Where the money is?

Some MPs Make More on Journalism

GEORGE Galloway earned as much money through journalism in the first four months of the year as his annual pay for being an MP.

Overall, Members of Parliament - who currently earn a base rate of £67,000 - have declared just short of £150,000 for journalism work in the first half of 2014, according to the latest register of financial interests.

Galloway, Respect MP for Bradford West, was the highest earning, registering £25,600 from Associated Press for work on the TV station Russia Today, £21,450 from LBP TV (a channel broadcast out of the offices of former Iran-backed station Press TV) and £18,000 from Arab-focused satellite channel Al-Mayadeen TV between January and April (he has yet to declare for May and June).

According to the register, Galloway also presents two weekly television programmes for Press TV on an unpaid basis. He hosts two programmes a month for Al-Mayadeen in Beirut and has his return flights and hotel accommodation paid for.

A spokesman for Galloway said: 'He does believe in spreading his message as widely as he can - not just through the prism of Parliament.'

Labour’s Gisela Stuart and Austin Mitchell, meanwhile, have earned £13,200 and £10,000 respectively for work on MP trade magazine House. 

Diane Abbott, also Labour, has been paid £5,600 for appearances on BBC Two’s This Week. Her appearance on Channel 4’s Fifteen to One, earning her £2,000, has not been included in Press Gazette's total.

Similarly, the BBC’s payments to MPs for appearances on Have I Got News For You – £1,500 for each show – are not included in Press Gazette's tally of journalistic earnings.
Not including Galloway's broadcasting earnings, the BBC is the single biggest payer of MPs for journalism work according to the register, a total of £20,677 in the first six months of this year...

Fleet Street, meanwhile, has shelled out just over £27,000 to MPs over the first half of the year, with the Mail and Telegraph titles the highest payers. The list below does not include London mayor Boris Johnson, a former journalist, who is said to earn around £250,000 annually from the Telegraph for his weekly column.

Some of the money may have been donated to charity or political parties. Payments made in 2014 that specifically state they are for work in 2013 have not been included.  Payments made in 2014 without a specified work date attached to them have been assumed to be for work in 2014.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (The real story behind it)

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

["The Witch is dead" from the Wizard of Oz is now at No. 2 in the charts according to Trevor Hoyle, but the Official Charts Company said on Thursday morning that 'Ding Dong the Witch is Dead' was on course to reach number four, up from 10 the previous day.]

THE Wonderful Wizard of Oz was first published in Chicago in 1900. Its author, L. Frank Baum, was the editor of a South Dakota newspaper and a supporter of William Jennings Bryan who stood three times, unsuccessfully, as a U.S. Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party.

The particular concern of both Baum and Bryan was the nature of the money supply then prevalent in the United States, and in the Mid-Western States in particular.

In America during the 1890s, as in Britain, there had been a severe depression. Many businesses had gone bankrupt, farmers forced to sell up, factories closed and workers made unemployed. True, some farms in the Mid-West were suffering from drought, but most were still capable of growing food; the businesses and factories were still capable of providing the things that people needed; the workers still wanted to work to provide those things, and people would still want the goods and services produced if they had the money to buy them.

The money in the USA then, as now, was entirely created by the private banking system. The pretence existed then that money was based on gold. (Even now some people still think that it is!) The major banks, based on the East and West coasts, could vary the amount of money in circulation, lending more to encourage commercial activity, then fore-closing on loans to put people out of business, enabling the banks to acquire their businesses cheaply.

Baum and Bryan wanted money to be based on silver, not gold, as silver was more readily available in the Mid-West, where it was mined. Such a money supply could not be manipulated by the banks. So the story of the Wizard of Oz starts with a cyclone in the form of imagined electoral success for Bryan...

Dorothy, a sort of proverbial �Everywoman�, lands on the Wicked Witch of the East (the East-coast bankers), killing her, so freeing the Munchkins, the down-trodden poor, but the Wicked Witch of the West (the West-coast bankers) remains loose.

To deal with her and to get back to Kansas (normality), the Good Witch of the North, representing the electorate of the North (this is less than 40 years after the civil war), tells Dorothy to seek out the Wizard of Oz (�oz� being short for ounce, the means of weighing both gold and silver). She also gives her a pair of silver slippers (as they were in the book - they became ruby ones in the film). Only these silver slippers will enable her to remain safe on the yellow-brick road, representing the bankers� gold standard, as she heads towards the Emerald City, representing Washington DC.

