Bit’s and Pieces… Understatement on Mitt Romney’s income, Newt Gingrich, teachers and social media, self-employment and more… January 27, 2012
Posted by WorldbyStorm in British Politics, Economy, Irish Politics, The Left, US Politics.trackback
Let’s start with some appropriate understatement. On KCRW’s To The Point, in interview Brody Mullins of the WSJ answered the following question:
Tell us a little bit more about his income over two years… where does it come from?
Really just from investments.. he gives a couple of speeches a year and from that earns a paltry $500,000… but most just investments… some from overseas… and that’s why he enjoys such a low tax rate… Bush era tax cuts, income derived from investment is taxed at 15% whereas regular income is taxed much higher up to 30%.
Who says Americans don’t do irony?
Also noted on To The Point, when Newt Gingrich took offence during the debate just prior to the North Carolina primary at questions over allegations of open marriage proposals and such like surfacing in the media why wasn’t the point made that it was he who had done precisely the same during the 1990s in relation to Bill Clinton at precisely the time he himself was having an affair – and given that Gingrich’s complaint appears not to be the veracity of these allegations but the fact they’re aired at all the issue of the former is irrelevant.
Here’s something that amazed me. I don’t usually feel my jaw drop reading articles, but this was something else. A range of examples of teachers whose use of social media has shaded into something quite dubious. Actually, strike that, very dubious indeed.
More than one in 10 school teachers accused of misconduct last year had used social networking sites and email to forge inappropriate relationships with their pupils, an analysis of disciplinary cases has found.
Facebook, Twitter, online chatrooms and emails were used to befriend children in 43 of the cases brought to the regulator, the General Teaching Council for England in 2011. Eighteen teachers were given prohibition orders and struck off, while 14 were suspended. In all, the GTC heard 336 cases of “unacceptable professional conduct” last year.
And what of this?
A disciplinary case brought against an English teacher, Lee Butcher, who taught at Garforth community college in Leeds came to light only after a pupil’s mother read parts of a Facebook exchange between the teacher and a former pupil.
And the details?
An investigation found that Butcher had had “inappropriate and sexually explicit” conversations with the 16-year-old over the site for three months. They included comments about the former pupil posing for erotic photos over a webcam.
During the exchanges with the girl, he tried to make sure she was alone and asked her not to tell anyone about them. The parent who discovered the exchanges believed they had also been emailed to other pupils.
There were no criminal proceedings, but Butcher admitted unacceptable professional conduct. A GTC committee reprimanded him, saying: “Teachers must not establish or seek to establish social contact with pupils, children or young people for the purpose of securing a friendship or to pursue or strengthen a relationship. That extends to the use of social networking sites such as Facebook.”
He was given a 12-month suspension order, from May 2011, but not struck off.
Some would think that that was a very generous. But the question that raises its head about the cases quoted is ‘how could any of the teachers have a sense that these were appropriate behaviours?
The curious thing is that as someone lecturing in 3rd level I’ve had discussions with colleagues about these issues. Tutorials take place in rooms with windows, or doors slightly ajar. There’s no communication on matters relating to none work related matters by email or social media and so on [I’m not saying it never happens but of those who were discussing the issue the consensus was that these are, again, inappropriate behaviours]. So the idea as expressed by one headteacher that…
The difficulty is that we didn’t grow up with social media, and therefore we fear it and don’t understand how our children interact with it. It’s easy to see the negatives, hard to understand how to protect the children – and very easy to ignore the positives.
… is a bit hard to take. The internet has been an increasingly pervasive part of life for over a decade and a half now for most people. It didn’t fall from the sky last year. That’s plenty of time for schools and other institutions to set out usage policies and so forth. But even if they hadn’t how could teachers believe that non work relationships were appropriate one way or another – whether conducted largely or not on social media. Duty of care and other phrases spring to mind.
Also in the Guardian John Harris has a good piece on how the rhetoric of self-employment, while find for some, is arguably a cul-de-sac for many others. An expedient one for the Conservatives though given that slipping towards self-employment alters the nature of the relationship with the state.
This week David Cameron will once again make a show of his support for an initiative called StartUp Britain, after paying tribute to its ethos in his “popular capitalism” speech last week: “If you take a risk, quit your job, create the next Google or Facebook and wind up a billionaire, then more power to your elbow.”
This is typically extravagant stuff, but the obvious riposte is how many Google’s or Facebooks are there? One each by my count, so effectively a couple of risk takers can look forward to the ‘rewards’. And the other risk takers? Harris references a CIPD report…
As happened in the Thatcher years, we are awash with such talk, just when going it alone is more difficult than ever – and, moreover, the grim truth about most new self-employment has just been revealed. “The additional self-employed are unlike self-employed people as a whole in terms of gender, hours of work, occupation and sector of employment,” says the CIPD’s report. Tellingly, of those who make up the net rise in self-employment since 2008, 90% are part-time. Moreover, the report’s author, John Philpott, talks about people “without skills, picking up whatever bits and pieces of work are available”, whose emergence “hardly suggests a surge in genuine entrepreneurial zeal.”
It’s the basic problem. Whatever about enthusiasm only a small fraction of those moving into the category – by the stats available – will make much a decent living in it. Only a tiny fraction will do much better.
Not that the Conservatives will worry overmuch.
The Tories are on 40%, up three percentage points from December, while Labour has drifted down one to 35%. The Liberal Democrats are on 16%, up one.
I tend to see Milliband as a weak enough leader, so on one level 35 per cent is good enough. But it’s not great, and against this particular Tory led government it’s nowhere near great enough. The next election is still some years away but one wonders what thinking is going on inside the LP currently as to how to change those numbers. Mind you, even the polling picture is fairly mixed still…
A YouGov poll for the Sunday Times recorded a five-point Conservative lead, whereas ComRes for the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror now have the two main parties level-pegging, after the same company recorded a four-point Labour lead in December.
