qed’s blog

In news today, little George has decided that Wall St needs another helping hand courtesy of the US taxpayer to the tune of $700 billion! In a most remarkable turn of events I even heard a professional money man on ABC radio describe this little event in terms of privatising profits and socialising losses. It seems that with figures this big even dyed in the wool capitalists are choking on their American Express cards.

If this measure gets the thumbs up the US taxpayer will be stumping up for over a $1000 billion to help the stock market avoid a serious structural adjustment. That’s a lot of money and as I said before, you could do a lot of other thing with that sort of money, a theme echoed in today’s Crikey by Jeff Sparrow. But what is really staggering is not only is this money going to bail out the uber rich, it actually returns absolutely nothing of value to the people (ie the taxpayers) coughing up the money. A trillion dollars of losses get transferred off the books of businesses that have been doing some transparently fucked up things onto the balance sheet of the US taxpayer. This is equivalent to adding $20,000 of debt to every american!

George Bush, not content with ripping of the US taxpayers with his highly commercialised and singularly stupid War in Iraq, has just added another massive debt to the american people. I guess they did vote for him, so it just goes to show what can happen in a democracy. Maybe George could pop the ranch up as security? How Alan Kohler on tonight’s ABC news managed to avoid the implications of this little bit of bookkeeping whilst he was waxing lyrically about the recovery in stock markets around the globe is completely beyond belief. Are these people all living in an alternative reality? This is utterly crazy stuff.

Footnote: In case you can’t read Crikey, here’s the text (I know copyright breach blah blah - get over it this is a one off)

We’ll bail out Wall St, but let’s leave climate change to the market - by Jeff Sparrow

A few months back, The Australian gave the weekly column it allocates to climate denialists to the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Klaus. Klaus explained that “climate alarmists” needed “to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.”

Future generations (if indeed there are any) won’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

The US administration effectively nationalised AIG to the tune of $100 billion or thereabouts but this isn’t the beginning of a socialist revolution. No, the Bush administration acted to prop up the rest of the stock market which might have collapsed if AIG had gone to the wall, which is what makes the development particularly sus.

AIG was in a bad way, they were left holding the bag on a whole bunch of so-called financial instruments which were underwritten by the now non-existent home loans that were extended to a whole bunch of people who couldn’t afford them. The credit growth over the last decade or so suddenly ran into the brick wall of reality and AIG were stuck with billions of dollars worth of assets that weren’t worth a thing. Zilch. Kaput!

So why should the US government buy them if nobody else wanted to be party to the biggest financial writedown in history? And importantly what do the good people of the US get in return for the money? Well it seems obvious that the move by the US Federal Reserve was meant to avert a complete collapse of the stock market, time will tell if that works, but it already seems likely that the crisis in the home of capitalism has not yet abated with news that a consortium of world central banks have popped another US $360 billion into the money market to avoid the next installment in the story. The figures just keep getting bigger. And the solutions are starting to look more like panic…

Why should any government, especially one that preaches so loudly on the efficacy of markets and the need to dergulate step in and pick up the tab? Who wins? Well the companies that don’t see their stock valuation disappear in a massive global plunge get some respite perhaps as do the fund managers who have sizeable portfolios invested in the stock market on behalf of pension and superannuation schemes. The average punter with a few shares might suffer, but it is the institutions with zillions of other peoples money at stake that are probably the most nervous at this stage, and here in lies the big rub for the western world.

The relatively recent phenomenon of spectacular and sustained growth in wealth via the stock market has suckered all and sundry into this house of cards. Governments around the globe have abandoned policies that protected national wealth as they heeded the neocon catchcry of global financial deregulation, market economies and notionally free trade. Public assets have been flogged off, government pensions replaced by private superannuation schemes and manufacturing dismantled in order to promote economies built on consumerism, driven by continuous credit. If the stock markets around the world collapse, then everyone is in deep shit because so many of our institutions are wedded to this system, whether we like it or agree with it or not.

