Category: Uncategorized

Ukrainian-born Armin Konn finally fulfilled a religious ritual that was denied to him due to the anti-Jewish ideology of the ruling communists.

By World Israel News Staff

In a historic event that has garnered attention from the Jewish community around the world, a 96-year-old man was recently circumcised in Canada, with the Chabad organization describing him as the “oldest man since Abraham” to undergo the age-old Jewish ritual of the brit milah.

The elderly man, Armin Konn, who grew up in Ukraine in a Jewish family, finally fulfilled a religious tradition that was denied to him due to the anti-Jewish ideology of the ruling communists at the time.

Armin Konn was born in Zhvil, Ukraine, in 1926 during a period when the communist rulers were actively suppressing the Jewish religion. According to the Jewish Russian Community Center of Ontario in Toronto, Konn’s parents, out of fear for their son’s safety, decided not to have him circumcised. This decision was driven by the oppressive atmosphere that made it unsafe for Jewish families to openly practice their faith.

During World War II, Konn enlisted in the Red Army’s Air Force. His aircraft was shot down over Lithuania, leading to his capture and subsequent imprisonment in a German POW camp. But he survived the remainder of the war and eventually made his way to Canada after the conflict ended.

In recent years, Konn developed a stronger connection to the Toronto Jewish community and began engaging in conversations with rabbis and doctors about the significance of circumcision.

On Thursday, at Chabad’s Jewish Russian Community Center of Ontario, Armin Konn underwent the circumcision ceremony alongside the newborn son of a local rabbi, Yisrael Zaltzman. The 96-year-old man and the eight-day-old baby were both given their Jewish names during the ceremony, as per tradition.

The Chabad organization expressed their admiration for Armin Konn’s bravery and commitment to reconnecting with his Jewish heritage. They acknowledged that he now holds a unique position in history as the “oldest man since Abraham” to undergo circumcision, a practice that traces its roots back approximately 3,700 years to the biblical figure commanded by God to be circumcised at the age of 99.

The post ‘Oldest man since Abraham’: 96-year-old circumcised in Canada appeared first on World Israel News.

I noted in the previous essay that one of the justificatory catalysts for entering into war against an aggressor is retributive, the punishment of evil. This is not without controversy.

International Law is, often enough, particularly uncomfortable with the idea. It much prefers self-defense to be the primary—essentially sole—just cause for fighting. Allowance is made, under Responsibility to Protect and other frameworks for intervention, for something more—though akin—to purely self-defense: the defense of other innocents elsewhere. In this, you’ll recall, International Law is simply catching up with the classic just war tradition’s first cause for war—protection of the innocent. One reason self-defense is sanctioned while punishing evil is prohibited hinges on the fact that, most often, self-defense is an urgent matter that cannot wait. When the beasts are beating in your gates, even the most pie-in-the-sky idealist knows now is the time to drive them back. Punishment, however, focused presumably on retributing wrongs already committed and not currently underway, enjoys a seeming lack of urgency. Other measures can, in principle, be employed to rectify past wrongs. Punishment by force, then, smells not of justice but merely of the quid pro quo of retaliation.

So, in 1993 when President Bill Clinton ordered the missile attack on the Mukhabarat—the Iraqi Intelligence Service—headquarters in Baghdad in response to the Mukhabarat’s attempted assassination of former President George H.W. Bush, the attack was condemned by some on the grounds that the assassination attempt had occurred more than two months previous. Clinton tried to justify the attack in the language of international law. He would have done better to use just war language. The reason that the just war tradition—following Thomas Aquinas who followed Augustine—posits punishment of evil as a cause of war has much to do with the nature and consequence of evil and the regard the Christian ought to have for the good. The assertion is rather simple: when encountering an act of injustice, any act of injustice, the Christian, because of the dominical command of neighbor love, cannot avert his eyes. Because an evil act deprives some particular good of some measure of its goodness, love, because it is love, will hate both the act and the deprivation. Clear-sighted love, thereby, necessitates requiting injustice with some measure of retribution with an eye toward the restoration of justice. Retribution—payback—ranges in degree in correspondence to the offense along a spectrum from the simple expression of opprobrium to restraint to punishment to threat of force to lethal restraint.

In the case of punishment under the guidance of just war, the nation taking retributive action will likely have one or more of three immediate objectives: 1) the punishment of private or particular individuals outside of their own nation; 2) the punishment of political or military leaders of another nation; 3) the punishment of another nation as a collective. Of course, the question of jurisdiction is important. By what right does President Clinton have for punishing the citizens of another nation who no longer threaten immediate harm? Here, I’ll name just two. The first is the basic responsibility a political authority has for protecting the order, justice, and peace of the political community over whom they exercise authority. For instance, in 1916 when President Wilson ordered General Pershing to lead a contingent of Marines into Mexico to punish Poncho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, it can be credibly asserted that this punitive expedition was self-defensive in nature. It had as its first goal the capture of Villa—ending his ability to torment Americans living near the border. Additionally, Pershing’s efforts to seek, attack, and destroy Villa’s militia similarly served in the first place as a direct means of protecting Americans from further attack—dead men don’t launch cross-border harassments—and, in the second, of deterring other would-be militias from attacking the United States. Similarly, Clinton’s attack against the Iraqi intelligence community served to issue the same kinds of warnings. In this case, punishment and self-defense significantly overlap.

