$700 Billion???

Posted in Comment, Politics, Society by david @ Sep 22, 2008

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.”

This was simply a reiteration, in slightly more trenchant tones, of the consensus dominating Western politics for the last two decades. The NYT’s Thomas Friedman coined the splendidly incoherent metaphor of the Golden Straitjacket to describe the neo-liberal orthodoxy he and everyone else saw as both desirable and inevitable. The Market gives. The Market takes away. Blessed be the name of the Market.

Hence Klaus’ denunciation of climate advocates. By trying to impose environmental regulations, they were, he said, bucking the market and its wisdom, arrogantly assuming they were better judges than “millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong.”

Silly them.

But one wonders what Klaus makes of that communist George Bush as he embarks upon what The San Francisco Chronicle calls “the biggest socialization of private assets in U.S. history”.

At first glance, the scheme to outlay a dizzying $700 billion on illiquid mortgage assets seems like the deal that Jack might have embarked upon just after trading the family cow for some magic beans.

But it all depends on your perspective.

If you’re Richard Fuld, the chairman of Lehman Brothers, what’s not to like? You get to keep your Greenwich mansion, your Park Avenue co-op, your estate on Jupiter Island and the $40 million you earned in the last year alone. Not only do you face no penalties or recriminations, the government whisks away all the losses for which you and your pals are responsible, and dumps them squarely on the laps of everyone else.

The Calculated Risk blog puts it like this:

Unless there is a dramatic change, there will be no upside participation in the financial companies for taxpayers, and the taxpayers will recapitalize the banks by, in Krugman’s words, ‘having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets’.

We’re talking, in other words, about a huge transfer of the liabilities from some of the world’s richest people to ordinary American workers, who will be handed something like a $20,000 debt each. Despite the Chronicle, this is not a nationalisation in any traditional sense, since the population doesn’t actually receive anything for their money.

Rather than becoming more transparent, the financial sector seems about to become less so. As Newsweek says, “The prospect of unelected officials putting massive amounts of taxpayer resources to work without transparency or approval from Congress, and without a clear process at work, is indeed troubling.”

Really? But it worked so well in Iraq!

Speaking of which, the $700 billion this little bailout will cost is, as many commentators have noted, roughly the same as the more conservative estimates of the bill for the Iraq war.

So that’s where we are. President Bush and his supporters can find $700 billion to spend on a war of choice. Almost overnight, they can stump up an equivalent amount to stop Adam Smith’s invisible hand from throttling their shonky cronies in the banking sector. Such extraordinary sums, if devoted to public transport or alternative energies or scores of other socially useful outlays, would go a long way to ending America’s dependence on carbon fuels.

Yet, when it comes to climate change — which, like, only threatens the viability of the one planet we have — there’s no option but to let market forces do their work.

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

Corporate Welfare

Posted in Comment, Politics, Society by david @ Sep 18, 2008

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.

Mass media preaching the new orthodoxy

Posted in ABC, Comment, Media, Society, Technology by david @ Aug 28, 2008

As the casualty list grows following yesterday’s Fairfax announcement, you get the feeling that the rest of the local media heavy weights are gathering tips for their own “business improvement initiative” . It seems we live in an age of management speak, where cost saving is used to describe sacking people and going forward, a term of evasion that avoids acknowledging what’s happened before. And it also seems that the disease is spreading, so we now have promises of periods of consultation that are both extensive and one on one. The door is always open, unfortunately it is fast becoming the door you show people out.

One of the amazing things you find in media industries is just how many people work in managing the people who make the content that fills whatever media space you happen to choose. That not to say that management is unnecessary, but it is a fact that the lion share of numbers and wage growth in media employment over time is in management, the people who tell other people what to do and sometimes how to do it. Something doesn’t seem right if the CEO of Fairfax can send 500 odd people in search of other jobs and then collect a performance bonus at the end of the day.

At the ABC similar thoughts must be running through the mind of a former Fairfax man, Mark Scott. Mark doesn’t collect a performance bonus, but he is busy driving a reform agenda designed to streamline content production and improve utilisation of resources. It will also mean quite a few people lose their jobs (mostly operational staff), but you don’t hear management use terms like redundancies, it is all about going forward and gearing up for the new age of media. For the record here is Mark Scott in march 2008.

