Update 12/10/2010: €40m in Bonuses for Greedy Irish Traitors Bankers
In the Old Country: Ireland is massively in debt to the IMF/EU because it (stupidly) bailed out its banks. Now AIB, one of the bailed out banks, is paying the people who ruined both the bank and the country €40 M in bonuses because – you’ve heard this before – if they don’t the clever boys and girls who sank an entire country will go to work elsewhere. Where? (Source)
The cost of the €40 M in bonuses will be paid for via cuts in everything for everybody else, in other words by harsh austerity measures, BUT:
Austerity Measures Will Fail: “The more that countries reduce wages and costs, the heavier their inherited debt loads become. And, as debt burdens become heavier, public spending must be cut further and taxes increased to service the government’s debt and that of its wards, like the banks. This, in turn, creates the need for more internal devaluation, further heightening the debt burden, and so on, in a vicious spiral downward into depression.” (Source)
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Update 1/4/2011: Irish Leaders Castigated As Greatest Traitors Of All Time: Brian Cowen and Brian Lenihan are now being reviled as the villains who inflicted horrendous financial disaster upon the Irish people and forced the enslavement of future generations to a criminal cadre of International Banksters. (Source)
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Can Ireland change? [Click: Dear friend of Democracy in Ireland or
http://www.directdemocracyireland.org
] Some bankers don’t think that Ireland should be allowed to change. For example:

Jean-Claude Trichet's body language speaks to the people of Ireland
Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, “has made very clear his opposition to “haircuts” (losses) for secured and unsecured bank creditors. In response to Fine Gael’s plan to unilaterally restructure Ireland’s debt, Trichet insisted that the bailout plans for Ireland’s banks have already been decided and that “the plans have to be executed. . . We have a programme, approved by the international community, approved by the IMF board, the entire world, approved by the European [Union], approved and financed by the IMF and the European [Union]” (Source)
Shouldn’t bankers like Trichet ask the people of Ireland if they want to assume the defaulted obligations of international bond holders, to become the designated debt slaves paying off defaulted obligations through higher taxes, just so that international bond holders don’t have to “take a haircut” (take a loss on their bonds).
Hmmmmm, anyone wonder how that would play out?
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