And what happens when it does fall apart? Then the financial reserves of the biggest economies get raided. But stop and think about the money involved. $100 billion, to bail out AIG could probably build millions of houses, or 100’s of hospitals or thousands of solar and wind farms. That sort of expenditure results in tangible assets and is arguably a better way to spend public money. Instead the US government has effectively offered a very limited form of welfare that directly benefits the big players on the stock market and ends up returning nothing to the rest of the population, other than a vague assurance that the whole facade won’t come crashing down. Brilliant! What could be done with $350 billion?

The only truly delicious element to this very sorry debacle is the way that the news of it has been spread so successfully by the very agents of consumerism and manufactured consent, the mass media. Maybe we will see a sudden upsurge in some other headline grabbing news so that the Wall St wonder can quietly go about and do whatever else it needs to. What that could be is REALLY worrying. Maybe we will see the worldwide launch of a massive tree planting scheme or perhaps a wholesale shift towards sustainable agriculture and food for everyone. Maybe George Bush will grow wings and fly, perhaps the Queen will abdicate or Angelina Jolie will adopt another half a dozen needy babies. Maybe people will figure it out for themselves.

Last week Garnaut predicted the destruction of significant environmental treasures in good ole Oz, iconic features like the Great Barrier Reef and the Murray Darling River system. Today, the once Nuclear Disarmament Party candidate turned Labor Party hack Peter Garrett extended the deadline for legislative assessment for the proposed Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania. As Senator Milne observed “Minister Garrett had absolute discretion on this issue. He had no legal obligation to extend the deadline, and no justification for doing so”. Garrett is about as useful to the environment as a chainsaw…

In what is clearly a sign of what to expect from the Rudd Labor Government, Peter Garrett has just announced an expansion of uranium mining for South Australia’s Beverly mine. Mr Garrett owes his fame to his extensive history as the lead singer for Midnight Oil, a band that was for many the touchstone for sentiments against nuclear power and other environmental issues. In 1984 he was the lead candidate for the Nuclear Disarmament Party in the Australian Senate as well as a time as president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and Greenpeace board member. In 2007 he voted against an expansion of the uranium mining at the party’s national conference saying “I have very great concerns about the current fragile safety regimes and the porous nature of safeguards because of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inadequate monitoring of safety issues.”

How betrayed are we all be feeling right now?

The Right must really be popping the champas right now as the pseudo lefties all over the country fall over themselves in a mad rush to pursue some historically right wing agendas, Iemma and the power sell off in NSW, Gillard and Rudd with John Howard’s education “reforms” and now Pete Garrett and an expanding uranium industry. It begs the obvious question of whether or not there is anyone with moral conviction actually in government. As for the Pete, obviously Nicholson didn’t realise just how far Garrett would go.

So as with Gunns, Mr Peter Garrett obviously is only too happy to accept the opinion of a select bunch of experts as to the consequences to the ENVIRONMENT of development proposals. The personal and instinctive responses that people feel on these subjects, and presumably Pete did share these feelings once upon a time (in a galaxy far far away), are irrelevant to a “professional” politician. I don’t share his view that ” (on the uranium mine) the proposal won’t produce any adverse significant impacts on matters of national environment significance” and I am sure plenty of other people who voted for Garrett and Labor agree. Nor of course is that any guarantee that there won’t be any adverse impact on the environment. Exxon showed us just how responsible corporations can be with regard to the environment.

He’s a piece of shit!

Not that anyone seriously expected Kev to be radical. He is a pretty conservative lefty anyway, worth millions and a regular church goer, the one thing that you could bet the farm on is that our latest PM is not going to rock any boats. So his government’s policy paper on carbon abatement is true to expectations, it looks like something but in fact is nothing more than window dressing.

Free carbon permits for big emitters! That will bring down carbon emissions overnite for sure. Cross subsidising motorists for increases in fuel costs is bound to have the roads clear in no time. Not counting agriculture in any carbon emission scheme until the cows come home, brilliant thinking! But rest assured there will be a carbon cap although what it is remains unsure and how will it be measured? By self reporting of course. By the emitters. Uh huh.

The only thing that appears to be close to the mark is that this scheme will be cost effective, it probably wont cost the coal fed power plants that contribute 70% of our total carbon a cent. But they will probably bump up their charges just in case. A government commitment to reducing carbon by 2050 is not even worth talking about, no more than say a government commitment to get rid of plastic shopping bags. The “cap and trade” scenario is likely to have only one outcome, more horse trading as permits to pollute are snapped up by investors to be sold to the desperate on demand. As far as reducing the carbon emissions are concerned, its all about protecting industries that need government protection.

