National strike 01/12/10

national | rights, freedoms and repression | event notice Monday November 22, 2010 21:06 by Jack - The people Facebook event entitled "general strike Ireland"

Enough is enough! We the people need to stand up and make our voices heard. Please join the facebook event entitled "general strike Ireland" so as to have a place to exchange our views and to organise ourselves.

Ed: There appears to be no particular group actively supporting a national strike on this date

Main article - http://www.indymedia.ie/article/98228;

Please please read this and spread the message.

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It's clear that all of the political decisions being made at the moment - whether by the Irish government, the European Central Bank or by the International Monetary Fund - are being made to protect the wealthy elite and to ensure that ordinary people are made to suffer for the financial collapse.

Recent analysis of wealth figures by Tom O'Connor of Cork Institute of Technology showed that 33,000 millionaires in Ireland still have €121billion between them (see http://www.wsm.ie/c/irish-millionaires-assets-121-billion).

Having this concentration of wealth in their hands also means that this tiny elite wield huge political power. The challenge for those of us who believe in fairness, justice and equality is to find a way in which we can take that political power from them and use it to build a society which puts the interests of the vast majority before the interests of the tiny elite.

Clearly those who have the power are not going to give it up easily. But there are lots of us and only a few of them. And, importantly, we have the ability to organise to defeat them. The weapon in our armoury which will allow us to do that is the organisation of a general strike. They need our labour, by withdrawing it we can show where real power lies.

Clearly the ICTU cannot be relied on to call such a general strike so it's up to each of us to get stuck in in our own jobs, unions and communities to begin to build from the bottom up the type of campaign that will bring about a general strike. And in the course of building for the strike, we need to discuss with each other what type of structures we want to put in place to build a new society.

If we are in a position to pull off a general strike, why settle for the limited objective of looking for a general election which will simply result in a different set of politicians being put in place to implement the same set of policies. Why not use our sense of power to go for the ultimate prize of getting rid of leaders and led, bosses and workers, rich and poor and building a society based on equality, justice and fairness.

Are we just going to sit back and let them do as they please with our livelihoods and futures?

We have the power!