Dublin Opinion

This article was originally published on Irish Left Review. I’m republishing it here because the points that Dr. Gerry Burke makes are worth repeating and because when our government say that they have no choice but to remove the univeral medical card for the over 70s as a result of our dire finances we can say that they do have a choice. They just don’t want to choose the option that would undermine vested interests. Donagh

This week, indignant old men and women have led a wave of unprecedented social protest in the national media. Next week, the same old men and women will take their protest to the streets. The government may fall.

The primary issue may be medical cards but the core value at the heart of the matter is the entire concept of the universality of welfare entitlements. Universality has become the battle-ground. Joe Behan has powerfully articulated the core Irish values long since jettisoned by Fianna Fáil. We may be witnessing the death throes of the Progressive Democrats, but the cancer of their neo-liberal ideology has spread.

Ms Harney, in particular, seems hell bent on ensuring that Ireland will not have the opportunity to transform itself into any form of egalitarian state, operating a Nordic-type social model, before she departs the scene. She wishes to dismantle the last remnants of the Irish welfare state.

What has been particularly striking about the budget debate in general is the absence of any protest about increased taxation by the wealthier members in society - as noted in the recent TASC survey, there has been a shift to the left among ABC1’s. There is an acceptance that the wealthier must pay more tax - this is simply no longer in dispute. No one is protesting about the cut in the ceiling for tax relief on private pensions or the 2% levy for higher earners. Higher earners themselves would probably support even more progressive taxation if it was clear that good public services and universal education and health care would be provided. And the entire population seems to be unified in its outrage by, not just the threat to the universality of the medical card for the over 70’s, but also the application of the 1% levy to even the lowest earners.

Health care is the key battle ground in the universality war. For over a decade now, universality has been losing ground to ‘market justice’ and privatisation, despite growing evidence that the market system has failed in health care provision. For example, it is common knowledge in medical circles that many of the country’s private hospitals would not survive at all without the National Treatment Purchasing Fund (NTPF). And it is also well known that the NTPF is a gravy train for private hospitals. Ms Harney has a particular fondness for the NTPF, which has managed to escape any real scrutiny despite its massive budget.

The 2008 budget for NTPF is €100 million - the same amount of money that was to be saved by taking the medical card off the ‘ineligible’ over-70’s.

Reducing expenditure on the NTPF would have been one of several health care ‘cuts’ considered by the government, but cutting the medical card for over-70’s is what it chose. Above all else, bail out the boys. Maintain the illusion that the private hospital sector is efficient and cost effective, rather than invest in the public hospitals so that they can deal, in a timely manner, with the patients that were referred to them. And spin it so that it looks like the medical card money was only going to doctors for doing nothing anyway. In this analysis, spending money on GP’s is the same as wasting money. (On the contrary, the evidence in the medical literature is that expenditure on primary care offers the best value for money in health care - much more so than expenditure in the acute services). But do not, under any circumstances, dare to mention or to threaten the extravagant profligacy of NTPF money (€100 million) being doled out to the beloved private hospitals and investors.

It’s not as if all of the cases being dealt with by NTPF are exactly high priority - only 44% of those offered outpatient consultations on the NTPF bothered to take up the offer and only 17% required any surgery. The annual reports of the €100 million endowed NTPF are a complete disgrace, thick with unctuous self-congratulation but exceedingly thin on meaningful data. They make no attempt whatsoever to provide any information on value for money or any comparison with the cost of the same treatments if they had been carried out in the public hospitals. The sum of money involved in 2007 was €92 million and the number of in-patients treated was 22,000.

This year, the Regional Maternity Hospital, Limerick, will provide comprehensive maternity care to some 6,000 mothers of all levels of clinical complexity on a budget of a mere €18.5 million (and this includes the neonatal intensive care of many extremely preterm babies, some born as early as 24 weeks and the cost of whose care can amount to over €0.5 million per baby).