Incidentally, it will be worth noting here that given modern tendencies, there are some today who would push against calling actions such as Clinton’s launching of a few dozen Tomahawk missiles war. Such acts are not acts of war per se, but something else—call them, perhaps: force short of war. A niche is developing within the academic study of just war therefore that would analyze such actions under the rubric of jus ad vim—or, essentially, an analysis of “just force.” I don’t want to have that debate here. I’m content to follow the UChicago political theorist Quincy Wright—who knew a bit about war—and his definition (or one of his definitions) of war simply as “an act or series of acts of violence by one government against another.” That definition allows the term “war” to capture a good number of things that that I’m perfectly happy to have the term capture.

The question of authority in international relations is exacerbated, of course, by the simple fact that—pace the United Nations—there is no “head” of the international community. The just war tradition understands war—in the manner in which I’m using the term—therefore, to be a paradigm case of iudicium cessans, or ‘judgment unavailable,’ a situation in which, as Oliver O’Donovan says in his magnificent The Ways of Judgment, “the appropriate judicial authority is unavailable or unable to function” and in which, therefore, “authority for judgment reverts to the holder of provisionary power…on the spot, who becomes, as it were, a primitive monarch…exercising all the powers of judgment necessary for the emergency.” TL;DR: self-help is the order of the day.

All of this is to say that just war is part of a tradition of retributive justice. Punishment—retribution—is, properly understood, the proportionate and discriminate giving of what is owed to the one to whom it is owed.

The observant reader might now offer a challenge. While it might be clear how, say, a war launched against Hitler’s Germany could serve as an act of retributive justice in punishing Hitler and his regime of evil thugs, what are we to do about the simple German conscript who is no idealogue, who has no love of the Nazi party, and who would really rather be anywhere else? Monsters, even in war—and even in the military of the aggressor—are few. Most of those who fight their nation’s wars are not monsters. Is war really a punishment—an act of retributive justice—against them?

There’s much more to be said here than can be. Sufficient for now is simply to turn to the idea of distributive justice. Used in the context of the moral analysis of harms done in warfare, distributive justice is the unsettled recognition that a certain quantity of harms are necessarily going to be done in the pursuit of even justified war aims. The just warrior, in the prosecution of a just war, must distribute those harms in the most justified manner possible. Happy—enough—is the occasion in which those harms can be distributed directly and solely to those who truly deserve them. War rarely allows so pure a luxury.

One might think here of the British mining of Norwegian waters in 1940 to prevent Hitler’s Germany from transporting iron ore through neutral Norwegian waters to sustain his war effort or, later that year, of the British attempt to sink the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir near Oman so that it didn’t fall into German hands. In cases such as these—and in the case of the poor German conscript—the justification for the harms done against nations or persons who do not directly deserve those harms is not—as Prov-friend Joe Chapa puts it in a magnificent little essay at The Strategy Bridge—retribution for past wrongs, but “forward-looking defense against future unjust harms.”

If this sounds grim and even rather tragic it is only because it is in fact rather tragic and grim. Resolutions to moral conflicts—the dilemma that ensues when two or more goods are in competition—usually are. Ethics in war are not always—nor perhaps often—akin to mathematical proofs that lead to easy and incontrovertible answers. Moral conflicts don’t always tally neatly, without remainder.

The post Just War 101: E7 — Retributive and Distributive Justice appeared first on Providence.

Almost none of the reports about Thursday’s conviction of four Proud Boys members mentioned the fact that the far-right group was riddled with FBI informants. But this kind of law enforcement collusion with the far right is a profound threat to democracy.

Enri­que Tarrio, former chairman of the Proud Boys, was found guilty Thursday, May 4, 2023, of seditious conspiracy in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. He is seen here in Miami, where he lives, on July 16, 2021. (Pedro Portal / Miami Herald / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

The news that four members of the far-right organization the Proud Boys were just convicted for seditious conspiracy, including their former leader Enrique Tarrio, has made the rounds this week. But if you only tuned in to the proceedings a few days ago to read about the verdict, there’s something you almost certainly haven’t heard: that both Tarrio and as many as eight other Proud Boys were secretly FBI informants, in part helping law enforcement to target Black Lives Matter protesters and other left-wing activists.

That’s because, after a non-exhaustive survey of reports covering the verdict, I discovered that only two news outlets, the Associated Press (AP) and the Washington Post, mentioned that government informants were present within the Proud Boys’ ranks, even though this fact was among the most shocking revelations that came out in the course of the trial.

