The unreformed finance sector is the central vehicle for this rollercoaster. The perspicacious Lordon once more: “Save me or I’ll kill you.” Or, more accurately, “Save me and I’ll kill you.” A sector whose integral function in economic activity gives it a public purpose has been appropriated for entirely private ends, and with disastrous consequences.
Meanwhile here in Oz the MSM are reporting the banks (all 4 of them) recorded a 9% increase in income from bank fees last financial year, a little under half of that coming from households who pay fees for mortgages, personal loans and credit cards.
Also echoing sentiments expressed by Jones, the ongoing debacle surrounding the Government’s moderate proposal for a Resources Rental Tax has included repeated threats by multinational mining companies to take their business elsewhere unless they get the proposed tax scrapped.
Despite the spectacular collapse of high risk schemes on Wall Street based on pernicious and predatory lending schemes and the public retreat of neoliberal ideology it is obvious that capitalists has no intention of modifying their behaviour or a desire to accommodate any desired social objectives that might be expressed by the majority of people. While this is classically portrayed as fundamental to the nature of free-enterprise and human behaviour it is also underlines the necessity for structural change. The choice is fairly obvious, either capital is brought within the sphere of social control or any ideas of social progress and ecological stabilisation must be jetisoned since the two are clearly incompatible.
Memory of the tragic Greek protests of a few weeks ago are fading fast, washed away in the never ending gush of Gulf Oil or rendered insignificant by Israeli bloody arrogance.Yet something in this report on Dublin protest organised by the Workers Solidarity Movement struck me as defining the greater problem. Maybe it’s the slogan they adopted -
“They didn’t share the wealth, why should we share the pain? Make the rich pay for the crisis”
because it seems to have far reaching connotations, one that I want to draw is the problem of anthropogenic global warming.
I’m an not going to debate the science, I’m not a scientist but my experience after 50 odd years on this part of the planet and what I see and read about other parts of the world as well as what I understand of the science and the opinion of scientists leads to a unshakeable conviction that our thirst for carbon multiplied by the sheer numbers involved has destabilised the relatively benign climatic condition the human race has enjoyed for the last 10,000 years. What’s more, the change now built into the system plus the potential for even more carbon to make its way into the atmosphere as well as the potential for methane liberated by warming the vast northern tundras creates a world changing scenario.
Now the denialist have tried to paint this picture as alarmist but that’s a tactic to divert attention from the causes and delay meaningful action to avert catastrophe. The conclusion we need to draw is that the denialist camp is part of the powers that be, maintaining the status quo as long as possible is their principle objective since the system as it is, continues to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite.
The principle argument is this, avoiding the worst consequences of catastrophic climate change requires action on a scale similar to that which we see in times of war. The material wealth of world and our collective intellectual capacity needs to be harnessed if we are to peacefully avert the threats to humanity posed by carbon enhanced natural disasters. I have chosen war and peacefully here deliberately since war has historically been waged by the elite to defend privilege yet the stakes and technology have far surpassed any chance that war will be neatly constrained by geographic borders. War could easily wipe out the human race. It is not an option, but the only alternative is for the rich to disgorge some or most of their wealth and for the rest of us to work creatively and collectively to reduce our carbon pollution. Pretending we can go on as we are is surely the highest folly.
Despite the rhetoric from the Obama administration that Deepwater Horizon threatens government approval for future off-shore oil wells there can be little doubt that the US will continue the drill for oil in the area.
Unfortunately for those hoping that the extent of the environmental disaster unfolding in the area will mandate against more drilling, I would simply point out that ecological catastrophes are part and parcel of the oil industry and as the Miami Herald points out, large scale spills have occurred in the Gulf area before.
The moral outrage by those who I think correctly point out that the damage to the environment is incalculable and is not justified by our greed may ruffle a few feathers in political circles but as the mining lobby in Oz has recently demonstrated, fair mindedness has no place when it comes to considerations of financial profit.
If there is money to be made drilling for oil then that is all that matters. The rest is collateral damage.
Oops just watched a trailer for Unrivalled…urgh what is going on with the world or am I just some latte drinking trendy overeducated and underpaid, indulging in some romantic sensibilities? Lordy lordy be.
