Reflecting over the Repeal the 8th March in Dublin yesterday I think one of the stand out messages I came across on social media was this poem by Tasha Kerry called My Womb is a War Zone.

My womb is a war zone,
A battleground
Where children die;
My children,
Not by my hand,
By the cast of a die
In a rigged game,
The soft walls of my flesh
Turned into rock
And a hard place.
 
My womb is a time bomb,
A hot-button topic,
Where politicians scrap
To score points from
Chauffeur-driven cars.
They are protected
From the likes of me:
Woman
With no money, no love,
No choice.
 
My womb is a plane ride,
A last-minute deal
Where the unborn
Travel for free.
Above the clouds,
In no man’s land
My flesh is allowed
To breath, and it screams;
“Take me home,
I’m lost”.
 
My womb is an old tomb
Cloaked by heavy lids
Where low murmurs
Debate my future,
Ignoring my pleas
For what’s fair;
My chance to bloom,
My choice, my voice,
My right to my life
And my graceful death.
 
My womb is the last-born,
A trail-blazer
Where Irish sisters unite
To call the nation
To rise and repeal,
Call the ghosts out
From under the carpet,
Call the unknowns back
From the runway,
Call our truths home.
 
 
Tasha Kerry is a writer @xsbabble (http://xsbabble.com/)Picture by @CiaraMPSI

This is an article by Jacob Sullum called:
‘Trump's Putin Praise Highlights His Authoritarianism’, published by TownHall.

​Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Tim Kaine, use the same word to describe Donald Trump's praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin: "Unpatriotic." Satisfying as it may be for Democrats to deploy that adjective against the nominee of a party known for its flag-waving jingoism, it is neither accurate nor adequate in describing what's truly alarming about Trump's admiration of the Russian strongman.

"He is really very much of a leader," Trump told NBC's Matt Lauer last week. "I mean, you can say, 'Oh, isn't that a terrible thing.' The man has very strong control over a country."

Trump, who also cited Putin's "82 percent approval rating," allowed that Russia has "a very different system" of government, and "I don't happen to like the system." Nevertheless, he said, "in that system, he's been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader."

Clinton slammed Trump for "taking the astonishing step of suggesting that he preferred the Russian president to our American president," which she called "unpatriotic and insulting." Kaine said the "irrational hostility toward President Obama, which started the very first day of his term from some of these people, is unpatriotic, and we've got to call it out."

Note how Clinton and Kaine equated Trump's insult to Obama with an insult to the nation. If you hate Obama, they suggested, you hate America.

Teddy Roosevelt, no stranger to jingoism, thought conflating love of country with love of the president is the opposite of patriotism. "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong," he wrote in 1918, "is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."

Patriotism is in any case a dubious virtue at best. An emotional attachment to the land in which you happen to be born is natural, but when elevated to a moral principle it easily morphs into state worship and warmongering.

As a guide to judgment, patriotism is utterly subjective and unreliable. If it is unpatriotic for an American to say Putin is a better leader than Obama, it is equally unpatriotic for a Russian to say Obama is a better leader than Putin.

The problem with Trump's comments about Putin is not that they show a lack of patriotism. The problem is that they reflect authoritarian instincts no president of a liberal democracy should have.

Trump cannot credibly claim to dislike Russia's system of government while admiring Putin's strong leadership, because that system is what makes his strong leadership possible. In Russia's "highly centralized, authoritarian political system," the State Department notes, the executive branch dominates the legislature, pressures the judiciary, and routinely flouts notional guarantees of civil liberties.

According to the department's 2015 report on human rights in Russia, "the government increasingly instituted a range of measures to suppress dissent," including politically motivated arrests and prosecutions; discriminated against sexual, religious, and ethnic minorities; and "failed to take adequate steps to prosecute or punish most officials who committed abuses, resulting in a climate of impunity." The report says torture by police was common, there were "numerous extrajudicial killings," and "corruption was widespread" in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

Freedom House, which classifies Russia as "not free," reports that Putin's regime last year "intensified its tight grip on the media, saturating the information landscape with nationalist propaganda while suppressing the most popular alternative voices." The report also notes that "the judiciary lacks independence from the executive branch," "there is little transparency and accountability in the day-to-day workings of the government," and "vague laws on extremism grant the authorities great discretion to crack down on any speech, organization, or activity that lacks official support."
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Trump's Putin partiality is of a piece with his praise of the strength shown by autocrats in Iraq, China, and North Korea. It does not bode well for his performance as president.

