Scant attention has been paid to the 80th anniversary of the October 1929 Wall Street Crash. Preoccupied with their own present devastating global crisis, the moneybags, the capitalists, can hardly repeat their theme of yesterday – “it can never happen again” – when dealing with 1929. How much of it really has happened again? And what are the underlying causes of today’s crisis?
A lot of ink has been spilt in the mainstream media, praising the role a free trade agreement between the EU and the US could play in pulling the two economies out of the crisis they are engulfed in. Richard Bruton outdid himself in the Sunday Business Post on 14 April 2013, claiming “abolishing restrictions in the EU’s services sector alone could boost EU GDP by 2.6%.” Three days later a press release from him claimed that the whole deal could boost EU GDP by a mere 0.5%!
“THERE’S NO way of preparing for Christmas, that bonus is actually Christmas”. This reaction from one single parent spells out what the Scrooge-like scrapping of the Christmas bonus will mean for the 1.3 million people previously eligible.
Minister Lenihan’s “justification” that prices are falling won’t compensate for a time of year when everything goes up – prices, fuel bills, pressure to buy presents, costs of travelling to relatives.
The premise of Fine Gael and Labour’s Programme for Government is that there is no alternative to continuing the austerity policies of Fianna Fail. socialistparty.net questions this assertion and argues for socialist policies to redevelop the economy.