The maternity hospitals in this country continue to struggle to provide a decent level of care on very miserable budgets. And for the second year running, despite huge increases in the number of births (44% in a decade), not an extra red cent has been provided in the budget to improve them.

Will pregnant women have to descend on the Dáil, along with the pensioners, to pelt eggs at the ministers responsible before anything will be done? And pelt them they should. We have indulged and put up with this type of messing for far too long.

“This Budget serves no vested interest. Rather, it provides an opportunity for us all to pull together and play our part according to our means so that we can secure the gains which have been the achievement of the men and women of this country. It is, a Cheann Comhairle, no less than a call to patriotic action.”

This was Brian Lenihan, ending his budget speech on Tuesday and apparently trying to sound like Franklin D Roosevelt. What unmitigated blather. No vested interest served? Patriotic action? Please, give us a break.

Here’s Roosevelt himself, proclaiming his New Deal in his 1932 election campaign - “Throughout the nation men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the Government, look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth… I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people… This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms.”

There are no FDR’s in this government.

Dr Gerry Burke, FRCOG, is a consultant obstetrician & gynaecologist in Limerick’s Regional and Maternity Hospitals. He is also a member of the Labour Party.

Klassekampen: To what can capital turn now? Will it generate another bubble in even “safer” areas, such as natural resources? Food? I must admit that western financial capital does not seem to be very geographically expansive at the moment, but could this change?

JBF: I don’t think capital has anywhere to turn in the immediate situation, that is, there is no hope for restarting accumulation right now. One hears all the time about the creation of new bubbles, and certainly since financialization is how capital in the monopoly-finance phase has sought to combat stagnation, this is a natural enough question to ask. But it is often treated as though bubbles, i.e. major speculative episodes within the more ongoing financialization process, can be based on anything whatsoever. Historically, however, such speculative bubbles in the advanced capitalist economies are based in the stock market and real estate. Neither is likely to be expansive at present. We are in a period in which a massive wiping out of value is taking place, which will eventually, as in all such occasions in the history of capitalism, create the basis for renewed accumulation. But the process has to work its way out first.

JBF is John Bellamy Foster, by the way, and the above is from an interview for Norwegian Daily, Klassekampen.

I only put it up because it was on Who Is IOZ, and Who Is IOZ is so hot right now.

Seanachie of Pleasures of Underachievement has written a great essay on contemporary French cinema, and says that the popular perception is fogbound in cliché.

One of the favourite punchbags for self-appointed francophobes is French cinema. Boring, dull and talky are the epithets one hears most often, to the extent that for many people, French cinema has morphed into one type of film, a parody of early Godard or Rohmer, like the skits on the Fast Show ten years back, of moody, languid, heavily-mascaraed young women talking existential gibberish to chain-smoking Belmondo clones. As with all clichés, there is a grain of truth in it, but a grain that is isolated in one strain of French cinema, and a very narrow strain it is these days.

Read the whole thing on Irish Left Review.

At all turns - the world’s bankers can be seen re-emerging almost unscathed from their own rectums. I could, I suppose, delight or despair at this spectacle were I not the flippant shagger I am. Instead, my attention is drawn to the ‘bread and circuses’ option of the boys in green in action tonight at a rather big circus arena on Jones’s Rd.
It was Italians, I suppose, that invented the whole ‘bread and circuses’ option of keeping the proles distracted, so fitting it is that we have an Italian at the helm tonight. In the role, according to the assembled Irish hacks, of dumb beasts to the slaughter, we have Cyprus. For a few good reasons, the mention of the place has been bringing me out in a cold sweat recently. Not among those reasons is the fact that the name of the place is only one letter away from Billy Ray Cyrus… that’s another problem entirely.

