Month: September 2012

13 posts
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Resistance – only way to stop €1,000 austerity taxes

“Introducing a property tax will prove one of this Government’s most difficult challenges.  It may even prove intractable.” - Noel Whelan, Irish Times, 1 September. The Government’s new property tax will hit households many times harder than this year’s household tax. The International Monetary Fund have called on the Government to introduce the property tax at a “suitably high” rate.

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Turn Off the Red Light: Challenging modern day slavery

“It felt like a prison, no time for lunch and I was on call 24/7... There was no choice about which men you saw and some men wanted sex without condoms. If you refused to have anal sex you had to pay a penalty or the ‘security’ men would beat you up.” This is part of a testimony from Isobel, contained in the Immigrant Council of Ireland’s 2009 report on sex trafficking in Ireland, found on turnofftheredlight.ie , a campaign against prostitution and sex trafficking supported by a number of trade unions as well as women and immigrant groups.

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US: One year since Occupy shook the world

Only one year ago, the Occupy Wall Street movement began its encampment of Zucotti Park in New York City. A mere two weeks later, the movement exploded to hundreds of cities in every state across the U.S., spreading the struggle against massive wealth inequality in society.

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Parades: A new front line opens

The eruption of sectarian rioting and attacks over several weeks in Belfast recently has demonstrated that the so-called “peace process” and the establishment of a power-sharing government have failed to end sectarian division.

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Book review: Leon Trotsky – A revolutionary’s life

Leon Trotsky’s life and ideas still provoke interest and controversy, 72 years after his assassination. The Socialist Party and the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) bases itself on the ideas of Trotsky as well as those of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and fellow leaders of the Russian Revolution. Here socialistparty.net reviews a new biography; "Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life", by Joshua Rubenstein, published by Yale University Press.

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Property tax will intensify opposition to austerity

Over the past few weeks speculation has intensified about the proposed property tax which we are told the government intends to introduce next year following an announcement in the Budget speech in December. There is an absence of hard information from the government but, in general, in the establishment media there is agreement that a property tax should be imposed with the rider that it should be ‘fair and equitable.’ For property tax we should substitute ‘home tax.’