France follows Israel's script

Welcome to Toulouse, a city that supports Israeli apartheid.

Admittedly, I didn't see this slogan on any billboards when I arrived in this splendid part of France earlier this week. The slogan nonetheless reflects reality.

Toulouse's importance as a hub for the aerospace industry has been bolstered by a recent announcement that EADS, one of Europe's top three weapons producers, is to move its headquarters here from Paris and Munich. There is a strong likelihood that the relocation will increase the already considerable level of contact between Toulouse and Israel.

Airbus, an EADS subsidiary, is based in Toulouse. In 2011, it signed a contract with Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) to develop a new "early warning system" for warplanes.

IAI is a key supplier of drones to the Israeli military and has benefited directly from the attacks on Gaza in November last year and during Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and January 2009. (It is true that work on this system is being handled by Airbus Military in Spain but that doesn't absolve its parent company in Toulouse of responsibility).

Partners in war crimes

IAI has also been cooperating with Airbus on developing a "semi-robotic pilot controlled vehicle" called TaxiBot. And the two firms have teamed up for several EU-funded scientific research projects.

One such project -- known as SARISTU (Smart Intelligent Aircraft Structures) -- aims to help make planes lighter. It is conceivable that the €51 million ($65 million) scheme will contribute towards developing the weapons of the future, even if it is currently decked out in civilian attire.

While in Toulouse, I learned that the authority for the Midi-Pyrénées has teamed up with the France-Israel Chamber of Commerce in order to provide local entrepreneurs with expenses-paid trips to the Middle East over the past few years. And about 10 Israeli firms were scheduled to participate in Aéromart, a fair for the aerospace industry, held in Toulouse last December. Organizers of the event announced, however, that Israel Aerospace Industries and fellow drones-maker Elbit withdrew at short notice.

Last year six people were murdered in a despicable attack on Ozar Hatorah, a Jewish school in Toulouse. In November, Benjamin Netanyahu turned up at the scene of that crime.

Cowardice

François Hollande, the French president, was reportedly disgusted that Netanyahu exploited the suffering of children for a photo opportunity at a time the Israeli prime minister was campaigning for re-election. But that didn't stop Hollande from accompanying Netanyahu on his visit.

Less than two weeks later, Netanyahu approved a considerably more lethal assault against Gaza. Hollande refused to condemn Israel's aggression, even though it, too, involved the deaths of children and violence directed at schools.

Hollande's cowardice was in keeping with how he has courted the Zionist lobby in France. Shortly before he became president in 2012, Hollande contended that it was illegal to advocate a boycott of Israel.

The president's stance is that of an extremist. To the best of my knowledge, no other Western leader has tried to muzzle Palestine solidarity campaigners so blatantly.

Courting the lobby

As it happens, Hollande's understanding of the law was flawed. A number of French judges have upheld the right of activists to call for boycotts.

Hollande has quite literally been following a script prepared by the pro-Israel lobby. His speechwriter Paul Bernard is an executive committee member of CRIF, the country's most powerful Zionist group. This may explain why Hollande emphasized that he disagreed with Stéphane Hessel's work on Palestine, when paying tribute to that courageous human rights defender and former ambassador, who died in February.

Hessel was a Jew, who survived the Nazi extermination camps. In his 2011 pamphlet, Indignez- vous! (Time for Outrage), Hessel wrote: "Today, my main source of anger is Palestine: Gaza, the West Bank...It is intolerable that Jews can themselves perpetrate war crimes."

Colonial mentality

Why is the French elite -- not its ordinary citizens, I hasten to add -- so determined to please Israel?

The most plausible explanation is that a colonial mentality persists in Paris.

In 1916, France and Britain reached a secret deal -- the Sykes-Picot agreement -- on carving up the Middle East between them. The following year, Arthur James Balfour sent a letter to the Zionist movement, effectively giving it Britain's blessing to colonize Palestine.

Almost a century later, Zionists are continuing to colonize Palestine -- with the support of Britain and France.

Plus ça change.

The caring facade of French imperialism

The "public relations" accompanying wars has become wearily predictable. Whenever one of its governments or allies conducts a military action, there is a near certainty that the European Union will host or participate in a "donors' conference".

