Public Opinion

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March 30, 2007

Workchoices +disciplinary power

What we know one year on is that WorkChoices work for those who have bargaining power in labour markets and work against those who do not. So far the impact is only being felt by unskilled and semi-skilled workers, and particularly women. As Greg Combet pointed out on Lateline Business people well recognise that:

when the economy slows or when the resources boom is over and they look around and they've lost a lot of their employment rights, they know they are likely to be worse off. It is going to be much easier for employers to reduce their entitlements in those circumstances. I'm not suggesting that the business community wants to set out to do that, but cost competitive pressures in a different legal environment that we are now in drive those sorts of chains. but workers know the impact will move up the labour chain when the business cycle turns down when current the resources boom ends.

Spooner

The Howard Government talks in terms of deregulating the labour market and continually measures the success of WorkChoices with decreasing unemployment and rising productivity. We can agree that have to have flexible labour markets and argue that should not mean a race to the bottom on wages and conditions. However, no independent analysis of the AWAs has been done.

Kenneth Davidson, writing in The Age. says:

The central objective of WorkChoices is to redistribute income from wage and salary earners to profits. The means is not deregulation of the labour market. It is to re-regulate the labour market in a way that increases employers' ability to unilaterally set wages and conditions by criminalising trade unions' function in collectively negotiating with employers, a function that needs to be backed up with the right to strike when employers refuse to bargain in good faith.

The free market talk about de-regulating the labour market is a misnomer. A different mode of regulation as disciplinary power is being assembled. Davidson goes on to say:

Over the year in which WorkChoices has been in force, its success has been measured in the decline in the share of national income accruing to wages and the concomitant continued growth in profits despite very tight conditions in the labour market.

WorkChoices is emphatically not a means to achieve higher productivity or even primarily directed at increasing employment opportunities for marginal members of the workforce. This is the conclusion that can be drawn from a study for the Victorian Department of Industrial Relations by Griffith University professor of industrial relations David Peetz.

How do you retain collective bargaining and economic flexibility? How do you, as Heather Ridout asked, unscramble the AWA egg?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:36 AM | TrackBack

March 29, 2007

Soros on Israel, America

George Soros in an article in The New York Review of Books entitled On Israel, America and AIPAC states:

The Bush administration is once again in the process of committing a major policy blunder in the Middle East, one that is liable to have disastrous consequences and is not receiving the attention it should. This time it concerns the Israeli–Palestinian relationship. The Bush administration is actively supporting the Israeli government in its refusal to recognize a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas, which the US State Department considers a terrorist organization. This precludes any progress toward a peace settlement at a time when progress on the Palestinian problem could help avert a conflagration in the greater Middle East.

The blunder Soros is talking about is that Israel with the strong backing of the United States, refused to recognize the democratically elected Hamas government and withheld payment of the millions in taxes collected by the Israelis on its behalf. He says:

This caused great economic hardship and undermined the ability of the government to function. But it did not reduce popular support for Hamas among Palestinians, and it reinforced the position of Islamic and other extremists who oppose negotiations with Israel. The situation deteriorated to the point where Palestine no longer had an authority with whom it would have been possible for Israel to negotiate.

He says that the current policy is not questioned in the United States.

While other problem areas of the Middle East are freely discussed, criticism of US policies toward Israel is very muted indeed, due in large part to the pro-Israel lobby--American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)---in suppressing criticism by saying that the critics of Israel's policies of occupation, control, and repression on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem and Gaza engender anti-Semitism.

Congress still cannot bring itself to stand up to the AIPAC line on America's Mideast policies which is similar to the Bush administration's neoconservative Mideast policy. So what happens to the those American Jews who don't support Bush's war in Iraq or his "war on terror". Do these liberal Jews continue to view AIPAC as the de facto spokesmen for American Jews? Will they provide an alternative Jewish voice willing to look critically at Israel, and AIPAC's position on Israel and he Middle East?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:57 PM | TrackBack

Iran: just a game of poker?

Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian says that the British forces, captured by the Iranians in the Persian Gulf, were operating as part of a multinational force under an explicit UN mandate, to protect oil installations and prevent the smuggling of guns into Iraq. I would presume that the British neo-con hawks are calling for some good old fashioned gunboat diplomacy to teach the Iranians a lesson. Might is right.

Other's question the U K's presence in the Gulf: what business does the UK have in the disputed Iran/Iraq waters in the Shatt-al-Arab waterway searching Iranian ships for smuggled cars?

Peter Brookes

Many in the Middle East would question the legitimacy of the western military presence in Iraq and its claimed territorial waters and the naval build up in the Persian Gulf and see Iran attempts to acquire influence and power in the Middle East as legitimate. They would see the Iranian provocation as another event in the the 20th century history of the Britain and the USA in relation to the Middle East.