It seems everywhere you have to have a position on something. Where do I stand on land rights for gay whales? Do I support the notional redistribution of capital into the hands of the rich at the expense of the useless layabouts bludging on the dole? What did Milton mean by promoting a straw man to finger Eve in the downfall of MAN? Jesus wept…a freakin decision please, just say where you stand!
Menzies took a stand 60 years ago against the evil communists who were in the words of the then Country Party like a poisonous snake, kill it before it kills you. Never mind the implications of outlawing a political party in a democratic state, some people are just too dangerous to let loose on the streets. 2001 and some bloody ideologically motivated nutbags fly a few planes into a few buildings and the whole world goes into shock therapy while governments aided and abetted by the media keen to broadcast a plethora of shocking images to the unsuspecting goes into legislative overdrive labelling any dissent no matter how trivial as an act of TERROR! For Fuck Sake! Get a grip a people.
What happens? The US leads a coalition of very unwilling in arms against a bunch of third world Arab states who happen to have the misfortune to be sitting on a large chunk of the known oil reserves and a whole shitload more people die, most of them innocent poor nationals of Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile private security multinationals collect a fuckin windfall in government money as they covertly roll out the next police state at home.
Here’s a bloody position for you dear reader. The acts of 9/11 are over. Sure they have echoed a few times around the world but they didn’t and don’t herald a new wave of popular armed insurrection that transcends national boundaries. In breaking news it appears that most people just want to eat sleep and be fuckin merry. The last ten years has handed back power to private interest after any social gains that might have occurred in the preceding 100 years. Wealth is increasingly disproportionate in its distribution, a very important consideration if you subscribe (as I do) to the belief that the usefulness of money is proportional to its distribution. In other words, money becomes more useful and powerful when it is not distributed evenly.
Oh and then there is the little matter of global warming. Remember a few years ago (I do, I went to Al’s little film one night in a George Street movie house)…global warming was going to get us and the culprit was humanity’s greedy consumption of all things carbon. The scientists, bless their little empirical socks, happen to by and large agree. The powers-that-be got a bit nervous, what if widespread populism actually motivated people to act? Well government can’t have people acting for themselves and the economy certainly wont put up with people absconding from their consumer responsibilities so let’s have a RECESSION and remind the wavering where their loyalties lie, with the economy!
So there. Three positions. The War on Terror is morally, legally, socially, ethically, emotionally completely WRONG! The re-distribution of wealth to the rich and the ongoing preoccupation with making and selling shit is utter FOLLY. And the mainstream political system in cahoots with big business should all be sent to Antarctica so they can bask in the new found warmth of a carbon enhanced globe. Cus sure as shit stinks, these things will bite us all on the bum one day, and probably sooner than later. Call me a greenie, a socialist, a lapsed hippy or whatever label comes with the position, frankly I don’t give a damn.
Oh and I think Milton was a closet misogynist who found it easier to attribute evil to women then admit it in himself.
Posted 3 months, 4 weeks ago at 12:37 pm. Add a comment
This story arrived in my inbox yesterday and like all good headlines it did grab my attention but the more I read the story and similar related ones doing the rounds the more curious I have become about the source and its methodology.
The source of the story seems to be a British based magazine called Stuff. Stuff is apparently a “mens” magazine which is code for a magazine which will frequently pander to sexual appetites of men in a softly pornographic way as this collection of google images illustrates. Now being a men’s mag shouldn’t count heavily against Stuff but it does raise a question over its methods and since it appears to be the source of the story about eWaste I am inclined to think that the story is doing the rounds as a form of indirect marketing driven by connections between the Haymarket media company and other media enterprises in the UK.
The fact that Haymarket (the parent company that makes Stuff) is apparently owned in part by Michael Heseltine the one time British conservative politician and now Baron in the UK makes the Stuff story a bit more interesting. Here we have a suite of glossy men’s mags bombarding readers with rave reviews for the latest technological gadgets which makes money from deals with advertisers (usually the makers of said gadgets or related services) gently chastising its market for the amount of eWaste the process creates presided over by a man, who we can safely say, knows absolutely no financial hardship and suffers not from the pangs of unrequited consumerism but instead enjoys a powerful position in the British establishment.