One of these grotesque events has been dedicated to Afghanistan each year since it was invaded by the US in 2001. After Gaza was bombed for three weeks in late 2008 and early 2009, the EU rushed to foot the bill for damage caused by Israel (often to infrastructure previously built or equipped with Western aid). And now the European taxpayer is expected to pick up the tab for destruction wrought by France during its military expedition in Mali.

Let me be absolutely clear: I'm fully in favour of increasing aid to healthcare and education in Mali, one of the world's poorest countries. Yet this Wednesday's donors' conference - jointly organised by France and the EU - is not really designed to reduce hardship in Africa. Rather, its purpose is to cover French imperialism with a veneer of benevolence.

Exploitation

At this juncture, there can be no doubt that France's "intervention" was motivated primarily by its determination to control natural resources in Mali and Niger. An analysis published in February by in-house researchers at the defence ministry in Paris points out that these two neighbouring countries possess 60% of global uranium reserves. While exploitation of these reserves by Areva, the French nuclear firm, is "certain," according to the researchers, "instability in the Sahel has an impact on economic projects in the whole region".

Less than a month after he was sworn in as president last year, François Hollande hinted that he regarded this uranium as effectively Areva's property. Following talks with Mahamadou Issoufou, his counterpart from Niger, Hollande said that Areva must be allowed to extract uranium from the giant mine of Imouraren at the earliest possible date.

As the former colonial power, it was France which set the border between Mali and Niger. The Touareg people who straddle this artificial frontier have been striving for autonomy since the 1960s. Hollande has been eager to quell the recent resurgence in the Touareg struggle and to bolster the Malian authorities.

Dishonesty

His efforts have been sold as being part of a fight against "terrorism". A more plausible explanation is that he wishes to make sure that the uranium in this area doesn't fall into the "wrong" hands. It is no accident that French troops were deployed earlier this year in both Mali and around the Arlit mine - a key source of uranium for Areva - in Niger.

There is a fundamental dishonesty behind this week's donors' conference. Briefing material prepared by its organisers gives the impression that it is part of the EU's overall development aid activities. The objective of development aid is defined in the EU's Lisbon treaty as reducing and eventually eliminating poverty (indeed, the inclusion of this principle is one of the few positive things in a treaty that has a right-wing ideological orientation). Raiding the aid budget to help a resource grab in Mali runs counter to that objective. It can, therefore, be considered as illegal.

This is not the first time that the EU is violating its own law. A 2011 EU strategy paper on the Sahel blurs the distinction between military and development aid.

The pretext cited is that security is a prerequisite for progress. This ignores how it is poverty and oppression that beget conflict.

With some rare exceptions, the EU's governments have reneged on a decades-old commitment to earmark at least 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) for tackling global poverty. Diverting some of the already inadequate development aid budgets to military training exercises is tantamount to blowing raspberries at the hungry.

Despicable

Apart from tiny Luxembourg, all of the EU's governments spend a higher proportion of GDP on the military than on international development. Not content with that manifest injustice, corporate-funded think tanks have pounced on the French intervention in Mali to advocate that Europe's military expenditure should be even higher.

Nick Witney, the first head of the European Defence Agency - a body tasked with boosting military cooperation between both private firms and nations - has written an especially opportunistic tract for his current employer, the European Council on Foreign Relations. Witney laments that the "crisis in Mali once again exposed the hollowness of Europe's military pretensions". France was "left to do the job alone," he writes, because of the lack of a "shared strategic culture in Europe".

His proposed solution is to have a similar level of scrutiny for the military spending of EU governments as that introduced for other types of expenditure over the past few years. This is despicable: the scrutiny to which he refers enables the Brussels bureaucracy to insist that countries eviscerate their schools and hospitals in the name of deficit reduction. Witney advocates that the same bureaucracy can simultaneously demand greater expenditure on drones.

Meanwhile, a pamphlet by Notre Europe - an institute headed by one-time European Commission chief Jacques Delors - labels many of the EU states as "free-riders" because they did not deploy fighter jets in Libya during 2011 or help France in Mali this year.

