The London Olympics are already achieving the number one aim of the politicians who brought them here, which is making our politicians feel very important indeed.
The media is quite frenetic in its efforts to make us all believe we should be terrifically proud of the fact we are hosting the Olympics, as though there were something unique in this achievement. If we can’t competently do something that Greece, Spain and China have done in recent years, that would be remarkable. Of course the Games will be on the whole well delivered, sufficient for the media and politicians to declare it an ecstatic success. Some of the sporting moments will be sublime, as ever.
But did it have to be in London? We won’t know the total cost of the Games for months, but it will cost the taxpayer at least £9 billion and I suspect a lot more. I also suspect the GDP figures will, in the event, show that the massive net fall in visitor numbers has hurt the already shrinking economy further.
But to take the most optimistic figure, holding the Olympics in London has cost every person in the country an average of £150 per head in extra taxes. That is £600 for a family of four. Actually it is in the end going to be well over £2,000, as of course the money has been borrowed on the never never, and taxpayers are going to be paying it off their whole lives, along with the sum ten times higher they are already paying direct into the pockets of the bankers through their taxes.
The very rich, of course, don’t pay much tax, so they are not worried.
But to take just the figure of £600 extra taxes for a family of four, the lowest possible amount, and not including the interest. Is having the Olympics here really worth paying out £600 for? If Tony Blair had approached the head of the family and said “We are going to have the Olympics in London, but it’s going to cost you £600, would the answer have been from most ordinary people: “Yes, great idea, this is that important to us”?
People are not disconcerted because they don’t see that they have to pay. There is no special Olympics tax, and they pay their taxes in a variety of ways, and individuals are not the sole source of taxation. But this is nonetheless real money taken from the people in pursuit of the hubris of politicians.
I love sport. I hate the corruption of the International Olympic Committee, Fifa and the rest; I hate the vicious corporatism and militarisation of our capital and absurd elitism of the transport lanes; the sport itself I love. But with the economy contracting, and the NHS being farmed out for profit, is it really worth £600 for a family – and many families are really struggling in a heartbreaking way – is it worth the money to have the Olympics here rather than in Paris?
Of course it isn’t. I think many of us will feel an extra pleasure watching the Opening ceremony because it is British. Patriotic pride will surge. It is not wrong to enjoy the spectacle tonight on TV. The corporate well connected and ruling classes will enjoy it in the stadium.
But after you have watched it on TV, ask yourself this question. How much more did you enjoy it than enjoy watching the Beijing ceremony, and was that margin of extra enjoyment something that everybody in the room would have paid out £150 for?
Because they just did.
Didn’t see much of Cleggover in the last fortnight. Couldn’t he manage to get tickets like the Camerons and Wills and Kate?
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Coalition in crisis: Only one in six now believes Government will survive until 2015
Number who think Lib Dem/Tory pact will end early has also doubled in two weeks
New poll shows public not impressed with squabbling over House of Lords reform and boundary changes
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2187585/Coalition-crisis-Only-believes-Government-survive-2015.html
PS, Saudi doesn’t have a regime, and even if it did it wouldn’t be a theocratic regime, how ridiculous. Saudi has a royal family. And pumps oil in our direction, of course.
Komodo,
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Regime means nothing to me. And I wish you had let me finish. I will comment on this morality you refer to in a deeper discussion, later; in this country we have a ‘single’ party slaved to those who control the economy and the media. We have mass surveillance and we/the majority are contained by fear orchestrated by our secret services. I strongly believe we are/have been/ deceived and that deception embodies the worst immorality to affect man causing untold suffering and death over thousands of years.
“We have a government
Our friends have legislatures
Iran has a regime
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M’kay?”
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No, not OK for me Komodo and a tad belittling – I am immune to oral bacteria.
Kim Gavin – not Boyle made that one, doh. That is all.
Komodo,
Very true, always it is the regime wot done it!!!!