That fact doesn’t just make the FBI’s failure to detect and prevent the Capitol riot even more baffling. Revelations from the trial suggested that the FBI’s historical and ongoing fixation on left-wing protests potentially blinded it to the threat of the far right, and that the bureau is even happy to collaborate with far-right groups as a way of neutralizing what it sees as a greater threat from the Left.

The AP’s reference was perfunctory — contained in a single line about how “revelations of government informants in the group” prolonged the trial — leaving the Post as the one and only news outlet that specified that Tarrio himself was a longtime informer for law enforcement in a wide range of groups beyond and before the Proud Boys. His own lawyer called him a “prolific” informer in a 2014 court proceeding.

That includes mainstream outlets like CBS, ABC, NBC, and USA Today, as well as Forbes, Reuters, Bloomberg, and Business Insider. This fact was also absent from both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal’s reports, as well as Politico’s, nor was it mentioned by the BBC or the Philadelphia Inquirer. Even Al Jazeera failed to inform its audience about this key piece of information, as did outlets like NPR and CNN, the latter of which only offhandedly and vaguely mentioned “newly unveiled evidence and informants” in a list of factors that had led to “countless delays” in the trial. The only reference to be found in Rolling Stone’s report was a sentence about how “the trial was not a bonanza of new information,” aside from “a witness that the defense hoped to call [being] revealed at the last moment to have been an FBI informant.”

But this is a misleading description of the trial. As the Washington Post — the only one of these outlets that seemed to consider the Proud Boys’ law enforcement links important enough to inform readers about — reported a month ago, government informants were not only rife within the far-right organization, but the “evidence shown in court indicates that many of the FBI sources inside the Proud Boys were asked only about their ideological opponents on the left.”

Explicitly progressive or liberal-leaning outlets were no better than the mainstream. Tarrio and other Proud Boys’ status as FBI informers was absent from Mother Jones’s write-up on the verdict, as well as those of the Guardian, Vice, Huff Post, and Salon. Democracy Now! stated that one police officer “had a relationship prior to January 6th with Tarrio, because he was gathering information from the extremist groups amassing there.” Besides ignoring the revelations, MSNBC went further and turned its reporting into something of a defense of the entities that had collaborated with the Proud Boys, calling the verdict a “massive win for the government” and warning that a failure to convict “would have emboldened the nation’s militia movement and congressional firebrands” who wanted to challenge federal law enforcement.

What’s particularly bizarre about this is that many of the outlets listed above — including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Associated Press, and Vice — have reported previously on the trial’s exposure of the extent of FBI infiltration into the Proud Boys, as well as Tarrio’s work with law enforcement specifically.

It could be that these outlets are loath to mention just how extensively law enforcement worked with the group lest they be viewed as assisting the Proud Boys’ defense, which had pointed to the FBI’s failure to prevent the incident despite having infiltrated the group as proof that the storming of the Capitol had been unplanned. They may also be wary of appearing to side with right-wing allegations that January 6 was a “fedsurrection” organized wholesale by federal law enforcement, a conspiracy theory circulated on the Right that has revolved around dubious and unproven claims that a rioter named Ray Epps was an undercover agent — claims Epps himself has strenuously denied.

But the failure to mention the FBI’s infiltration into the Proud Boys cuts across ideological lines. Neither Fox News nor the right-leaning New York Post included the Proud Boys’s FBI connections in their reports, despite both outlets having taken an increasingly adversarial stance toward the bureau since the 2016 election.

This failure isn’t trivial. As the Washington Post put it in March, the FBI’s presence within the Proud Boys “underscores the intelligence failures in advance of January 6, as the FBI was unprepared for the riot despite having inroads into the groups now accused by the Justice Department of plotting the violence.” Those failures are as copious and serious as they are still mysterious: one of Liz Cheney’s last acts in office was to block the January 6 committee’s investigation into law enforcement failures regarding the event, and several disclosures have raised the specter of Trumpist sympathies within both the Secret Service and the FBI.

Whether intentional or not, the media’s failure to mention the FBI’s link to the Proud Boys ensures that law enforcement agencies face no accountability for their stunning failures on the day, ironically making a repeat of the Capitol riot far more likely. More alarmingly, it means the long-standing and well-documented sympathies toward the far right that exist to a concerning level inside US law enforcement won’t be cleaned up, but stay unexamined and sealed away from public scrutiny — until, at least, the next time it threatens US democracy.

Putin does not want Washington’s nuclear missiles parked on his western border in the Ukraine. For security reasons, he cannot allow this. He has made this excruciatingly clear over and over again. “If US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes”

The post The War in Ukraine: Made in Washington Not Moscow appeared first on Global Research.

First published by Global Research on June 1, 2022

***

THE PLAN shows the official agenda of the World Health Organization to have ten years of ongoing pandemics, from 2020 to 2030.

