Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week March 20, 2011
Posted by Garibaldy in Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week.trackback
A bumper week, with many deserving candidates missing out (like Eamonn Delaney who the abolition of tuition fees, and Marc Coleman, who thinks banking standards are now being set too high).
Is it just me, or has Daniel McConnell has discovered a new branch of mathematics; one where incrememental increases make up for all the cuts and tax rises public sector workers have been hit by?
The perception of a pay freeze and the pension levy hitting public sector workers stands in stark contrast to the reality of State employees in permanent, pensionable jobs. They are still seeing their gross salaries increase because the Government is allowing them to receive increased pay purely on the basis of time served.
Could it be that the word “gross” reflects the reality of the reporting better than the amount of pay actually going into people’s pockets?
Good to see that that massive election victory has not dimmed the quality of contribution we can expect from Shane Ross. In an article that should have been a companion piece to last week’s winner, he tells us the real soloution to our problems. Is it using some of the massive power of the state to create jobs? Don’t be silly. Is it using the publicly-owned companies to generate jobs, wealth and income from trade? Of course not. Is it taxing the wealth created and moved through this country properly? (Indignant splutter). It’s bankruptcy (fair enough on defaulting on the debts of the banking class and property speculators) allied to swapping our masters from Merkel and Sarko to our true friends, O’Bama (copyright Spintered Sunrise) and Elizabeth II, who we can even grovel to on the cheap when they come to visit.
The US and Britain remain our largest trading partners. The month of May will see a visit to Ireland from the heads of state of both nations. We should not yet ask them to bring the royal cheque book or the presidential seal — but we should remind our European partners that if they drive us to bankruptcy, we have older friends elsewhere.
And speaking of last week’s Stupid Statement of the Week, Brendan O’Connor got a mention for arguing that the Celtic Tiger had made Irish people leave their homes and be sociable. This week, proving that even he probably doesn’t worry about consistency in what he writes from one week to the next we get this.
But there is a huge argument to be made that now is a time to look out again to our neighbours and our communities. Maybe it’s time to accept that we might have overdone individualism in this country for the last 10 years, to the point where lots of people of a certain economic status became almost narcissistic. And maybe it’s time for us to start reaching out to each other again, time to rebuild the collective.
Not so much a stupid statement in itself, but some might take it as a demonstration perhaps of how stupid the Sindo columnists think their audience is.
Eamonn Keane has a superb entry this week. What will happen if those nasty Germans, forgetting how the Versailles treaty reparations hurt them, insist, like Shylock, on their pound of flesh in the form of the Republic’s coporation tax? Why the country will turn into Weimar Germany of course.
The consequences of wringing this corporate tax pound of flesh from us are very serious.
Politically, if Enda Kenny surrenders on this he is finished. Secondly, there will be the danger of a rise in extremism. Go back to post- war Germany and see what the punitive Treaty of Versailles created. It will be easy fodder for both far left and right wing elements.
Is it just me, or might there be something deeply distasteful in taking the stereotypical evil, money-grubbing Jew that is Shylock, and using a comparison to him to suggest an Irish Nazism might result? Maybe we can ask Michael McDowell, who talks about the corporation tax argument with the French and Germans in terms of appeasement.
Despite all the Nazi nonsense, this week’s undoubted winner, and also winner of the lack of self-awareness award, is Aengus Fanning.
Now our people are being crucified on the altar of German monetarist dogma which, it seems, we daren’t challenge.
German monetarist dogma caused this mess? Really Aengus?
Never read the Sunday Independent – with one exception : http://tomasoflatharta.com/2011/03/20/enda-wants-a-nicer-cabin-on-the-titanic-gene-kerrigan-gets-it-right/
Irish army personnel are in Afghanistan as part of the imperial invasion force and Shannon is a key logistics node for the U.S. military.
A meek Eamon Gilmore at a news conference with Hilary Clinton in Washington did not answer a question about the possible role of Shannon in the bombing of Libya.
Kenny in Washington met with Treasury Secretary Geithner about the possibility of the Irish Central bank borrowing from the U.S. Fed.
The visits of Queen Liz an President Obama will reinforce Ireland’s involvement in the imperial project.
The IMF/EU deal is now being declared a failure, and default is no longer a dirty word. The ruling oligarchy is desperate for an alternative, but one that does not transcend their regressive ideology. The conservative scribes in the Sunday independent are beginning to reflect this reality.
Eamon Delaney’s article is complete bullshit. The issue with tenure and academic freedom is that attempts are underway to casualise academic staff, which would leave them with less job security than the average private sector worker on a permanent contract. He probably thinks nobody anywhere should ever have a permanent job, but to say this openly is still considered a bit outré – even for the Sindo.
He then elides this issue with an extended moan about overpaid academic staff – all the examples of which turn out to be managers/senior administrators rather than working academics – and the supposedly shocking statistic that 75% of the education budget goes on pay & pensions. I mean what does he think a university does? It’s like complaining 75% of the health budget goes on healthcare.