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Pathetic, attempts of a bunch of corrupt wankers who have ran out of options and are busy applying the same nostrum copiously: “attack. attack, attack, …..” evidently when the only tool in the tool case is a hammer, every problem in the world takes on the shape of a nail.
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Economic incompetence and fraudulent economic systems are propped up through additional incomes accrued through wars, and smash and grab raids, akin to the crack addicts feeding their habit through preying on little old ladies, leaving bingo halls.
Ghosh appears to have had enough of Theresa May and/or the ConDems.
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Top civil servant Dame Helen Ghosh to leave the Home Office
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19242114
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She must be getting a lower salary at the National Trust.
Komodo at 8:30am on 13.8.12. Yes, as a rock band, The Who at their peak, which lasted quite a while, were out of this world (so I hear – wish I’d been born at the right time to have been able to see them live during that period!). I see there was a quick whizz-through by ‘Mods’ as well – and the Mods always had the best music and styles, in my opinion. Mohair! Lambrettas! The Ultimate Action!
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That’s obviously Mods as in ‘Modernists’ rather than ‘Moderators’, though no doubt Jon would’ve enjoyed gate-crashing the ceremony with his trusty bike that has been through riot and flood, I believe. He then would’ve been granted the accolade of being a Mod Mod.
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Mary, yes, some of the stuff was trashy and not to my taste, but it was to lots of other people’s tastes, it was a celebration of British pop music, it was a choreographed party in a sports stadium and that trashiness and brash-i-ness is part of the metropolis. ‘Imagine’, yes, the quintessential humanist (communist) song. John’s face, yeah, even after 30 years, how we miss his presence and incisiveness (though sadly, his last two albums were not good; he was too happy by that time).
The new chairman of Barclays Bank, described as ‘a safe pair of hands’, is touting the suggestion that current account holders should be charged. The banking crisis is all our fault according to him. Another YCNMIU.
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Banking crisis? It’s the public’s fault, says new boss of Barclays
The comments will come as a blow to the ordinary families stung by the payment protection racket and overdraft fees
http://www.mirror.co.uk/money/city-news/barclays-new-boss-sir-david-1256426
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I’ve been everywhere man! The list of his connections is endless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Alan_Walker_(banker)
I wonder what the UK nuclear lobby which now includes George Monbiot will have to say about these mutations.
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‘Severe abnormalities’ found in Fukushima butterflies
By Nick Crumpton BBC News
The study found that mutation rates were much higher among butterfly collected near Fukushima
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Exposure to radioactive material released into the environment have caused mutations in butterflies found in Japan, a study suggests.
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Scientists found an increase in leg, antennae and wing shape mutations among butterflies collected following the 2011 Fukushima accident.
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/..
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19245818
A review here of the closing ceremony, which anyone who took an interest in the multi-culti/immigration debate should find interesting.
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“Not just shit but also dangerous: Kim Gavin’s Closing Ceremony”
http://louderthanwar.com/not-just-shit-also-dangerous-kim-gavins-closing-ceremony/
Is Monbiot officially working fro ‘the other side now’?
Nuid, funny, Chris TT still owes me a CD! Good writing too. That was for sure the feeling I got from a brief view of Liam looking like a cynical old lag: missed most of the rest of it. Though I was briefly cheered by the sight of Freddie Mercury. Wish I had seen (in a way) the Daily Mail piece they had to edit…
Chris TT’s review was idiotic:
“Another outing for Emile Sande. In the Opening Ceremony she performed too but it wasn’t so much about her, then, as what she was singing: The Meaning had little to do with her domestic fame or career path. This time it was the opposite: entirely about Sande as a PR machined product – and she went on for ages. ”
She sang the first song, a little nervously, but that is all tt had to say about it, here are the lyrics:
http://www.elyrics.net/read/e/emeli-sande-lyrics/read-all-about-it-%28ptiii%29-lyrics.html
“…
come on, come on,
lets get the tv and the radio
to play our tune again
its ’bout time we got some airplay of our version of events
…”
This song was loaded with relevant motivational lyrics. It can be dismissed as cheese. But words can make their imprint regardless.
