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What an unbelieveable pile of crap. How has this story dominated the news for so long? It’s so insignificant as to be a total non-event in my opinion. They had an expense allowance. They had rules. They had an overseight body. They claimed and were told they were within the rules and given the money. Now they’ve got to pay it back because … well, I can only come back to jealousy and envy. They followed the rules, they shouldn’t have to pay it back. If you disagree with the rules, then they should be changed, but people who complied with them should not be forced to pay back what they claimed. It’s a fundamental fule of justice, that changes to the rules should not be retroactive! Not breaking the rules is not grounds for punishment.
Take the case of the guy who’s having to repay £41,000. Now, even if every MP had to repay a similar sum that’s only about £2.7 million. Yes, I say only. The budget of the NHS alone was £90 billion in 2007 and was set to reach £110 billion in two years time. That’s one service the government provides which is over 33 thousand times higher than what would take to give every MP £41,000. And, of course, the £41,000 repay was accumulated over 4 years. So it’s even less siginificant. It would work out to £675,000 a year, or 133 thousand times smaller than the budget of the NHS. It wouldn’t even make a dent in the NHSs £900 million deficit last year.
Lets say the figure for MPs over claiming is actually massive and averages to £15,000 per MP, per year (not the case considering the largest ‘over claim’ is £41,000 over four years, or £10,250 per year). Lets also say we can get every penny of that back at zero cost (impossible) and lets round it up to a nice even £4 million reclaimed. Lets say we then give all of the money reclaimed from the past four years to the education department. The education department gets around £80 billion a year. If we translate that to numbers which can be more easily comprehended, it’s like giving a minimum income worker, pulling in £12,000 a year an extra 60 pence. It’s not going to change anything for that person. They can now afford an extra bar of chocolate. They’ll be thrilled.
Okay, lets say we were even more specific and gave that £4 million to primary schools, which have a budget of £700 million. Now we’re talking! That’s the equivalent to giving our £12,000 a year worker an injection of almost £70! Not life changing, sure, but they’ll be able to buy… well, maybe they’ll be able to replace a broken part on their car which didn’t seem worth it before. Or they might be able to take a loved one out for a nice meal.
Of course, the assumptions made are crazy. There’s no way that reclaiming the money would come without cost. There’s no way that the over claim by MPs is that high. The whole thing is a total non-event. Complete storm in a tea-cup.
Interestingly (or actually not if you’re even slightly clued up on how the media operates) it was actually quite hard to find a web news page that said the £41,000 repay figure even in the same paragraph as the fact it’s spread over four years.
I think the story should have been told as: “Look how many MPs don’t claim nearly any of their allowed expenses! What a bunch of freaks/saints!” (depends on how you want to spin it) Seriously, how many people can honestly say that, if their company was to offer to pay for something that they would say no? How many people, when offered either money for, or money towards their work-related costs say no to that money? I would venture to say very few, and further to venture that the ones who do say no say that because of the difficulty of claiming, not because it’s morally wrong to claim. These MPs claimed when everyone of us would have claimed and we hang them out to dry for it!
Of course, there are those who are arguing that it’s not the money, it’s the principle. These people followed the rules and got money. They were open about what it was being spent on. It’s a fucking disgrace! They should all be strung up and shot! No, wait. Hang on. That actually sounds like reasonable behaviour to me. There’s the guy who had his daughter stay with him. He’s a total fiend of course. We want our MPs to be good family people, but not in a house part paid for by us, goddamnit! We want our MPs to represent us and be normal people and we want them present at Parliament and able to vote on the issues of the day, yet we want to make it so that only the disgustingly wealthy can actually hope to be an MP because we want them to finance their own central London houses!
I’ve heard it suggested that MPs should share bed sits… which is a really wonderful idea. Yes, lets have the leaders of the country hunkering down like crack addicts, four to a room!
I hate the coverage of this story because it is so petty. The premises at work are envy and jealousy. The ones demanding these MPs act like super humans are themselves acting like brats who’ve just been told the kid next door has got a new bike.
It strikes me that this story is being used to try and distract us from the worsening economic situation. For fear that we might notice that the system is seriously broken and we might get it into our precious little heads that maybe it needs changing. Maybe it’s not a good idea to have a system built on growth! Maybe it’s not a good idea to have power and wealth pooled in a very small number of hands. Maybe we should think about doing things differently… no, wait! That guy there claimed expenses he was entitled to, in a way he was supposed to, for things he was allowed! Burn him! Get the mob together and tell them to put down the “We demand change” banners and grab up the pitch forks and flaming torches! It’s witch hunt time!
