Ireland. Debt Bailout. US. Financial Criminals chased by FBI.

Protest against IMF's role to trap countries in debt to pay off the money lenders.

There is a term in Ireland - Gombeen men. Or today it would be more correct to say Gombeen persons. These are, this was more in the past, the small business people in the villages who would loan money to the locals and charge them high interest or keep an eye on everything and see when people would be in trouble and use their capital to move in and exploit the situation. Maybe buying up a piece of land the person had to sell due to family difficulties. This Gombeen person was usually the owner of the local pub. He or she would be in a good position to hear what was going on from this vantage point and be well placed to swindle the person when they were drunk. All in all the Gombeen person tended to be the most odious creature in the village.

As the Irish economy has plunged into the abyss it is clear that it is these Gombeen persons, albeit now dressed in more expensive clothes, and flying around Europe, no longer tied exclusively to the village pub, with their grubby fingers in part ownership of the banks in many cases, and representing development companies and international banks and corporations, who have been pretending to be running things. They have presided over an explosion of debt in the Irish economy and now are presiding over the collapse of the economy. Now their international counterparts have arrived to take over.

These international Gombeen persons have pushed aside the Irish ones and are now looking over the books of the Irish economy and making loans to bail it out. But the the condition is that the Irish people eat less and go back to the days of emigration and poverty. Capitalism does not work. This is what we say. These Irish Gombeen persons and their international equivalent should all be locked up and the keys thrown away. And with it their system ended once and for all. It does not work.

There are laws of motion of capitalism which throw it into crisis again and again, which throw it into wars and destruction of all kinds. Its mad addiction to profit means that it is not a progressive system of running things, and swindling and corruption is an inseparable part of the system. With capitalism it is also inevitable that the worst scum in society will rise to the top positions in the system. Taken together with it being a system that inevitably throws the scum to the top, these laws of motion which throw it into crisis again and again make capitalism a system which does not work and which has forfeited all right to exist. Capitalism does not work. This is what we are always saying.

Now here in the USA we have a major investigation of the financial industry by the FBI. This involves insider trading. That is people who work in the finance houses and who have inside knowledge about some deal that is to go down, or are in a position to make some deal go down, tell this information to some friends or contacts who invest on the basis of this knowledge and have an advantage over other investors and in this way further corrupt the system which is inherently corrupt from the beginning. Its essential corruption being where it only pays the working class a fraction of what it produces and takes the rest as unpaid labor in the form of rent, interest and profit.

The Wall Street Journal is full of coverage of these swindles today. This mouthpiece of capitalism is worried that if these swindles become too well known it will have two affects, both of which would be damaging to capitalism. One would be to undermine confidence in investing in the stock markets, in the capitalist markets in general, and two increased realization of how corrupt capitalism is could motivate the working class to take up the fight against what they would increasingly see as a corrupt and rotten system which does not work. All the FBI can get from the attorneys of these swindlers and crooks are repeated "No Comments." Capitalism is corrupt and rotten to the core. No wonder that in spite of no major force campaigning for socialism in the US 36% of Americans look favorably on socialism. A new movement is being formed in the depths of society by these exposures of the rottenness of capitalism.

For a democratic socialist society.