... by protecting the interests of the rich, and stamping on ordinary workers.

... elsewhere.

If you want, Ireland is looking to be the capitalists' henchmen. The two richest Irish are one Indian conglomerate magnate (20% of Tata) and one Texan finance guy (Lone Star Funds). The third one, while Irish, seems to have his money in Canada. The fourth managed to sell some telecom business to BT at the top of the dotcom bubble and is now building a telecom business in the Carribean or Pacific. Etc etc etc.

Ireland's growth and jobs came from the low tax rate, the EU subsidies and the too-low-EU-wide- interest rate. That's it.

Here, if they raise that tax rate, it will be a powerful signal that says to corporations "stop locating your profits in Ireland" - The next thing you know, these companies will move and Ireland would fall back to being the little meaningless backwater place it was. That won't be much fun for the Irish workers either... There was a reason they immigrated in drove and were amongst the least developed country in Europe.

__________________
Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.

Gilles, I fully understand how this works. And as I have pointed ourt before, all this fear of taxing business, and making labour "flexible", whether here or in Ireland or wherever, all amounts to the same thing: a race to the bottom for which the many pay and the few profit.

It's only that it is all the starker when part of the same action as one that reduces workers pay. It makes the exploitation baltantly obvious and clearly indicates whose interests are being served.

Yeah - The interest of the Irish workers are being served at the expense of every other workers... The rich of the world being just a mean to an end for the Irish.

That's fundamentally different, imho, from saying "let's screw our poor and protect our rich" like, you can argue, the ConDem are doing...

__________________
Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.

Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

Yeah - The interest of the Irish workers are being served at the expense of every other workers... The rich of the world being just a mean to an end for the Irish.

Not at all. The interests of Irish workers are being sacrificed. Their pay is reduced, and that will spread through to workers on better than minimum wage as well. Everyone will suffer - except the rich, whose profits will grow.

When you get to the point of saying that it is in someones benefit to have their pay cut, you have entered into the realm of doublethink.

Originally Posted by contracycle

When you get to the point of saying that it is in someones benefit to have their pay cut, you have entered into the realm of doublethink.

I disagree.

Let's have a thought experiment and say that Ireland raises its corp. tax rate. According to you, that's awesome, the workers' interests are served. Well, not if they all get fired as financial companies relocate to Luxembourg and the Irish gvt get even deeper in debt as its income dries up.

The interest of the Irish workers ARE being protected because they're keeping their jobs... while they should actually be losing them/never have them in the first place.

__________________
Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.

Originally Posted by contracycle

When you get to the point of saying that it is in someones benefit to have their pay cut, you have entered into the realm of doublethink.

Granted a different set of circumstances led to the shit hitting the fan, and we can probably agree about how they should have done some things differently, but the current reality being what it is/was try telling that to the people who work at General Motors, and everyone else who is part of the US auto and manufacturing chain.

__________________
Righteousness will always be the trap at the gates of hell