Neo Liberalism The Truth

It is a grand little country after all—where our austerity preaching politicians are feted as celebrities and people like Lucinda Creighton and Paschal Donohue come across as angels such is their innocence and horror if there is a mention of ideology or in their case codology.
The name of the whole game here is spin—because spin works and spin is politics—Paschal in particular likes to lecture you and I Mr and Mrs Joe citizen—that we are broke and Government are being forced to borrow money just to pay our public service bills—if he is good form he will throw in a bit about the nurses and the doctors, and social protection is another favourite.
Somebody should tell Paschal that Ireland has a long history of borrowing money from the markets to pay all of these bills—and the crisis began when we just couldn’t go back to the well anymore. The funds that we are using now come at a much lower interest rate-but perhaps the real problems we face is in what we have chosen to do with these funds, and what caveats were attached to us receiving this money. Paschal of course has no ideology at all he is as much for the worker as he is for big business in fact nobody in this coalition will admit to having ideology be it left or right.
Lucinda Creighton is well able to speak but she tends to get lost down blind alleys and often looks completely perplexed like the questions she is fielding are grossly unfair and bare no relevance to her daily experience in Fine Gael—the no ideology party. The new buzz word from the government is to tell us little citizens that we will march out of this crisis and it is only a matter of time before Enda Kenny parts the Irish Sea and the hordes of neo-liberal suited entrepreneurs are going to save us from this politically imposed austerity.
Little Joe citizen is asked to believe this patent nonsense like we are about to accept an apology from an aggressor who has dropped an atomic bomb on us by mistake—and then we put them in charge of clearing up the mess.
Let us look at the spin and the way it works and how they are managing to keep the stench of neo-liberalism away from our sensitive noses. There was a very important statement made by Joan Burton earlier this year where she referred to social welfare fraud and how successful the reporting of people who were thought to be abusing the system—was to the increase in detection of welfare fraud—she of course is using fraudulent figures herself in this area—as Michael Taft has so graphically enlightened us the figure is near to 26 million euro rather than the 600 million the government are spoofing about. Why do they do this—well it is spin and it is purposely done to paint those on welfare as been central to the current mess we are in.
If that hurts wait for this, do the government ever publish figures as to how much money would be saved if we were to implement the following—means test children’s allowance—and college grants—and state old age pensions. We Joe citizen will accept a fair threshold of income and correlated assets and anybody above this reasonable line will be deemed to be in no need of these benefits, so the money saved I suspect billions would be redirected to the poor and the needy perhaps into educating disadvantaged children.
There is no chance of this happening for those people who are wealthy enough to do without these state payments basically control politics in Ireland and they are fundraisers for Fine Gael etc, one does not cut off one’s own foot but are people who claim benefits that they don’t need, are they not defrauding the state?
Michael Noonan stood up and said it and I could not believe what I was hearing he is offering a 30% tax break to certain high value foreign citizens to come and live here and create loads of magical jobs now before you stop laughing I tell you he was very serious about this fairy-tale from fairy land. We must understand that not only do neo-liberals not do state or sense of nationhood they profess that the state has no role in job creation. This of course just means that the state has no role but to make the conditions favourable for entrepreneurs and foreign high value entrepreneurs at that. This from the no-ideology party who are whipping the poor and the vulnerable with austerity.