Hello Suhayl – thank you for your reply, and sorry I didn’t read your same to a similar question earlier. The thread is very long, and I sometimes have the silly impression my question might be an original one. Agreed, (6) and (7) (unlimited and zero immigration) would be daft. But I’m not sure that numbers aren’t important. We might want to talk about what sort of country we want to be, and immigration Vs emigration numbers will be major deciders in that. (Why is there one ‘m’ for emigration, but two for immigration?)
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My main concern is the number of people here overall. We cannot just go matching world expansion on a relative basis, because our island is not expanding accordingly, and cannot raise population densities indefinitely regardless. That would not be a positive result in any quarter. The environment of the UK would certainly suffer further, and there is an additional strain on the rest of the world to support us (which they do in great measure).
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Sure, mass immigration and talk about it is a great one for getting out the vote. But the investor/monied class has always loved it, because I’d argue it does actually lead to cheap labour – when we’re talking about work which is not highly skilled. I’m not just talking about Bangladeshi workers in restaurants and generally doing jobs the natives don’t like doing, I mean labourers showing up by the coach-load from eastern Europe to work specific projects, staying in enclosed compounds almost as if they were working on an oil rig, then buggering off again (with their wages) when the work is complete. Or casual workers showing up by the million in the good times, pushing down wages because employers do not have to compete for labour, and clearing off during bad times so – again – employers can call the shots. Why should we hang on to you? We can employ another Polish barman/ waiter if things pick up again.
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You did ask for my thoughts (such that they are)… our society now is vastly richer for immigration, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics made me feel proud of my country in a way I have not for some time. It showed the diversity we are now quite comfortable to boast as an achievement – I don’t think any other country could possibly “show off” its India and Pakistan British mix, that particular blending of humour, colour, music, dance, dress, in quite that fashion.
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British Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are not like the establishment English. But then again, us Welsh lot are definitely not like them either (thank Christ). Maybe it’s because the aforementioned do not see themselves as a downtrodden colony, but rather as rising great countries in their own right. Funnily enough, I’ve noticed a distinct increase in the boldness of an assertion to Chinese origins in the past decade or so.
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Rambling aside – which of the options would I select? None. I’d choose a target of population reduction, and any immigration would have to be part of that target. Should benefits be assumed to accrue based on the number of children? Should people be provided a living simply for reproducing? The one-child policy is a bit harsh, but why reward and subsidise people for expanding the population? So we should aim to reduce the population significantly, encourage the same in developing nations, not cream off their most useful young people, and reward small families on the home front – the emphasis being (through nudges in the tax/benefits system) small.
Chris Jones: It seems you regard not having much regard for both Alex Jones and Obama as being mutually exclusive. Why should having contempt for Jones’ lies about concentration camps, gun-grabs and climate change denial, make one automatically admire O’Bomber’s drone murders, and NDAA constitutional crimes, as you appear to imply?
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*
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Cryptonym: I’ve understood all about Alex Jones that I need to, in order to get a measure of this cheap huckster, and his rather clueless true-believers too for that matter. If you “haven’t a clue” about AJ’s Obama Conspiracy BS, it seems you don’t know AJ very much either! Type “Alex Jones” into any predictive-text Internet search tool, and “Alex Jones Obama Conspiracy” is the very first thing it throws up! Are you seriously claiming utter ignorance on this point? Seriously? Or is that pile of horseshit about Obama so embarrassing you’d rather pretend you didn’t know about it?
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About peak oil – no, you’re not introducing a wild new concept to me, sorry. It’s just that refining and production capacity has bugger-all to do with the effects you’re pretending we’re seeing right now. Understand the difference? Your spilling out a stream-of-consciousness of half understood Alex Jones BS only works with the already converted, btw… this which you wrote earlier…
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—start quote / 12 Aug, 2012 – 5:22 pm
He never, though fingers culprits except in crude outlines of global government and shadowy string-pullers and the permanent near-east beachhead statelet, you know the one, rarely gets nailed to a wall and dissected.