Now although I confess to a certain cynicism with regard to the idea of a 4th estate, there may well be a problem for the notion of democracy if we end up with next to no one actually generating the stories that were previously thought of as journalism. This might be sold as the price of progress, but the cost savings deserve to be challenged. It is most unlikely that media organisations in the throes of retrenching staff will be very interested in commissioning expensive in-depth journalism. Trivial lifestyle features or cooking shows are much easier and cheaper to make. This is a view illustrated in more depth by Nick Davies, a Gaurdian journalist and author of Flat Earth News on the 730 report. As we move to a new world of fractured news distribution via the internet, there are clear signs that those people who once were seen as champions of the press (journalists) are being replaced with content producers who have little time or interest in pursuing the traditions or ethics that guided their predecessors. Which suits who?

Footnote
Orthodoxy - if you think about the implications of this definition from Wikipedia, it seems obvious that we are indeed losing a radical and dissenting voice in this media revolution.
In general intellectual contexts, the terms “orthodox” and “orthodoxy” are commonly used in an unfavorable sense, similar to that associated with “dogma” and “dogmatic”. The implication is that orthodox beliefs are not rationally justified but are imposed by some overseeing body, such as the dominant group in an academic discipline. For example, the term orthodox economics is commonly used by critics to refer to the dominant approach to economics, which its supporters would more commonly call mainstream economics. In this sense, orthodox economics is commonly counterposed to radical or heterodox economics.

Looking for inspiration

Posted in ABC, Australia, Comment, Politics, Society by david @ Jul 13, 2008

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.

Who needs a library?

Posted in Comment, Media, Society by david @ Jul 10, 2008

Seriously. When was the last time anyone went to a library? I heard a conversation recently about some caller to talkback radio who was inquiring about IF there was something like a video store where you could go and like borrow books. The mind boggles! And today I was re-reading my daily Crikey and in was a little news gem relating how parts of the Fairfax media conglomerate (Fin Review and Fairfax Business Media) have decided that they don’t need their own in-house library service, specifically opting out of paying their contribution for a group wide delivered service. Predictably this appears to be a piece of management inspired enlightenment as it is reported that “AFR bosses Michael Gill and Glenn Burge have decided that journalists can be “self-service researchers”" and then it is also noted that “Business Media reporters have accounted for twenty per cent of the work of the library.”

As is noted elsewhere this has interesting implications for material generated by journalists. But it seems to reflect some popular thinking, that the rise and rise of a universal database called Google has claimed yet another scalp. Of course if material isn’t available in on-line form then Google won’t help you and despite the understated charm of interfacing with the very stylish and attractive Google receptionist, I can’t help but think that losing the quaint little human interface to your very own library is something that deserves special consideration.

Yet in that sense the AFR is just jumping on the bandwagon, albeit one that they don’t appear to be actually contributing to. One of the things that makes it possible to use Google as a research tool is the availability of data. Worldwide a number of significant libraries have committed to digitising their assets and making them available to the general community. Despite the concerns of copyright owners, there seems to have been a bit of an avalanche of digitalisation in recent times, at my local university for example, entire collections have disappeared to be reborn as digital assets and of course even borrowing a book if you can find one, has been automated. You still can’t borrow the latest bestseller from Google, or even micro pay for it like iTunes but that would seem to be the next logical step. Why else would you bother trying to create eBook readers unless you could see a market?

So it appears that globally we are heading in the direction of an on-line only repository of information, the world wide electronic library. There are risks of course, in the past libraries although somewhat revered were not an entirely protected species. The odd burning or ransack was out of the question if things got a little out of hand, yet today’s modern electronic library has built into it a rather naive belief that the technology that supports it is immune to any major disruption. This is rather a simple concept but difficult for some to grasp so consider this; you can still see in some places the actual books made by people hundreds of years ago. That’s right, hundreds of years, and there is even remnants of ancient Egyptian papyrus in some museums. As a storage medium for information and ideas, books are hard to beat. The only thing that the modern age has come close to in terms of durability is the vinyl record used by the music industry which fell out of vogue when the digital age arrived.

The strength of the book as a method of information storage is that provided it is reasonably well made, and our modern paper technology is pretty good, then it requires nothing more that to be stored in a dry place. It will work without power, it doesn’t require a login to open up and all that it requires is someone with some basic literary skill to pass on the ideas and information it contains. Pretty simple huh? Of course they take up space once you start to collect the little beasts and getting back to the Fin Review, after a while you ending up employing people to look after your collection of printed material, people called librarians. But by and large, the system has stood the test of time. It is a brave act of faith to dump such a time honored method in favour of something that has only been with mankind for the last couple of decades.