When talking about the current economic crisis, climate change, man’s negative impact on the planet, etc, it is often the case that the truth is massively complicated. Climate change, as an example, requires one to understand compliex chaotic interrelationships across much of the planet. The fact that we still have such poor weather forecasting, even over short time periods, is evidence that the systems are so complicated and chaotic that we don’t yet fully understand them. Explaining to people that past average global warming has caused northern Europe to disappear under two meters of ice is tricky, they can’t accept that a lot of the warmth we enjoy comes from the Gulf of Mexico via the Gulf stream. It seems counter intuitive to them that increases in warming over the planet may cause come areas to suffer from incredible freezing incidents.
Doubt, however, is easy. You pick one facet of an idea and take a liberal sprinkle of misunderstanding, whether deliberate or not, and then package it in certainties. You don’t follow the scientific language model, using qualified and uncertain terms. No, you make use of that scientific language in entirely the wrong way. You nit-pick, you poke holes, you highlight where scientific language makes it seem like there is a lot of uncertainty (it doesn’t matter that good science is full of such language, even when reasonably certain). Doubt is easy to generate, because science doubts itself all the time. The scientific method doesn’t prove, it dis-proves. You come up with how you think things are, what would be the case if they weren’t and then experiment. The experiment never proves that things are a certain way, only that they aren’t. If a statement can’t be disproven then it’s not science, it’s a tautology or it’s non-sense. If you have no criteria which would compel you to change your position, then you’re not engaged in science, you’re engaged in dogma and religion.
Both sides of a debate can often be accused of dogmatic adherence to their personal beliefs. Often it’s the case that they don’t admit what it would take for the other side to convince them that they are wrong. Often they don’t admit to themselves that there’s even a chance they are wrong. They believe they have arrived at their position by examining all the evidence critically, so how could they possibly be wrong?
I’ve said it before, but I’d love to be wrong. I’d love it if someone were able to show conclusively that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas. That the nuclear industry is safe. That the economy can grow exponentially forever without negative side effects. That mankind is smarter than yeast. I long for these things to be the case, because it would mean a much, much nicer future to look forward to. Hell, if I’m wrong then there is actually a future to look forward to! Wouldn’t that be great?
One of the essays I have recently been asked to write for my politics degree was titled “Should democracies be concerned about the losers in a capitalist system?” As part of the process I went through in answering the question I asked a few of my non-politics student friends the question to get their views and almost unanimously they answered ‘yes’. Their gut reaction was that we as a society should care about the people who are given the short end of the stick by the capitalist system we have in operation. When I pressed them to ask if they would be willing to pay more taxes to finance this caring they were almost unanimous again in their answer: No.
I tried to get to the root of this apparent (well, to my mind anyway) contradiction of opinion. How did they envision the government would help those who lose out if they were not to spend any money on helping. They didn’t want the losers to be helped, just for their to be concern that they were losing out. I was confused. I tried to argue that concern without action was the same as no concern at all. Their argument was that we can be concerned and use that concern to limit our actions and so make sure the losers don’t lose out too much. I asked who was to police this, they didn’t want anyone to. I asked how we would ensure that the losers don’t lose too much, they said we didn’t. I asked who defined too much and they said it was down to the individual. I asked how this was to stop anything. I was missing the point.
I don’t think that concern without any action, limits, etc, is actually concern at all. I think concern without action is simply ego stroking. We can be concerned without acting and so we can feel better about paying slave labour wages. We are concerned after all, that’s enough. We can be concerned without acting to stop mass species extinctions. We are concerned after all, that’s enough.
When a question about change is asked it is almost always limited, qualified, in such a way as to be essentially: How can we change everything without changing anything? For example: How can we make a sustainable society while protecting economic growth? You can’t, sustainable and growing are against one another. If something is growing then it’s not sustainable. The economy is part of society, if it’s growing then society is growing. If society is growing then it’s not sustainable. How can we change everything without changing anything?
How can we cut greenhouse gas emissions without slowing economic growth. Well, economic growth is almost predicated upon the release of greenhouse gas emissions. It almost necessitates the externalising of costs, for example efficient, effective clean up of pollutants. How can we change everything without changing anything?
The question posted by my politics tutors was aimed at generating a discussion between the works of John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls believes that society should protect and help people and should use taxation as a method of doing this. Nozick believes we have three rights: Life, liberty and property. Any taxation of the state which is not used to ensure the protection of the first two breaks the third and should therefore be illegal and is immoral.
Rawls wants us to imagine how we would like society to be ordered, but he first wants us to imagine we don’t know what position we would have within that society. As a white, middle-class male I might find a certain way of doing things where women or blacks bore the brunt of the costs of society as fair. However, as a free-floating entity creating society from scratch and destined to be a part of it without knowing what part, would I be so happy with that arrangement? If I might be black then I’ll want a better deal for blacks. If I might be a woman I’ll want a better deal for women. Etc. So Rawls believes.