This is revealed by a WHO virologist, Marion …

The post Video: Supported by Bill Gates, The WHO Plans to Have 10 Years of Pandemics (2020-2030) appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Follow …

The post World Economic Forum Adviser Claims the Planet No Longer Needs the ‘Vast Majority’ of the Population appeared first on Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

.

.

Introductory note

In September 2009, Justice Department attorneys and …

The post Video: Pfizer Has a Criminal Record. Is It Relevant? appeared first on Global Research.

A dysfunctional housing system is putting intense strain on Ireland’s social fabric as rents spiral out of control. The current malaise has deep roots in the structure of Irish capitalism, and radical reform is the only way to turn things around.

Rental signs outside Georgian buildings in Dublin city center, Ireland on February 15, 2023. (Artur Widak / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

On April 1, amid a protracted housing crisis that has been steadily mounting in scale and intensity, the Irish government lifted an eviction ban that had protected tenants since last October. As the current housing minister Darragh O’Brien conceded, the predictable outcome will be a rise in already record-breaking levels of homelessness.

Whatever way you look at this hydra-headed housing crisis (which seems increasingly unmanageable for the ruling parties), it has produced catastrophic effects for the country’s residents, particularly in urban areas. Emergency accommodation houses 11,988 people, with others sequestered away in more hidden forms of homelessness. Those who wish to buy will see that house prices are now seven times the median income.

But we can find the most striking symptoms of the crisis in the private rental sector, as is the case in many other countries. One day last August, only 716 homes were available to rent in the south of Ireland, and rents stood at an all-time high. Even mainstream liberal commentators detect unmistakable signs that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have “decided to bring back nineteenth-century landlordism, to reshape Ireland as a nation beholden to private property owners.”

Overcoming the crisis will require a comprehensive transformation of the Irish housing system. But how are we going to achieve this?

The Irish Housing Question

Exasperated at the ineffectual efforts of bourgeois reformers, Friedrich Engels wrote in 1872 that the “housing question” could only be resolved by ending the capitalist mode of production. Yet Ireland’s capitalist class and its political elite are clearly not staring down the barrel of social revolution, however unanchored they may be in economic reality. While the problems with housing “may not be resolvable under capitalism,” argue Peter Marcuse and David Madden in their book In Defense of Housing, “the shape of the housing system can be acted upon, modified, and changed.”

To make sense of the Irish housing crisis, you have to understand why the development of the southern Irish state has been so bound up with housing and property.

If you want to make sense of the housing crisis, you have to understand why the development of the southern Irish state has been so bound up with housing and property. By drawing this historical arc, we can see how the underlying philosophy shaping Irish housing policy for a hundred years in the South — the North deserves its own analysis — has been an unhealthy obsession with owner-occupation. This preference interacted with the forces of globalization and the neoliberal turn to bring us to where we are today.

In the apocalyptic aftermath of an Gorta Mór (the Great Famine), an agrarian movement called the Land League, formed in 1879, organized the rural poor in Ireland into a mass national campaign that resisted evictions and employed rent strikes and boycotts. It eventually concluded that the only way to defeat a vampiric form of rural landlordism was through widescale farmer-tenant proprietorship. This dream soon became a reality.

Before the British state carried out agrarian reforms in response to popular mobilizations known more broadly as the Land Wars, thirteen thousand landlords owned the land of rural Ireland. By 1920, tenants had purchased 316,000 holdings. These tenants became private land- and homeowners, beneficiaries of a mass division and redistribution of estates held by the Anglo-Irish ruling class.

Politically, as the historian Diarmaid Ferriter writes, the implication was that the descendants of the “Land War generation” were “imbued with the idea that home ownership was the ultimate goal and renting was wasted money.” Those descendants, Ferriter concludes a little too definitively, were the “inheritors of a conservative impulse.”

Housing and the Irish State

After gaining independence, the nascent post-partition state in the South would come to assume a leading role in providing housing capital by funding a relatively large social-housing construction program, which constituted a majority of the housing built from the 1920s to the 1950s. At the same time, it also played an outsized role in the funding and building of dwellings for owner-occupation, its preferred type of tenure.

Similar surges in output during the 1960s and ’70s could not conceal the fact that government subsidies still favored, to a considerable degree, the private home-buyer more than the social-housing tenant. The 1966 Housing Act was a further boon for private ownership, extending the right of purchase to all local authority tenants. Come 1969, local authorities had sold an astonishing 64,490 council homes.

As the Sinn Féin housing spokesperson and author Eoin Ó Broin points out, the “largest output of housing in the history of the State” during the 1970s was severely undercut by the “massive transfer of stock from the public to the private sector via tenant purchase.” This transfer tipped the balance in favor of homeownership further still.

Irish governments prioritized ownership of property over other forms of social protection.

Private homeownership, having stood at 52.6 percent in 1946, rose to 70 percent in 1971. The ruling conservative parties could reasonably have felt that this was the crowning achievement of the modern Irish state, after centuries of absenteeism, dispossession, and insecurity.