No doubt they remember the Persian Prime Minister Mossadegh and how MI6 and the CIA conspired to overthrow a democratically elected leader Persian because he nationalised the oil industry and replaced him with the Shah? They would see the US-Israeli-UK alliance as actively seeking a confrontation with Iran.

A tit-for-tat game---American special forces are operating within the Iranian border since late last year whilst spy drones are overflying and photographing targets---is now being played out in the Persian Gulf. In this political chess game United States and Britain have bolstered their presence in the Persian Gulf to confront an ascendant Iran flexing its muscles throughout the region and developing nuclear technology. More provocative events will follow.

I watched Fox Television last night and was surprised by the second generation neo cons deep hostility to the UN.---The talking head from the heritage Foundation said the UN was protecting a totalitarian regime. Their advocacy of international hegemony, preemption and regime change by the US is a policy that undermines the UN. The neo-cons in America are dedicated to regime change in Iran and have been ever since the Iranian revolution.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:30 AM | TrackBack

March 28, 2007

health reform, professional self-regulation, Tony Abbott

In his ‘Health Reform: Important but easy to overrate speech to the Australian Financial Review Conference at the Sydney Marriott Hotel on February 2007 Tony Abbott, the Minister of Health and Ageing, strikes a warning note about reforming Australia's health care system. He says that:

The “health reform” debate has three recurring themes: changing the way public hospitals are managed; “big bang” restructuring to end the blame game between Commonwealth and state governments; and renegotiating the Health Care Agreements in ways which keep the structure but change the outcomes.

This account overlooks the structuring themes around health workforce issues and the regulation of the health professions.

Regulation of health professions(medical and non-medical) is a health reform in the light of the failures of professional self-regulation to ensure public safety, most notably with the case of Dr.Jayant Paytel in Queensland. CoAG has moved in this direction with its proposal for a national registration and accreditation scheme under the National Reform Agenda. This scheme proposes a single regulatory body to ensure public accountability.

This shift to national registration is part of the CoAG's response to the Productivity Commission's important Report on Australia's health workforce.

Minister Abbott's reluctance for reform can be seen in his responses to CoAG's national registration and accreditation scheme in his speech to Global Access Partners Conference, Parliament House, Melbourne on 16 February. He states:

The draft scheme circulated last year proposed a single national health registration board with authority over all the professions. A national advisory committee (perhaps comprising the chairmen of the various national registration boards) now seems more feasible. This committee would meet regularly to discuss issues of common interest and would report to the Health Ministers' Council but would not have authority over the professions' individual national boards. It would operate in much the same way as the committee of medical college presidents, a sounding board for ideas and a forum for finding common ground.

This rejection of a single regulatory body that would ensure the accountability of professional self-regulation is a rejected by the Minister in favour of the continuance of self-regulation. Minister Abbott adds:

Some of the professions are concerned that any national health registration board could be used to determine function rather than competence. As far as the Commonwealth is concerned, national health registration is about guaranteeing public safety, enabling portability of practice and reducing red tape. It's not about changing existing professional demarcations.

That leaves the professions investigating and adjudicating public complaints against bad practice with little by way of public accountability, even though the history of self-regulation shows the health professions frequently closing ranks against the public so as to protect their own.

The Minister, it would seem, has been captured by the AMA, which is resolutely opposed to any regulation of its autonomy or self-regulation by a single regulatory body

start

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:58 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Costello blues

Repudiated by his own kind:

Allan Moir

It will be interesting to see how Costello responds to the intervention of Nicholas Stern in the Australian debates about global warming. Sterns' message is simple: Australia faces a bleak future of increasing droughts, storms, sea level rises and the collapse of the Great Barrier Reef if the planet kept warming; and that the costs of acting worldwide to combat climate change are much less than the cost of inaction.

Costello is vague on this issue. He doesn't talk about market failure at all.

Simon Grose in The Canberra Times says:

According to the Electricity Supply Association of Australia, at least 2200megawatts of new electricity generating capacity is under construction in Australia and a further 2250megawatts is at the advanced planning stage. This equals an increase of about 10 per cent to our existing national capacity of 45,000megawatts and is part of a huge effort to meet growing demand for electricity. By 2030 national demand is estimated to be 67 per cent higher than in 2006, requiring about 30,000megawatts of new capacity.

Increasing demand provides a good opportunity to start making the shift away from electricity generated by fossil fuels. Alas

Fossil-fuelled new CO2-emitting plants account for just over 4000megawatts of the total, or more than 80 per cent. A couple of these involve partly experimental exercises in either reducing CO2 emissions per unit of energy or capturing and storing CO2, and gas-fired plants produce less CO2 per unit of energy than coal-fired plants, but the fact remains that we are investing heavily in new CO2-emitting plants while simultaneously expressing a new peak in concern about global warming.

So what is Costello going to do about that? How is he going to rtr try and frame the issue? The union dominated ALP and economic vandalism talking points are no use here, so is it back to nuclear power, big government subsidies for the nuclear industry and slow strangulation of the solar power research and industry.