Jacob Sullum is a columnist with Creators Syndicate and a senior editor at Reason Magazine. He focuses most of his writings on shrinking the realm of politics and expanding individual choice. 
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Illustration by Bill Bramhall called Barfback Mountain 

This article is a little long but worth a read, originally titled 'The Cold War Is Over' written by By Peter Hitchens

Like most Englishmen, I grew up with a natural dislike of “abroad” and a belief in the inferiority of all foreign things. I think it took me five visits to France before I began to regret leaving that lovely country rather than to rejoice at my return to our safe and familiar island.

It often strikes me as quite funny that I spent so much of my life as a foreign correspondent, a profession for which I am so unfitted. When I went to live in Moscow in 1990, I felt that I had somehow betrayed my native soil. (I was born in the middle of the Mediterranean, but these are technicalities.) I still recall a brief return from the U.S.S.R. to my hometown of Oxford, during which I was asked for directions by an American tourist. “You must live here,” he said, impressed by my historically detailed advice. “No,” I confessed with a strange feeling of guilt. “I live in Moscow.” For the first time in my life I had chosen to live in foreign parts, and very strange and hostile parts they seemed to be.

Yet the experience of living in that sad and handsome place brought me to love Russia and its stoical people, to learn some of what they had suffered and see what they had regained. And so, as all around me rage against the supposed aggression and wickedness of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, I cannot join in. Despite the fact that Moscow has abandoned control of immense areas of Europe and Asia, self-appointed experts insist that Russia is an expansionist power. Oddly, this “expansion” only seems to be occurring in zones that Moscow once controlled, into which the E.U. and NATO, supported by the U.S., have sought to extend their influence.

The comparison of today’s Russia to yesterday’s U.S.S.R. is baseless. I know this, and rage inwardly at my inability to convey my understanding to others. Could this be because I have been unable to communicate the change of heart I underwent during my more than two years in the Russian capital?

Let me try again, starting in a Moscow street called Bolshaya Ordynka. The existence of this place, at the end of the Soviet era, was a great shock to me. Moscow in 1990 was at first sight a festival of concrete. Its cityscape was the Leninist word made flesh, arrogant proletarian lumps deliberately defying all concepts of beauty and grace, the very suburbs of hell.

But Bolshaya Ordynka was not like this. Here was the Moscow of Leo Tolstoy, with trees and low classical houses, not ordained by some gigantic bureaucratic plan, but sweetly proportioned to human needs. On it stood a church with the haunting name of “The Consolation of All Sorrows,” something badly needed at that time of nervous shortage, abrupt catastrophe, and the ever-present fear of a midnight putsch with tanks grinding along the streets. (In August 1991 I woke from a fretful sleep to find those tanks coming down my Moscow avenue, Kutuzovsky Prospekt, barrels aslant in the morning light, throwing up dust as they tore the road to bits.)

This modest street, Bolshaya Ordynka, could outdo Paris in loveliness. Here, under many grimy and bloody layers of Leninism, neglect, and about three wars, lay Russia, a very different thing from the U.S.S.R. Unlike the U.S.S.R., it was profoundly Christian, rather glorious, and no particular threat to the West. Perhaps the Bolsheviks had not, after all, destroyed and desecrated absolutely everything, and a lost nation was waiting quietly to return to life.