The motivation appears to be whatever sells works and guilt is a close companion to sex so the two combined should be a winner for the future Stuff however, looking at the UK’s Telegraph site the first line in their story discloses an immediate fallacy in the claim. It’s not that fifty two billion pounds of new gadget promptly wind up in the UK trash can every year, rather it is a somewhat lesser observation that -
the average Briton only uses half of the functions available on their gadgets
So what can we expect now the news has broken that the good people of Britain are frittering away their hard earned wages on gadgets they don’t use? Well a publicly funded education campaign is one possibility, the sort paid for by taxpayers and run by private consultants that buys up expensive media space in magazines like Stuff or perhaps, a public declaration by Michael Heseltine admonishing the great unwashed for their wasteful ways is another possibility. Are we likely to see a concerted media exploration into the morality of consumerism or a huge public outcry about the waste of resources? I think I will leave the answer to your imagination…
A song by the wonderfully talented Tiffany Eckhardt tells me to shine today, something I’m sure Auntie Gertrude would agree with, my lack of illumination not withstanding, yet I am sorely troubled by two things that have surfaced on my screen in recent times.
The first one I want to share is a job ad. I won’t bore you with all of it, just the summary should suffice.
“Are you passionate about changing people’s understanding and attitudes toward death and dying? Do you want to contribute to social change…”
Now I don’t know about you (I mean really I don’t, drop me a line sometime and tell me) but being passionate about death and dying? Okay there is the bit about attitudes and understanding as well as social change but is this really the right tact? If I think about people who are passionate about their interests artists and musicians come to mind, and accountants… actually no, sorry accountants don’t have an entry in their system for passion but I digress. This idea that one can be passionate about death and dying or changing people’s attitudes to it is intriguing. The only other people I can quickly think of who want to change social attitudes towards the end of our days usually come knocking on my door nicely dressed in suits and or dresses clutching copies of the Watchtower and offering to shine a bit of light into the dark corners of my troubled soul.
That is not to say that social attitudes to death and dying couldn’t do with a nudge but given the constraints of a part time position for ten hours a week just how much change could we expect to see? Society is a big scene and one person for ten hours a week hardly seems like social changing event but maybe I’m just cynical. On the other hand it might just be a cover for some kind of evangelical organisation that’s busy recruiting passionate people to spread the word that it’s okay to die because our suffering and death leads to a better world.
The other thing that crossed my screen this morning that deserves some reflection is (warning…adult material) this. News from the Expo is slowly making its way into the mainstream press which I guess just goes to show how easy it is to get publicity if you smile sweetly. But something about this easy adoption of the sex industry by the traditional conservative mainstream media is worrying me a little and it coincides with the avalanche of publicity over eReaders that has swamped the tubes recently.
Volumes have been written about the sex industry and my opinion is covered somewhere by someone so I’ll skip most of it. What I do find interesting about the “industry” is its implication for relationships between the sexes. Douglas Hines illustrates the point perfectly. A middle aged man sitting next to a piece of plastic that he can have sex with. Sure sex dolls are nothing new but people like Douglas are making money out of selling dolls to other men presumably because they can’t have a normal sexual relationship with another human being. It’s hardly surprising that women simply go and buy an unobtrusive vibrating thing that neatly fits in the drawer next to their bed but men have to buy a “recreational innovation” that can talk but still ”has a full C cup and is ready for action” for a quiet little $7000.
That the sex industry is primarily directed towards fulfilling heterosexual male fantasies is pretty much beyond question but what does it say about our societies? Like the 3D experience that Lance Johnson and his muse Breanne Benson are selling (and a virtual reality scenario putting it all together can surely be just around the corner) I am inclined to ask, is this the pointy end of the capitalist system as applied to our fundamental desires? It certainly seems like it. Create an environment where sex is commodified, regulate supply through various social agencies which increase the demand and then sell a solution. That would simply be business 101.
Am I passionate about death and dying…is selling sex ok? It’s worth thinking about, death as something we end up doing alone and sex as something infinitely more meaningful when it’s done with someone else.
Posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago at 10:08 am. Add a comment
Guy’s article caught my attention because he revealed the rather depressing news that eBooks outsold their physical predecessors on Amazon over the Christmas Consumer Festival. His argument though is nothing particularly new, the idea that our society and culture are underpinned by various needs and the material way in which these needs are satisfied which is in turn threatened by the ever expanding reach of technology is fairly familiar to anyone who has been following the debate. That does not mean the idea is less valid nor is the question of who benefits from the new technology unrelated.