Update
Costello took a different stance in Question Time. Australia though not a signatory to Kyoto will achieve its greenhouse reduction targets. The Europeans, who are signatories, will fail bigtime. No mention was made that Australia will do this because of reduced land clearing in Queensland. The implication is that the free market+technology approach will deliver whilst the big government approach will fail.

The argument can be found here at the Globalisation Institute.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:55 AM | TrackBack

March 27, 2007

developing Canberra

I see that the federally funded National Capital Authority in Canberra has redevelopment plans around the Albert Hall Precinct of Lake Burley Griffin adjacent to the Commonwealth Avenue Bridge and the National Library. The NCA plans to revitalize the area with a landmark (8 story) building to increase tourist activities, whilst responding to the heritage values associated with buildings and the landscape. The NCA says:

It is proposed that this area be zoned to allow a high level of tourist, entertainment and leisure uses and build Canberra as a waterfront city. This amendment would allow for new restaurants, cafes, bars, tourist and cultural facilities to enliven this area instead of surface car parks and redundant road infrastructure.

It is part of the NCA's development of the Griffin Legacy to take Canberra into the 21st century.

It is unclear how a landmark 8 story building that transforms another section of lake foreshore on the south end of Commonwealth Avenue Bridge responds to the heritage values associated with buildings, such as the Hyatt Hotel or the landscape. The latter includes open green space as well as planned common areas and would preclude a Darling Habour-style revitalization or a Kingston foreshore development.
.

There is not much greenery left in Manuka and Kingston apart from the Telopea Park and this makes the greenery around the Hyatt and the old Albert Hall even more precious. The latter land is in the parliamentary triangle is a national heritage responsibility and not for Canberrian's decide. Presumably there is money to be made for privatising the public land by NCA on behalf of the development lobby

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:14 AM | TrackBack

March 26, 2007

ghost blogs+ dying newspapers

There is an article from the Sunday Times downloaded into todays Australian that talks about the death of blogging. It is not attributed to any journalist. It's central argument is:

The extraordinary failure rate of online diaries and claims that interest in blogging will soon begin a precipitous slide are sparking an intriguing debate about the future of self-expression on the internet and whether blogs, once seen as revolutionary, are destined to become a footnote in the history of computing.To the embarrassment of millions of internet users ... the evidence of failed diary-keeping cannot be easily erased from search engines that continue to provide links to blogs that have lain dormant for years. Some internet analysts call them "ghost blogs", lingering reminders of a cultish enthusiasm for self-expression that is rapidly wearing off. Others liken the abandonment of blogs to "the suicide of your virtual self". At least one internet writer blames the blogging culture for helping to turn the internet into a "dictatorship of idiots".

it reads like professional disdain for the amateur. It makes no attempt to address the political blogs (which remain very lively in the face of newsroom budget cuts) or cultural blogs. Blogging is equated with personal diary writing--hence we have ghost blogs---not the rise of blogging as citizen journalism in response to the decline in the quality of the mainstream media.

Presumably political blogs would be dismissed as just chatter by freeloaders --- regurgitating someone else's reporting work. It would not be considered commentary upon the work of journalists.

The critical edge of blogging in relation to Canberra Press Gallery journalists on a drip feed is ignored in this turgid piece, as is the migration of audience to the Web. What is not explored is the significance of the changing nature of the audience as the Internet continues to transform the average person from a media user to a media creator producing online content. The shift in the online world is to more open conversations and open discussion is not mentioned, nor the view that the print business model cannot sustain journalism, nor the slow death of the local newspaper or the lack of great regional papers.

How can newspapers can survive in an age of free online content? The issues are explored here by David Lazarus at SFGate.com. Lazarus says the issue is one in which the Internet is a potentially fatal threat to newspapers.and that only an elite handful of newspapers can currently get away with directly charging customers for online access to their content. Consequently, newspapers will need to invest in creation of the sort of unique content that readers (and Internet users) simply can't find anywhere else. Then they can charge for their content.

So why is the Guardian so successful? Their newspaper content has value but they don't charge for it online.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:22 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

investing in broadband

What will be the Howard Government's response to the ALP's broadbanding the nation plan? There needs to be one as the Coalition have failed to deliver on fast broadband across the nation, and they need to counter the political momentum that Labor gained from its Future Fund announcement.

Bruce Petty

Using some of the Government's leftover Telstra shares to build a broadband network that is likely to boost productivity makes sense. A national broadband network is useful infrastructure and hardly economic vandalism.

Cutting a deal with Telstra is the Coalition's most obvious option. That would mean rolling back the regulatory regime and cutting back on competition. You can't say that a good regulatory regime that ensures competition is high on the Coalition's economic priorities can you? So what do they plan to do with regulation? Same question for for the ALP, as it says it will relax regulation. What does that mean?