Though it seems that one Boris Johnson is set to enter the Commons in the next couple of years. Can this be true and if so what of his bid to retain the Mayor of London role? He himself rules it out…
“I really don’t see how I can run for Parliament in 2015. Let’s kill this. I’m ruling myself out.”
But Reigate may appear a more attractive prospect if Johnson finds himself with a bit more time on his hands in May. Two successive polls in recent days have given Livingstone a narrow lead.
Nice to have a parachute prepacked and ready, no?
Returning briefly to the US Republican primary contest I’d found a lot of comments on articles online from Ron Paul supporters saying that he was arguing the Golden Rule. Intrigued I have to be honest, I had to look up the Golden Rule. It may be familiar to many of us, albeit formulated in various different ways… [from wiki]:
The “Golden Rule” has been attributed to Jesus of Nazareth: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7:12, see also Luke 6:31). The common English phrasing is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.
But here’s a thing. When Ron Paul tried out a variation on this in explaining his stance on foreign policy to an audience consisting in no small part of Christian evangelicals at the South Carolina primary debate the response was…well, here’s the ABC report…
Paul’s willingness to stand up for what he believes in when it comes to U.S. involvement in foreign countries hurt him repeatedly in Monday’s debate.
The conservative Republican electorate in South Carolina booed Paul’s answers on foreign policy and Texas Gov. Rick Perry even suggested that a gong should have been used to cut Paul off.
Christian evangelicals and an avowedly Christian oriented party booing the Golden Rule.
A bit of consistency lads would go a long way.
On self-employment, I’m self-employed and it suits me ok for the moment, but the point made above about it not being the first choice or a viable option for many/most people has to be stated again and again whenever those entrepreneur-alohics get up on their high horses about being self-made etc. A brief anecdote if I may. In the mid 80s I was working in Britain. My bike was damaged when someone reversed into it with their car while it was locked to a post. I rang around the local bike shops asking if it could be fixed. They all said no and wanted to sell me a new bike. Money was tight so a new bike wasn’t an option. I eventually found a number for a guy who said he would be able to fix it, so I went along with the bike. His “shop” was a small unit in a run down industrial area. The guy was in his 40s I’d say and was waiting for me to arrive after I finished work, say 6:30pm. It was winter and he was sitting infront of a calorgas heater in a half-empty shell of a unit, just a few second-hand bikes for sale around the place. Chatting with him while he bashed my bike back into shape with a hammer (it never worked right after!) he told me he’d been laid off one of the local factories a year earlier and had been unable to find work, so he took on board the Thatcher mantra of getting on his bike (literally!) and starting his own business, selling and fixing bikes, but it wasn’t working out to be the bed of roses he had hoped. I paid him the fiver or whatever he charged me and left him to lock up the unit on a freezing cold damp winter night. 35 years later I can still remember the look in his eyes, that life wasn’t supposed to work out like this, that his hopes and dreams were shattered. And how many of our neighbours are suffering that same collapse at the moment? Ah yes, self-employment, as you say it’s not all Google and Facebook billionaires.
This may be of considerable interest, given discussions here on the past on the tech industry and worker’s rights. Google etc. were operating a cartel to keep employees’ wages down:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-26/apple-google-poaching-case-will-go-forward-u-s-judge-says.html
No surprise there. MNCs in the electronics sector here share information in an annual salary survey which acts to keep them all more or less line across their pay grades. Not quite the free market that their representatives spout in the media.
Just on the subject of hi-tech, very very good article over on CrisisJam about state involvement in technological innovation and how many of the technological advances we take for granted would never have been funded for R&D if it was left to private capital to step up to the plate.
http://www.politico.ie/crisisjam/8239-the-entrepreneurial-state-.html
On teachers and technology: anyone interested in how technology is regarded here in Ireland the Teaching Council have published a new set of draft guidelines for teachers professional conduct which are pretty dismissive of the whole idea that teachers have any sense of right and wrong, on tech or anything else. Also twitter is being used very positively here. Check out the Hashtag #edchatie or this http://wp.me/s1N9yC-42
That sounds great, and fair dues over the coverage in the media. I found email essential over he past fou years for keeping in contact with students and also in keeping them focused.
“Chancellor Angela Merkel pushed strongly since the outset of talks on the treaty for signatories to adopt a “golden rule” on debt and deficits in “constitutional or equivalent law”. Dr Merkel’s stance faced resistance from Ireland and other member states, who sought leeway to introduce the rule in secondary legislation.”-http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2012/0127/1224310807555.html
The golden rule? Those who have the gold, rule.
The curious thing is that as someone lecturing in 3rd level I’ve had discussions with colleagues about these issues.
I can recall something Clive James wrote, probably more than thirty years ago now, to the effect that in every university faculty he’d ever known, there was at least one man who saw nothing wrong with trying to screw the prettier students. (I’m trying to recall his exact wording, and I think I’m quite close.) I doubt it’s as bad now as it was then, but there must still be quite a lot of this about.
I think there’s an element of truth in that. And it’s often covered up by the trope ‘everyone is over 18′. True, but an evasion of the power relationships at work.
That’s true of the old guys, but not anyone my age or younger. In my experience, anyway.
It’s true in other situations as well, where older men have such authority and power over the lives and fortunes of younger people on the bottom rung. I’ve seen it in action.
On the other hand, the young women (sometimes men!) involved get bored and move on quickly once the power relationship ends. I’d be hesitant to say that they’re scarred by the experience, though it doesn’t exactly do any good for the morale of other people in the workplace.