Its worth noting as David Spratt did last night in launching his book “Code Red” (co-author Phillip Sutton) that the “Government’s 60% reduction target for 2050 is purely a political target and has “nothing” to do with scientific recommendations. It concedes atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will rise to a level — about 550 parts per million of carbon dioxide — that will cause at least a 3-degree rise in global temperatures. A 2-degree rise is predicted to trigger feedback effects leading to much more rapid melting of ice too difficult to model…What the Government doesn’t understand is that when it comes to climate you are not dealing with social or economic policy, but you’re actually dealing with the laws of physics and chemistry, and trying to negotiate with the laws of physics is a really dumb idea.”

Rudd fails the planet but then the planet clearly isn’t his concern.

This doesn’t look good. The so-called Future Fund is the government’s stash for paying out peoples retirement benefits and its source of funds has been government surpluses over recent times. In part these surpluses have come through the sale of government assets such as Telstra and through taxation revenue. In a sense superannuation is some form of guarranteed financial independence for people after they stop working which fits nicely with our current rampant capitalism. No mention of social security, just personal financial security…

However, even given the nature of the fund, you would think that contained within such a body is some consideration for protecting the financial asset they have control of. Apparently the fund usually invests in the stock market, an act of faith not unlike investing in racehorses, but for some inexplicable reason the management of the Future Fund decided to help out the liquidity problems currently being experienced by the local banks who were slightly affected by the sub-prime induced financial collapse. Also stepping into the breach was the local Reserve Bank (supposedly the one that is a measure of a nation’s financial reserves). All to prop up the local lending market which might otherwise have been forced to raise interest rates to some very unpopular levels. Given that these decisions most likely occurred whilst the previous government was at the helm, it suggests that there may well have been political implications at work behind such decisions.

All of that is interesting speculation. What is really interesting is what happens now? Apparently both parties, the Future Fund and the Reserve will want their money back at some stage and it seems likely that alternative sources of funding have all but dried up in the current international financial environment. This seems to suggest that banks will have no alternative but to lift their rates, possibly substantially, in order to maintain liquidity which has inherit risks to the rest of the economic health of the country. What isn’t clear in our so-called free market environment, is why government funds are being used in this way. Time and time again the champions of the free market advocate freedom from government intervention yet it seems the government is only too willing to prop the system up with commonwealth funds whenever it sees fit.

So rather than use commonwealth funds to say build national infrastructure, say for example an efficient railways, a state of the art broadband network, better research and education facilities or even a high quality health care system we are seeing instead government reserves propping up the very engines that drive a consumer society, for the sake of averting some short term political difficulties with the associated risk that the whole thing is only postponing the day of reckoning anyway.

Sunday’s newspaper reading over breakfast was meant to be a civilising moment, a chance to catch up on the latest cultural offerings and partake in some incisive analysis of the latest news. Sadly reading today’s news is a risky exercise, unless of course you happen to think as Murdoch does that the most important thing in Australia is a public apology by the Pope for the deviant behavior of his disciples.

The risk is that you might just discern some deep political malaise affecting a world confronting some rather crucial issues, things like climate change and declining resources. Throw into the mix the resurgence of violent extremism, the threat of another Middle East implosion and the seeming insurmountable problems of disease, poverty and malnutrition and it is easy to see why people seem content to get fixated over a hollywood celebrity’s birth event.

However there is some hope, and it would seem that our good friends across the ditch have the right idea. The Kiwis are pretty famous for punching well and truly above their weight, you only have to look at how often their national sports teams give their Aussie counterparts a regular thrashing or how often a NZ creative talent is unceremoniously adopted as an Aussie to see how much ability comes from the land of the long white cloud. So it is no surprise that I read today that Helen Clark’s government is busy nationalising key industries, in particular I was heartened to read they have just nationalised the rail and ferry network in that country.