Will either force Telstra to separate its infrastructure from its retail business? Will either be strong enough to do this? Telstra's track record indicates that it will fight to remain a monopoly.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 25, 2007

Gunns, pulp mills and POPs

The Stockholm Convention is a global treaty to protect human health and the environment from persistent organic pollutants (POPs) POPs are chemicals, such as organochlorines, that are toxic to humans and wildlife; remain intact in the environment for long periods; become widely distributed geographically; and accumulate in the fatty tissue of living organisms. Signatory nations must eliminate or reduce the release of POPs. Australia is a signatory to the Stockholm Convention and so is obliged by the Stockholm Convention to apply the Precautionary Principle in addressing the problems of POPs.

So is the risk of producing unacceptable levels of deadly and persistent organochlorines too high from the bleaching process in the Gunns' pulp mill? Little is being publicly said about this issue. What we do know is that the bleaching process proposed by Gunns for its pulp mill in the Tamar Valley uses chlorine dioxide, and that most of the evidence about the dioxin discharged by pulp mills point to the chlorine bleaching process. We also know that among the most deadly organo-chlorines are dioxins: potent, toxic chemical by-products of chlorine bleaching that get into the air, water, soil, and food chain.

Once released, these chemicals persist in the environment, spread through the food chain, accumulate in fatty tissues and disrupt, mimic, and block the hormone systems of living organisms. Hormones actively regulate the reproductive, learning, behavioral and disease fighting capabilities of humans and wildlife and are transferred from mother to fetus, in utero and through breast milk.

The Stockholm Convention says the following about dioxins:

These chemicals are produced unintentionally due to incomplete combustion, as well as during the manufacture of certain pesticides and other chemicals. In addition, certain kinds of metal recycling and pulp and paper bleaching can release dioxins. Dioxins have also been found in automobile exhaust, tobacco smoke and wood and coal smoke.

I guess the assessment under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act will have to assess the existence of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and do so in the light of the Australian Government being obligated to act in accordance with its international treaty obligations. Many Liberals in Canberra would not like that as they are in favour of the pulp mill.

However, dioxins is serious stuff as research has indicated that minute exposures to organochlorines can lead to cancer, loss of reproductive capabilities, developmental and behavioral disorders, learning disabilities, birth defects, and damaged immune systems.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:13 PM | TrackBack

March 24, 2007

interest rates + foreign debt

It was only a few weeks ago that the economic talk in Australia was about a reduction interest rates. It's suddenly been transformed into talk about interest rate increases this year. That is a rapid shift in market sentiment. Maybe it is the Reserve Bank---ie., it's assistant governor Malcolm Eddy--- jawboning.

Another interest rate hike would mean five rises since the 2004 election — and that means another $230 more a month on the average mortgage repayment. Ian Manning, at the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research, is quoted by Marc Moncrief in The Age as

"From an economic view, the exposure is worse. The general economic policy has been to drive economic activity by a continued consumer boom funded by debt — that, in turn, made tenable from the banks' point of view and from the borrowers' point of view from rising land values. But, of course, rising land values also come home to bite us because that comes into the housing affordability question."

Australian household debt is increasing and Sydney is the seventh least affordable city in the world in which to buy a home, and the least affordable anywhere outside of the US. (London was ninth). That is a consequence of inflationary pressure associated with an large expansion of credit that fosters asset price bubbles.

There is a fault line lying behind interest rates and it is foreign debt, which barely figures in the flow of economic statistics these days. Kenneth Davidson says in The Age that since 1996, net foreign debt has grown 170 per cent to $520 billion and is continuing to grow by nearly $50 billion a year despite the biggest export commodity price boom since the Korean War.These are large international liabilities. Davidson adds:

Most of the borrowings that aren't used to pay the interest on the existing stock of borrowings have been used by the banks to finance the housing bubble. We are assured by authorities that the growth in household debt doesn't matter because the debt burden has been reduced by low interest rates and rising house values.

But the housing bubble will pop if interest rates and/or unemployment rise as a result of foreigners deciding to withdraw the foreign needle. Our future is no longer in our hands. In the past decade we have frittered away the savings generated by accumulated budget surpluses and asset sales.

He says that long-awaited rebalancing of the economy, in which domestic demand contributes less to overall GDP growth while net external demand (net exports) swings from a negative to a positive contribution, has still not materialised. And this despite the continuing improvement in our terms of trade, which are now 32 per cent better than they were three years ago and the best we've had since 1959.

Doesn't this make Australia vulnerable to capital flight? Could not the Australian dollar be hit by surges in global volatility? Shouldn't the Reserve Bank of Australia ne looking beyond narrow inflation targeting to the broader issues of financial stability?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:10 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 23, 2007

is federal Labor trusting Gunns?

I'm picking up on this post over at junk for code about Gunns, the pulp mill and dioxins in Tasmania. As Gunns is refusing to guarantee to abide by guidelines agreed to by Tasmania and the Commonwealth and the State Government has engaged in political interference in the Resource Planning and Development Commission's assessment of the $1.4 billion pulp mill project.

