Reform Alliance?

The joke is that the media keeps going on and on about how Ireland needs a new political party.  On TV we've had Ben Gilroy on with Declan Ganley where they go on asking Ganley if he will run because we need a new political party while Ben is sitting on the same panel.   

We have the media tripping all over themselves asking the Reform Alliance if they are intending to create a new political party, while DDI has announced its existence.  

Remember they would prefer to promote Lucinda Creighton, who is part of the "Status Quo", to leads Ireland's so called need for political reform.  

Remember like Enda Kenny, Lucinda has been a Vice President of the European Peoples Party (EPP), the main architects of the highly undemocratic European Union, whose EPP vision for Ireland, currently being implemented by Enda Kenny and team, is not necessarily what the Irish people themselves want for Ireland.  

Why does the reform alliance need to listen to the Irish people in the RDS?  

Could it be the easy way to find out what we are thinking instead of going door to door getting lectured for campaign promises and lies while ruining your 300 euro Gucci designer shoes?  

Could it be that they are just looking for new "Campaign Rhetoric" so their speech writers can write the perfect speeches and get the Fine Gael / Labour "Say One Thing Do Another" politicians elected for another 5 years.  

Have they suddenly found their hearts and really care now? From my point of view it’s another highly paid crafty professional PR spin doctor strategy and media stunt to sway the public and control the narrative for change, without DDI leading the charge. 

 I think we are being duped again.  

When was the last time you heard a real in depth discussion of Direct Democracy (DD) in the Irish mainstream media? They know that DD threatens the “Status Quo”; it threatens the old way of doing business like cronyism, brown envelopes and offshore bank accounts.   I think intuitively they know it will completely reform the Irish political system.  

Let’s see how long it takes for the "Say One Thing Do Another" politicians to jump on the DD band wagon when they see that including DD in their speeches can win votes.  

Don’t believe them.  

For them, it’s more campaign rhetoric as a strategy to win, with no intention of follow through.  

Do not vote for them.  

It is like a dysfunctional relationship or a bad marriage ending in divorce. You will regret it if you do.  They’ve had almost 100 years to prove themselves and nothing has changed, it ends up always being “Say One Thing Do Another”. 

I think it was Albert Einstein who defined insanity as being those who are “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

PRESENT, PAST and potential FUTURE of Ireland

PRESENT State of Things

Higher taxes, Loss of Government Services, Inflation, higher food costs, higher education costs, Massive unemployment, Huge banking debt , And for the great job they have done, the previous government give themselves good salaries, great pensions, and a good severance pay package when they lost the election.

As an outsider, it is interesting to note how this was done. When it started, Print, Radio and Television spoke of the banking scandal and eventual debt was Ireland’s debt even though it was still a private corporate debt. The spin doctors spun it as: “Irelands reputation was at stake”. “What would the world think of Ireland?” “Ireland could not default on this debt”. How can this be so? This was a private debt. Which Ireland did they speak of, certainly not you and me. No, it was the corporate elite, large investors, the bankers and the leaders of our government. Actually this is the Ireland that really matters, it was their reputation that was at stake. The corporate elites and the ministers who created the mess.

Normally what they would do in a situation like this is by selling off the good assets and divide the income of the asset sale between the investors and creditors, and then let the corporation fail. This could have been easily done. But then the investors would not get all of their money back. So what did they do? First they lied about the size of the debts so we nationalized the bank and made the private debt public sovereign debt. We were told that it was 1 billion, no 2 actually its 4, not really but 8 and so on. How is this possible, I’ve never known a bank to make any accounting mistake? They always know exactly what I owe them to the last penny.

Have you ever taken a look at the NAMA business plan? About 25% of it are Credit Default Swaps; Worthless derivatives.

So what actually happened?

You have the elite making bad investments. Everyone lies about the enormity of the problem. The government contracts with one of the large bond holders NM Rothschild to advise on how to sort out the banking sector problem. NM Rothschild already has a lot of experience bailing out governments and advise that the government already running deficits, borrow more money from other bankers and through the Irish central bank puts all of Irelands sovereign wealth up and tax revenues for a large number of years as collateral to pay for it.

