Economist Michael Hudson was recently interviewed on RT by Peter Scott on the current situation with regard the US instructing Europe to commit economic suicide -aka the sanctions against Russia. In it, he lays out what his happening and where Europe and the US is headed. It cuts right through the bullshit narrative

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All State Land And Property To Be Sold To a Private Entity Called The Land Development Agency. Yes you heard this correctly.

The government is transferring all state land and property to a private entity called the Land Development Agency. We cannot allow this to happen. The Post Offices are semi-state owned but they are actually being starved of cash.

Richard Boyd Barret TD: In the Dail

Just wow is all I can say… of course the minister has already left the building. The boys are back in town. Fianna Fáil and the developers. This is a hyper-speed version of “The Mistakes of the Past”. This legislation is a heist, is a legal method to pillage the land bank, the entire public land bank. It’s absolutely extraordinary. It’s not just local authorities, it’s every single public sector and their land. Not just housing land, “any relevant land” you can look at the definition in the legislation. They can take any bit of land from any public body and they can do what they like with it. “

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Melissa Ciummei, a financial investor from Northern Ireland, has serious concerns that injection passports will be used more like data passports to control participation in society.

NB. FACEBOOK IS BLOCKING OUR BACK-UP PAGE SO TONIGHT'S SHOW WILL BE BROADCAST ON OUR MAIN PAGE. WE ARE TAKING A RISK IN DOING SO AS ONE MORE STRIKE COULD HAVE US PERMANENTLY REMOVED FROM FACEBOOK. WATCH TONIGHT'S SHOW AT THE FOLLOWING LINKS... ... read full story / add a comment

It's not often, in fact never that Indymedia agrees with Michael O’Leary but in this case we do because the whole pandemic is a hoax. Now some people might think this now means that we agree with everything he had ever said, is saying and will ever say in the future. And it is not. We value our freedom and liberty first and foremost rather than submit to police state controls which have been clearly laid out. We don't agree that if Micheal O'Leary says lift the lockdown then we must automatically say the opposite but that is how people will expect us to think.

However given this pandemic is a hoax it means the forces at work are far far bigger than Micheal O'Leary so he is not likely to get his way. In fact the era of tourism for the masses may have come to abrupt permanent end last March for all we know. ... read full story / add a comment

Prof Neil Ferguson who was the chief advisor to the UK government in the lead up to the Covid lockdown and was instrumental in bringing it about based his advice on the output of his own undocumented computer code he wrote 13 years ago. In the initial stages of the crisis his "model" predicted 500,000 deaths in the UK from Covid. Then a short time later, he revised his figures sharply downward and said his model now predicted to 20,000 deaths. This incidentally is the same number of deaths from flu in the UK in a typical year. So it appears to be the case that the UK has committed economic suicide based on software that no-one else could inspect in advance nor was there any independent verification. To make decisions based on this type of methodology is nothing short of criminal. And we haven't even got to the assumptions used which obviously are on equally shaky ground given one day the model was predicting 500,000 dead and then when obviously some level of correction was done, it was then only 20,000. ... read full story / add a comment

Never before in the history of the world has there been such a massive and widespread shutdown of the economy for as long as for this Covid-19 scare. As of today April 21st it has been more or less shutdown for a month and the politicians instead of doing their usual and saying we will be out of this soon are saying we need to continue it indefinitely and even when the lockdown is lifted, it will only be gradual return to normality. Clearly everyone is worried and a lot depends on how long this lockdown continues for. The question is not whether the economy both here in Ireland and globally will be damaged but more by how much. This is an important question because real lives depend on what happens in it

Here we attempt to assess where we are, what has happened and what logic dictates are some of the possible outcomes. ... read full story / add a comment

Financial Justice Ireland and the Latin America Solidarity Centre are pleased to host Luiz Vieira of the Bretton Woods Project for a public talk on the role of the IMF in Latin America.

Monday 24th Feb @ 7pm
Wynn's Hotel, Dublin 1 ... read full story / add a comment

In Somalia, 60 percent of the 15 million person population lives in extreme poverty. According to the United Nations Development Programme almost 10 million people live in extreme poverty or close to poverty in Somalia while the war-torn African nation wrestles with a $4.6 billion debt. On Friday, Somalia's Finance Minister Abdirahman Beileh will call for debt cancellation for humanitarian assistance. ... read full story / add a comment

This is a repost of an recent article (Dec 1st) by economic analyst and trade unionist Michael Taft on www.tasc.ie covering the good news trend where there is now a trend in Europe of reversing privatisations. And that is certainly something positive.

There is a spectre haunting Europe – the spectre of de-privatisation, re-municipalisation, and re-nationalisation. Local, regional and national Governments throughout Europe and in other countries - fed up with high costs, low investment, deteriorating quality and poor working conditions – are taking services back into public control and ownership. For many, privatisation has produced poor results; now they are starting to reverse that process. Public ownership is back on the agenda. ... read full story / add a comment

WSWS.org carries a report on the plans of the new French president - Emmanuel Macron -who was presented as an outsider but in fact was not and in cohorts with the corporate controlled media misled the French people, for now he is about to launch the greatest assault yet on workers conditions.

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We are republishing this article by Stephen Donnelly TD who has been doing great work in exposing how Fine Gael have gone out of their away to facilitate vulture funds who are now preying on ordinary people by charging exorbitant rents and fueling the current property and are replacing the English absentee landlord of centuries past, with ruthless vulture funds capitalists of this era and essentially introducing a form of neo-fuedalism as increasing huge swaths of the population are either priced out of buying homes, or are signing up for debt that last close to a lifetime.
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The political establishment have been left reeling by the size of the award made against Apple. They have launched an all-out propaganda war to try to recover ground.

