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No Bail out for the Bankers and developers!

No sell- out of the workers!

No to NAMA!    No to Cuts   There is an alternative!

Leaflet distributed at anti-NAMA, anti-cuts demo in Dublin

19 September 2009

Perhaps the biggest property company in the world is just about to be created in one of the smallest countries, and straight after one of the biggest property crashes in history.  Doesn’t sound like a good idea, does it?  It sounds like a very bad idea when you, me and every other worker in the State is being asked to pay for it.

We are told by the Government that we will actually make money out of it.  But if this is true how come no other smart suited capitalist investor is interested in buying the rotten loans from the banks?

Lies and more Lies

The Government is lying – again and again and again.  They say they won’t overpay for the bad loans held by the banks but if this were the case there wouldn’t be any point to NAMA, it wouldn’t exist.  The whole point of it is to bail out the banks, yet the Government tells us another lie by saying it isn’t a bank bail out.  The Government says we will make money out of it in the end but this can only be true if we have another property boom that can only end up in the same disaster.  In the meantime the national debt will have to explode to pay for NAMA and we will have to pay the interest on this debt and pay it all back through tax increases, wage cuts and cuts in services.  An Board Snip Nua has told us where the cuts will come.

But perhaps the biggest lie is that we need NAMA because we need to save the banks – the same banks that dodged taxes and overcharged its customers for years.  These banks are bust – only our taxes are keeping them afloat.  We don’t need them and if we bail them out they will do what banks in the US and Britain are doing now – paying themselves big bonuses and still restricting credit to workers and small business.  It is much more likely that they will seek to invest abroad, or look for the next class of asset to speculate on, than that they will invest in productive enterprise.

A Workers Alternative

There is an alternative and one that make the bankers and developers pay for their mess and protects workers and those dependent on social services.

The first part of this alternative is to reject ICTU’s demand for us to share the pain.  The union leaders say they are willing for workers to make their ‘fair’ share of sacrifices, but since workers didn’t cause any of this mess our fair share of the pain is precisely NOTHING!

This means we should reject the cuts in our wages, the tax increases and the cuts in our public services.  We should organise militant and direct strike action, in opposition to ICTU’s capitulation in order to stop NAMA and stop the cuts.

We should not fall for the demand that we should bail out the banks by nationalising them.  This would still mean us paying for their bad debts because these would belong to us through the State.  We should reject the idea that we nationalise them and then sell them back to the private sector after we have paid to return them to profitability.

Instead we should advocate a workers solution to this crisis.  This means we first of all ask the bank workers to tell us all the dirty big secrets that lie in Anglo-Irish Bank, a bank the Irish people are supposed to own but of which we know absolutely nothing.  We have put billions of euro into this bank and it hides its rotten loans from us and promises to give more money to bust developers like Liam Carroll to finish his useless developments!

The banks should be taken over by its workers who should reveal the true extent of the mess and tell us who us owes what.  We should call in the loans to developers and seize their assets if they can’t or won’t pay up.  If the banks are still bust after this we should wind them up and tell their shareholders and bond holders that they took a gamble and they have lost – hard luck!

We should guarantee all the deposits and transfer them into a Workers bank and we can then democratically decide how we are going to ensure we have a banking system that finances real economic development, such as green technology instead of useless speculation.

This way we don’t bail out the bankers or developers, we defend workers living standards, we save billions through not buying useless loans and we start to create a new and democratic economy.

This is the socialist alternative.  If you want to find out more and discuss how we can fight for this alternative come to our public meeting.  It has been called by a range of different socialist organisations who want to unite to fight back against this giant rip-off.

Public Meeting
CENTRAL HOTEL, Exchequer St, D.1
Saturday 26th September 2009, 2pm

 


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