I looked at a Kindle recently and after a few minutes with it I could easily imagine the marketing potential. It looks a bit like a book, it feels a bit like a book and it has words in it like a book. You can carry it with you like a book and it works in standalone mode quite well for a few weeks until the tiny power consumption overwhelms the inbuild battery. So far it’s just like a book, except it needs charging every now and then, but the real marketing power lies in the fact that a kindle like device means you can read or view a variety of things on the same device. So instead of having to lug fifty books around with you on your holidays, if that’s what you do, you can simply load them into your kindle and provided you have a source of power handy your reading pleasure is assured.
But a part of me feels like this is a con job. I struggle to read enough now and having another device will not actually give me more time to read. Convenience in having a small library neatly tucked into a book like object might be a good thing but it isn’t convenience that prevents me from reading, it is time and sometimes motivation. My reservation about the eBook phenomenon is that is a solution to a problem we don’t have. Carrying a bunch of books around isn’t really the issue unless you are a student perhaps, what is an issue for books and reading is that people are so busy consuming other physical things or absorbing neatly packaged media that reading books is becoming a chore.
The marketing solution is simply to package the reading experience into a something new that can be sold to consumers as a benefit. The essence of the this technology is that a. it is convenient and b. it is something we don’t have but need. I disagree with both. It is not convenient for me to have yet another gadget that I must come to terms with so I can then do my reading. I refuse to have to learn that a book needs to plugged in every now and then or connected to the internet to get is material or any of the other idiosyncrasies that go with a new bit of technology. And I refuse to learn those things not because I am some rebellious hippy but because in learning those things Amazon can make money from its investment in technology.
I think we need to be very clear about this. The eBook has arrived now because the business model that has driven the computer age is rapidly running out of options. Making a buck out of the computer business is getting harder, consumer fatigue has set in, the market is saturated with workstations, laptops or netbooks and the technology has become so ridiculously cheap that growth is looking decidedly limited. Yet the financial investment in the technology and needs of capitalism to sustain ongoing growth mean that something must be produced that will maintain consumer demand. Since the computer age has already liberated many bits of writing already, the eBook is a logical extension.
What is clear is that this technology is being sold as a benefit to consumers but in reality it is a benefit to the producers of the technology and those that have financial investments in the technology business. And like all con jobs it carries with it hidden costs that are ignored in the glossy sales pitch. The eWaste problem, the consumption of limited resources, the assault on the writing process that has grounded book publishing for hundreds of years and the questionable rationale that the internet is somehow beyond the reach of controlling interests. All of these issues are non-existent in the glossy sales pitch, its all about the convenience of buying online everything you can imagine.
But if what we can imagine is driven in part by what we are exposed to in our daily lives, what we see or hear or read, then the eBook disease becomes another form of thought control in much the same way as TV functions. Books as standalone things that take people out of the world at large will become things that put people back into the larger world. I will be spared the serendipitous experience of sharing a read experience with people I meet because my read experience will simply become just another pattern of consumption online.
However I think Guy’s essay on the potential impact of technology on our society misses the point. It isn’t the technology that threatens our culture and our society, it is the capitalist imperative to commodify every part of our lives that poses a greater threat. The eBook disease is simply a logical extension of combining capital and marketing with applied science without imposing social limits on the growth of money. Wringing one’s hands over the death of books without recognising that it is a consequence of our ongoing acceptance of money as the determining force in our lives simply allows the debate to miss the point. We are not harnessing technology to do what we really need it to do, that is, to produced a more sustainable and socially agreeable place because we have allowed technology and money to determine our cultural and social agenda.
What can we do? Well I’m not buying a Kindle anytime soon despite the tsunami of publicity that is swamping me. I don’t need one.
In case there is any doubt left in the world, the last two days of rain have finally washed away the last vestiges of support for the rather silly idea that mankind’s addiction to carbon based energy is somehow heating up the planet.
