 24 November 2010 by the Fianna Fáil/Green Party and which received glowing approval from the EU, IMF and the ECB.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal towards the end of 2011 Taoiseach Enda Kenny was asked if it was true that the reason so many tech firms set up European headquarters in Ireland was because of Ireland’s low corporate tax rate. Kenny gave an emphatic no to that. But, the interviewer wanted to know, if that was the case, why then was the rate defended to vigorously?

“Foreign investors like decisiveness” he said. 'There isn't any confusion about Ireland's corporate tax rate: it is 12.5%. End of story.' He then added 'but that is not why major corporations come here. It is a cornerstone undoubtedly of why companies might invest in Ireland. But no matter what the business is, it is always about people that can actually develop it and grow it.'

It's a disorienting and frequently disconcerting sensation to live between two countries on the European periphery and witness the striking similarities but also the glaring differences. It is not that things are much better in Spain than in Ireland; for many they are worse. But what there is, to a far greater degree than in Ireland, is the availability of media productions that are a significant countervailing force to the dominant media machinery - which treats the destruction of labour rights, the dismantling of the welfare state, the privatisation of public services and the immiseration of the population as mere administrative facts at worst and necessary measures for national recovery worthy of enthusiastic backing for the best part.

No such luck in Ireland, where all the newspapers and radio stations are right-wing.

I read some of the pieces in the Irish Times's 'Squeezed Middle' series this week. In one of the inaugural pieces, Dan O'Brien wrote the following of the bourgeoisie, which he praised effusively:

'who else made the modern world?'

There was no mention of the modern working class that the bourgeoisie had called into existence.

The ‘austerity package’, as the newspapers like to call it, seeks to impose on Greece terms that no people can accept. Even now the schools are running out of books. There were 40% cuts in the public health budget in 2010 - I can’t find the present figure. Greece’s EU ‘partners’ are demanding a 32% cut in the minimum wage for those under 25, a 22% cut for the over 25s. The minimum wage in Greece is around €500 per month, well below a living wage in that economy. Already unemployment for 15-24 year olds was 43.1% last April - it will have risen considerably since then. Overall unemployment has increased to over 20%. The sacking of public sector workers will add to it. The recession predicted to follow the imposition of the package will cause unbearable levels of unemployment at every level.

In addition the ‘package’ demands cuts to pensions and public service pay, wholesale privatisation of state assets – a fire-sale, since the global market is close to rock bottom – cuts to public services including health, social welfare and education. The whole to be supervised by people other than the Greeks. An entire disciplinary and punishment system.

The EU is bailing out of Greece.

The current debate on the need to cut back the state in order to unleash the power of entrepreneurship and innovation in the private sector builds upon a stark contrast that is repeatedly drawn by the media, business and libertarian politicians: a dynamic, creative competitive private sector versus a sluggish, bureaucratic, inert, ‘meddling' public sector. Company heads complain about the state stifling innovation; in the US, Tea Party politicians call for the state not to meddle in areas like healthcare that are more efficiently run by the market; David Cameron calls civil sector workers the `enemies of enterprise', and editorials in the Economist call for the public sector to be reduced to open up opportunities for innovation and competition.

In painting this contrast, it is assumed that the private sector is inherently more innovative, more able to think out of the ‘box' and to lead a country towards long-run innovation-led growth. In this view, the retrenchment of the public sector will inherently make the economy more productive and achieve higher growth. But many examples in the history of innovation, entrepreneurship and competition, in different sectors and across different countries, paint a very different picture - of a risk taking innovative state - especially in the most uncertain phases of technological development and/or in the most risky sectors - versus a more inert private sector, which only invests (in innovation, in new start- ups, in networks) once the state has absorbed most of the uncertainty.

Last night on TV3’s Tonight with Vincent Browne show Fine Gael TD Simon Coveney claimed he did not know the names of the bondholders to whom we handed over €1.25bn yesterday (Wednesday, 25 January). Towards the end of the show, Browne handed Coveney a list of bondholder names and asked him to pass it on to his colleagues in Government. This list has been available online and widely circulated since it was published by Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, on his site, order-order.com in October 2010.  In December 2010 then-Senator David Norris attempted to read the names on the list into the record of the Seanad but was ruled out of order and silenced. He succeeded in reading out only five names.  According to the Irish Independent, a copy of the list was subsequently forwarded to all members of the Dáil and Seanad (including, presumably, Enda Kenny, who pleaded ignorance this week as to the identities of the bondholders to whom we were yesterday giving a sum equivalent to a third of all of the monies raised through cuts in Budget 2012).