In a landmark study, Michelle Norris disputes the widely held assumption that the southern Irish state failed to develop a comprehensive welfare regime like many of its Western European counterparts. Instead, she argues, a paradigm called “asset-based welfare” meant that Irish governments prioritized ownership of property over other forms of social protection, reminding us of Ferriter’s contestable, if resonant, notion of the inherited conservative impulse.

Financialization

From the 1980s onward, the structure of the system did not change — just the way in which it was financed. In his book Sins of the Father, Conor McCabe writes of a kind of “revolution” that was underway at the time:

Banks were becoming “one-stop shops” for financial services, and the Irish government played its part by changing the rules and allowing building societies and insurance companies to compete with high-street banks in the areas of personal and business loans.

The impact of credit and financial liberalization combined with the withdrawal of the Irish state from providing homes and funding their construction. The 1980s saw a 30 percent collapse in the output of social housing compared to the previous decade.

The 1980s saw a 30 percent collapse in the output of social housing compared to the previous decade.

Yet as Ó Broin explains, the effects of credit liberalization on house prices were “more delayed than in Britain,” where the Thatcher government was engaged in a mass sell-off of council housing. By the time prices started creeping upward, financial deregulation and banking standardization steered through by the European Union in the 1990s exacerbated the trend — in particular the newfound access to cheap credit for Irish financial institutions arising from membership of the single currency.

Housing in Ireland, now thoroughly financialized, was thus central to the boom and bust of the Celtic Tiger. In 1994, the average price of a house in the state was €72,000. By 2004, it had soared to €249,000.

Then came the crash of 2008. Construction, private sector investment, and capital spending vanished overnight. Successive austerity budgets by the Fianna Fáil–led government slashed capital expenditure in social and affordable housing from €1.5 billion in 2008 to €485 million in 2011. After the bailout, when the Irish state lost its fiscal sovereignty to the European Union–European Central Bank–International Monetary Fund troika, social-housing output plummeted, shrinking to a new historic low of 642 units in 2014.

Getting Boomier

Meanwhile, housing affordability became a growing problem in the private rental sector, which had expanded during the Celtic Tiger as investors flooded into the market through buy-to-let mortgages. Rents in the state ballooned by 68 per cent between 2010 and 2021. Across the EU as a whole during that period, rents rose by just 16 per cent.

By explicit design of government policy, the latest phase of the crisis has increasingly been fueled by investment from what scholars call asset-manager capitalism.

In 2014, the introduction of the landlord-friendly Housing Assistance Payment led, as Ó Broin notes, to a situation whereby “non-subsidised renters were being crowded out of the private rental sector by increasing numbers of social housing tenants.” He describes this as ground zero for the terrifying excesses of the homelessness crisis. All the while, house prices were rocketing skyward, squeezing prospective home-buyers into an ever-larger pool of tenants.

By explicit design of government policy, the latest phase of the crisis has increasingly been fueled by investment from what scholars call asset-manager capitalism. In the words of Rory Hearne, real estate investment trusts (REITS) and similar funds of that kind desire the creation of “a permanent renting class,” out of which they can wrench endless rents.

The economist Josh Ryan-Collins observes that this state-sponsored swarming of asset-management institutions around real estate in Ireland is a global phenomenon, as the “wall of liquidity created by Quantitative Easing” resulted in a search for “high yielding, but safe assets.” When those engaged in this search made it to Ireland, they set their sights on distressed commercial assets that were being held by Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency (NAMA).

Now that the market for commercial assets is contracting, the “wall of liquidity” has moved into the domain of residential development. Deploying scorched-earth investment strategies, these institutional landlords — who bought just seventy-six units in Ireland in 2010 — scooped up 5,132 homes in 2019, and now own more than forty-five thousand across the country.

Put simply, the private rental sector is completely broken, blighted by severe supply shortages and unaffordable, exploitative rents. Various rent subsidy schemes for social-housing tenants also drain close to €1 billion from the exchequer to fill the coffers of private landlords. Only harebrained schemes to line the pockets of developers are forthcoming from the government. The crisis thus rages on with no end in sight.

To make matters worse, the coalition government, in full knowledge of the scale of the crisis and the breadth and depth of hardship, has failed to spend over €1 billion of its housing budget over the last three years. Of perhaps greater concern is the unforgivable refusal of local authorities to spend 90 percent of their allocated affordable housing budget across 2021 and 2022. But if the system appears to be at a tipping point, then where are the main, viable solutions coming from on the Irish left?

Alternatives

On behalf of Sinn Féin, Ó Broin has put forward various proposals, mapping out in detail the most compelling reformist alternative. This vision closely resembles the housing policies supported by the strongest socialist force in the Dáil, People Before Profit (PBP). PBP’s ideas differ from those of Ó Broin in making an explicit call for rents to be set at a percentage of take-home pay and advocating the nationalization of all dwellings owned by corporate landlords. Few on the Left would resist such moves to radically rebalance the system.