What’s that you say? Two days of rain doesn’t make for a cooling planet? What about the IPCC predictions of global warming of at least 2 degrees this century? Well if that news was alarming then surely the responsible governments (notably China and the US) would actually do something, I mean it sounds drastic, rising sea levels, increasingly disastrous droughts and storms, melting glaciers, rising cases of tropical diseases…
I hear you. But as we know, courtesy of the little inside disclosure job done on the East Anglia Climate Unit, the climate scientists are just cooking the books to ensure the continuation of lucrative government research funding. Makes sense doesn’t it? I mean everyone’s on the take so who can blame the scientists for fudging things occasionally. So there you go, the science is bunkum, its just some sort of intellectual conspiracy designed to baffle the poor people and con governments into handing over money to keep scientists in work…
Really I didn’t expect a socialist world government to take over post Copenhagen despite the assertions of Planet Janet. Aside from questions over the science, or rather the assertion that what we do know is sufficient to accurately predict the future which is in itself a claim deserving of some scrutiny, I think that things will change anyway but not necessarily because of collective action on AGW. The reason I suspect has more to do with the complexity of the modern world and its utter dependence at root level on carbon based energy.
Brian Davey at Open Democracy writes a refreshing argument about the world post Copenhagen. He argues that overarching policy instruments fail not because of their intent, but instead, they fail because of their complexity. A global agreement at Copenhagen would have been a plan too complex to succeed even if the political will existed. A more likely constraint on carbon emissions is simply supply, that is, the easy and cheap availability of oil and gas. As these reserves diminish we will naturally release less carbon into the atmosphere which, while it sounds attractive in terms of AGW, also implies that less convenient energy will be available for general consumption.
The argument about carbon based energy supplies is far less controversial than the science of AGW. Known reserves plus possible new discoveries only give us a limited timeframe. Then there are recovery costs. Simply put it is completely certain that the world will run out of oil,gas and coal before long and it is just a matter of when. A gradual decline in cheap energy, or it’s corollary, a continued climb in the price of convenient energy will do more to undermine the “business as usual” scenario than any convoluted government carbon pollution reduction scheme.
I suspect certain sectors of the economy are awake to this potential and are busy lobbying government to get financial subsidies to offset their expected cost increases under the guise of doing something about carbon pollution. No such luck for the average punter who is increasingly caught between higher energy costs and fewer lifestyle options. Fortunately their is some hope and it is nicely espoused by Brian who writes
there are no magic bullets for this situation. The assumption of governments is that there are large scale solutions for large scale problems but this is not so. The problems have to be solved one house, one street, one neighbourhood, one farm, one forest, one region at a time.
This solution is already taking shape. In Canberra we have a wonderfully inspiring little organisation called SEE-Change who are helping people adapt to a low energy sustainable future and I’m sure other similar organisations exist, because realistically, they are our best chance. It is time, post Copenhagen, to stop expecting someone else to clean up our mess and start preparing for what will happen the best we can. Surely that’s a better thing to believe in than any doom and gloom scenario.
Posted 8 months, 1 week ago at 7:14 pm. Add a comment
So I finally got around to watching this lengthy documentary which has been lying around my place for a few years gathering cobwebs. Which is a shame really because it deserves to be watched.
However Youtube is everyone’s friend and it looks like the whole thing is available in bits so knock yourselves out. Highlights for me were the bits on “The Investigators” Fox News story on BST and the story about IBM during WW2. Both stories highlight a key feature of the corporation, that is, its survival instinct dominates any concerns of morality. The allegation against IBM were covered extensively in the book IBM and the Holocaust and the Fox/Monsanto coincidence is also covered in the documentary Outfoxed.
The survival instinct of the corporations cannot be underestimated. As a human invention their existence has produced some of the worst features of capitalism stemming from the sole concern for making money. In other words, human beings invented these things and gave them only one thought, to make money. It stands in stark comparison with the articles in a country’s constitution which might have concerns for the public good, morality, religion, the environment, law and order and so on. And while nation states are constrained by territorial boundaries the corporations have risen to a point where they transcend the power of the state yet at their heart, corporations are still human inventions, we can bring them to heal.
Or can we? These corporations embody a very human characteristic, the will to live. That instinct exists in the hearts and minds of the people who sit in the boardrooms of these things and they understand only too well the possibility that their powerful position could be undermined by the will of the masses. So they will act to prevent any dissolution, just like Murdoch is acting to protect the interests of News.corpse for the battle lines are clear. A corporation that exists with no temporal limits, no certainty of death cannot reflect the true nature of humanity. The corporation fundamentally does not serve the people, it serves itself and its only objective is to make money and money is another guise for power. That’s why the Egytians built pyramids, so their kings could live forever apart from the world that gave them life. So the corporations will engage in activities that make them look like good corporate citizens because their biggest fear, their only fear, is that the people that created them might decide to kill them.
Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago at 9:36 am. Add a comment