These pamphlets have been produced as part of a concerted effort to step up the pace of the EU's militarisation. You can be sure that they won't be allowed gather dust.

•First published by New Europe, 12-19 May 2013.

Warren Buffett signs $2 billion check in support of Israeli apartheid

I gave up drinking the day after the Live8 concert in 2005. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. Apart from the obvious health benefits, it helped me figure out things that I had avoided trying to understand.

My decision to shun the bottle was a sudden one. But it now seems apt that it was made following an extravaganza where Bill Gates took the stage to feign concern for the poor. Today, I become apoplectic when I see the ultra-wealthy posing as friends of the downtrodden.

The latest billionaires' list compiled by Forbes magazine names Gates and his pal Warren Buffett as the world's second and fourth richest men. Between them, the pair have a "net worth" of $120.5 billion.

Fawning news features tell us we should admire the duo because of their philanthropy. Yet a newly-concluded business deal demonstrates where the sympathies of the 1% really lie.

"Message of faith"

Buffett has just spent a cool $2 billion to take full control of the Israeli company Iscar Metalworking (he had already bought most of the firm in 2006). Eitan Wertheimer, Iscar's president, described the transaction as a "message of faith" in the Israeli economy and "a type of Balfour declaration."

At first glance, Wertheimer seems to be resorting to hyperbole. But Buffett's act is arguably more significant than the letter of support to the Zionist movement that Arthur James Balfour, then Britain's foreign secretary, sent in 1917. The Balfour declaration was aspirational; Buffett, on the other hand, has signed an enormous check in support of Israeli apartheid.

Buffett's investment is an insult to the Palestinian-led call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. I'm a supporter of the BDS movement, not a strategist for it. Yet I think there is a clear case now for Palestine solidarity activists to urge a boycott of products made by firms in which Buffett has a major stake. They include Coca-Cola and Heinz.

Class war

It is noteworthy that Wertheimer's remarks were reported in Israel Hayom, a newspaper owned by the gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson. As well as holding racist views towards Palestinians in particular, Adelson generally holds the underprivileged with contempt. He has emphasized his staunch opposition to the redistribution of wealth.

Buffett may be less obnoxious than Adelson -- the former has, for example, urged Barack Obama to increase taxes on the wealthy. Yet they are both fighting a class war with the objective of widening inequality. Buffett has correctly observed that his class is winning that war.

The super-rich can never be trusted. Even when they lavish money on charities, there is invariably a flipside. Bill Gates' work against malaria is severely compromised by how his foundation has invested almost $1 billion in BP and ExxonMobil. Malarial mosquitoes thrive when temperatures soar -- something that is happening now in Africa and beyond thanks to the global warming that the oil industry has forced on the planet.

Warmongers hug trees

The effrontery of corporations knows few bounds. Lockheed Martin, the arms giant, recently published its annual "sustainability report." Two gems jumped out from its pages: Lockheed is striving to achieve a "zero-accident workplace" and to cut down pollution from transport by buying one-quarter of components from suppliers "within 30 miles of our significant sites of operation."

For a second, I was so in awe of Lockheed's commitment to tree-hugging and ergonomics that I forgot it is the single biggest beneficiary of US military aid to Israel. As Shir Hever, the left-wing Israeli economist, pointed out recently, this military aid is in the form of vouchers. Israel is required to exchange the vouchers for American weaponry, principally that manufactured by Lockheed.

Israel's attacks on Syria will surely be a boon for Lockheed if they continue -- or even if they don't. The attacks have been conducted with the aid of Lockheed's F-16 Fighting Falcon jets.

Of course, Lockheed's armaments are routinely used as tools of oppression against Palestinians. Are our Palestinian brothers and sisters supposed to be comforted by Lockheed's policies on local sourcing and safety at work?

The "public relations" industry is forever tying big green ribbons around corporations and the super-rich. These ribbons cannot conceal the toxic truth that the super-rich look out only for themselves. They will happily trample over Palestinians or any other people if doing so can make them even richer.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 6 May 2013.

Breaking Europe's silence over Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning is a hero.