Premier Lennon's legislation, which was drawn up to create a new process as an "approval process" rather than an assessment, is a fast-track assessment that removes any further public hearings from the pulp mill assessment and dumps the RPDC expert consultants and puts the onus on Tasmanian MPs to decide the project's fate.

In getting Gunns off his back by abandoning any semblance of proper process, Premier Lennon effectively tossed the assessment of the mill back to Canberra. It must now go through the federal government's environmental approval process conducted in accordance with the EPBC Act.

Zap + e-collegiate network, how self-regulation works

Gunns can’t argue that dioxins are among the most toxic chemicals known. They can’t argue that the mill won’t release any dioxins. What Gunns could argue is that the pulp mill will release what they could call ‘negligible’ amounts of dioxin. But the sticking point is that dioxins accumulate in the food chain. So they need to counter, dismiss, or fudge the bio-accumulation of dioxins in the food chain.

The bulk of research shows dioxin loads in seals, and the accumulation of dioxins in invertebrates, fish, birds and other animals in the food chain. There are also concerns about air pollution and odour emissions as well as toxic effluent.

I notice that federal Labor is rather quiet on the issue. We know they have abandoned Latham's attempt to save Tasmania’s forests at the last election, and under Beazley and Rudd, the ALP have to the same position as the Howard government. So where do they stand on converting old growth native forests into toilet paper in an election year?

Has the federal Labor position to the Dick Adams position, which holds that Tasmanians forests are to be fed into the export woodchip process or a pulpmill, whatever the industry believes is best for it? Senator Kerry O'Brien, from Tasmania, reckons the Gunns' pulp mill is world class.--the world's greenest mill. Gunns, apparently, is to be trusted. O'Brien, who has the Forestry portfolio, is pro-logging. But what about the dioxin? "World class" implies little to no dioxin. Is Gunns building a world class pulp mill when it is using chlorine dioxide in the bleaching process?

Where then is Peter Garrett on the politics of dioxin? Is he, the shadow environment spokesperson, in favour of the Gunn's mill? Does he support the current process under Lennon state government which the environmental impact would be approved by politicians who go along with the pro-logging Premier?

What we do have a media release, which confirms that the ALP supports downstream processing of forest products, with the proviso that:

The Commonwealth assessment of the pulp mill must examine the impact of the proposal on matters of national environmental significance, including the impact on threatened species and marine ecosystems.

The ALP is in a tough spot. Rudd cannot support Lennon's actions and court green voters across Tasmania. On the other hand, Rudd needs the logging votes to win back seats in Tasmania.

However, Malcolm Turnbull is also in a spot:--he cannot fall in behind Lennon's dubious process, due to the threat of legal action by the Greens to ensure a full and proper inquiry under the EPBC Act. Currently, he is playing his cards close to his chest.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:18 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Ministerial responsibility

John Warhurst has an op-ed in the Canberra Times on ministerial responsibility. He says that this doctrine is central to the way our system of responsible government operates.

Responsible government is about the link between citizens and their representatives. More particularly, it is the way that ministers, collectively and individually, are held responsible for their actions on behalf of the people that elected them.Individual ministerial responsibility in theory has two parts to it......Individual ministers, such as Campbell and Santoro, should be held responsible both for their own actions and for the actions of their departments. It is the only way departments can be held accountable.

Warhurst says that Ministers Campbell and Santoro have departed for personal sins, though in Campbell's case very much a peccadillo. Even 'peccadillo' overstates the Campbell event.

Warhurst goes on to say:

...it should be recognised that neither resignation goes to the heart of what the Government has stood for in terms of policy. They are not resignations brought about because of the administration of refugee and asylum-seeker policy by the Immigration department or of the AWB scandal by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade or of the Iraq War by the intelligence agencies or any of the other major planks on which the Government has stood. The scalps have not included Philip Ruddock or Amanda Vanstone or Mark Vaile or Alexander Downer or even a junior minister on this account.

This does not mean that no one in the Government has deserved to be held to account under the doctrine of ministerial responsibility. What it does mean is that the way ministerial responsibility works in Australia is that personal rather than policy failures are much more likely to bring a minister down.

So who is responsible for policy failures? Presumably parliament can try to hold the government of the day responsible. What if the executive controls parliament--both the House and the Senate, as is the situation now?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:58 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

March 22, 2007

Future Fund: building a broadband network

I thought that the Rudd/Tanner proposal to use a bit ($2.7 billion) of the Future Fund (estimated to be $120 billion by 2020) to develop national high speed (12 megabits per second) broadband was an excellent policy initiative. Clearly Telstra is not going to do that, nor the G-9 who will only concentrate on the capital cities. Rudd has dumped the ALP's opposition to selling the rest of Telstra and come up the plan for an ALP government to join with private enterprise to develop an old Beazley telecommunications policy under a 1:1 funding arrangement.

