Remembering Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rebellion

And neocolonialism today 

http://fpif.org/terrible-beauty-remembering-irelands-1916-easter-rebellion/

Conn Hallinan 

Standing on the front steps of Dublin’s general post office a century ago, the poet Padraig Pearse announced the Poblacht na hEireann — the “Irish republic.”
He was reading from a proclamation, the ink barely dry, of a provisional Irish government declaring its independence from British rule. It was just after noon on March 24, 1916, the opening scene in a drama that would mix tragedy and triumph, the twin heralds of Irish history.
It’s a hundred years since some 750 men and women threw up barricades and seized key locations in downtown Dublin. They would be joined by maybe 1,000 more. In six days it would be over, the post office in flames, the streets blackened by shell fire, and the rebellion’s leaders on their way to face firing squads against the walls of Kilmainham Jail.
And yet the failure of the Easter Rebellion would eventually become one of the most important events in Irish history — a “failure” that would reverberate worldwide and be mirrored by colonial uprisings almost half a century later.
Colonial Parallels
Anniversaries — particularly centennials — are equal parts myth and memory, and drawing lessons from them is always a tricky business. Yet while 1916 is not 2016, there are parallels, pieces of the story that overlap and dovetail in the Europe of then with the Europe of today.

Greece, Ireland, Italy, California -Keynes was Right

By Paul Krugman

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.”  So declared John Maynard Keynes in 1937. Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy further; austerity should wait until a strong recovery is well under way.

Unfortunately, in late 2010 and early 2011, politicians and policy makers in much of the Western world believed that they knew better, that we should focus on deficits, not jobs, even though our economies had barely begun to recover from the slump that followed the financial crisis. And by acting on that anti-Keynesian belief, they ended up proving Keynes right all over again.

In declaring Keynesian economics vindicated I am, of course, at odds with conventional wisdom. In Washington, in particular, the failure of the Obama stimulus package to produce an employment boom is generally seen as having proved that government spending can’t create jobs. But those of us who did the math realized, right from the beginning, that the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (more than a third of which, by the way, took the relatively ineffective form of tax cuts) was much too small given the depth of the slump. And we also predicted the resulting political backlash.

The Greek Debt Crisis - and California's

The so called Greek debt crisis continues to grow.  The Sacramento Bee has an editorial on Sept.12 on the editorial board’s view that the nations of Europe will need some form of consolidation. Here. http://www.sacbee.com/2011/09/12/3902163/europes-debt-crisis-will-wash.html

This view illustrates how the corporate owned media takes austerity and budget cutting  for granted.  They are presented as normal and inevitable.

    The Bee editorial, along with one side of the  European economic establishment,  propose  the need for a consolidation of government power in Europe.  The editors compare the growing debt crisis in Europe  to the Articles of Confederation .

But,  to understand the situation, you need to first ask, unified for what purpose?  The proposed solution forms a new government power to protect the financiers in Germany and France.  They want a government that can enforce austerity to repay bank debts.  The Bankers and capitalists caused the crisis.  Now, the question, as in the U.S. is – who will pay for it.

Austerity programs, whether in Greece, Spain, Italy or California, cost someone.  In addition to the loss of wages and benefits,  austerity programs take capital out of the system and thus make the recession worse.  Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and California working people will suffer more.