Nobody else has put so much classified evidence about the reality of America's wars in the public domain. The "Collateral Murder" video which he released to WikiLeaks should be shown at the beginning of every academic course on international relations. It captures the nonchalance with which the world's most powerful army kills and maims civilians.

Once the soldiers recorded in it notice that they have injured a child, they react as if they have done nothing more sinister than step on someone's toes. "Well, it's their own fault for bringing their kids into a battle," one voice says. The line encapsulates the amoral nature of US aggression. Victims of state-sponsored violence are treated as if they had it coming.

Only the naive could expect the US authorities to treat Manning leniently. But what about here in Europe? Catherine Ashton, the EU's foreign policy chief, is a fearless defender of human rights - when it suits her. Happy to champion political prisoners in Iran and Ukraine, she is prepared to overlook persecution when it is carried out with the approval of her bosom buddies in Washington.

A search on Ashton's website indicates that she has not issued a single statement on Manning's incarceration. I asked her spokesman to explain this silence; he did not respond. MEPs who have tried to solicit her views on this matter haven't fared much better. Last year, Ashton answered a parliamentary question about an investigation by Juan Méndez, the UN special rapporteur on torture, which concluded that the treatment of Manning was "cruel and inhuman". Ashton noted that the Méndez report highlighted "potential violations of rights" before making a vague commitment that the EU would "seek clarification" from the US authorities on "what measures they intend to take".

Cowardly

Her stance was both misleading and cowardly. Méndez stated clearly that "imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity, as well as of his presumption of innocence". The solitary confinement forced on Manning, therefore, involved a definite abuse of his rights - not a "potential" abuse as Ashton hinted.

Manning has been in detention for three years now, without having been convicted of any crime. It is almost impossible to foresee his trial - scheduled to begin next month - being in any way fair. Barack Obama has already declared him guilty by saying on video that "he broke the law" and implying that he deserves to be punished.

In a personal statement delivered at a pre-trial hearing in Fort Meade, Maryland, earlier this year, Manning said that he gave a trove of documents to WikiLeaks because he wished to "spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general". Manning confessed to being alarmed by the "bloodlust" of the aerial weapons team on the "Collateral Murder" video and expressed his hope that the public would be just as disgusted.

There is little doubt that Manning has been imprisoned because of his sincerely-held political beliefs. So it is baffling that Amnesty International has so far declined to consider him a prisoner of conscience and to undertake a major campaign for his release.

Right to information

Amnesty has told the Canadian blogger Joe Emersberger that it cannot deem Manning to be a prisoner of conscience until it has verified if he released the information in a "responsible manner". I contacted Amnesty to check if Emersberger had accurately reflected its position but received no reply. Assuming that Emersberger is correct - and I've no reason to suspect he is not - Amnesty should specify what it means by "responsible".

By the standards of the US authorities, Manning did not behave responsibly. But Amnesty is supposed to be an independent watchdog, not a mouthpiece for the US military. The very first session of the UN's General Assembly in 1949 formally recognised that "freedom of information is a fundamental human right and the touchstone of all the freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated". Manning took a great risk to uphold that freedom. Amnesty should be supporting him by every means possible, not quibbling over whether he has respected the terms of his employment contract.

I have been involved with Amnesty since I was 15-years-old. Until recently, I've been convinced that it fights oppression regardless of where it occurs or who is involved. Sadly, an event held to coincide with NATO's 2012 summit in Chicago made me have second thoughts.

Feminist war?

Promotional material for an Amnesty conference on the situation of women in Afghanistan bore the slogan "NATO: Keep the Progress Going". The inference that the alliance was waging a feminist war must have delighted NATO's spindoctors.

For most of last year, Amnesty's US office was headed by Suzanne Nossel, who had just finished serving as a deputy assistant secretary of state under Hillary Clinton. It is unthinkable that Amnesty would chose a senior aide to Robert Mugabe as director of its Zimbabwe team - unless that aide had renounced Mugabe first. Nossel, to the best of my knowledge, didn't speak out against how Clinton had cosied up to dictators in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Why on earth did Amnesty hire her?

Bradley Manning has been let down by those who claim to defend human rights. The silence over his treatment must be broken.

•First published by New Europe, 5-11 May 2013.