Here are some of the lies and half truths:

‘The EU is attacking Ireland’s sovereignity’ . The same politicians who meekly accepted orders from the European Central Bank to pay out €64 billion in bank bail-outs have suddenly discovered nationalism.

When it comes to water charges or the privatisation of Aer Lingus they tell us to obey the Brussels bureaucracy. But it is a different story when there is a threat to the ‘tax planning’ industry that is staffed full of accountants and lawyers. Then all of a sudden it is time for the green jersey.

The global elite are under pressure and this is leading to splits and divisions. When this happens they spill the beans on how their system really works. ... read full story / add a comment

DDCI Calls for Oireachtas Debate; Full Review of Tax Ruling Practices by the Revenue Commissioners Following Today’s EC Apple State Aid Ruling

Following today’s decision by the European Commission that Apple was granted illegal state aid, Debt and Development Coalition Ireland (DDCI) is calling for a full Oireachtas debate to take place before any decision is made to contest the ruling in the European Courts.

The details of the revenue seemingly voluntarily foregone by the Irish state are truly astonishing, with Apple paying an effective tax rate of 0.005% in 2014 and reports of 13 billion EUR foregone in the period 2003-2014. This is particularly remarkable given the austerity policies ordinary Irish citizens were facing during much of this period. ... read full story / add a comment

WP says tax windfall must be used for ‘public compensation fund’ to build public housing

Apple revenue could build 72,000 houses in Ireland

The Workers’ Party has today (30th August) issued a call for the government not to appeal the European Commission’s Apple tax decision, but to establish a ‘Public Compensation Fund’ with money recouped from Apple’s unpaid tax bill. ... read full story / add a comment

A new report from the independent progressive think tank TASC shows that consistent child poverty almost doubled during the recent economic recession. This data is contained in Cherishing All Equally 2016, the first annual update of TASC’s groundbreaking 2015 report on economic inequality in Ireland.

Cherishing All Equally 2016 – which was prepared by Dr Rory Hearne and Cian McMahon – updates 18 key economic inequality indicators including the distribution of income and wealth, as well as the provision of public services, taxation, family composition, people’s capacities and the cost of goods and services. In addition, the report includes two in-depth themed sections: ‘Children and economic inequality in Ireland’ and ‘Gender and economic inequality in Ireland’ – the latter section was prepared by UCD’s Dr Ursula Barry and Dr Maggie Feeley. ... read full story / add a comment

Prof Werner is the authority in the area of Public/Community Banking and also has an unrivalled understanding of the real forces controlling/manipulating economies worldwide.

Please allow me to bring the Banking and Money Reform Conference and the Public Banking project to your attention.

The Public Banking Forum of Ireland (PBFI) and the Public Banking Alliance (PBA) are working to introduce Community Public Banks to Ireland. Much progress has been made. We have learned that the Public Banking Project has been introduced into the Programme for Government discussions by the Independent TD’s. ... read full story / add a comment

Today campaigners of the Robin Hood Tax Campaign presented a cheque for €1.8bn at Leinster House in Dublin. It represents the amount of revenue a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) could raise over the 5 year lifespan of the next Government. Also called the Robin Hood Tax, its implementation would oblige financial institutions to pay a tiny tax on trading in bonds, shares and derivatives. ... read full story / add a comment

The undemocratic anti people TTIP agreement between EU-USA has it's counter part in the Pacific region and it is called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which is equally as bad. The purpose of the two agreements is to permanently push back democracy and sovereign rights of peoples of huge areas of the world. It is the ultimate global corporate power grab.

Regrettably the TPP was signed by representatives from 12 countries on Feb 4th and on the same day tens of thousands of people protested throughout New Zealand against the formal signing. The signing follows years of secret negotiations between the US, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

Approximately 20,000 people marched through Queen Street and thousands rallied outside the SkyCity Casino in Auckland where the deal was signed. Protesters held placards and chanted slogans denouncing the TPP as a power-grab by US-based multinational corporations. ... read full story / add a comment

Forget the official Banking Inquiry report because Joe Higgins has written a much more better one and it asks the rights questions and gets to the heart of the matter by putting the whole saga in its proper context -something which the official report couldn't thing as it would mean asking fundamental questions. Indeed the inquriy itself and official report have been steeped in controversary with allegations of coverup because of numerous reports of key officials and whistleblowers in the regulator office and central bank were ignored and their evidence never making into the inquiry. The whistleblower made a formal complaint under the Protected Disclosures Act and (Village Magazine) "outlining a range of detailed concerns about how the Central Bank and some of its legal representatives were omitting huge swathes of vital documents, redacting many of the most crucial pieces of evidence, and delaying release of vital material until it was too late to use them in briefings for public hearings – in at least one case handing them over 24 hours before a scheduled interview about them." ... read full story / add a comment

A coalition of 40 Irish Civil organisations are launching the Robin Hood Tax Campaign Ireland, united in the belief that it is time to make Irish financial institutions pay their fair share in tax to help clean up the mess they have helped create, and to help avoid another financial crash happening by curbing speculative trading.

The Nevin Economic Research Institute is estimating a net gain in the range of 320 to 360 million Euro each year from the Financial Transaction Tax to the Irish exchequer. Ten other European countries are about to introduce the tax while the Irish Government is NOT taking this opportunity. The campaign aims to change this Government position and campaigns for Ireland to join the other European countries and introduce a Financial Transaction Tax.
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