—end quote
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What the hell are you talking about?
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And I might ask you again – if it’s a seller’s market, why are the speculators making more profit than the sellers? Why are the sellers throttling supply, and the buying reducing their refining capacity, if the growth is increasing more than supply is increasing which leads to all sorts of the dreadful implications you think are terribly important?
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Hammond is having a rethink on the so called benefits of the private sector vis a vis the state. Well, well! In spite of this I bet that G4S still go off with the money. I believe that Buckles goes back to the HoC committee next month. In the meantime G4S have made a £2.5m donation (ie sweetener) to armed forces organisations.
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‘Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said the failure by G4S to meet the security requirements illustrated the different approaches taken in the private and public sector. In an interview with The Independent he said: “I still think that, in general, there’s a lot that the public sector still has to learn from the way private sector does things. But, the story of G4S and the military rescue is quite informative because as two models of how to approach a problem you could not get two greater extremes than the G4S model and the military model.
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“The G4S model says here is a cost envelope within which I have to deliver an outcome and therefore I have to do it incredibly leanly. I have to do it with very little resilience. So G4S were literally hiring people and expecting to deploy them three days later, into a live situation; trying to build up a management structure overnight, at the beginning of the operation. A very lean structure, with lots of dependence on self-motivation by the people in the workforce; scheduling their own shifts, for example, by accessing an internet site.
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“The military comes at it from the exact opposite extreme. What’s the job that needs to be done? Ok, we’ll do it. Whatever it takes we’ll pour in massive over-resourcing, massively heavy structures of management.”‘
“Though I was briefly cheered by the sight of Freddie Mercury.”
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Same here, Tech, Freddie got a great reaction! Which disappeared when Jessie J took over from him … The whole thing was depressing. Long, slow and boring. And one wag commented that all the dead performers were better than the live ones …
Nuid, perhaps it is easier for the dead (as James Joyce might have said).
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Glenn, many thanks for that thoughtful post – 14.8.12, 01:48am.
“Chris TT’s review was idiotic”
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Well naturally, you’re entitled to your opinion, Crab.
But Chris TT’s piece “went viral” so fast, his blog either crashed or was in danger of crashing. Which is when Louder than War published it.
Here’s hoping..
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Ecuador to make Assange asylum bid decision ‘this week’
Julian Assange has been at Ecuador’s embassy in London since 19 June
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Ecuador president’s has said he hopes to make a decision on whether Julian Assange will be granted political asylum in the country this week. Rafael Correa said in a TV interview he would make a decision after consulting advisers on Wednesday.
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If granted though how would he get out of the embassy and then the country?
“Nuid, perhaps it is easier for the dead”
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Maybe, Suhayl. Or maybe Cowellian karaoke artists just don’t last. And the geniuses die too young. Sad.
Glenn I’ve known of the peak oil phenomemon since the late 70s, it was taught in school, along with commonsense, it isn’t informed by my sampling an occasional Alex Jones radio program; Jones is an entirely different creature from the typical right-wing US shock-jock, and mention of has launched off on unnatural tirade of abuse, ad hominem attack and trolling, which is amusing to watch, however calculatedly disruptive it might be.
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Your half-blind view of refining capacity being reduced only applies to US, West European and UK refining, hence the Hurricane Katrina damaged refining capacity never replaced and the refinery closure in England, cut off from its supply of Iranian oil by Leader Cameron’s bombast, his bluff being called, and his shackling us to disastrous US mandated foreign and economic policies to save face; there is more to the world than just your backyard, like the remaining 2/3rds of the planets population, whose demand still waxes and where processing capacity is still expanding. Speculation alone does not account for price increases, speculation is successful because it cannot lose by betting on prices increasing, the speculation rewards are assured but odds and profit are marginal. Present supply does not meet current demand, demand is invariably predicted to increase and supply fall, the bottom of the barrel is already being scraped by enhanced recovery techniques. National figures of ‘proven reserves’ which determine production allowances have no connection with reality, claimed reserves simply being inflated regularly to increase production allowances.