Keeping the Israel lobby on its toes

Does the pro-Israel lobby have to be embarrassed into playing by the rules?

Yesterday, I contacted Dimitri Dombret, former secretary-general with European Friends of Israel (EFI), about his entry in a "transparency register" for groups seeking to influence the EU's policies. When I asked Dombret why the financial information presented for his "public relations" firm D&D Consulting Services related to the year 2010 and that no details had been provided for the past two years, he replied swiftly. "Thanks for reminding me to update my details," he wrote in an email message. "It's just been done."

I immediately felt a sense of déjà-vu.

On 11 August 2011, I wrote a blog post noting that the EFI had not signed up to the EU's "transparency register" and was secretive about how it is financed. The EFI rectified this omission a few hours after my post was published. Within less than a week the European Jewish Congress, another pro-Israel lobby group, had also signed up to the register.

Unlike a similar system for lobbyists in Washington, the EU has decided against introducing a mandatory register for pressure groups in Brussels. Yet it has provided incentives to sign up to its voluntary register: securing an access badge to the European Parliament and taking part in certain "expert" committees that effectively set policies for the EU's executive branch, the European Commission, are conditional on signing up.

Grounds for complaint

Moreover, a code of conduct for the register's participants requires them to make sure that the information provided is up-to-date. If Dombret did not add fresh data when I prompted him, I would have had grounds to file an official complaint with the register's administrators.

Updated or not, Dombret's entry does not tell us a great deal about his activities.

According to it, the only client he represented in his dealings with the EU bureaucracy in 2012 was Teva, the Israeli pharmaceutical firm. Teva, he said, generated a turnover for his firm of between €50,000 and €100,000 that year. (If memory serves me correct, his entry for the year 2010 was identical).

Because Teva is a manufacturer of generic medicines, it has been trying to present itself as more compassionate than corporations selling branded drugs -- at sometimes extortionate prices. As its man in Brussels, Dombret has been spotted attending events organized by the humanitarian agency Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières on improving access to healthcare for the world's poor.

The Palestinians, as it happens, do not benefit from Teva's generosity. Prevented by Israel from developing a pharmaceutical industry of their own, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza pay the same prices for medicines as citizens of Israel do. This is despite how the rates of poverty and unemployment are higher in the West Bank and Gaza than in present-day Israel. In 2009, the World Bank -- not a revolutionary institution -- stated that the lowest priced generic product available in the public healthcare system in the West Bank and Gaza was on average 4.5 times that of the same product in Syria.

"Messages that work"

Dombret's website also lists The Israel Project as one of his clients. An endorsement from Laura Kam of The Israel Project credits Dombret with "getting messages that work in the media and our speakers in front of European policy-makers."

Headquartered in Washington, The Israel Project has undertaken a few "missions" to Europe in recent years. In 2011, for example, it arranged for Oded Eran -- previously the EU envoy for Israeli war criminal Ariel Sharon -- to visit Strasbourg (a French city, where the European Parliament holds monthly sessions) and Paris. The magazine Le Nouvel Observateur helped out the Zionist lobby on that occasion by publishing a softball interview with Eran.

When I asked Dombret about the precise nature of his work for The Israel Project, he claimed that it is no longer on his roster.

Still, it is possible to discern a trend whereby pro-Israel lobbyists with deep pockets are turning to "public relations" professionals for help on particular projects. Laura Kam has herself formed a Jerusalem-based firm -- Kam Global Strategies, which offers businesspeople and governments the change to "place your stories" in the media.

Courting elites

Now that public opinion has turned decisively against Israel in Europe, that state and its sympathisers are doing what they can to court elites. In late 2011, Israel's embassy in Brussels awarded a contract to Kreab Gavin Anderson. This consultancy assisted Israel in honing propaganda efforts aimed at convincing members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to approve an agreement designed to boost Israel's drug exports.

Karl Isaksson, head of Kreab's Brussels office, made good use of his contacts in the Parliament, where he had previous worked as an adviser to MEPs with Sweden's Conservative party. One MEP with that party, Christoffer Fjellner, fought especially hard for Israel's pharmaceutical industry. He signed an opinion piece -- almost certainly written in conjunction with Kreab -- arguing that the accord would be beneficial to healthcare in Europe. Sadly, this chicanery worked and the accord was endorsed by the Parliament, albeit by a slim majority.