On behalf of Sinn Féin, Eoin Ó Broin has put forward various proposals, mapping out in detail the most compelling reformist alternative.

So what are Ó Broin’s solutions? Chiefly, in the medium to long term, “the expansion of public housing on a scale not seen in the history of the State,” with something in the order of an additional 230,000 public housing units over the next ten years. Ideally, he argues, this would be led by resurgent local authorities that had been reassigned the power to build and build. Developments would be mixed-tenure and mixed-income, as well as world-class from the point of view of amenities and architecture. The housing movement also sees a constitutional right to housing as an imperative.

Ó Broin’s most interesting policy idea may be his lease-holding suggestion. Firstly, he argues, “the land on which the affordable purchase home sits should never be sold, rather it should be leased to the homeowner indefinitely at no or low cost.” Secondly, to avert re-commodification, it should not be possible to sell the property on the private market. A slightly diluted version of this model of affordable housing has already been developed, on a micro-scale, by Ó Cualann Cohousing Alliance in Dublin since 2017.

According to Ó Broin, public-private partnerships, sales of public land, private rental subsidies, and long-term leasing arrangements “all introduce ever greater levels of profit maximisation” and should be phased out of the public housing sector. To address the short-term affordability crisis as we await the largest house-building program in the state’s history, O Bróin has proposed an immediate three-year rent freeze, which would replace the existing, unfit-for-purpose Rent Pressure Zones.

To achieve a reduction in existing rents, he also wishes to introduce a refundable tax relief, pegged to “8.3 percent of rent paid in the previous year.” A three-year rent freeze, combined with a refundable tax relief alongside an ambitious program of public house-building, should in Ó Broin’s view see “private rental supply and in turn rents start to return to pre-peak levels by the time the freeze and relief expire.”

Even if these policies are successful, should the limit of our ambition, against a backdrop of hyperinflated rents and stagnating wages, be to return the cost of rent to precrisis levels? For Sinn Fein at least, that seems to be the case.

Supply Is Not Enough

Other policy interventions called for by Ó Broin include greater tenant participation in policy formulation and decision-making as well as far-reaching land reform. The latter could, he maintains, be tackled by actively increasing the stock of publicly owned land, reintroducing credit controls, and reviewing the current vacant tax rate. More broadly, he wants a reconsideration of how “land speculation is financed and taxed” in order to “end the corrosive impact of speculative investment in land on the housing system.”

The continued use of Irish housing as an asset class by international asset-management institutions deepens the links between the domestic housing system and global financial markets. For economist Ann Pettifor, the main “propellant” of this crisis is not supply shortages but an excess of finance. House prices will fall, she has argued, “when the propellant is withdrawn — and flows of finance decline.”

There is a serious engagement with the history of financialization in the interventions of Ó Broin, Hearne, and others. However, they fail to fully connect the financial exuberance that underpins the current economic order in Ireland to the need for a reformed housing system. Extra supply will not resolve everything.

Irish housing activism must make arguments that challenge the entire edifice of housing commodification and Irish capitalism.

We should therefore place greater emphasis on land reforms. We should also give more consideration to whether a continuation of the current Irish economic model — based on an overreliance on foreign direct investment, with Ireland as an intermediary zone between US and European capital — will allow for the kinds of reforms that are required, and not simply bake further instability and pricing flux into the system.

As the example of Finland has shown, the policy of Housing First — giving homeless people a home unconditionally, preferably with integrated support in a context of higher supply — can work and come close to ending different types of homelessness. It is also necessary to rein in the brutal predations of landlordism through regulation and possibly new taxes.

A common narrative suggests that this whole crisis was not a necessary outcome of Irish economic policy in general but rather a housing-policy failure in particular, which arises from the misjudgments of politicians, not any inner logic of capital. If not for those misjudgments, everything might be okay.

However, this reasoning is seriously flawed and myopic. Irish housing activism must make arguments that challenge the entire edifice of housing commodification and Irish capitalism.

Housing Activism

A militant uprising in the style of the nineteenth-century Land Wars seems unlikely, and not only because those struggles arose from the specific historical conditions of post-famine rural Ireland. It is also because Sinn Féin, on the brink of real power for the first time in the South, has effectively monopolized the debate on an alternative model, ably assisted by housing activists, the socialist left, and even some social democrats in other parties.

Postcrash Ireland witnessed a new wave of extra-parliamentary housing activism.

Over the past decade, however, there have been real echoes of the Land Wars on the ground, particularly in Dublin. Postcrash Ireland witnessed a new wave of extra-parliamentary housing activism, from Housing Action Now to Home Sweet Home to Take Back the City. These campaign groups emerged to build a counternarrative on the housing crisis and engaged in forms of direct action such as the occupation of vacant buildings. Many were connected to the Right2Water campaign, Ireland’s largest grassroots mobilization so far this century.