Nozick believes the state’s only legitimate role is that of protection of our rights. This is legitimately done through the police, to protect our rights against each other, and the army, to protect our rights against the people in other states. Any taxation not for these two purposes is theft and slavery. It’s the state demanding we work for them. If we are taxed at 25% above what it takes to finance the military and police, and we work 40 hours a week, then the state is enslaving us for 10 hours every week, in Nozick’s vision.
In my experience, most people agree with Nozick’s analysis of taxation and slavery, but want Rawls’ society… contradictory.
The name of this blog is inspired by Endgame by Derrick Jensen.
Often the premises of the media are shrouded in secrecy. We have to read between the lines to try to understand where the news writers stand, for example. This leads to the right being able to claim the media is left wing, and the left being able to claim the media is right wing. The obscurity of the premises that the media operates on results in this situation. A given media source will be written by a lot of people and so can easily be accused of a lot of different things. A person levelling such criticism is likely to focus on the aspects which support their case and ignore the aspects which don’t. Were the media to put their premises up front and be honest about them then this couldn’t happen. You could argue that given articles operated within different premises, or that many articles did and thus the media was lying about its premises, but you couldn’t make any claim you wanted to about them.
Because we don’t know their premises we don’t know what questions they are asking. Because we don’t know what questions they are asking we can’t know if the answers given to us within their content are actually of any use or not. The formulation of a question is very, very important, as anyone who has spent time on compiling a good questionnaire will tell you. Ask the wrong question, or even the right question in the wrong way, and you get a useless answer. Assume the answer and ask a question aimed at getting it and you might as well not have wasted your time. However, assuming the answer is what happens every single day in the media. Their premises are assumptions they don’t even admit to themselves. These assumptions lead them to answers which leads them to questions. A meaningless exercise.
The stealthy nature of the media’s premises leads to the general public having no idea that there is even a problem. They don’t understand the importance of questions. They belittle the role of stories and narrative. They fail to realise that every news item they absorb is based on assumptions, assumptions which they probably would agree with without understanding why (simple truth is they’ve absorbed the assumption from so many stories that they see it as ‘just the way things are’ and not as an assumption based on nothing more than other’s having made the same assumption).
This blog isn’t claiming to have the right answers and to have asked the right questions. It is simply an attempt to get people who read it to think in different ways, to ask questions about their assumptions. To motivate people to try to find out more. To compel people to find their own questions, their own answers. To help them to open their eyes to the scary reality of the world they live in and ask why, who, how. To get to the bottom of the mess so they at least understand what they are doing to the planet, to children in developing nations, to mother’s breast milk, to their own bodies. If they achieve that level of understanding and then continue to want to carry on with business as usual then they can (how could I stop them?), at least they’re armed with the understanding of what they are doing. They are informed.
I’ve just read David Waddell’s very wise words over on his blog about whether debt is good, bad or ugly. He makes a lot of very sensible points about micro scale economics. In his example of Bob and his new sofas, for example, he’s entirely right that if Bob saved, rather than got his sofa on credit every time, he’d be able to buy more sofas in the long run. Bob doesn’t do this and the economy doesn’t encourage him to because of the very nature of our entire society. The short term is more important than the long term. Governments look no further than the next election. Businesses look no further than the next profit report. Individuals look no further than the next pay slip. There are exceptions to those rules, but generally people live pay slip to pay slip, saving and then spending their savings, putting a tiny amount into a pension and then regretting it in the long run. Businesses may have what they call a ‘long term plan’, but they’re usually only very sketchy beyond 5 years, and 5 years isn’t the long term. Governments are seen as over-stepping their legitimacy if they make too many policy decisions which run for more than their term in office. Etc, etc, etc.
Also, Waddell seems to ignore the fact that our currency is now debt. It’s not linked to anything more tangible than the debt we owe to the banks. If we stop borrowing or they stop lending then we’re in serious problems (hey… spooky). Because we can no longer be paid on demand the sum of £5 in gold, and instead are paid the sum of £5 in £s, we now need banks to keep providing easy to obtain debt and consumers to keep taking out more debt than they can easily finance. Bob may be better off if he figures out that saving will enable him to get more, or more expensive, sofas in the future, but for that to work as Bob intends it to work there needs to be enough other people who don’t realise it so the system keeps working and Bob’s money is still worth enough to buy him a sofa by the time he wants one.
He also overlooks the fact that the interest paid on loans made by the banks becomes available for re-lending. So a sea of consumers taking out loans is a good thing for lending as it generates interest which the banks can then lend out to more customers. Since the banks are able to lend many times what they actually have in reserves, and since the interest is theirs to keep, they can get a lot of money for lending from lending money.