Kreab's entry to the EU's transparency register states that the contract with Israel was worth less than €50,000. This week I asked Isaksson if his office was undertaking further work for Israel but he told me that the contract had not been extended.

It is unlikely, however, that it is the last time that Israel will seek professional help in pursuing its pernicious agenda.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 3 May 2013.

Italy's new foreign minister Emma Bonino wants Israel in EU

Emma Bonino, Italy's new foreign minister, has been lobbying that Israel should be admitted into the European Union for more than a decade.

In 2001, Bonino and fellow members of the Radical Party launched a campaign in favor of Israel's immediate membership of the bloc, which then incorporated 15 countries.

As the call was made during the second intifada, it could only be interpreted as a gesture of support for the murderous tactics used by the Israeli military against Palestinians, with the full blessing of Ariel Sharon's government.

Radical Party activists that I have quizzed about the initiative argued that because Israel was a democracy it should be welcomed into the EU. This indicates that Bonino and her acolytes had fallen under the spell of Israeli spindoctors, who repeatedly insist that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. (The historian Ilan Pappe has demolished that propaganda by labelling Israel a herrenvolk democracy - a democracy for the masters only).

Bonino was a member of the European Parliament (MEP) at the time her campaign was undertaken. In that role, she had a duty to scrutinize if Israel was honoring the terms of an "association agreement" it had signed with the EU, which came into effect in 2000. That agreement stipulates that any trade preferences granted to Israel would be conditional on its respect for human rights. Bonino did not appear perturbed by how Israel was flouting that legally-binding accord.

"My friend Peres"

Bonino is known to have cordial relations with Shimon Peres, the current Israeli president. On the surface, the alliance is a puzzling one. The Radicals purport to be inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, whose image adorns the party's logo. Almost certainly, Gandhi would have despised the war crimes committed by Peres, particularly the 1996 massacre of 102 civilians that he authorized in Qana, Lebanon.

Speaking in 2004, Bonino recalled a 1995 visit to "my friend Shimon Peres" (then Israel's prime minister). Bonino said, "I -- who was then a bit disenchanted with Europe because of the events in the ex-Yugoslavia -- found a Peres, who said 'you have started from coal and steel, and we have to start from water resources, as an element of common management'."

This inference that Peres is committed to regional integration in the Middle East overlooks his pivotal role in nurturing Israel's arms industry (including its quest to develop nuclear weapons), thereby ratcheting up tensions with its neighbors.

Bonino has taken a progressive and brave stance on a number of issues: abortion rights; equality for homosexuals; the decriminalization of drugs.

Her bravery has, alas, deserted her on some key foreign policy issues. In 1999, for example, she supported NATO's attack on Serbia -- an operation which involved the use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium.

Craven

In 2011, she signed an appeal urging the EU to set up an "arm's length equivalent to the National Endowment for Democracy" as part of its response to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. The NED is an American-funded organization designed to make sure that governments in the wider world protect US interests.

Bonino's call was endorsed by Ana Palacio, the former Spanish foreign minister who backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It should be interpreted primarily as a plea to ensure that the elites in the Middle East remain receptive to Western demands, rather than as a cri de coeur for genuine democracy.

Italy has been one of the most ardent supporters of Israel in the EU over the past few years. Silvio Berlusconi, its prime minister at the time, even claimed that he did not notice Israel's massive wall in the West Bank when he visited Bethlehem in 2010. The main beneficiaries of this craven and buffoonish attitude towards Israel have been Italy's arms merchants. Last year the country's top weapons company, Finmeccanica, won a $1 billion contract to supply Israel with training jets.

Bonino is not a buffoon but she offers a continuation of this craven attitude towards Israel. Gandhi would be ashamed.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 29 April 2013.

The rich are getting richer: so tax them more

My brain is addled and my belly is full of blubber. I have just returned to Brussels after three weeks in Ireland, watching too many news bulletins and eating too much chocolate.