I watched Question Time yesterday and the Liberals were all over the place with their rhetoric of irresponsible economic announcement, economic vandalism, smash and grab raids on the fund, raiding the honeypot, robbing future generations (threatening the superannuation payments to public servants, judges and politicians) etc etc. The burglary and stealing rhetoric was over the top.

All that Rudd+ Co are doing is selling down 30% the Government's Telstra's shares to invest in building national infrastructure that is needed for an information economy. Australia is falling behind other developed countries in terms of availability of high-speed broadband. Costello's performance in Question Time was ham fisted and shrill, with more than a touch of desperation, as he tried to to get an economic scare campaign working against Labor using the slippery slope argument.

The AFR has continually warned that the Future Fund, which was established in 2005, would be viewed by politicians as a piggy bank to be raided for political purposes. Todays editorial comments:
.

.regardless of whether fast broadband infrastructure is needed any faster than private industry players are prepared to invest in it, the fundamental question here is one of governance.The Future Fund was established in the 2005-6 budget to build an income stream to pay the unfunded liabilities of federal public servants for which successive federal governments had dodged responsibility. Almost two years ago that liability stood at $91 billion. By 2020 it will be closer to $140 billion. The find has received funding of $40.3 billion to date, plus the 17per cent stake in Telstra remaining after the partial sell-down last year, known as T3...The Telstra shares are worth about $9.2 billion today.

Rudd's proposal is is envisaged as a capital investment with any dividends going back to the Future Fund and so leave it no worse off.

So what's the problem with Rudd's carrier-neutral proposal, given that the Future Fund is not being used as a piggy bank that is raided for political purposes? The AFR's response is that 'major investments in new technology fall into the speculative camp and glib promises to make returns out of future budget surpluses and little comfort.'. The ALP needs to be careful not to use the Future Fund as a piggy bank, given its public commitments to keeping the Future Fund locked up, independent and its decisions based on expert advice.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:10 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

March 21, 2007

Google + journalism vs bloggers

The journalism vs bloggers debate could be undercut by the boring NSW election. This election is primarily concerned with who is better in terms of the management and delivery of services. If the Lemma Government is on the nose, then so are the Liberals. It's LibLab recycled yet again. It is becoming taken for granted that the state government in NSW is corrupt and incompetent, if not dysfunctional.

Alan Moir

Dissatisfaction with the incumbents isn't enough: voters need some evidence that the opposition would do better.

So how could the old journalism vs bloggers divide be undercut? Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine says that we have two models of the media: centralized and decentralized.

Journalism as a part of the media sees itself owning audiences. The SMH markets itself to get me to come to its site. Then it feeds me as much advertising as they can, until you leave and go elsewhere. That’s the centralized model of media. But bloggers are not an audience and we are not owned. Google understands this. They bring their services to my own personalized homepage. This introduces a decentralized media ecosystem.

Glenn Greenwald argues that one of the core functions bloggers could perform is to battle against the cliched narratives and reflexive mindset the media has relied upon for two decades now in determining which stories they select to cover and what they say about those stories. He says this refers to:

how the national media depicts political movements and the assumptions embedded in how they referee our country's political discourse. The point here -- as always -- is to try to force the media to write about the stories it covers in a more critical and factual manner, to compel them to abandon the cheap and lazy cliches that otherwise frame everything they write. That is one of the most critical functions of blogs, and it is one of the goals that is realistically attainable by bloggers and their readers working together.

Bloggers could question the conservative media hunts the Left under beds, in university corridors, everywhere elites gather to swap their dangerous opinions and fills their columns’ with their endless fake rage and challenge the conservative machines tactics of setting up fake controversies to mask the real ones.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:29 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Gunns, ALP, pulp mill

Tasmania is again debating and fighting over its forests. The timber industry continues to be the problem. Tasmania's future is what is up for grabs and it has reverted to its 'crash through type' to overcome the environment economic divide.

Ray Norman, Tasmanian postcard

At the moment it does look as if there has been a sweetheart deal between Gunns and the government to fast-track approval of the proposed pulp mill in the Tamar valley at all costs. Gunns Ltd have withdrawn from the Resource Planning and Development Commission (RPDC), the body in charge of assessing their pulp mill proposal in northern Tasmania. They have withdrawn the proposal from the RPDC and referred it to the State government to fast-track the approval of the mill by passing legislation to have it assessed. Premier Lennon has recalled parliament to put legislation into Parliament yesterday to approve the mill.

That means the final say on the mill lies with the Tasmanian Parliament. Will the parliamentarians, especially MLCs, who support the mill, but only if assessed by the independent RPDC, stand firm when called on to vote in parliament?

I understand that Federal Government will make its own assessment of the proposed the pulp mill under the terms of the bilateral agreement to meet the requirements of the EPBC. If it doesn't meet these requirements, then it won't be approved. Will that be the case though?