The name of the thoroughfare means “The Street of the Great Horde,” and refers to the Golden Horde, the Mongol power that used to send its emissaries along this very road to demand their tribute from medieval Muscovy. Here is a difference to be noted. My country boasts that it has not been invaded for one thousand years. The U.S. has not really been invaded at all, unless you count Britain’s 1814 rampage through Washington, DC (almost exactly two years after Napoleon Bonaparte had made a far more destructive and less provoked attack upon Moscow). But Russia is invaded all the time—by the Tatars, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Swedes, the French, us British, the Germans, the Japanese, the Germans again: They keep coming. Nor are these invasions remote history. On the main airport road into Moscow, at Khimki, stands a row of steel dragon-teeth anti-tank barriers, commemorating the arrival there, before Christmas 1941, of Hitler’s armies. The Nazis could see Ivan the Great’s tall white and gold bell tower glittering amid the snow in the Kremlin, but they never got any nearer.
​

It is widely agreed that globalisation has bought immense benefits. But it is also recognised that these benefits are not equally distributed.

Last week’s Apple decision demonstrates the complexity of the issue of distributing the benefits of globalisation. The Irish Government, faced with a windfall of some €13 billion, appears to have sided with the world’s largest and most profitable company against the welfare of its citizens.

It was believed once that countries initially became more unequal as they became more prosperous, but that all would then benefit from globalisation. This theory, which was correct at the time for the US, is wrong.

The fact is that globalisation brings increasing inequality. Soaring inequality can only be addressed by governments, and increasingly only by governments co-operating internationally.

The dilemma of the Irish Government is whether it acts to increase or reduce inequality by siding with its citizens or with corporations. The issue is far more complex than this, but the Apple case brings to a head the unequal struggle between unchallenged, powerful corporations and sovereign governments trying to represent their citizens.

It is unequal because, to date, governments have sided with corporations and, in Ireland, we appeared to gain from that tax strategy. But growing inequality and corporate tax avoidance on such a scale has brought the issue to a head.

Apple has staggering cash reserves, but it still borrowed a huge amount in order to offset the interest against taxation. It and most multinationals no longer believe in paying tax. For them, tax is a business cost, not a payment for public services.

Apple’s iPhone, in particular, has several key features that were invented in publicly funded labs – which were supported by taxes.

With globalisation, transfer pricing has allowed companies to easily avoid taxation with the assistance of their “professional” advisers – the Big Four accounting firms.

Until multinationals begin to see tax as a legitimate, lawful and morally responsible payment for public services, then international tax avoidance on an industrial scale will continue.

Up until now, the EU’s directorate-general for taxation negotiated with the Big Four and multinationals on taxation issues. But it took a wildcard –commissioner Margrethe Vestager – to seriously disrupt these cosy chats when she made the Apple ruling.

The EU now looks as if it may be finally working for its citizens!

Tax avoidance cheats us out of funds that could be used for the public benefit. It is out of control. And wherever you find tax avoidance, you are likely to find the big accounting firms.

These firms have had a major influence on policymaking in taxation. The partners and their professional organisations, which they dominate, have pursued an anti-tax and particularly an anti-progressive tax policy at every opportunity.

Thus another issue raised by the Apple case is whether there is a revolving door between the Irish Revenue Commissioners and the Big Four?

The Government has a real moral dilemma. It must act in the interests of its citizens. The Irish State has demonstrated that it is not powerless in the global economy. It was able to rescue all of its six banks and most of its developers, and it put the economy back on course, albeit with some external help.

The EU has now shown multinationals that such levels of tax avoidance, while legal, will no longer be tolerated.

The Government should do what is morally correct: take the money and invest it in an ambitious capital programme, not on day-to-day spending. It should also develop a sustainable industrial policy that is no longer dependent on the uncertainty of the tax avoidance industry. Ireland has much more to offer.
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Most multinationals, including Apple, invest here for many other good reasons and will continue to do so. If governments cease their “tax wars” and big companies begin to pay a fair tax on profits, inequality will also decline. We should warmly welcome the Apple ruling.
 
This article was written by Paul Sweeney and published in the Irish Times on Monday 5th September (originally titled ‘On Apple tax, State must side with its citizens’). Picture by Rod Clement – Australian Financial Review