Allied Irish Banks propped up by the State are going to pay €40m bonuses despite the bailout and a full frontal attack on workers and the poor. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/08/allied-irish-banks-pay-bonuses-despite-bailout
Stricken Allied Irish Banks is preparing to hand out €40m (£34m) of bonuses next week – despite being on the brink of receiving another emergency bailout from the Irish government. As many as 2,400 bankers in its Dublin capital markets division are to receive the payments on 17 December under agreements struck with the bank in 2008.
The bank, 19% owned by Ireland's taxpayers but expected to reach 95% state-ownership, had originally been blocked from making the payments under one of the government's bailout programmes.
Meanwhile the blood continues to be sucked from the Irish people four years of tax rises and brutal cuts to social welfare after its parliament narrowly passed the harshest budget in the Republic's history.
As angry protests raged outside the Dáil, the country's finance minister Brian Lenihan announced that child benefit would be slashed, more workers taken into the tax bracket and petrol prices raised to save €6bn (£5bn) in the forthcoming year.
The country's opposition, trade unions and poverty campaign groups all lined up to condemn the budget, branding the swingeing cuts as the last act of a "puppet government" and a "frontal attack" on the poorest strands of society.
During the debate in the Dáil Fine Gael's spokesman for finance Michael Noonan accused the Fianna Fáil/Green Party government of being socially blind and said the budget was "soft on the rich and hard on the poor".
Noonan added: "This is the budget of a puppet government, doing what it is told by the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank. They have done it so they can draw from the bailout, now that the state is insolvent."
This is the most clear case for monetary reform humanity must free itself of the privately created money and banking speculators. Government's led by a call from their people must take back money creation from the vampire banks.
See also http://unisonactive.blogspot.com/2010/12/vampire-squid-still-on-loose.html