The new assessment process of the chlorine dioxide pulp mill put forward by the Tasmanian Government will include a social and economic benefit study that will not take account of any negative impacts on the wine or tourism industries in the region. Tamar already has problem with air quality, exacerbated by the region's topography. There will be thousands of tonnes of particulars put into the air shed in a place where eight people die every year directly related to air pollution related diseases. I understand that because of the long flushing times in Bass Strait where the effluent outfall of the mill is to be, the contaminated water, including organo-chlorines, will remain around for a long time.

There need not be this environment v economic standoff. How about an environmentally responsible mill through a properly managed process?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:03 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

March 20, 2007

corporate welfare + Gunns

One definition of corporate welfare: privatize the profits in good times and socialize the losses in bad times. It is the other side of the coin of those whose mantra is “self-regulating free markets”, who love no regulation and little taxation of capital, and claim that it is government regulation and interference that is the cause for why things go wrong in the market place. Two examples of corporate welfare neo-liberal style: both farmers and financial markets are bailed out when times are tough.

A recent example of the corporatist form of corporate welfare is the government payment to Gunns in Tasmania for its proposed pulp mill to produce its low value, pulp and woodchip products sourced from cutting down old growth native forests.

Zap + e-collegiate network, too-much-horse

This is an industry that is heavily propped up (subsidised) by the state Lennon ALP government, whose industry policy is to rely on a monopoly producer selling a low value, bulk commodity into a world market. The Lennon Government appears to be indifferent to Tasmania's vulnerablity to external market forces that are well out of its control.

How does Gunn's chlorine bleaching pulp mill stay competitive with the booming South American pulp industry that enjoys the benefits of cheap woodchips, labour, chemicals and manufacturing? Corporate welfare.

As Mike Bolan points out in a public debate hosted by the School of Government at the University of Tasmania's Launceston campus last year this is:

an industry which is clearly in trouble and which relies on tax subsidies at every stage of its operation in order to survive. That’s payments by us. They’re paid by us, we put in roads, we put in bridges for them, we’re supposed to provide them with extremely cheap timber, all kinds of access. They have tax subsidised plantation acquisition. They’re acquiring our farmers' land courtesy of the taxpayer. And its not costing them a thing.

What’s good for Gunns is good for Tasmania is the stance of the Lennon Government. Bolan goes on to describe the losses to Tasmania from Gunns. He says:

I believe that the glue that holds Tasmania together and the country is water. If there is no water we have to leave. If there’s no water we can’t grow our own food. We can’t do anything without water. Water is vital and yet this entire industry presents a massive threat to our water supply. First of all by removing the catchments. The second is when the plant plantations in these huge densities, these trees growing are very hungry for water. And they start taking massive amounts of water out as they tree grows from the dwindling remaining water supplies. Remember they’ve already been reduced because we’ve lost the upstream catchments, we’ve lost that rich soil that holds everything back. So suddenly we’ve got two problems.

Paying for the community costs of that is another form of corporate welfare.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:14 PM | TrackBack

negative campaign backfires

Though the Prime Minister makes himself as father of the nation protecting us citizens from the evildoers who want to destroy all that we value and hold sacred, he is also chairman of the Liberal noise machine whose standard operating procedure is dirty tricks, including being lied to.

Power--acquiring and holding onto it-- is all that matters for this kind of machine politics. Lies and myths are the necessary tools.

Geoff Pryor

Drip feeds are circulating throughout the media. The machine operators---'Senior Liberals' in the media---reckon they have gone over the top in their personal attacks on Kevin Rudd. they are "informing selected journalists-- that their anger is being directed at Tony Abbott, the Health Minister, who m overreached with his attack on Kevin Rudd's account of his father's death 39 years ago. Howard gave the okay to flick the switch to negative.

The backpedalling has taken place because internal polling must have told them that their negative campaign is back firing.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:46 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 19, 2007

Howard upbeat on Iraq

I see that the PM is upbeat on Iraq after a fleeting visit. He has confidence in the strategy being pursued by the US and Iraqi governments, reckons that the situation in southern Iraq was improving, that it would be disastrous to withdraw troops too early, and use of military force remains essential to building Iraq's democracy. He repeats the US claims that the surge strategy was working and that the Iraqi army was maintaining order on its own.

Such a prognosis is usefully compared with the recent analysis by Anthony Cordesman, the defence analyst at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. It is entitled The New Strategy in Iraq: Uncertain Progress Towards an Unknown Goal, and Cordesman argues that the situation in Iraq is so bad that none of the “least bad options” now available to U.S. policymakers will likely allow the U.S. to achieve its goals: creating a relatively politically and economically stable Iraq with reduced levels of violence that is able to defend itself against neighboring states.

