Afternoon Blog - 05 December 2010

Criticism, analysis, response: The BudgetJam live blog.  Email your comments here or comment below.

15.51 This from Rolling Stone (via Eadaoin O'Sullivan) on "vampire squids": 

"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates."

(More of this here if you're as intrigued as I am.)

15.28. Sorry to keep harping on about the Sindo but there’s just so much ammunition in there and I think I’ve saved the best till last: John Brennan. Apparently there was no time to sub-edit the piece as it’s almost entirely incoherent. The gist of it is that we should all hope the budget is passed to give us time to “build alliances against the Goldman Sachs of this world…and the rest of the vampire squids of the bond markets.”

 “Vampire squids”????

 Anyway, John suggests that last week saw quite a few “unspoken pleas” (now what would that be exactly, sign language?) from the “opposition” to FF not to reject their own budget. Because, apparently, if they do chaos awaits as precisely the same opposition who are making these silent imprecations (is it prayer perhaps?) that the budget will go through simultaneously have a sense that “defeating the budget would be a consequence-free act.”

John then invokes a striking metaphor – the “Axis of Bankers”. Now, for some the echoes of “Axis” may date back no further than George W’s invocation of an “Axis of Evil” but for others we’re taking WWII. So, these bankers are bad guys then. Indeed John concedes that they have “fiscally garrotted the State”. This would suggest that we adopt some kind of resistance strategies posthaste, no?

Not according to John: “if we protest too early about this then Ireland will resemble a group of teenagers who don’t want to pay the bar bill for the party.”

I don’t know that I’m with John on this. Although my direct experience of this is limited, my feeling is that when being garrotted one can’t protest early enough. Even if one has a cunning long game stratagem, allowing the garrotter to complete their task leaves the (now dead) victim with little chance of actually putting those stratagems into effect. Indeed John’s suggestion seems to be to lull the “Axis” into a true sense of security.

14.58. Neatly feeding back to the earlier Richard Bruton/Roisin Shortall, how many public servants can you fit on the edge of a razor debate earlier, Michael Taft has written a useful piece here about exactly how expensive (actually, it turns out how cheap) our public service is. Well worth a gander.

14.54 And this in from Miriam Cotton:

This is what happens when you try to take the establishment on. 

14.49. In a hint that there's more than a crack in the consensus of "common-sense" politics even the Sindo offers a variety of perspectives on the Budget. On p. 4 there's an op-ed piece from Profs John Crown (an oncologist of all things) and Ray Kinsella (ironically from the Michael Smurfit Grad School at UCD) calling the Dail to reject the budget to allow "calm and measured renegotiation of the terms and timeframe of the present oppressive 'bailout'".

Not actually a rejection of the bailout then but it's a start. And, in a similar vein, Shane Ross, in a piece which somehow recalls the frenzied tone of the start of the “What have the Romans done for us” scene from Life of Brian (its strewn with references to “European Masters”, “IMF czars” and “conventional apparatchiks”) is arguing that there’s no shame in a default.

Elsewhere in the Sindo it's business as usual. Whilst bemoaning the terms of the IMF/ECB deal Colm McCarthy opines that "The deal had to be accepted and the task for this government and the next is to make the best of a poor situation." What's more according to McC, "Those on the political left, who have been ranting on about rejecting the deal, know perfectly well that cannot be done, and are throwing sand in the eyes of the electorate."

(Apparently the notion that politics is about offering meaningful choices, indeed that in their absence there can be no politics, is not something which need detain Colm's flow.)

Then there’s a difficult to parse piece from Aengus Fanning although one thing is clear: boy, is he pissed. Basically he lashes out at no less a target than “the State” which appears to encompass everyone from Mary McAleese down to street sweepers. According the Aengus the real intent of the government in acceding to the terms of the  IMF/ECB deal was to place public servants (presumably including said road maintenance artisans) in the exalted position of constituting a “new aristocracy” paid for “by the taxes of struggling serfs in the private sector”. (Readers will recall how public servants were exempted from ever having to pay taxes again back in the good ol’ days of the Celtic Tiger.)

For Aengus, things would have been entirely different if, instead of Lenihan, Honohan et al being sent into the lion’s den with the IMF/ECB, we should have seconded a crack “A-Team” from outside the government to negotiate on our behalf. Their names? Dermot Desmond, Michael O’Leary, JP McManus and Jack O’Connor.

If at least one of those names doesn’t make it to the Who’s Having a Great Recession Strand, I’ll be sorely disappointed.

