By Joe Higgins: from The Daily Mail. January 21, 2009
It’s rather amusing to watch senior members of the political establishment together with sections of the media heap abuse on the head of Mr Sean Fitzpatrick the former chief of Anglo Irish Bank which was nationalised yesterday. They are desperate to give the impression that most of the blame for the catastrophic situation in the Irish financial institutions is down to one man – ‘Seanie the cowboy.’
This is a standard means of defence by ruling elites that find themselves in the eye of economic and political storms. In a cynical bid to divert attention away from the fact that crises usually arise from the nature of the system over which they preside and from which they draw their privileges, they saddle the blame on one or two individuals.
Historically the privileged and corrupt bureaucracies that ruled the Stalinist states were the most ruthless practicioners of this institutionalised scapegoating. When one of their number got caught in a scandal of excessive greed and jeopardised the interests of the others and their hold on society, retribution was swift and often brutal. In Russia and China the offending miscreants were often taken out and shot as sacrificial examples! We have the equivalent happening here in the case of Mr Fitzpatrick except the bullets aren’t of lead.
Mr Fitzpatrick is indeed guilty of inordinate greed. Not content with his salary and bonuses amounting to millions of Euro a year, he borrowed massively from his own bank to gamble on the casinos that are the world’s stock markets and financial markets. And like a gambling addict he tried to hide his massive punts from prying eyes.
But what Mr Fitzpatrick was doing was not at all exceptional – it was the rule. The establishment that is now turning on him was up to its neck in parallel speculation in search of super profits.
In the ten years up to very recently, no questions whatever were raised in any section of the business, media or political establishment about the right of those who controlled building land and dominated the building industry to profiteer obscenely at the expense of young people needing to purchase a home. No questions either about the banks which facilitated the racketeering in the housing industry by shackling the same young people to mortgages of forty years duration.
How could there be anything but silence from the establishment political parties all of which had point blank refused to introduce legislation to outlaw speculation in building land in the thirty five years since High Court Judge Kenny recommended such amove?
How could there be anything but silence from those sections of the printed media that earned a multi million fortune annually from the speculators and developers advertising their monstrously priced houses in property supplements? The Irish Times went one better and and bought into the speculation fest by laying out €50million for a property dealing company.
In 2005 I challenged former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in the Dail in 2005 over an outrageous land deal in Stillorgan, Co Dublin. Eleven acres of land intended for apartments and houses were bought in 2000 for €32 million and without even a brick being shipped onsite were sold four years later for €85million – a mindboggling profit of €53million. The speculators in this case were not considered to be ‘cowboys.’ They were the cream of the establishment spanning the business, medical and legal worlds. I was rebuked from the Chair for referring to them as ‘parasites’. I pointed out how the massive profits made from this kind of speculation of this kind were being hung around the necks of young house buyers and added massively to the cost of their mortgages. Not a line of these sharp exchanges was reported.
The crisis that now engulfs the financial system and the economy is a crisis of the system itself and not at all the responsibility of one man.
In response the Government has nationalised Anglo Irish Bank. But this is a ‘shotgun nationalisation’ not done to serve social needs and the welfare of the majority of ordinary people in society, but to once again bail out the speculators and major developers whose activities have crashed the Irish economy and to save market capitalism itself from the crisis that engulfs it. Taxpayers are being saddled with the risk of massive burdens of bad debt with no real information on what the exact situation is in this bank.
All the banks and major financial institutions should be nationalised. But by ‘nationalisation’ I mean public ownership under democratic control and management so that these institutions are harnessed to serve the needs of the majority in society rather than facilitate super profits for major shareholders and to facilitate the obscene property speculation and profiteering which have plunged the economy into an unprecedented crisis.
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