It is interesting that here in Oz little coverage was given to the overly socialist actions of the NZ Labor government. Certainly the British press offers far more coverage than does the any indigenous aussie news outlet which seems quite paradoxical, after all the UK is on the other side of the planet with regard to NZ and Australia on the other hand is supposed to be a close friend and ally to the Kiwis. As far as Fairfax is concerned, The Brisbane Times has little gem meanwhile good ole aunty obviously thinks this story from almost 8 weeks ago would suffice.

The case for nationally owned assets that provide an essential service to all has always been difficult for the champions of capitalism to argue against. In part their argument has always rested on a claim, difficult to actually verify, that market forces will ultimately produce a service equal to a universal nationally provided service. The problem is that the very market forces that the capitalist espouse depend in large part on an unequal and unfair society, something that is fostered and encouraged by a free market idealogy. Ultimately we end up in situation where only the rich can afford anything of value while everyone else has to slave away for an increasingly smaller slice of the pie. Often this thinking is couched in terms of “reward for effort” or “encouraging initiative” when the reality is that all that is encouraged is a dog eat dog mentality that acts against the common good.

So the advocates of privatisation have had a field day up until now, whole slabs of commonwealth assets have be flogged off and we now have the rather dubious scenario of governments rolling in cash but still unable to implement any structural change for fear of offending key economic stakeholders. As our friends in New Zealand have rather astutely observed, having key public assets in public hands is ultimately a more secure long term option. That is not to say that private enterprise organisational skills could not achieve similar outcomes, rather it is simply an observation that certain services that sustain a society can only be provided by an entity that does not place as its highest priority always increasing profit returns to stockholders.

Only by acting together do we have any real chance of averting the doomsday scenarios that abound. Its not rocket science and it would seem at least the Kiwis have decided to do something other than play politics.

And worse still it isn’t just on your TV. The spectacle of a society consuming itself out of existence is unfolding before our eyes as Catherine Deveny observes in The Age. Her opinion piece on the scary business of rampant consumerism is interesting but on a couple of points I thinks she is wide of the mark.

Her claim that we are just blindly following our animal instincts or as she puts it “we can’t help ourselves because we’re just mammals programmed to binge in times of plenty” is quite debatable. Whilst it might be true that in a primitive sense we have a tendency to eat when we can in order to survive, this tendency has evolved in concert with environmental issues that might have meant that such gluttony occurred on a irregular basis. Think aborigines and hunting. You might have a feast of kangaroo every now and then but there were a lot of times when you didn’t.

What does this tendency have to do with the current trend to consumer binging? Simply this, there is no associated mechanism to regulate our consumption, at least not one operating at the same time as the prevailing supply of consumerables. There is of course a mechanism that will ultimately bring our consumption back to earth, and that is the natural limit of the world to sustain 6 billion people and their associated greed.

On another level Catherine’s piece is also guilty of trivialising what is really a fundamental problem, and in so doing she avoids any critical analysis of what is driving this cult of gluttony. She seems to think it is all the fault of the people doing the buying, yet as she points out, people are following some basic instinct in this regard. Why do we feel compelled to buy our happiness? Or perhaps a more interesting question is what are we trying to achieve when we indulge in consumption. It seems that we are seeking some form of security, something that is constantly denied to us in a world where we have no power over the things that might make us actually feel more secure.

In this the mass media which the Age is part of, play a significant role. They feed us a diet of fear and loathing. The mass media is in fact the ideas manufacturing arm of big business and it is big business that really profits from consumer society, and since clearly the general population is impoverished by consumption, the real villains are not people in general but those that would and do exploit a known human condition for their own personal gain.

Which kind of brings me to the question of carbon. The G8’s little announcement regarding carbon emissions was pretty well summed up by Crikey. It is of course a pretty meaningless commitment since by 2050 the world will be deep in the pooh as a result of today’s emissions so a target for 2050 is a bad joke. However I reckon there is something that could be done about carbon and it could work. First, it has to be simple and it has to be universal, simple because we are talking about life and death and universal because the issue really does affect everyone. So what we do is impose a universal carbon tax on everyone and every faceless corporation, the same rate across the board and measure it on wealth. After all it can be argued that all of our wealth is derived from what the planet has provided so think of it as back rent. Then you put the money into building sustainable societies, which means unfortunately, giving up those things we currently have which clearly are not sustainable over any real measure of time. We can build environmental friendly and carbon neutral but bugger all of what we have now actually fits that bill. Worse still we will only get there if we pursue a radical agenda, we simply don’t have the time for softly softly.