Here is why I am confused. The top story one day was that an International Monetary Fund official who elbowed Ireland into accepting a ruinous loan in 2010 had admitted that he got everything wrong. The "entire reliance" had been on austerity, according to Ashoka Mody, a former IMF head of mission for Ireland, and "clearly the experience, if experience was needed, has demonstrated that reliance on austerity is counterproductive".

The top story another day was that members of the country's trade unions had voted to reject a package of pay cuts for public sector workers. Such an act of rebellion to austerity was long-overdue. Yet the response from the Labour Party - a supposed ally of the unions - was to moan. Brendan Howlin, a veteran Labour politician who is now a minister for austerity, went on TV to alert the nation about the difficult phone call he would shortly receive from the "troika".

Insanity?

Howlin was almost demanding our sympathy as he prepared for a scolding from his masters in the IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank. He didn't arouse any sympathy from me. Rather, I scorned his determination to continue with the very austerity measures that a senior IMF figure had so recently repudiated. It was impossible not to think of Albert Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Except, I'm not sure the champions of austerity want different results. Their prescriptions seem tailor-made to benefit the rich at the expense of people on low and middle incomes. From that perspective, the prescriptions are having the desired effect.

Social Justice Ireland, a group run by a principled priest Seán Healy, published a detailed analysis of the nation's economy while I was home. It states that the gap between the wealthiest 10% of the population and the poorest 10% has "dramatically widened" since 1987.

In 2009, the top 10% had an annual disposable income - the amount households can spend after they have paid all their income taxes - of nearly 120,000 euros. The poorest, on the other hand, had to make do with less than 11,000 euros.

The gap is getting bigger. The Gini coefficient is an indicator of inequality ranging from 0 to 100. Ireland's inequality levels were at 29.3 on this scale in 2009. By 2011, they had jumped to 31.1.

According to the latest "rich list" compiled by The Sunday Times, the number of Irish billionaires has almost doubled since the financial crash. And the future looks bright for the country's elite, judging by a new paper by Knight Frank, a consultancy on property. It predicts that the number of Ireland's "high net worth individuals" - those with $30 million or more in net assets - will grow from 554 in 2012 to 751 by 2022. That would be an increase of 36%.

Cop-out

All this data leads to a simple conclusion: Ireland could solve its economic problems by levying a special tax on the wealthy.

But on the rare occasions this idea is raised in the mainstream media, it is blithely dismissed. The argument generally trotted out is that the rich will flee the country if they face higher tax bills.

The argument is a cop-out. Firstly, it is fanciful to believe that a wealth tax would cause the rich to quit in droves. Ireland's history of emigration shows that it is primarily those with limited opportunities who have to leave, not the ultra-wealthy.

The alleged risk of the rich absconding makes the case for a wealth tax even stronger. To reduce that risk, it's necessary to campaign for the closure of tax havens, so that the greedy will not be able to squirrel away their cash.

And if some rich folk do split, the rest of the population should say "good riddance". As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate in their book The Spirit Level, inequality is a scourge that causes or exacerbates a myriad of social and health problems. UNICEF, for example, has found that relatively equal societies such as Finland and Sweden score far higher on child wellbeing than unequal societies like the US.

Menace

The super-rich can be a menace. Until a few years ago, Ireland's richest man was Seán Quinn, a multi-billionaire who was the single largest shareholder in Anglo Irish Bank. His lust for money was a major factor in the bank's eventual collapse. Bizarrely, some of my compatriots continue to defend him, arguing that he provided much-needed jobs.

We are too deferential to the rich in Ireland. It is obscene that Bono, the singer, is still taken seriously as a campaigner against poverty. He and his fellow members of U2 are worth 612 million euros, according to The Sunday Times.

A more obscure Dublin band, The Radiators, released an album called Ghost Town in 1979. That record came to mind after a visit to the Irish Financial Services Centre, which hosted a network of phantom banks. Between 2000 and 2006, the amount of money passing through them quadrupled to 1.6 trillion dollars.

The lax regulation of the financial sector proved catastrophic in Ireland, as it did elsewhere. But the elite is carrying on as if nothing has changed.

•First published by New Europe, 28 April-5 May 2013.