Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Ireland 2014; or when the deep state meets a power vacuum



The term “ the deep state “ has gained a lot of traction through Mike Lofgren's magisterial essay. I will use it here to refer to a nexus of intelligence agencies, financial monoliths, government agencies and politicians to which enough power has accrued that they can act outside the law

The deep state as the end of liberal democracy

For example, many of the repossessions of homes in the USA from 2008 were illegal because the banks, the foreclosing entities, had sold on the mortgages. Lloyfd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs let the cat out of the bag on TV when he baldly stated that the Obama administration ignored citizens' welfare in order to buttress the “economy”.

The USA has entered a pathological political space in which the most libertarian Republicans are now the voices avowing classical values of free speech, getting the state out of our business, and the benefits that have accrued from the Snowden revelations. The response from Obama has been to create “rights” like “marriage equality” and to use everyone's discomfort with gender-as-politics to hide his true agenda.

The situation is very different in Ireland because, particularly since the Shatter incident, the state has lost power. Indeed. there is a consensus that there is a lack of enforcement of many laws;

http://www.corruptioninireland.com/apps/blog/

 It is indeed conceivable that neither of the two parties that have dominated Irish politics since 1921 will be in government after 2016. So what does the deep state do when it meets a power vacuum?

Let's look first at the Irish deep state. The preceding entry talks about its actions; destruction of many of the signal achievements of Irish culture. What these actions have in common is first of all their criminality; it is clear that they were able to hire/create politicians willing to interfere with prosecutions. Secondly, there is a nuancing of the private and public; DCU, a state university, was able to have an illegal disciplinary procedure on its books for over a decade. IMRO, a “private” “music rights” organization, benefited from a state-created monopoly (one corruptly given). Both committed many crimes, with impunity., Lacking recourse to the criminal law, those injured by the crimes can take their chances in the ruinously expensive Irish civil courts, a system that has spawned 3 of the biggest 20 law firms in the EU.


Why does this writer think some of this came out of an American think tank? There is the fact that Ahern repeatedly brought David Putnam over to talk about how community and civil society can be destroyed; it is likely that Ahern saw this as a “how to” manual. The goal was a state largely owned by Ahern and his cronies, democracy crushed by e-voting, and massive immigration making the native Irish a minority. Since 2009, this last has been happening through emigration of the Irish.

The two Tweedle parties alternated in government and protected each others' scams. Who knows what would happen to FG's scam of Rehab if they attacked the CRC? What might happen to the Motorola lawsuit against Denis O'Brien if FF were not allowed keep their music scam, even if it destroyed the greatest music industry in the planet as of 1995? The Irish “deep state” was unfortunately riven with tribal allegiances

So what can be done? In fact, very much can be done. The state has extremely little power now, particularly relative to pre-2008. We can insist that Irish public institutions reflect our sensibility as Irish people. We can insist on the now radical notion that the rule of law applies equally to all citizens, and that civil servants who perpetrated the crime since 1997 should lose their pensions. And so on

The current state of affairs is not sustainable and it is really only a matter of calibrating how aggressively nationalist the incipient party that may hold power from 2016 will be. Ireland has turned from its initial goal of exemplifying an ethnic nationalism by allowing its citizens take over control of a hitherto colonial system to a neo-colony in which a self-appointed elite judge their citizens in accordance to how they conform with neoliberalism. The goal, to make the Irish an ethnic minority in their own country, was actually explicitly stated by DCU's president during the  Ahern era as both inevitable and desirable. It is unlikely that speech could be given in the current climate after 5 years in which the Irish have carried the burden of the 2008 Wall St crash, as Tim Geithner explicitly proposed that they should.

 Seán Ó Nualláin 22 Iuil 2014

 PS 26 u nollag 2014; The political party system in Ireland has since self-destructed with sinn fein now the most popular party. It is unlikely that they will be quite as compliant as the tweedle parties so what happened? How did an experienced (if not very bright) politician like Kenny preside over this?

The explanation possible lies in a set of deals comprising the deep state takeover in the 1990's; law to be used as a subversion of citizenship, not as a means to justice; the destruction of native culture (artistic, intellectual, archaeological) and an inexorable progression to privatizations like water, health,  and the universities, a rerun of 1970's Chile. In return people around  Ahern became (if briefly) billionaires and foreign investment (FDI) grew.

The problem is that the deep state imperatives required either e-voting with power to nominate a PM or eternal Tweedle alternation with "Labour" enabling the scams of each. Of the items not mentioned in the 2011 manifesto by which  fine Gael achieved government, if not power, Kenny almost certainly believed he could get away with continuation of the scams (eg penalty points, music), abortion, gay marriage, and full payment of the bondholders as the economy recovered, It is well within the bounds of possibility that he failed to see the new dispensation agreed by Cowen and Ahern wherein destruction of the institutions of the  first Irish republic would be compensated for by a massive, undemocratic  transfer of money and thus power to their cronies. For example, why bother that the state has no territory (after the 1998 Belfast "agreement") if you and your cronies hold title, through coillte, to massive tracts of land?

Now it is too late for Kenny and a new terrible beauty is possible. in this, my last post of the year, I ask the reader to look at the posts on Scotland and hold out the hope that we will learn from their hopes