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.” -- Mayer Amschel Rothschild

Of course they already know that we will default. The politicians are kicking the can down the road and the bankers look forward to milking us for all they can get. We can now look forward to higher and higher taxes and when we finally default they will privatize everything that can be sold. The elite will buy up everything for pennies on the Euro. A massive fire sale, and the irony is that they will do it with the same money we gave them to bail themselves out.

Irelands PAST

How were they able to do this without even asking us through referendum if we wanted to take on the bankster debts? After all, Iceland had a referendum and they decided not to take on the debts “right away”. They decided to fix the economy first and when the economy is stable then to revisit the debts. In fact the bankers are wanted for questioning. Their logic was how we can take on more debts when we are already having huge debts due to government mismanagement. Basically they were right. Last I heard their economy is recovering faster than expected. How is it that the government can put us in this situation without asking the people?

The answer lies in the first Irish Oireachtas (National Parliament). After living in tyranny for hundreds of years and after the revolution, the first Irish constitutional framers created a constitution that gave the people a lot of over site powers to regulate the government if they were not operating as expected. These powers were enshrined in Articles 47 & 48 of the new Irish Free State which gave the people the power to initiate referendum to create new laws and throw out laws that did not serve them. One of the first things the new Oireachtas was to delete them form the constitution and assume referendum power for themselves. Off course the people protested, but by the time the new constitution was ratified many years later most folks had forgotten about what had been done.

So here we are today with massive debts and referendums that are repeated because we did not come up with the right answer.

Potential FUTURE

So, my take is that it will only continue to get worse. Right now everything looks reasonably stable as it slowly continues to rot in the core. Basically the whole economy is running on borrowed money or credit. The politicians have only kicked the can down the road. Eventually the whole thing will fail, but the current politicians will not be the ones dealing with it. As the situation slowly begins to unravel a lot of folks will be caught in the pinch. Higher and higher taxes, greater Unemployment, resulting in more foreclosures, and greater loss of government services and rampant inflation, and as it continues to unravel and default the investors will buy up everything for pennies on the dollar (euro).

The only way to stop the situation from unraveling further is to organize ourselves and implement direct democracy (DD). What is DD? DD sets the right relationship between the citizens and the politicians who represent them. Basically DD means that the citizens and only the citizens or a constitutional trigger can cause a referendum to happen. Not the parliament like in Ireland. This is called a Plebiscite. A Plebiscite is when the government or the majority party in Power can call a referendum on whatever they want and when the voters vote the wrong way, the government can keep calling for a referendum until they get the answer they want, and then only then it becomes law. This is why the power of referendum must be with the people and not the government. Try to get the people when they control the referendum to vote again. Forget it. DD is a check on government power whose nature is to always continue to assume more power for itself. DD sets up the right relationship between the government and its citizens. After all whose country is it? It belongs to the citizens, the sovereign nation. Remember, in the past the king or queen was the sovereign, and then after the revolution the citizens became the sovereign. A democracy is born, each one of us sovereign and free, who are a small part of greater sovereign body, the nation. To organize ourselves, we crafted a constitution or an agreement amongst ourselves, on how the business of the nation would be carried out by a representative government. DD goes a step further and says if our government creates laws that we don’t like, that make our lives difficult (like bailing out private banks with higher taxes and sovereign debt), then we have the right to step in and change or abolish them through referendum. This is the right relationship between the government and its people. This makes the people its managers and the politicians its public servants. DD will end politician pay rises, back room corporate deals, payola, brown envelopes, and banker bailouts unless the people approve.

So Ireland needs to do the following to implement DD.

1) Work with Direct Democracy Ireland to put articles 47 & 48 back into the constitution.

2) We can do this by changing the political narrative in the country by telling all of your friends and colleagues in Ireland about DD.

3) Blog about it, get stories in the Newspaper, Radio and Television

4) Give speeches about it at large rallies

5) Make an issue about DD. Like abortion we must make DD a contentious political issue. We need to ask every politician what their stance on DD is, and if they are not for it, we don’t vote for them.