Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week February 12, 2012
Posted by Garibaldy in Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week.trackback
We start this week rather surprisingly, with the Sindo doing something useful, namely reminding us of the extent to which recent tax hikes have hit the lowest paid, who collectively in 2011 paid 215% more than they did in 2010. Middle class earners up to 50,000 are also paying more, and as we might expect it is them who get most of the sympathy. Anne Harris identifies these people as Eoghan Harris’s “coping class” and the “squeezed middle” so beloved of the Irish Times. And how are we to recognise the lower and middle income earners who make up the squeezed middle?
These are the people who give a nation its life force, who, with their ordinary decent human activities like spending, starting small businesses, having legitimate ambitions for their children, even dreaming their dreams, could be relied on to lead the fight against recession. Now their libido is drained. They see themselves as a castrated generation consigned to paying off negative equity — or other debt — until they die.
If she meant small businesspeople, why not just say so, instead of dressing it up with all the other nonsense? Be proud of who you are; someone who, Mitt Romney-like, doesn’t care about the poor, only the middle class.
At least Eilis O’Hanlon seems to be developing more self awareness. Perhaps she’s just started reading her own paper.
THOSE who work in the media like to think that they are more rational and informed than the great unwashed who pay their wages. In fact, they’re prone to exactly the same outbursts of irrational panic and groupthink as the rest.
Declan Doyle is not a regular Sindo writer, but a civil servant venting his spleen against the Croke Park agreement. Some of what he says makes sense. But most of it doesn’t. Here is a mixture of sense and stupidity.
Leaving aside the fact that the Dail was completely sidelined by this anti-democratic shadow government, we now know, that at least in part, some of their late-night ‘sessions’ in Government Buildings were spent planning trips to Florida and Hawaii on the Fas slush fund, or arranging places on semi-State boards for the boys.
He’s right about the abuses and to some extent the issue of jobs for the boys, but he’s mistaken where the anti-democratic shadow government is. It used to be in the FF tent at the Galway races. Now you’ll find it congregating round NAMA.
This week’s editorial mixes up the effects of neo-liberalism and the government acting on behalf of the bourgeoisie with Soviet socialism. An easy mistake to make obviously.
Nothing typifies this new attitude more than Nama where there is a distinct absence of political knights queuing up to behead a hydra that combines sclerotic Soviet Bloc economics with the bureaucratic inertia of the Irish public sector.
I assume John Drennan has used this week to play a practical joke or indulge in a form of literary performance art. You would hope so anyway.
It is not just a feature of country living either, for one of the most corrosive features of what is evolving into a dangerously cowardly Government, is that each piece of bad news (and others might call the bad news reform) is prefaced by an apologetic twisting of imaginary caps and a whine of “the Troika, your honour, made me do it”.
It is a measure of the utter moral bankruptcy of our political elite, and the electorate that chooses and then curses them, that apparently only colonial occupation, by either the Black and Tans or the Troika, forces us to act in a morally responsible fashion.
I think that “coping class” (or perhaps “coping classes”) may be a construction of the UK Daily Telegraph, rather than originating with Harris. Obviously the content of the phrase – that the worst-off are in fact people who struggle to pay school fees, because the people below them are all right on welfare – is the same.
Carol Hunt has a column quoting the Telegraph citing Harris as its author from 2007.
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/carol-hunt-well-only-be-pushed-so-far-enda-theres-nothing-left-to-take-from-us-3016993.html
Good Lord. Well I stand corrected.
Serendipity that you ask the question the day she answers it. And tells us what is needed for a revolution too. Although George Washington as middle class might be pushing it a bit.
Skip the Harris Drudge, go straight to Gene Kerrigan’s Column:
Enda’s mad transitions make no sense
Confusion seems to be the order of the day when it comes to implementing policy :
“LET’S open two official documents and see what they tell us. Then, let’s consider the recent behaviour of the Taoiseach and some of his ministers.
From this, I believe, we could reach the rather chilling conclusion that this Government is as incompetent as the disastrous Cowen regime of 2008-2011. Personally, on the evidence, I’m wondering if the Taoiseach is just plain mad. Consider the following.”
Read on and discuss :
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/gene-kerrigan/gene-kerrigan-endas-mad-transitions-make-no-sense-3016984.html
It wouldn’t be a very long Sindo stupid statement of the week if it was about Gene Kerrigan being the problem.
plus one!
I suspect Creighton is being a bit jesuitical in talking of “discussions about a write-down.”
This could cover extensive negotiations with our European partners in relation to percentages, timescales, conditions and other such parameters. Equally, it could cover a conversation that never got much further than “Will you let us off a bit of what we owe?” “Piss off”
Kerrigan is wrong on one point: Lucinda Creighton will not be discussing anything with our European partners. She may be Minister for European Affairs, but one must then consider that most of the European issues (i.e. bonds, debts, and treaty changes) have been transferred to the Taoiseach, Tanaiste and our two Finance ministers. Lucinda is only responsible for any excess on that – which is not very much at all, at all.
Well, in fairness now, she may well be briefed by Fine Gael’s partners in CDU. Lucinda might come away from that thinking it was a discussion
Perhaps the most important line in that Kerrigan piece is this:
Even if they were our legitimate debts, writing down crushing debt is a standard route to solvency.
It’s amazing the lengths that economists and economics commentators have gone, over the past few years, to avoid seeing this elementary point.
There’s also some useful observations from Joseph Stiglitz a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV-pVDztNuU”>here.
Or even here. (I knew I’d never get that right first time. I blame a weekend of gastro-enteritis.)
