Category Archives: Ireland

A Crack in the Debt Wall?

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In this morning’s New York Times, there was an odd story about Irish mortgages. It suggested that substantial debt abolition was set to happen but gave very little detail. So I went online to try and find out more and, as far as I can tell, it’s not true. Or, given that there were no details, it’s true that some people in Ireland want this to happen but it’s not clear whether it will. So why was it on page one of the “paper of record”? We can only presume that some people of influence are trying to sow the seeds for debt “forgiveness” as the paper calls it.

In the piece, now not visible on the top pages of the website, Peter Eavis asserts:

The Irish government expects to pass a law this year that could encourage banks to substantially cut the amount that borrowers owe on their mortgages, a step that no major country has been willing to take on a broad scale.

With more than 50% of Irish mortgage holders now underwater and the Allied Irish Bank raising interest rates on mortgages recently, such a decision makes sense. Only there’s no clear indication that it’s actually happening.

What Eavis is referring to is the Irish Insolvency Bill, proposed last June in the aftermath of the Keane report into the financial meltdown in Ireland. Media reports at the time noted that Keane placed

huge store in the implementation of a personal insolvency bill in early 2012.

 

This legislation is curiously lost in the parliamentary process with no clear account of what’s going to happen being available.

In fact, Irish media reported today the creation of a new joint Irish and UK personal insolvency company, Debt Options, which will be based in Dublin. The Leicester-based firm IrishBankruptcyUK.ie, has been involved in the write-off of more than €1 billion worth of Irish debt in the UK over the last year. Expectations are that more business is to be had because Irish procedure requires expensive legal counsel and a

six-month personal insolvency arrangement process with the bank

Clearly this investment would not have been made if people involved in Irish bankruptcy proceedings thought the government was about to act.

Certainly, debt forgiveness or abolition is in the air in Ireland. Here’s the Irish Independent from September after Blackrock showed that negative equity was at 50% and Moody’s reported that 20% or more of such mortgages would default:

“Principle modification” — which is a nicer way of saying “debt forgiveness” — is, according to Moody’s, the only solution. This has been empirically proven by Blackrock. Thus, we have a known cure that we won’t countenance and can’t afford.

That forgiveness is the answer has also been argued by Harvard economist Carmen Reinhart and backed up by several economists in Ireland, including Oxford’s Ronan Lyons, Trinity’s Brian Lucey and UCD’s Ray Kinsella.

Banks know that even mentioning this possibility is financial kryptonite to their sector. But just look at the figures. Short of mass repossessions, there really is no alternative. The message from the banks is: “Stay calm, don’t worry, this is under control.”

Quite frankly, our banks have been lying to us. This is about as controlled as herding butterflies.

Well put. So we have to conclude that the Times put this story on A1 because it too wants to put pressure on the banks. Who pushed them to do that? The only conceivable “source” that might have such clout would be the Federal Reserve or similar high placed financial regulators. Debt activists have been hearing rumors for a while now that debt abolition is on the Fed’s agenda.

Mortgages are $14 trillion. The earth may be moving under our feet.

 

 

Why M15 Matters

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Indignation is not enough! Build the 99% republic!

Austerity is a form of political repression by means of the economy. Across Europe, people have begun to reject the notion that the fiscal crisis caused by the banks should be solved by cuts in social services and redistribution of wealth to the rich, whether that be rich nations or rich individuals. Ireland and Greece have decisions to make in the weeks ahead. Much may turn on whether the protests in Spain and worldwide planned for the anniversary of the May 15 movement continue to give momentum to anti-austerity.

We were told that a Greek election that did not endorse austerity would be a market disaster. In fact, the euro is stable at around $1.29, making it still a strong currency as evidenced by the unrelenting hordes of Franco-German euro-laden shoppers in New York. Stock market traders punished the Greek market, driving it down about 8%, but left global prices only mildly diminished.

Today, European Union figures show that austerity does not work, even as a debt reduction policy. Spain’s budget deficit will actually rise to 6.4% of GDP this year compared with a previous forecast of 5.9%.  The Portuguese deficit will be 4.7% (was 4.5%), while Greece goes from worst to worst with its deficit predicted to be 7.3% (was 7%). Given these self-evident failures, also clear in the US economy, we have to conclude that the stakes in austerity are political: keeping the populations of the EU periphery in deprivation so that the global one percent can continue to flourish without restraint.

Yesterday in New York, OWS activists were pleasantly surprised to see that it was not in fact the usual suspects who turned up for the launch of NYC solidarity actions for the M15 events. A spontaneous orientation about Occupy was held. There are actions all weekend, including a Granny Peace Brigade and a Stroller March for Mother’s Day. Doing exams or stressed out by too many protests? Head to the May 15 rally in Times Square at 6pm, organizers request.