Finally, borrowing from the IT world, you often hear the term redundancy employed by geeks talking about their wonderful systems. They have a spare of something running that is meant to provide you with some sort of guaranteed level of service, be it a storage system or a network connection or the physical processor. I think there is a very strong argument to maintain redundant systems of information storage just in case the world wide online system ever catches a cold.

books

Its a horror movie…

Posted in Australia, Comment, Politics, Society, Technology by david @ Jul 9, 2008

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?

The IMF knocks on the door

Posted in Comment, Society by david @ Jul 1, 2008

Now I really have no idea what the real politics of the IMF are, but they don’t have a great record in some places which tends to make me think they are probably just the caretakers of the rich, which makes this little development even more interesting.

By the way, The Age also had the good sense to run the story which just goes to show they have some journalistic integrity after all ;) Actually that’s unfair, as Fairfax Digital seems to be shaping up pretty well these days as far as their reporting is concerned, certainly they seem to adapting well to the new digital reality. Mark Scott (a former Fairfax man) must be gnashing his teeth with frustration as his more nimble competitor seems able to bring the traditional news strengths of print to the emerging digital market, but I digress.

A couple of things really grabbed my attention in the Der Spiegel story other than the news itself. First was the rather frank admission that the current inflationary pressures in the world have got bugger all to do with the money side of the equation and that it is quite likely that the current low interest rate regime in place in the US is actually making things worse. To put it simply, as Der Spiegel does, “Modern inflation is driven by the global scarcity of resources. Nowadays purchasing power exceeds purchasing opportunity. Most of all, there is not enough oil, and too few raw materials and food products.” To a casual observer this seems so obvious and it also seems astounding that no-one else is drawing the same conclusion. This is really a King’s new clothes moment and one has to suspect that one reason that such information is currently not doing the rounds of the daily radio talk shows is the consequences that naturally follow from such a bleak analysis, namely that “these increasingly scarce resources are becoming the focus of disputes among many people and billions of dollars are at stake.”

After the gravity of this little economic discussion sinks in the rest of the article is almost superfluous but for the almost as revealing comment that little Georgie doesn’t want to get caught with his finger in the pie so his approval for the IMF inspection is conditional on its report not hitting the fan before he retires to his Texas holdout. Doesn’t really inspire confidence in government does it or the so-called economic system that is meant to sustain us. As we used to say in the shadow of the Vietnam War and the first oil crisis, there is enough in the world for everyone’s needs, just not enough for everyone’s greed.

Politics in Oz

Posted in Comment, Politics, Society by david @ Jun 26, 2008

Bernard Keane writing today in Crikey paints a pretty sad picture of Oz politics. Unfortunately he’s also pretty well summed up the failure of this new Labor government to actually come to grips with the problems it has inherited. The current challenges facing us down under are all the more difficult because there seems to be a rather depressing “head in the sand attitude” currently being expressed by the incumbent media, with the ABC leading the way.

We have huge problems facing the world right now! Food is running out all over the place. This is very very bad, it makes people angry and it undermines peaceful coexistence. Unfortunately in the fat capital of the world, we here in Oz don’t seem to understand how important having enough to eat is to the majority of the world. Like our grossly overindulgent friends in the US and elsewhere in the west we are far more obsessed with having enough cheap petrol to put in our nice new shiny cars. The current media frenzy about petrol and the hijacking of political debate on the subject seems to have completely obscured the 5000lb elephant in the room, the lack of food for an ever increasing world population and the impact of climate change on existing agriculture.

Anyone who expected Kevin Rudd to be the man to help lead us thru this difficult time really should have their head examined. However it must be said that John Howard was even less likely to be able to act in the way we need. The failure of the political system is simply to be expected given the short term thinking that predominates in a three year electoral cycle and the ownership of the media by powerful vested interests. Things won’t get better by themselves and history is littered with examples of what happens when people fail to act when they can. The sort of things we need right now if we are serious about the issues ahead are seemingly way beyond our mandarin speaking Kev. Things like major investments of public funds into carbon neutral and sustainable energy sources that will deliver results in the next 3 to 5 years, not piddling little feasibility studies but real tangible substantial reductions in the amount of coal we burn for electricity and oil we use for transport. Its not beyond doing but it involves a degree of honesty currently lacking in the whole sorry debate.