On her journey, Dorothy encounters a Scarecrow, representing the farmers, who do not have the wit to understand how they can end up losing their farms to the banks, even though they work hard to grow the food to feed a hungry nation. If only they could think it through!

Next, she encounters a Tin Woodsman, representing the industrial workers, rusted as solid as the factories of the 1890s depression, and who have lost the sense of compassion and co-operation to work together to help each other during hard times. Also, a spell cast upon him by the Wicked Witch of the East meant that every time he swung his axe, he chopped off a bit of himself - he downsized!

Then the growing party encounters a Cowardly Lion, representing the politicians. These have the power, through the power of Congress and the Constitution, to confront the Wicked Witches, representing the banks, but they lack the courage to do so.

Dorothy is able to motivate these three potent forces and leads them all towards the Emerald City, whence �greenbacks� had once come, and an encounter with the omnipotent and wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The Wizard of Oz is initially quite majestic and apparently awesome, but he turns out to be a little man without the power that people assume he possesses. He does, of course, represent the President of the United States. With the Wizard�s illusion of power shattered, he is replaced by the Scarecrow who would �be another Lincoln�.

The Wicked Witch of the West, fearful for her own power, then attempts to destroy Dorothy but is herself dissolved in a bucket of water, as rain relieves the Mid-West drought, saves the farmers� livelihoods and prevents repossession by the banks.

The Good Witch of the South, representing the Southern electorate, tells Dorothy that her silver slippers, silver-based money, are so powerful that anything she wishes for is possible, even without the help of the Wizard. Dorothy wishes to go home. There all is now well, because the land has a stable and abundant money supply.

More here: http://www.moneyreformparty.org.uk/money/about_money/wizard_of_oz.php

'Money is losing its value!'

LAST Friday I overheard an old man in the Yorkshire Building Society in Manchester say 'I'm spending my money on my house because money is losing its value'. The very next day, I picked up the Financial Times to read Merryn Somerset Webb writing about Adam Fergusson's book 'When Money Dies', which she says everyone should buy: it's about hyperinflation in Weimar Germany.

It seems that at some charity event a year ago, Ms. Somerset Webb had argued that: 'Five years ago, we trusted the big banks to keep our money safe and they trusted each other to stay more or less solvent' but she then went on to say 'That's not the case any more.' She followed this by making a prediction that we would endure 'a period of deflation before a period of much higher inflation.' Her talk was accompanied by one from Gillian Tett, the FT's United States' managing editor, who had predicted that 'the next stage on the crisis would involve a collapse in trust between populations and governments.'

This year, at the same charity function, Ms. Somerset Webb will be explaining 'why she was wrong on deflation'. A headline in today's International Herald Tribune entitled 'In Greece politicians are seen as common foe' and quoting a recent study by Transparency International that 'in Greece ... 9 out of 10 Greeks said their politicians were corrupt, and 80% said Parliament had lost credibility' suggests Ms Gillian Tett got her prediction spot on. As I write demonstrators in Athens have projected the word 'Thieves' across the facade of the Greek Parliament.

While the citizens of Greece face wage and pension cuts, their lawmakers have benefits including state cars, generous double pensions (from the government and professional guilds), bonuses for attending committee meetings in addition to monthly pay of $8,500 or £5,800. Even the Prime Minister, George A. Papandreou, realises he must do something and has promised to form a committee to look at cutting the number of Parliamentary members and to abolish the law protecting Greek MPs from prosecution.

In her column in last Saturday's FT, Merryn Somerset Webb admitted: 'Gillian's (Tett) prediction in June last year was entirely right' and she says 'Look at Greece and you can see the next stage of the crisis ...' But, Somerset Webb writes: 'Along with losing their faith in their politicians, the Greeks have lost faith in their currency.' 'After all, if you think that there is a chance Greece might end up out of the euro, why on earth', she asks, 'would you hold any money on deposit in a Greek bank?' Why indeed? Reports of Greeks swopping their euros for olive groves, Swiss francs and gold coins now flourish.

Ms. Somerset Webb is what has been called 'a gold bug' and she has be advocating that we get into gold with her for some time now. The old editor of The Times, William Rees Mogg, took a similar 'Buy gold' view, as I recall, in the 1980s. Webb thinks their will be a sudden loss of faith in paper money because of 'the levels of sovereign debt knocking around the world' and that there will be 'either defaults or more massive rounds of money printing'. Either way her message is to stock up on the Krugerrands before it's too late. Today's price for a one oz Krugerrand is £977.00.