Formed in 2019, Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), the only tenants’ union in Ireland, has gone from strength to strength, accumulating members across the island on an all-Ireland basis. Along with the inherent difficulty in organizing atomized tenants, Irish tenant politics, in the judgement of Michael Byrne, suffers from political centralization, which moves sites of organized conflict away from the city or town to central government.

This is an obstacle CATU must overcome, but it is not helped by the passivity of the trade-union movement and the pacifying effects on the housing movement of NGOs. A number of small charities that rely heavily on state funding are among the loudest voices in the debate, yet simultaneously find themselves unable to advocate for sufficiently radical change because of “service level agreements” and the threat of losing access to funding.

We can see the consequences of this “NGOization” of the response to the housing crisis most starkly in advocacy over homelessness. As some scholars have observed, the Apollo House occupation maintained a rather “restricted focus on homelessness” that “failed to connect up with the wider impacts of the housing crisis.”

Fighting Back

Today, we run the risk of succumbing to the same temptations: focusing our attention on rising homelessness and evictions at the expense of reexamining a wider system that also alienates us in our workplaces and in our everyday interactions with the world around us. As Marcuse and Madden argue, a “truly radical right to housing” cannot be limited to a narrow legal right: it must “comprise a similarly expansive set of political demands”.

Even if a left-leaning coalition led by Sinn Féin comes to power, it would leave the current economic model largely untouched, so activists should not rest on their laurels. Given the scale of the crisis, all actions should be on the table. During the Land Wars, the Whiteboys and Ribbonmen — secret organizations whose tactical repertoires included attacking landlords and their property — attracted notoriety.

But much more recently, at a time when levels of trade-union density and activity were high in Ireland in a European context, tenants still undertook national rent strikes. In 1972 and 1973, tens of thousands of tenants fought back against deteriorating housing conditions and spiraling rents. Powered by a social movement, the Left can confront the beast head on, smashing the neoliberal consensus on housing and cleansing the system of predatory land and property speculation.

The glitz and glamour of Coronation Day will cover it up, but the tax havens of King Charles’s Britain aid and abet multinational corporations — enriching elites at the expense of everyone else.

King Charles III shakes hands with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Leaders Meeting at Marlborough House on May 5, 2023 in London, England. (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

The world’s biggest tax haven empire has a new king. King Charles III will be anointed, blessed, and consecrated on May 6. He is sovereign over Great Britain, the Crown Dependencies, and the British Overseas Territories, which collectively inflict nearly 40 percent of the tax revenue losses around the world.

Britain was starting to spin its web of tax havens around the time Charles was born in the late 1940s. Britain allowed and often encouraged this insidious second empire as many nations were breaking from the shackles of European and British colonialism. Currently, British tax havens aid and abet multinational corporations shifting profits out of the countries where most of the real business happens. Wealthy and powerful individuals are also able to hide money and assets behind the secretive laws of the spider’s web.

The Tax Justice Network — a coalition of activists and scholars campaigning against tax avoidance — sent an open letter to King Charles urging the monarch to address the economic and human cost imposed by the British tax havens over which he is sovereign. The letter details the organization’s latest research, which estimates that British tax havens mete out a total tax loss of more than $189 billion per year on the world. The total tax losses are more than three times the humanitarian aid budget the UN needs this year to help 230 million people living on the brink after multiple disasters.

While Britain’s overseas aid has dwindled in recent years, unwinding the web of tax havens instead would help many governments fulfill the rights of their citizens. If we were to reverse the tax revenue losses caused by the UK spider’s web, there would be thirty-six million more people with access to basic sanitation, eighteen million more people with access to basic drinking water, and almost seven million children could attend school for an extra year, according to the Universities of St Andrews and Leicester modeling tool GRADE.

Yet, the British political establishment doesn’t look ready to reform. Successive Conservative prime ministers and their families have been fingered in leaks and investigations, including the Panama and Pandora Papers. The wife of current British prime minister Rishi Sunak also played the tax game, avoiding an estimated £2.1 million per year in taxes from foreign income.

The British government has also undermined efforts to transform international tax law. For the last sixty years, the UK — along with the exclusive club of the richest nations at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) — has set rules to its own benefit. African states, in an act of defiance, presented a resolution at the UN in November 2022 that paves the way for negotiations on an international tax cooperation framework instead. The UK and its OECD friends unsuccessfully pulled out all the stops to prevent a vote, and spoke out against the resolution, but ultimately joined in its unanimous adoption. They will likely throw many hurdles in the way to stop negotiations from getting off the ground at the UN General Assembly later this year, as their initial input to the Secretary-General Tax Report makes clear.

In his speech to the Commonwealth Heads of Government in Rwanda last year, King Charles, then Prince of Wales, expressed his sorrow over Britain’s “most painful period of history.” “To unlock the power of our common future,” he said, “we must also acknowledge the wrongs which have shaped our past.”