For Messrs Kenny, Noonan and Coveney, then, we present a handy cut out and keep version of the list. (Click image for larger version.) {jathumbnailoff}

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”

― Howard Zinn

Imagine threatening to set off bombs if you didn’t get your way with something. Most people would call that the threat of violence. But what if it’s the type of bomb that doesn’t need mercury tilt switches or ammonia? What if they are not made in rural outhouses; not devised by men with degrees in electrical engineering who studied at Queen’s university. My part of the world has seen plenty of those bombs. You might have even been there. We have seen what bombs do, but more importantly we know what they are intended to do. Bombs are not just about the considered obliteration of human flesh and bones, of human life. They are also blunt instruments designed to create environments of fear and insecurity. An explicit expression of power-over, diametrically opposed to the creative and democratic possibilities of power-to.

So what if the men threatening bombs didn’t do degrees in electrical engineering? What if those issuing threats and using the discourse of violence studied political science and economics? What if they didn’t devise plans in rural farmhouses, but instead held closed meetings in big glass-fronted buildings with private elevators you wouldn’t be welcome in? What if the men threatening to unleash bombs in Dublin didn’t use tilt switches or fertiliser, but instead used blunt financial instruments that control the money supply and the banking system? What if this meant that vulture capitalists would intentionally seek to fuck up our already fucked society even further by using ‘the free market’ and hedge betting to inflict more pain and hurt? Real pain and hurt, not some abstract pretend shit of  the Irish Times’s imaginary ‘we’ variety.  The kind that affects the very real ‘us’.  That ultimately leads many in our society to die earlier, to lead sicker lives, to have more fear, more emigration, more unemployment and insecurity, more suicide and broken souls, higher food and energy prices, less access to education, more addiction? I could go on, but you all know what I mean.

Dublin-based street artist CANVAZ was out and about last night adding his latest stencil-work to the city's Outernet.

Appearing this morning on the corner of Abbey Street and Capel Street, the piece reads 'Give a man an education and he will build a new world but give a man a loan and you can own that man forever', and signs off with 'Not Our Debt', a reference to the Anglo - Not Our Debt campaign launched last week to resist the €1.25bn payment to unsecured Anglo Irish Bank bondholders scheduled to be made by the Government on Wednesday, part of over €9bn that will be paid on behalf of Anglo from the public purse this year alone, in addition to the countless billions that will be paid directly to the ECB and IMF for gambling debts that the citizenry had nothing to do with.

CANVAZ was also responsible for the 'Occupy All Streets' piece last year. You can see more of CANVAZ on his Facebook page and his Flickr photostream. {jathumbnailoff}

Another global wave of critique and resistance would come, I told myself and anyone who asked. For many years I watched and waited. Not passively, but actively, keeping alive the social memory of movements past, analysing the ever-shifting shape of the global system and going into the streets to protest against many forms of exploitation. We no longer had the wind at our backs. Our numbers were small. Our voices were marginalised. Nevertheless we knew that the structural problems that had brought us on to the streets in the beginning had not been solved.

As boom led to bust, expropriation intensified by means we never imagined possible. The level of anger rose greatly, but activity not so much. The powerful were even more powerful and we were so powerless.

Iceland, Greece, Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Chile, etc, etc. Would it be everywhere but here? Here being a country that had plunged down in the world far more dramatically than most. Yet we beheld signs of Greek protesters saying ‘We are not Ireland’. The shame of it. What would it take to get Irish people to act?

The trade union movement got 100,000 out on the streets of Dublin in November 2010 and everybody went home again. After beholding the indignant on the squares of the world in 2011, I thought that we had to get out and stay out.

Then came Occupy Wall Street. I tweeted: “#OccupyIFSC. Up for it?” I wasn’t the only one. It was in the air. During the first week of October, it got focused. There were already several actions planned for 8 October. There were several small groups planning to be at the Central Bank in Dame Street with a street theatre flavour: one going for ‘pots and pans’ and another for ‘the shirt off our back’. Then #OccupyDublin and #OccupyDameStreet started trending on Twitter. On Facebook too we got liking and planning.

It was spreading like wildfire throughout the US and other countries and continents too. I got reports from Occupy Philadelphia, the place where my protesting began. A meeting to plan it that week attracted massive attendance, including many of my new left friends, veterans of many protests, greyer now but still going, along with many new to protest. The occupation started on 6 October and I was mesmerised by the livestream. I was fascinated by a general assembly where participants responded to the question ‘Why are we protesting?’ by telling their stories in the call-and-response of the mic check ritual.

There was a sixties feeling sweeping over me. A Buffalo Springfield song came back to me. It went “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” I found it on YouTube and posted it and it spread. It kept playing in my head. Of course, I knew there was a difference between the 60s and my 60s, but I was determined to be up for it.