It’s a recurrent cold sweat dating back to my tuning in an hour late to RTE’s coverage of our last away trip to Cyprus and being flabbergasted to learn from the commentary team that we were 4 or 5 goals down to the Cypriots with an open season declared on Paddy Kenny’s goal for all in the blue of Cyprus. I’m still filtering through and have yet to find the exact phrase in the Book of Revelation that confirms shipping five to Cyprus as announcing the beast - but I will find it, mark my words. I do know that the beast will address us in a Louth accent. He may well begin his reign by expressing surprise at the current rude health of Cypriot football. I remember them as being a team we automatically expected to beat up to about a decade ago. The first sign they were emerging from the minnow ghetto was probably a 3-2 home win over the Spaniards a few qualifying campaigns back. Their victory over us and considerable trouble caused to the Germans, the Czechs and most recently the Italians prove thay are definitely no longer in the minnow bracket.

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Michael Taft has asked a question that was buzzing around my head while watching the budget coverage.

So the real question is: how are we going to pull ourselves out?

With all this talk of being patriotic, and spreading the ‘pain’, the crap about helping the vulnerable and creating sustainable growth for the future, there is bog all being said about what Fianna Fail plan to do.

Like the bank bail out, they’re crossing their fingers and saying a hail mary.

Or as Michael says:

Fianna Fail has no answers, no hope, no strategy, no bloody idea. All they can give us are fantasy projections going forward: the economy returning to growth in 2010, with growth of nearly 4 percent by 2011; and with that our fiscal problems are solved. Yeah, right.
As one Department of Finance official told me shortly after the Minister finished his budget statement - ‘We can always hope for more emigration.’ Back to the old standby when Irish governments get into fiscal trouble.

So over the next few days, when commentators, Opposition spokespersons and social organisations start delving into the details to reveal more horrors, just keep an eye on the medium-term: Fianna Fail has not only deflated our economy, it has deflated our hopes for a way out. And in the meantime has fiddled numbers beyond recognition to any resembling planet Ireland.

At the dead end of the no-hope room, what a party we will have with Fianna Fail.

The full budget will be available here, when they’re finished in the Dail with it.

But the rationalisation of state agencies can be seen now.

The entire Eurozone seems to be following Gordon Brown’s lead and working to recapitalize the banks by having the government take an equity stake in firms that need assistance. This is how Sweden successfully resolved its banking crisis in the 1990s and it appears to be the right thing to do.

So said Matthew Yglesias yesterday.

The result:

Stock markets in Asia and Europe surged on Tuesday after a historic rally on Wall Street saw US markets record their biggest rebound since the 1929 Great Crash after investors welcomed a pledge by European governments to invest €1,873bn ($2,546bn) to shore up their financial sector.

But Yglesias is wrong. One member, Ireland, hasn’t followed Gordon Brown’s lead. If anything Brian Lenihan has insisted that he doesn’t want tax payer’s money being used to shore up the banks.

The result:

The Iseq index climbed just 2.5 per cent, as shares in the State’s two biggest banks fell sharply amid fears that the Government would have to intervene by buying equity stakes in the banks to further bolster the Irish financial system.

AIB fell 18.8 per cent, while Bank of Ireland shed 14 per cent.

But Ireland is different, we’re unique. We’re always different and unique. Of course, we still don’t know if it is a problem of liquidity or capitalization – mainly because the government is hiding the answer to that question until after the budget. Michael Casey, writing in the Irish Times today, thinks its liquidity, although he’s still confused.

In that eventuality it will probably be accepted that the main problem affecting Irish banks was the lack of liquidity and the seizing-up of the global inter-bank market - problems which the present State guarantee are designed to address. In this context though, it is not entirely clear why the Irish banks cannot access enough liquidity from the European Central Bank by pledging their mortgages as security.

Mortgages as security??? Does he not read the newspapers?

Ireland’s banks have extended loans of at least €106bn to builders and developers, accounting for over half of all loans to businesses. At present, associated bad debts are thought to be in the order of €500m.