Are you okay? That can be very unpleasant.
Re your thoughts +1
It’s incomprehensible how that fact has been evaded.
Yeah, I’m fine, more concerned about three wasted days than anything else.
There really is a very large component, in present-day economic policy, of people who really must know things pretending they don’t know them. Everybody knows that debts aren’t always paid, everybody knows that austerity makes things worse. But they pretend anyway.
Glad to hear it.
I think that’s very true. It’s infuriating. But I think that mcuh of the time it is for a political or socio political purpose.
It’s almost akin to the blinkered view they had during the ‘boomtimes’.
How accurate is the department of finance’s line regarding the proportional contribution of the wealthy?
“Declan Doyle is not a regular Sindo writer, but a civil servant venting…”
Not quite. He works in the HSE, which is not the civil service. A civil servant would not be allowed to publish piece like that. Originally set out in 1932 [here], and updated only as recently as 2009 [here]
My mistake. Maybe he said public sector worker, and I translated it in my head to civil servant
The phrase he used was public servant in fact.
“How accurate is the department of finance’s line regarding the proportional contribution of the wealthy?”
<nerd alert ON>
Any question of accuracy isn’t really about a “line”. The Sunday Independent’s article draws mainly on the dull and detailed parliamentary questions numbered 133 and 134 on 7 February (30 rows, 6 columns, not inluding rows with headings and the totals). The main part of the answer is a table that I cannot post on this blog, but you can see it here — http://debates.oireachtas.ie/dail/2012/02/07/00084.asp.
A second source the Sunday Indepent uses is a parliamentary question on 25 January, which deals only with high earners. It is available here — http://debates.oireachtas.ie/dail/2012/01/25/00055.asp.
Limits to the accuracy of the data will not be dues to a “line” taken by the Minister in answering the question. It will arise because correctness of the tax returns for a year will not be finalised so soon into the current year. As it happens, the first question that provided the material for the Sunday Indpendent provides a reference to allow you to get get some sense of how much leeway there might be with these figures. That question (no. 133) asked for updated estimates for the same data for the tax year 2010, which were provided in answer to a PQ in on 12 January 2011. That one is here — http://debates.oireachtas.ie/dail/2011/01/12/00148.asp. So, if you want to see the accuracy, print out the 2011 answer and compare it to the left-hand columns of the answer to the February 2012 answer.
</nerd alert OFF>
Thanks, but I can’t seem to find that link.
Links now added
Thanks
Confused piece by Eoghan Harris on Dresden and war crimes. Apparently the deliberate killing of innocent children is not a war crime.
What is or is not a ‘war crime’ is determined by the victors.
There is something nasty about the way he has used to illustrate what he is pleased to call a point about the `exodus’ of Southern Protestants.
For a newspaper that constantly berates those who it claims “live in the past” for referencing the historic struggle against the British presence in Ireland, in one single issue we have the following snippets from five different articles:
John Drennan: “It is a measure of the utter moral bankruptcy of our political elite, and the electorate that chooses and then curses them, that apparently only colonial occupation, by either the Black and Tans or the Troika, forces us to act in a morally responsible fashion.”
John Drennan (again): “But, as they lurk like a clever old pike, the smart use that party formerly known as Sinn Fein/IRA are making of these issues means they are perfectly poised to wreak havoc amongst the sleepy FF and increasingly skittish FG and Labour political fry.”
Eoghan Harris: “Hard nationalists who heckled revisionists for raising the enforced exodus of southern Protestants in 1919-23 have received rounds of applause from audiences who claim to abhor the hecklers’ nationalist politics.”
John-Paul McCarthy: “He threw snowballs at Taoisigh Sean Lemass and Jack Lynch, something that might have landed him in Martin Corry’s special IRA ‘vault’ in Knockraha near Cork city had he tried that on Lemass in his leonine prime. ”
Stephen J. Costello: “Sinn Fein wants to go it alone in Europe — ‘we ourselves’, as it proudly proclaims. For most of its history it has been associated with the IRA.”
Not so much a case of living in the past as rewriting the past so that the losers become the victors, and the immoral becomes the moral.
Truly bizarre fare
Odd that one by Harris. Who on earth is he referring to?
Perhaps Harris is referring to the time he was jeered
for speaking at that Liam Lynch commemoration.
This is BizarroWorld:
apparently only colonial occupation, by either the Black and Tans or the Troika, forces us to act in a morally responsible fashion.
(i) firstly, conflating a bloody British occupation and the actions of a group of international creditors, who for all their faults, have yet to crack a skull, burn a town or murder an Irish citizen dead in the streets, is morally repugnant.
(ii) secondly, the Black and Tans “force[d] us to act in a morally responsible fashion”? Really? What on earth is John Drennan referring to?
Is anybody monitoring how it’s doing under the new editor? Too soon to say, I suppose, but it would be interesting to see if the looney edge comes off it.
Perhaps, but is it in their interest to do so? In a way their predicament reminds me of FF, once it abandoned its brand of rhetorically green nationalism in the 90s/00s part of the glue which bound it up in corporate terms was gone, to some extent. However extraordinary the claims of the S. Indo, and given SFs increasing popularity and own evolution those claims become more and more inappositely baroque, it may well be seen by them as a necessary means of retaining readership. Problem though is that medium to long term if the divergence between reality and the perception they challenge becomes too great they become increasingly odd looking. Indeed that seems to be what is happening already to judge by the tenor of some of the above quotes.
Always dangerous to be fighting the last war.
“perception they promote” natch! Pesky mobile.