Many times through the last 83
weeks of our protest in Ballyhea and Charleville we've had people tell us that
they don’t see what we’re protesting about, that unless the government is
actually taking money directly from their pockets, as in the controversial
Household Charge, they won’t protest. But the government IS taking money from
their pockets.
Here’s how it works. If you went
through your bank accounts to discover that money is being taken from your various
accounts every week without your permission and with no indication as to where
it was going, how would you react? If you went to your bank manager to
investigate and discovered that without ever being either asked or told, the
bank had slapped an extra loan of €15,000 not just on you but on every single
member of your household, and that you were now paying back this extra ‘loan’
with interest through your various different accounts – a few bob taken here,
another few bob taken there, all under different headings – how would you
react? Last Monday, for example, AIB paid an unsecured unguaranteed bond of €1bn - that's our money, money we sank into AIB over the last couple of years, over €200 for every man, woman and child in the country for one bond in one day.
Denise O'Toole's courageous one-woman stand on Monday last in Sligo
If you delved further to discover
that it wasn’t just in your case this subterfuge was happening, that your local
bank manager was settling further disputed debt by taking out interest-only
loans at inflated rates in the names of your children, and of your children’s
children, the principal to be paid a decade hence, another decade hence, yet
another decade hence, spread over the next 40 years, debt that is NOT yours but
debt that has now been passed on to future generations of your family, how
would you react? Because again, this is EXACTLY what was done with the 2012 Promissory
Note and what’s being planned for all the future Notes.
We are being robbed blind by the ECB,
and I mean blind – we’re not being told. They have intimidated our own
government – this one and the last – into acceding to their policy of placing
banks and other financial institutions above people, they have fooled our major
mainstream media into cheerleading that same plan.
Fear and fog have been their
major propaganda weapons. Fear, in moving the question on a level from where it
should be. Instead of questioning the morality, the ethics, the legitimacy,
even the practicality, of what they’re doing, they have succeeded with both the
media and with our government in moving the question on a level – what will
happen to us if we DON’T do as they demand? Fog, the truth lost in the mist of
lies, half-lies and semi-truths we’re being fed to disguise what’s happening.
Recent examples? The so-called
2012 Promissory Note deal that transformed a very arguable €3.06bn loan ‘guarantee’,
for which we could have borrowed that same €3.06bn from one of the ECB emergency
funds at about 3% while we continued to argue over it, into a very solid
Sovereign debt for which we had to actually borrow €3.46bn on the markets –
that’s an extra €400,000,000 my friends – and on which we’re paying over 5% per
annum until our kids have to pay the full amount of that bond when it ‘matures’
in 2025.
You want another example? How
about the ‘seismic shift’ announced after the EuroZone leaders’ summit last
June, Enda’s and Eamon’s blather, all the money the various national newspapers
then trumpeted we were going to get as a result; where is that seismic shift
now? As Constantin Gurdgiev put it so succinctly on the Vincent Browne Tonight
show on TV3 during the week, it’s merely a ripple in a bath-tub.
We’re told to gird ourselves for
the cuts and taxes coming up in Budget 2013, that all the low-lying fruit has
been picked. What fruit is more low-lying than the salaries, expenses and
pensions of our politicians themselves? What fruit is more low-lying than their
own numbers and the numbers of similarly overpaid representatives on our 34
local authorities (29 county councils – Dublin with three, Tipperary with two –
and five city councils)? 34 local authorities to deal with a population of 4.58m?
What fruit is more low-lying than the number of salaries of the various
advisers in the various government departments? God above, what fruit is more
low-lying than the pensions we pay to our ex-politicians?
Has the Troika touched any of
that? No. Why not? Because these people are now the reincarnation of the old
British Empire Agents, they are our new overseers delivering to us the list of
demands from our new Masters, the ECB/EU.
For those who would succumb to
the propaganda of fear, I have one word – Iceland. The people of Iceland, due to
the courage and integrity of their President who – for the first time in
Iceland’s history – refused to sign the legislation that would have enslaved
them for generations to bail out their banks as we’re being enslaved now, were
given a choice, a referendum. Just as we’re being now threatened they were threatened by their own media with the
prospect of Armageddon if they rejected the ‘agreement’. They did reject it,
and only a couple of years later they are thriving.
Protest. March with us. This is
now week 84, we’re In Ballyhea this Sunday October 7th 2012 at 11.30am,
meeting at the church carpark. Join us.
Regards, Diarmuid O’Flynn.
