Joe Higgins TD

The economic crisis in the US and Ireland have huge similarities, from their causes to their impacts. Just back from the US, here Joe discusses these parrallels, and how they can help build international workers solididarity and struggle.

Irish visitors moving from city to city in the United States this summer will be struck by the universality of the economic crisis in the country and by the similarities between the major talking points there and in Ireland. The US with around 300 million people is massively greater, but on the human level, working people, the unemployed and the poor are facing very similar difficulties arising from the same basic causes.

‘Nurses Not Immune To Sick Economy’ ran the front page headline in the Chicago Sun Times three days ago, relating how a large percentage of new nursing graduates can’t find jobs. On Sunday also the Irish Nurses Organisation was quoted in the Irish newspapers over the fact that 1,600 newly graduated nurses in Ireland are finishing their courses with no jobs for them.

The recently unemployed in both Ireland the US now face cruel dilemmas with regard to being able to afford their accommodation and other essential living costs. In the minds of people who are still working, the worry of being made unemployed is a real concern.

This fear is more pronounced a among those who are caught with very high mortgages for modest enough homes. And in both countries the profit lust of speculators, big developers and big bankers drove the price of homes bought in the last ten years to frightening heights. Now people fear that losing their jobs may not just result in plummeting living standards but could also result in them losing their homes.

It is not difficult to see how this uncertainty works its way through the economy. Jim, a construction worker in Illinois whose father is from Ireland, relates how he was going to come with his wife and two children on a visit to Ireland this year but with the sharp crisis in the US economy they have decided to stay at home instead. ‘What little money we have saved, we need to hold onto just in case,’ he said. Four less visitors then to be served by workers in Irish hotels, shops and restaurants.

You can be sure that many people from Europe who might have visited the US this year from Europe have made similar decisions. Generalised, the effect of this is thousands of jobs lost in services in both the US and Europe.

The immediate trigger of the crisis in the US economy and the crash in the Irish economy is fairly clear to people in both countries. They understand that it was the role of speculation and profiteering in property by a minority of big players that distorted the economies to such an extent that, when the bubble they created inevitably burst, it was always going to cause mayhem in the economies generally.

There is also a very common perception that it is ordinary working people who are being forced to pay the price for this orgy of speculation and profiteering while those who are responsible are being bailed out by governments with these same ordinary people’s taxes.

The gambling wasn’t confined to property however. On the front page of the New York Times on August 2 was the extraordinary story of a trader in Connecticut who is due a staggering $100 million bonus from Citigroup bank. The trader, Andrew Hall, is the chief of a commodities firm That trades on behalf of the bank.

Essentially Mr Hall speculates on the price of energy products like oil and buys and sells these products at times and in quantities that make fortunes in speculative gains. Traders like him rarely if ever see the goods they gamble with, which can range from oil to coffee to wheat. But the activities of such speculators can seriously distort the supply and distribution of crucial products and cause prices to rise to degrees that are catastrophic for ordinary economic activity. It is the ordinary consumer who finishes up paying for the obscene speculative profits made on such operations.

This kind of anti social activity is part of the fabric of modern capitalism. Citigroup made $2 billion in profits from Mr Hall’s activities over recent years. Just as Goldman Sachs, one of the most ‘prestigious’ financial giants on the globe, made billions from gambling with the sub prime mortgages which preyed on the most vulnerable people in US society.

There is no shortage of common points of conversation then when Irish and American workers meet. They empathise immediately with each other’s worries. The next step, however, is to have a more broad understanding that the soaring unemployment, whether it be among nurses or any other category of worker, directly flows from the system which gives greed driven speculators such power over our economic lives and until we change that system and put human need before corporate profit we will continue to have these problems.

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