14.10 Colin Coulter has reminded me to plug our running Guess Who’s Having a Good Recession? strand, so who better to start off with than a contribution on our Head of State from Colin himself:

Please forgive this statement of the obvious, but it has to be said that the President is not feeling the pain quite as much as most other Irish citizens right now. Mary McAleese won the 1997 election on a wave of popular acclaim generated by many years of sterling service to the state, acts of selfless energy that included…ermm, you know, that thing she did…you know the one…Jaysus, sure it was only in my head a minute ago…

Mrs McAleese’s period in office coincides of course more or less exactly with the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger. For most of her two periods in Áras an Uachtaráin, McAleese drew an annual salary of €335 000. That doesn’t exactly rank her among the Dermot Desmonds of this world. And it even falls somewhat short of the salary drawn in the same period by the top earning bureaucrat in UCD. But it remains a very generous stipend nonetheless. Since the crash, McAleese has, as one would expect from the patron of ‘Your Country, Your Call’, taken two voluntary pay cuts and is now scraping along on a mere quarter of a million a year. The blow of a dwindling salary has probably been cushioned though by the rather generous fringe benefits that attend the office of the President. There is of course the opportunity to live rent/mortgage free in one of the most substantial and sumptuously appointed homes in this, or any other, country. And then there is an expense account so generous that it must make Ivor Callely simply flush with excitement. According to the redoubtable Laois Nationalist, in the last four years of crisis and austerity, the President has received around €1.2 million in tax free allowances. That’s six grand a week. In other words, Mrs McAleese receives more in tax free allowances in a fortnight than someone on social welfare gets as income in an entire year. How’s that for cherishing all the children of the nation equally?

 But have the many millions of euro that the First Citizen has received over the last decade and a half represented value for money? The role of the President is, as I understand it, to assert and defend the constitutional values of the state. And the Constitution of this particular state has some rather agreeable things to say about the autonomy and equality of the citizenry. In her role as President, Mrs McAleese is honour bound to resist the hectoring of imperial forces abroad and to decry the neglect of those people at home who find themselves at the bottom of the heap. So we might reasonably have expected her to have denounced the US militarisation of the civilian airport at Shannon, to have railed against the obscene fortunes assembled by those who enjoyed the hospitality on offer in the Fianna Fail enclosue at the Galway races and to have exposed the sheer injustice of an economic boom that left so many behind and turned Ireland into the second most unequal society in the western world. But, inevitably, she said nothing of the sort. On the few occasions that the domesticated Nordie in the Phoenix Park had any thing at all to say, it was simply to parrot the views of her political sponsors. The era of the Celtic Tiger was, apparently, a golden age, the ‘best of times’ as some academic fellow travelers put it. How well these sage estimations have stood the passage of time...

 In the last few months of catastophe, public statements from the President have been strikingly, though perhaps thankfully, few and far between. On those increasingly rare moments when she has chosen to share her searing insights with the rest of us, has Mrs McAleese chosen to berate the golden circle of politicians, capitalists and journalists that got us into this unholy mess? Of course not. Why denounce the greedy and the corrupt when you can launch an assault on public workers instead? On October 1st this year, the Irish Times reported comments by the President issued at a conference in the stadium formerly known as Lansdowne Road. Apparently Mrs McAleese has grown concerned about the ‘under performance’ of those who draw (in the main, very modest) salaries from the public purse. The President is particularly aggrieved at those public sector workers who appear to be in a ‘permanent strop’. We can only speculate as to the origin of this particular girevance. Is it that Mrs McAleese forgot to pay her bin tax, stumbled upon her final reminder under a pile of correspondence and got on the phone to her local authority only to find herself on hold and listening to the Flight of the Valkyries for some unpardonable stretch of time? Sorry, I forgot. The President probably doesn’t have to pay the bin tax.

 I could go on. But I will leave the last word to Diarmuid Doyle of the Sunday Tribune. In one of those relatively few occasions when an Irish journalist decides to call the powerful and/or wealthy on their hypocrisy and spite, Doyle hits the nail precisely on the head:

‘The first thought that struck me when I heard the president's remarks was that as McAleese is – how can I put this delicately? – the very model of an underworked public servant, she knows of what she speaks. The second is that this was an unprecedented intervention in a public debate by an Irish president, who is supposed constitutionally to remain aloof from making statements on matter of public policy. She's there to speak for us and inspire us in times of crisis like the one we're going through now.

Instead, she picks a row. The tension between public- and private-sector workers – an artificial one in an ideal world, but a handy divide-and-rule weapon for the government last year – has been a source of huge debate in Ireland since 2008; to hear a president, who came to office on a promise to build bridges, blatantly take sides and pander to a particular prejudice about slovenly public-service workers was genuinely puzzling. Perhaps she was auditioning for a Sunday Independent column after she leaves the Áras.’ 