It could be done. We have the technology now whether or not we have the will is another question entirely. More importantly is the attitude of the powerful vested interests that seem to have our politicians in a thrall, are they interested in doing something for our long term survival?

Kohler in today’s Crikey reckons Oz has gone into panic over Prof Garnaut’s little report. Tim Flannery agrees with the good prof’s prescription but one suspects that very few will come out to publicly back the measures. Simply put, the future of our economic system is rather severely constrained if carbon emissions are taken into consideration. Everyone with a vested interest in this system, which is almost everyone these days, is going to take a hit and not just once but on an ongoing basis. The problem is fundamental to our capitalist model.

Unfortunately for us now, today’s economies have been build on a high carbon polluting base. In the past this has been at no cost to the polluters, but there was a consequence which we are seeing now as climate change. At the root of the mantra of unlimited economic growth is a rather naive notion, that is that we can have continuous growth in a world of finite resources. Pollution is an example whereby the polluters gain some economic value out of a common asset, the ecological health of the planet. In terms of balance sheets, clean water and fresh air have no monetary value, hence no business has to deal with the cost of pollution except perhaps in the most extreme case (think Exxon) and even then there is a good argument to say that no amount of money will return the affected area to its original unpolluted state.

Gore, Garnaut and Flannery are just stating the obvious, something that in a sense is well known and has been for a long time. Changing a few light bulbs or ticking a green energy box on your money electricity bill is about 25 years too late. The challenge is rather difficult because we have avoided dealing with the fundamental issues for a long time, and thanks to the recent neo-conservative resurgence it could even be argued that we are even less able to deal with the problems than we might otherwise have been. The pleadings by vested interests to continue for business as usual will be especially difficult for government to deal with since governments around the globe have become much more wedded to the interests of big business. It is quite likely that if any concrete action is taken to deal with the problem of carbon, the burden will fall to those who are less able to pay. A cynic might suggest that the current crop of politicians will merely be the fall guys for a raft of very unpopular decisions that might reduce our carbon footprint but will do so in a way that lets the big end of town of the hook.

However unpopular such decisions might be, the unfortunate bottom line is that unless there is international consensus and unilateral action by all countries then in reality the world is faced with a very uncertain future. Try figuring that into a company ledger.

Josh Gordon has a little piece in the Age about the troubles facing an IT contractor that services government departments. It seems that all is not well with these guys and they might not be able to honour their service agreements which in turn means the government departments, paid for by taxpayers will have to pay more to find another service provider. Apparently “The contract can be traced back to the bungled $5 billion compulsory information technology outsourcing program introduced during the 1990s by the Howard government.”

Josh is being disingenuous. John Howards compulsory IT outsourcing project was a huge success, it managed to funnel $5 billion of taxpayers money directly into the private sector. As such it was typical of the neoconservatives idealogical approach, take money from the state and give it to private sector businesses. So everyone still pays the same taxes and arguably the work gets done but somewhere along the gravy train, some business presumably makes a profit.

Now this is not exactly in the spirit of a government service which is supposed to be delivered on a cost or subsidised cost basis, it is somewhat a tacit contract between government and taxpayers that government provided services are provided cheaply enough so that all can make use of such service if they choose and there is a strong argument that in areas where such services are essential they should be provided by government agency.

If such a service is provided by a profit making private enterprise then clearly it is not being provided at the cheapest possible cost. What’s more if the service is apparently cheaper than an inhouse service, which is often an argument advanced to support the outsourcing of IT work, then it is reasonably to ask how this is happening. Is the company providing the outsourced work employing monkeys or are they cutting corners?

All of this is below the surface of Josh’s story but it is quite important to the consideration that if a company contracted to provide an essential service to government defaults why does the burden of fixing the problem fall to those who have already paid whilst those who have profited from the situation hide behind bankruptcy. No doubt a few scapegoats will be found to hang out for public display, but the real villains are those that espouse such obviously flawed policies in the first place. It will be a significant test of the character of this government to see how they respond.