The Murray Darling river system is probably a goner so we also need to really start thinking about where to move our agriculture and it would be a real bonus if we didn’t fuck the country up any more than we have in the past. And we need to decouple ourselves from the western myth that unlimited consumption is in our best interests. Maybe we should ask the aborigines how they managed to live here for thousands of years without turning the place into a dustbowl.

These things don’t sound too bad, but as Bernie points out, implementing any sort of policy that brings any of this about is going to be very unpopular in the short term. Generally very unpopular political decisions have a habit of being made in situations where people really have no choice and more often than not are made with under the guise of a national emergency. The time for easy political decisions is long gone. Pity.

bread

Even the Home of Capitalism has Misgivings

Posted in Comment, Society by david @ Jun 2, 2008

It would seem there are rumblings of discontent in the US over current economic policy and the behaviour of corporations.

At issue are two rather obvious fundamental problems. The first one is the ability of large rich multinational corporations to act above and beyond the rule of law as it applies to the rest of us. This obviously leads to a lawless chaotic environment for them to operate in, which seems rather counter intuitive. One would be inclined to the view that stability is prefered so perhaps this is just a phase in the lifecycle of the new economic world order.

The other problem that is referred to above is the threat posed by unfettered corporations to national interests. On this there would appear to be even stronger grounds for concern. We often hear of cries for more competition in markets as a means of providing benefits to consumers, however such claims are based on a consumption based society. Any business regards another competitor as a threat, to be vanquished as soon as possible  Microsoft are proud exponents of this philosophy, one which is mostly portrayed uncritically by the mainstream media, as something in everyone’s best interests, without ever questioning the foundations of such claims. Importantly, the economic footprint of such a large corporation naturally results in special consideration by governments who rightly have concerns for the broader community. Such considerations often end up resulting in outcomes more beneficial to the vested interest and of less benefit to the nation as a whole, something we all ought to be concerned about if we don’t want to retreat to a feudal society ruled by a handful of mega rich overlords.

The Politics of Inaction

Comments Off
Posted in Australia, Comment, Politics, Society by david @ May 22, 2008

Crikey beat me to it. The thrust of their comment is that governments need to start acting, NOW! Oil is only going up, any talk of something else on the horizon is just a crock. Food is going up, perhaps in part because of oil, perhaps in part because of global warming and the impact on agriculture and probably because there are just more people to feed.

There are some simple facts about life in the 21st century. Fuel not only costs more, it will continue to rise in real terms due to the scarcity of supply and the compounding problem of carbon in the atmosphere. We need a cheap carbon neutral alternative yesterday. The second simple fact is people need food to survive. Sure having a shiny new gizmo is fun, but until everyone has the basics covered new toys are a luxury, a fact that seems to be lost in the west as consumption approaches something akin to religion.

Now the basic consequence of rising fuel and food prices is pretty simple. Poor people won’t be able to afford to pay. I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer but I have a feeling that there a lot of dirt poor people in the world. Even here in the so-called lucky country, the distribution of wealth in recent years has skewed significantly back in favour of those that already have enough so my guess is that this trend might be happening elsewhere. Drawing the dots together shouldn’t be too hard but there is another element in a democratic society.

Just to refresh, a democracy is a system of government where everyone (or nearly everyone) over a certain age gets to vote for the people who make the laws that we are supposed to abide by. The people thus elected agree to act in the interests of everyone even if they didn’t vote for them. Once democracy was couched in terms like “of the people, by the people and for the people”. One problem these days for democracies is a pretty big one, they are hostage to the prevailing economic conditions. This is a fairly recent phenomenon in a sense, there was a time when governments realised the importance of protecting society from free market forces, especially after the famous stock market crash in 1929 however since then and especially since the rise to power of the neoconservatives the state has capitulated on the key issue of public ownership of important infrastructure.

So the extra dot that needs to be joined is this one. The general population may one day recognise the need to actually do something big about the problems we face. They might in turn apply pressure through the ballot box to get the government of its arse, however any large scale structural changes contemplated by a government run a serious risk of having to confront the big end of town. After all they can afford to pay more so they don’t need to change a thing.

If you have any doubt as to how powerless governments have become, look at the stupid plastic shopping bag. Then look at how much money governments commit to building more roads and bigger cities. ask yourself if these are sustainable policies in light of what is what is really going on ie the price of fuel and food. Then ask yourself why the stock market continues to go up, where is all the energy and food going to come from in few years time and why aren’t our governments doing something about it, like NOW!

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