13.55 There's a piece in the Sindo from Eddie Hobbs on how "Our natural resources can power recovery". The focus is on the manner in which despite "sitting on billions of value per year in terms of huge natural energy resources" we've failed to exploit it. However, as Eadoin via a Hugh Green Tweet points out "our" natural resources don't seem to include those in which Tony O'Reilly or Shell have a stake.

13.35 Tony Kileen, on to talk about the Red C poll,  rehearses the "unpopular decisions makes for poor polls" line. In short, we don't know what's good for us and if only we could be made what was good for us, then FF would be riding high in the polls.

At this stage you'd have to ask, why not simply concede that the public are capable of recognising poor decisions and that the polls might simply reflect that perception - when you're on 13%, how much is there left to lose by such a decision?

And here's the other bit of the "it's not our fault" mantra: everywhere in the world made the same (wrong) financial decisions over the past few years. In other words, everyone else was doing it, sure why wouldn't we do the same. Well, that's all right then.

13.32. The hair-splitting seems to have come down to 20,000 (Labour) public service job cuts versus 30,000 (FG). Richard Bruton has referred to FG research which promises to achieve better service from with a smaller number of employees: I'm trying to recall previous examples of institutions/firms which have achieved this particular combination.

No, they're not coming.

13.25. Richard Bruton and Roisin Shortall now clarifying exactly how different they are to a frankly doubtful Richard Bruton.

13.09. Over at “Star Sunday” there’s some interesting framing in a page long story notionally about Tuesday’s budget. Under the headline “Slash Tuesday”, the first two paragraphs describe how “militant protestors” are planning “mayhem” outside the Dail on Tuesday. This is followed by a reminder that “troublemakers threw bottles and fireworks at gardai” outside the Dail after the ICTU march thus concentrating our attention on a tiny side event rather than that attended by 100,000 people. Fully 40% of the 50 column centimetres in the story (yes, I used a ruler) are devoted to a critique of what is characterised as illegitimate protest: less than 10% actually concentrates on the content of the budget itself. There’s some old school content analysis for you.

The rest quotes an anonymous FF spokesman rehearsing the TINA line on the cuts: “the country really isn’t in a position to argue against anything anymore, they just simply have to be done.”

Except that, in the very next line, it is acknowledged that some things don’t have to be done “the source revealed that State pensions will not be cut as it would be extremely difficult for Lenihan to get the Budget passed if it attempted to tamper with pensioners pay.” So can cuts be argued against or not? You decide.

(Actually on the pensions things, elsewhere the paper misses an opportunity for a bit of joined up thinking, failing to make a connection between a reluctance to cut pensions in the budget and the fact that so many of the politicians currently in the Dail are about to become recipients of pensions.)

In any case, having comprehensively de-legitimated public protest, the Star does offer some concrete suggestions on what the ordinary person can do to bring things forward. Step in, “Ireland’s No. 1 Columnist on Sunday” Kathryn Rogers who offers us this:

“These are tough times indeed.

The weather is confusing us with Moscow. The country is being run by morons. And we’re all about to be beggared by Budget day on Tuesday.

The only light relief amid the stygian gloom is Mary Byrne in X factor. And that could be all over tonight.

Yes folks, unless we wear out fingers down to nubs in the next few hours Mary could be back on the checkouts in Tesco in time for the Christmas rush.”

Now elsewhere in the paper we’re assured that “MaBy” is in line for a €5m cash windfall on the back of X Factor so I’m guessing a return to the checkouts isn’t really on the cards. Nonetheless, Kathryn insists that getting out and voting for Mary will do us all good:

“Yes things are bad out there. But step back from the ledge for a minute and sprinkle some pixie dust for Mary by giving her a vote.

Seriously, it’ll feel far more worthwhile than casting your vote for all the jabbering half-wits already lining up for the general elections next year.”

Who said satire is dead?

13.00.  Hello all, Roddy Flynn here. Thanks to Miriam for the reportage from the Dunphy Front. Everything turns to sport after 2-ish so I'll be looking at the papers a bit from now till 4. Let's start with a mail from Carol Craig on then Sindo's online strapline:  "SF swing can make Gilmore Taoiseach". Carol quotes the opening line:

"THE spectre of a Labour and Sinn Fein-led government, with the support of independent socialist TDs, is now uncomfortably close to reality, according to the latest analysis of voting intentions."