In Spain, unemployment is predicted to rise to over 25% next year. Another bank has had to be bailed out. More banks are in trouble. So every effort at state level goes into restraining popular protest. Events begin tomorrow in Madrid with marches setting out from four cardinal points to their destination in Puerta del Sol.

As you can see from the poster, the plan is to hold assemblies in the squares from May 12 to May 15 on topics ranging from the economy to feminism, health, water and migration. While the camp has been permitted in Barcelona, in Madrid riot police are set to contest the streets. The conservative government does not want its population discussing such matters.

In Greece, the election has failed to produce a pro-austerity coalition and Syriza failed to create an anti-austerity formation. A second round of elections in June now appears likely, with Syriza today predicted to win with 24% over the conservative New Democracy, down to 17%. Greeks appear to have gone on tax strike since the election, according to the Guardian, with public revenues  falling from an average €40m per day to less than €25m. And the E.U. has withheld one billion euros of its “aid” to the bondholders of Europe in order to punish Greek voters for having the temerity to have an opinion about their own lives. Somehow this seems unlikely to swing people to a pro-austerity position.

In Ireland, there is a referendum on March 31 on the fiscal treaty, which is in effect a vote on austerity. While opinion polls in April had a yes vote ahead, 20% were not decided. If anti-austerity continues to grow, Greece and Ireland can take the electoral lead if Spain can push the political agenda. There’s going to be a media downplay of the events in the U.S., so it’s up to us to use social media, blogs, and our presence in the streets to make this known. Go to an action as well: Tome la calle!

The Anarchic Archive of Refusal

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As people worldwide develop new tactics to refuse the subjugations and humiliations imposed on them in the name of austerity, an archive of resistance is re-emerging into view. It details the present, as evanescent as it is, and generates connections to past struggles. It is what we might call the an-archive, an archive of the desire for a fairer life, which we might call a world without hierarchy. Or anarchy.

Has any nation in the developed world been more damaged by neoliberalism than Ireland? When I visited after the 2008 crash the sense of despair was palpable. It’s all the more remarkable, then, to see the success of the campaign to resist the so-called “household levy,” a quaint-sounding term that attempts to disguise the fact that it is in fact what one might call an “austerity charge.” Each household is supposed to pay 100 euro (about $130) in advance of a more onerous property tax to come next year. As of this writing, only about half of Ireland’s households have complied. No doubt the authorities will try and claim that getting just over 50% is somehow a victory.

5000 demonstrate against the tax--note the Occupy banner top right

It’s clear, though, that no-one anticipated this refusal because the tax process is voluntary. As there is no existing register of households, each is supposed to register themselves and then pay. It says much about the hierarchical culture of Ireland that it was just assumed that this would happen.

The refusal brought a  predictable response from former Celtic Tiger booster economist Jim Power:

If we go down the road of breaking the law because we believe it to be unfair, we will create a total disrespect for the law and the logical conclusion is that we will gradually descend into a state of anarchy.

For the aptly-named Power and his ilk, this anarchy is the worst imaginable state, the war of all against all. The actions taken by the majority of the Irish people suggests that an anarchy in which laws are consensed, and the quality of life of the multitude is the determining factor, might indeed be just what they want. And they are not alone.

It’s very interesting to see how widespread the global contempt for the solutions proposed by austerity has become and how the desire for an alternative is reviving long-forgotten precedents. Over the last couple of days, activists in Tahrir Square, Cairo, have set about demolishing the walls built by the Egyptian military to contain and separate the square from the rest of the city.

The wall comes down

In these photographs by Mosha’ab El Shamy, the familiar Tahrir coalition can be seen, toppling a wall that had been brightly graffiti-ed by star artists of the new street art movement.

Celebrating the collapse

No nostalgia here, no call to preserve the art, as there would inevitably be in the overdeveloped world. Luckily Suzee in the City had documented it already:

Graffiti by Kaiser on the separation wall, Cairo

Such photographs now become part of the resistance archive that is being rediscovered and recirculated at the moment. I have already posted some examples of the photographs of past May Day actions in Union Square. Gavin Brown today posted a photograph of a rent strike in London from 1959:

3500 refuse higher rents in London, 1959

Such organized rent strikes were a common tactic of radical city life from the 19th century on. Here’s a painting by the Parisian genre artist Louis Léopold Boilly known as The Movings from 1822, showing a typical scene on the day that rent for the next quarter fell due and many of the city’s working classes were forced to move.

Boilly, "The Movings" (1822)

I like these kinds of genealogies that lead us from present-day actions to the now canonical archives of a certain modernism. This moment of quiet dignity, a refusal to pay a rent that could not be afforded, is the backdrop to the more celebrated Paris of the dandies, the courtesans and indeed the revolutionaries.

I draw energy from these past and present reconfigurations of everyday life, the archive of a set of claims that laws should be fair and that a certain anarchy should indeed prevail.