Listening to Morning Ireland this morning it seems that the value of all Irish banking shares is no more than €8bn at the moment. That sounds like a capitalization problem to me.

But Michael Casey says that people who claim that the bad debt and lack of capitalization don’t know the facts:

Commentators who say that loan write-offs and capital shortage are in fact the main problems facing some Irish banks are essentially saying that they do not believe the financial authorities. These commentators do not of course have the detailed information of the authorities and simply point to anecdotal evidence about distressed property speculators and half-finished building sites. They also seem to assume that the speculators who are selling Irish shares are behaving rationally; this is not necessarily the case at all.

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You see brothers and sisters, there’s not a single good reason for any worker — especially any union member — to vote against Barack Obama.

There’s only one really bad reason to vote against him: because he’s not white.

And I want to talk about that because I saw that for myself during the Pennsylvania primary.

On 1 July 2008 Richard Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), gave a forty-minute speech to the United Steelworkers’ Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Trumka talked about unions, employers, class unity, corporate profits, strike breakers, and, near the end of his speech, he spoke about race. He told a story about a chance meeting he had with a female Democrat voter he’s known for years, and who told him that she wasn’t going to vote for Barack Obama. At first she said that she was not voting for him because “he’s a Muslim”, and he’s unpatriotic as he doesn’t wear an American flag lapel pin.. Trumka challenged her on these reasons and, after some prodding, she admitted that the reason she could not bring herself to vote for Obama was altogether much more simple and direct: Obama is a black man, and she does not trust black people. “Brothers and sisters”, said Trumka to the convention, “we can’t tap dance around the fact that there are a lot of folks out there just like that woman. A lot of them are good union people; they just can’t get past this idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a black man. Well, those of us who know better can’t afford to look the other way.”

Trumka received a standing ovation for his speech, and there’s a video clip of the section of his speech that dealt with Obama and race at the end of this post. (Cheers to Becky for the link.)

The clip brought me back to an essay by R. Jeffery Lustig entitled ‘The Tangled Knot of Race and Class in America.’ Lustig is Professor of Political Science at California State University, Sacaramento, and the essay is taken from a book edited by Michael Zweig, What’s Class Got To Do With It? I’ve been meaning to write something about Class and Race ever since I read Lustig’s essay, but I never felt confident enough with the material - I have never even visited America, so to write about its society at a grassroots level seems a somewhat futile exercise. (It’s one of the joys of high politics, you can just enjoy the spectacle at face value.) I still don’t feel comfortable with the material, but I thought I’d summarize Lustig’s points as a kind of accompaniment to Trumka’s speech, as both call for a need to engage with the topic of Race and Class.

So. This is what Lustig has to say about Race and Class in America.

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In August 2007, the Al-Jazeera program People & Power ran a special report from Max Keiser about the Icelandic currency speculation bubble. Based on the carry trade, Keiser explained how the Icelandic economy was heading for a massive fall, and it did not have to do with toxic loans or sub-prime derivatives, simply good old fashioned money speculation.

I first came across Max Keiser about, oh, I’d say, maybe thirty minutes ago? Here’s a blurb on him from www.intrade.com

Max Keiser is a financial expert, Prediction Markets analyst and inventor. He is the creator of the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) the first Prediction Market. He is a frequent guest on Al Jazeera, France24, and PressTV. Max pioneered the first Prediction Markets TV content in 1998 with 13 episodes of NBC’s “Access Hollywood.” He is also the creator and presenter of “The Oracle” a Prediction Markets TV show in development at a major international broadcaster.

Max Keiser co-hosts “The Truth About Markets” on ResonanceFM 104.4 in London. He also produces and presents documentary films covering markets and finance for Al Jazeera’s “People & Power” series.

Max Keiser started his career on Wall Street in 1983. He is the creator of KarmaBanque a site that enables activists to challenge corporate power and Kinooga, a patent-pending social finance site for indie films.

The program is in two parts below.

Enjoy.