The British royalty’s long reign over these wrongs was succeeded by a new form of plunder, exacted today by Britain’s tax haven empire. King Charles has an opportunity to stop the clock running on this plunder. As the inheritor of the British Crown and its legacy, King Charles could use his unique position to encourage dialogue on UN leadership over international tax rules — a move that could pivot the course and legacies of history — and support the right of African countries to exercise sovereignty over their taxing rights at the UN General Assembly.

At home, the king might rightly argue that he has no business interfering in the UK government’s policies. It may be His Majesty’s Government, but it’s a democratically elected government of its people. We should not expect Charles to outline his positions on the need for the UK finally to meet its commitments to end anonymous companies that make it too easy for criminals and would-be tax evaders to hide assets and illicit money, or to introduce public country-by-country reporting so that multinational companies’ tax abuse remains largely out of sight. In the UK, the reporting would have increased corporate income tax by £2.5 billion per year.

What we can hope for, however, is that the new king will set the tone for the end of his tax haven empire. By acknowledging publicly Britain’s leading global role in tax abuse, and the human costs this imposes all around the world, Charles could make a necessary break from the history of imperial and royal denial. He could point the way to reparative funding for territories that make up the tax haven empire, as well as to those countries in Africa and elsewhere where the empire’s most violent extraction took place.

Extensive slavery routes and sanctioned colonial pillaging all added jewels to the crown over centuries, some of which make appearances at coronations. King Charles himself also has some questionable wealth and tax practices. Without changes in its tax havens and the global tax rules, Britain will continue to rack up its bill of reparations to former colonies.

The British monarchy is a withered husk that should be put out of its misery.

King Charles, then Prince of Wales, reads the Queen’s speech next to her Imperial State Crown in the House of Lords Chamber, during the State Opening of Parliament in the House of Lords at the Palace of Westminster on May 10, 2022 in London, England. (Alastair Grant – WPA Pool / Getty Images)

Despite much officially sanctioned mourning, most Canadians reacted to the death of Queen Elizabeth II with ambivalence. Muted as this response may have been, its emotional scale dwarfed anything elicited by the coronation of Charles III. Today, the British monarchy is a withered husk, the stuff of middlebrow Netflix dramas and condemnatory exposés featuring its own former members. The jig is up, even if the institution officially remains, and whatever legitimacy the institution may have once enjoyed is palpably a thing of the past.

Even before the death of the queen, Canadians’ bond with their formal head of state was less than intimate. Polled by the Dominion Institute in 2009, a full three-quarters didn’t even realize the title belonged to her to begin with, a clear reflection of the monarchy’s effective nonexistence in Canadian civic life. Over the past decade or so, public support for the maintenance of ties has waned still further, and the latest data suggests no slowing of the trend. On the eve of Charles’ coronation, a survey from the Angus Reid Institute found that a mere 28 percent of Canadians have a favorable view of him, while a full 60 percent don’t want to recognize him as king. Just over half, meanwhile, don’t want their country to remain a constitutional monarchy.

Compared to Australia or Barbados (which declared itself a republic in 2021), Canada has not hosted a strong republican current since the nineteenth century, though dissent against the monarchy has been a sporadic feature of its political landscape. Thanks to Quebec nationalism, the monarchy has tended to be less popular in French Canada, where members of the province’s national assembly have sometimes refused to take the constitutionally mandated loyalty oaths and, in 1976, premier René Lévesque protested the queen’s participation in the Montreal Olympics.

Something similar recently spread to Ontario, where indigenous members of the province’s legislature have refused to sing “God Save the Queen.” After the death of Queen Elizabeth last year, indigenous MPP Sol Mamakwa and half of his caucus colleagues from the social democratic Ontario New Democratic Party declined to participate in a mandated pledge of allegiance to her successor.

The usual rejoinder to republican sentiment in Canada is that the country’s constitutional arrangements make breaking ties with the monarchy impossible. To “open up the constitution” is to trigger memories of the divisive constitutional negotiations of the early 1980s, which ultimately prompted years of fraught debates over rights, federal and provincial jurisdiction, and national identity. Angus Reid’s polling, however, finds a resounding 88 percent of Canadians are fine with the idea of doing exactly that in the service of formally severing the country from Britain.

Such a process might be technically complicated, and any actual constitutional change would among other things have to take into account existing treaties between the British crown and indigenous people. But a popular referendum could lend it considerable weight, and the available evidence suggests that the pro-monarchy side would struggle to mount a case many would find convincing.

At least some of Canadians’ ambivalence toward the monarchy undoubtedly has to do with the figures who will now be fronting for it. If the House of Windsor had opted to buck tradition and offer up Charles and Camilla’s probable successors instead, there might, at the very least, be a bit more coronation fanfare. Regardless, the institution’s place in Canadian public life would almost certainly remain what it is today: a passive and unimportant presence that few would miss, if they even noticed it was gone to begin with.