Spot on dmfod re education budget. What does he think the costs of most operations public or commercial go on? The plants in the foyer?
McConnell’s story is a re-hash of a hardy perennial of the ‘Independent’ stable: public sector increments. At this stage you could almost say it marks the arrival of spring when either the Indo or the Sindo publish this particular story, as it’s around this time of year, every year.
The 250 million in increments paid out last year equate to an average of about eur 48 per month, if you take a tax, pension and prsi clawback of 20%. Of course, whatever paltry gains made from increments have been blown away by the Universal Social Charge. But McConnell and his ilk have no time for such qualifications.
By the way, and I’m open to correction, increments are afaik revenue neutral. Now It could well be they’ll be done away with but they don’t increase the costs of the public sector wage bill. Furthermore many commercial enterprises of my experience have annual pay reviews which are essentially nominal and/or operate as increments. Given that public sector increments function across time periods, ie annual for five or so years and then a couple of subsequent long service ones every five or so years well they’re not that handsome.
That increments are revenue neutral just re-iterates what a pile of horse s**t McConnell’s so-called story is. That annual pay reviews are structurally embedded in large parts of the private sector (good point) also undercuts McConnell’s garbage. One wonders what our descendants will make of the Sindo’s steady output of lies in a context where fact-checking is comparatively easy to any computer literate soul.
You’re right. Problem is that you fact check, and I fact check – otherwise we’d be subjected to a withering hail of criticism from certain quarters, but most people reading the Sindo won’t go to the trouble.
‘Eamon Delaney’s article is complete bullshit. The issue with tenure and academic freedom is that attempts are underway to casualise academic staff, which would leave them with less job security than the average private sector worker on a permanent contract.’
I agree, mostly. the problem is some of those who signed up to the academic freedom manifesto are/were not exactly renowned for either, hard work themselves, or standing up for lower paid academics. Delaney mentions one, a very right-wing sort, who he probably loved in UCD, but who would be a very bad example of how junior staff have to work now.
The days of writing one book, designing one course and then churning the same shite out for the next 20 years are gone thankfully. Students deserve better.
However they have been replaced, without a peep of protest from most senior staff, by low wages, admin and other work thrown onto junior staff and ‘contracts’ of six months, 10 months, a year etc. There are literally dozens of PhD students who will jump at these jobs, thereby driving down conditions further.
Delaney is a prick of the highest order, but anyone who has had to sit through a meeting involving UCD lecturers won’t be chomping at the bit to dfend them.
“the problem is some of those who signed up to the academic freedom manifesto are/were not exactly renowned for either, hard work themselves, or standing up for lower paid academics”
That’s a) an ad hominem argument and b) falls into a trap beloved of divide and conquer strategists everywhere in implying those better off ought to be equally immiserated, rather than attempting to raise the conditions of all to the same high level.
I agree on the contracts issue, although the days when PhD students got temporary contracts are fast being replaced by a slave labour system obliging postgraduate students to deliver lectures, skivvy for senior staff etc. as part of their studentship. This obviously reduces even the number of temporary contracts, thereby further undermining pay and conditions.
You’re right most senior lecturers were quite happy with this arrangement, but they now seem to be realising that casualisation is coming knocking at their door too with demands to renegotiate all contracts. It’s a pity it took a direct threat to their own interests for them to get moving, but now some of them are finally copping on to what’s been happening for the last decade or more, there’s no point sulking about their previous lack of concern for junior staff.
I’m also inherently sceptical about claims academics did nothing in the past, and even if some of them did there doesn’t seem to have been any dramatic improvement in standards since neoliberalism started working everyone to the bone as an article of faith. Constantly pressurising people can make them work faster and harder, but it may actually be counterproductive for creativity.
dmfod, I agree there’s a danger in looking back and using past experience to guide present responses and if full time staff are finally waking up belatedly to the threat that they also face well well and good on them, but albeit in a different institution or three I’ve had a not dissimilar experience to Too cool for school across the last decade at third level.
In part this is structural, once people move into full time positions there’s a subtle pressure to detach from their former part time peer group. I’ve had the genuinely weird experience of people not telling me that they’ve gone full time when I’ve known perfectly well about it.
I think academics did do something in the past, though some managed to get away with a lot less than most of us would have liked. That said I also agree that there’s not necessarily been an improvement.
dmfod, I am not arguing for immiseration all round. But I could not keep a straight face listening to people on 100,000 grand plus worrying about academic freedom, when they have used that freedom to preach neo-liberal bullshit themselves, along with the Cosgrave worship that passes for historical writing. Mind you, a lot of the younger PhD’s are no better, and some of them would be first in line to scab in a strike situation.
Aside from that everything’s great, thanks!
Btw, delaney has some cheek, isn’t he the guy who made up a 1916 record by fooling some 80 year-old man?