It’s a brilliantly subtle system while it’s working. People believe the money they trade for goods and services is a unit of value. They believe it is worth something, because of that belief it is. If that belief disappears then the money they trade actually has no value at all. They can’t trade in the money at a bank for a thing which has value as a tradeable item such as gold, they can only trade in the money for different money. If they don’t accept the value of that money, where does that leave them? It’s in their best interests that they accept that the 1s and 0s in the bank’s computer which represents their wealth has value as they have no other recourse if they don’t. Belief is what holds the entire economic system together. That and the legal system deems it to be acceptable if someone will only offer to repay a debt they owe to you in the legal currency of the country you’re in, whether or not you believe in that currency’s value any more.
Waddell has a good point when it comes to the three phenomena of self-certification, 6 x mortgages and over 100% mortgages. However, once one accepts that money is debt (rather than value) and that the banks hoover up the money supply through interest payments, it becomes obvious why such things started to happen. The system needs larger and larger debts to finance the interest payments on the debt already in circulation.
There is a finite limit on what credit-worthy people can finance and are willing to finance. So they introduce self-certification to allow those who aren’t credit worthy to get into debt. Since this debt is secured against their house, which is going up in value, it doesn’t matter if they finance the debt or default, the bank makes money, the interest gets paid and the loan has created the money it needed to create for the system to work.
The banks lend money to everyone, even those who on paper can’t pay it back, and that fuels further increases in property prices, which helps the banks out because the defaulters’ homes are worth repossessing. Now, the increase in price starts to mean that people who should be able to finance a house can’t. So the bank increases the amount they will lend, because more people buying houses is good for them, both in interest payments and in house price inflation for future repossessions.
When you’re moving house there is almost always something you want to change about the house you’re moving to. Some small or not so small detail which is wrong. Now, if you’re having to give the vast majority of your pay to the bank so they’ll give you a 70 or 80% mortgage then you can’t make that change right away and may never get around to it. Many such changes will increase the value of the home, such as an extension. The bank wants your house to be worth as much as possible and so starts giving out 100% mortgages, so you can spend that 20% you’d saved on your extensions and remodelling. Lovely. However, word gets around that the banks are now giving 100% mortgages, so people stop saving that 20% and just want their house. The banks still want the house to increase in value by the addition of extentions and remodelling, so they up the percent they will loan to the borrower in the hopes that the excess will be used to increase the value of their home or buy some other retrieveable goods. If the mortgage is financed the bank gets its share. If not then its gets its share by repossession. This works so long as the price of houses is going up.
The reality is so stupid that it seems almost impossible that it would be allowed to continue. A bank shouldn’t be allowed to loan out almost $100,000 on a starting capital of only $1111.12 (part two of Money As Debt), but in effect they can. They can have $1111.12 and collect interest on almost $100,000.
The current credit crunch (God I hate that it got called that) was obviously going to happen. The system makes it inevitable. If we have the fossil fuel energy reserves left to claw our way out of the huge hole we’re in then it will happen again, unless we change the way banks and loans operate. We wont change a thing though because we like the illusion of prosperity that the system creates. We like to buy things today that we can’t afford until next year/decade. We like to have businesses able to operate despite losing £75 million in one financial year. We like these things and these things are what the system provides. There is so little real incentive to change the system that it wont be changed. I can even imagine post-crash societies which still operate this type of credit system. We’re short term animals. We like the benefits today and don’t care if it hurts tomorrow. We like it even more when the benefits are today and the pain might not be felt until after we die (see the way we treat the environment, the problems looming with peak oil and the lack of action, etc).
Possibly an odd thing for me to say here, but I would love to be wrong.
I would love for everything I am about to write in the days/months to come to be total crap. I’d love for someone to post a point of view which was well supported with both reason and evidence which showed that oil was not finite, or that it was not filling so many roles which we aren’t even looking for something else to fill, or that we are working on sensible, workable solutions for the peak oil situation. Hydrogen fuel-cells are not a replacement for oil, since there are no hydrogen lakes. Hydrogen is an energy carrier, not an energy source. As such it can’t replace oil. No one even bother suggesting nuclear, the argument there is too easy to bother with.
I would love for someone to show that we are not deforesting the planet. That, year on year, we are not losing anchient forests and jungle and rainforest. Anchient is the key modifier there. New growth is meaningless. A new growth forest contains only a fraction of the bio-diversity of an anchient forest. A new growth forest often only contains one species of tree also, which makes matters even worse.
If someone could come along and prove that we are not spewing so many greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere that there is no other inevitable result than widespread climate change that would be great. If you could even prove that Mark Lynas (Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet) is wrong, that global climate change is not going to reach six degrees (or over) if we make it reach three degrees, or that if the global climate does reach six degrees that this would be inconsequential for non-human life on the planet then that would be something.
Maybe you would even be so good as to disprove the assertion that we are responsible for the destruction and extinction of over 200 species a day.
No, I would love to be wrong. I would love it if business as usual was an option. It would mean I was in the minority of crazies instead of being in the minority of sane people.