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That “near-east beachhead statelet”, I think most readers here know exactly the place referred to and you purposely omitted any context in order to feign ignorance, but you lack comprehension, just come along make a lot of noise, start arguments, ask muddled incoherent unanswerable questions, throw accusations around then bugger off chuckling away, your job done. Your worst trait though is making up things people never said. Troll and liar.
Another viewpoint on Gaddafi’s Libya.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkTUDw0mjMA&feature=share
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Rather lets itself down at the very end.
Mark – you may have missed what I was getting at there, which was intended to illustrate a basic tool of propaganda: dehumanising the enemy. You can attribute anything nasty you like to a regime. And we do. That wasn’t a bite…
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Suhayl –
Despite being a biker and having nothing but contempt for people on scooters*, I STILL think the Who were ace. And Townsend the best musical talent we’ve produced in two generations…
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*I guarantee the current criminal crop of bankers were of the mod persuasion in their youth
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Mary: I think the military would take issue with this, in no uncertain terms –
“The military comes at it from the exact opposite extreme. What’s the job that needs to be done? Ok, we’ll do it. Whatever it takes we’ll pour in massive over-resourcing, massively heavy structures of management.”
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Hammond is evidently thinking of the procurement process, and is absolutely right, if he includes obscene cost overruns and nonexistent project control. But the military don’t do the procurement – that’s his department.
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The military have to use what’s available at the time, which is, thanks to the government/procurement/lobbying nexus, often insufficient, inadequate or unsuitable: and the chain of command is not comparable with civilian management practices in any way at all. For one thing you don’t see directors being shot at or grabbing a rifle and joining in the fray….pity.
Whoops.
http://www.rnw.nl/africa/bulletin/drc-judoka-coaches-missing-ministry
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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Philip K Dick’s vision of an information-rich pink light beam transmitted directly into his consciousness proved insightful:
“It appeared in vivid fire-with shining colours and balanced patterns and released me from every thrall, inner and outer.
“It, from outside me looked out and saw that the world did not compute, that I and it had been lied to. It denied the reality and power and authenticity of the world..It seized me entirely lifting me from the limitations of the space-time matrix. It mastered me, as at the same time, I knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake. Through its power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-thought decision, I acted to free myself. It took on in battle as a champion of human spirits in thrall, every evil every iron imprisoning thing.”
Cryptonym,
Sound analysis, and a good enough title: That “near-east beachhead statelet”, a working name for the Yiddish emirate.
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The points with respect to the reduced refining capacity, that effectively is telling of the peak oil consumption in the west, sometimes gets mis constructed as the “peak of the entire world stock of oil”. Fact is West in general has reached maturity and its fuel consumption is steadily on the decline. This adding a further strain on the budgetary models in the West that have so far relied heavily on taxing the poor and letting the rich, to pay little or no tax at all, but that is another argument for another day.
This is why the Bradley Manning petition needs to be signed. The poor man has been tortured for more than two years in US military institutions.
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http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32334
Glenn _uk wrote: “It seems you regard not having much regard for both Alex Jones and Obama as being mutually exclusive. Why should having contempt for Jones’ lies about concentration camps, gun-grabs and climate change denial, make one automatically admire O’Bomber’s drone murders, and NDAA constitutional crimes, as you appear to imply?”
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I think you’ve mis read my points Glenn. Im not here to defend everything Alex Jones thinks or does but for the most part he deals in facts divulges and discusses information subjectively in his own unique way: information thats out there for all to see for themselves. I would appreciate it if you could point out where specifically he has lied? Overexaggerated and overdone the hyperbole yes but otherwise i disagree with you. And like someone else commented ,you can watch him and his show and ignore the bits you don’t agree with. Compared to the BBC he is a bastion of morality!
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Not sure why you hink i’m a fan of Obama-he has been a disastrous president,possibly worse than Bush. His NDAA act and drone programme are highly dangerous and immoral. David Cameron thinks the world of him of course