Cordesman puts Howard's upbeatness into perspective. He says:

Just as the British confused Basra with a regional center of gravity, the Bush Administration may well have compounded these problems by confusing Baghdad with the center of gravity in a national struggle for the control of political and economic space that affects every part of the country..... Winning security control of the city and losing Iraq’s 11 other major cities and countryside to Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic factions is not victory in any strategic, it is defeat. As has been discussed earlier, the minimal requirement for a successful US strategy is a relatively stable and secure Iraq, not temporary US military control of Baghdad.

Cordesman adds that:

The US needs a strategy for all of Iraq, not a single city – particularly when a focus on control of Baghdad could mean leaving most of the country to divide on sectarian and ethnic lines. So far, the US has failed to set forth a strategy and meaningful operational plan for dealing with Iraq as a country even if it succeeds in Baghdad.

At the end of his analysis, Cordesman makes what is perhaps the most troubling point, that what happens now in Iraq is largely out of U.S. hands:

Another key reality is that the US really is no longer in control even of “Plan A;” the Iraqi government is. The British withdrawal plan may simply be yet another warning that the real-world contingency is plan I – one controlled and shaped by Iraq’s internal power struggles. Moreover, if the Bush Administration strategy does fail, virtually all of the plans to come will be shaped by fighting and power struggles between Iraqis where the US will have to respond to events shaped by both enemies and “allies.”

One of the lessons that both the Bush Administration and its various US opponents and critics may still have to learn is that at a given level of defeat, other actors control events. US discussions of alternative plans and strategies may well be becoming largely irrelevant.

I doubt that John Howard will argue his case against Cordesman's analysis when he makes his big speech to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute this week.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:11 AM | TrackBack

March 18, 2007

the nuclear option

There's a lot of spin about nuclear power isn't there in Australia where coal is king.Those promoting nuclear power say that it is a 'climate friendly' energy option. It is held that electricity generation from nuclear power is now a well established safe technology used worldwide which, from an environmental and resource point of view, Australia should be embracing as soon as possible.

Atchison
The cartoon refers to the news that a private company---Australian Nuclear Energy---has been formed to set up the first nuclear power plant in the country, with South Australia and Victoria identified as potential locations. The economic reality is that nuclear power in Australia will never start up without government subsidies.

One argument against is that there are significant concerns about whether an acceptable waste disposal solution exists. From a sustainability perspective, while the nuclear waste issues remain unresolved, the uranium/nuclear power industry is transferring the risks, costs and responsibility to future generations.

What is needed is a commitment to the sensible alternatives that produce sustainable cost-effective reductions in greenhouse pollution: wind power, solar water heating, energy efficiency and gas. Nuclear power is expensive, slow and dangerous, and it won't stop climate change.

I suspect that the real motive of many who have called for a debate about nuclear power is to persuade Australians to accept a possible expansion of uranium mining, primarily BHP Billiton's planned expansion of the Roxby Downs uranium mine in South Australia based on building a de-salination plant.

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March 17, 2007

bubble land

I see that the Australian Financial Review is beginning to take the meltdown in the US subprime market a little more seriously than before. Last Thursday its editorial said:

Jittery American investors, spooked by cracks in dodgy end of the US housing market, are casting a temporal pall on an otherwise robust local market. In reality, the impact of the US housing sector's troubles should be kept in perspective. The consequences could be more optimistically interpreted as a serendipitous pause for securities markets in a steadily growing economy.

The market will self-correct the wobbles. The AFR is like the Wall Street cheerleaders mocking as Chicken Little "sky is falling" hysteria those who interpret the bad news on the housing finance sector as a clear and present danger. But the adamant denial is no longer repudiating economic reason about the housing price 'bubble land', even if the AFR thinks in terms of mitigate the "fallout" when it occurs and easing the transition to the next expansion into a new bubble land. We have 'jitters', 'cracks', 'dodgy,' 'pall' in the one paragraph. 'Jitter's' is another word for panic.

And there is reason for panic. As Henry C K Liu says in Asia Times Online:

In the United States, when house prices have generally tripled in less than a decade, it is evidence that the value of the dollar has declined by a factor of three in the same time period. Consumer prices have not risen by the same amount because of outsourcing of manufacturing to low-wage economies overseas also acts as a depressant on domestic wages. Imbalance in the economy appears if wages and earnings have not risen proportional to prices. A homeowner whose house has increased 300% in market price while his income has risen only 30% has not become richer. He has become a victim of uneven inflation. He may enjoy a one-time joyride with cash-out financing with a new mortgage, but his income cannot sustain the new mortgage payments if interest rates rise, and he will lose his home.

It looks more like a foreclosure bloodbath to me. One that is far broader than the AFR's tacit view that it is only a sub-prime niche problem that is contained and will have no spillover and contagion effects to other mortgages, to the credit market, to the economy and to the US growth rate. Wall Street, like the AFR, continues to deny there is a serious problem, even though 30 or more subprime lenders have gone out of business since December.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:27 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

March 16, 2007

negative political campaigning

There has been a concerted negative campaign being launched by the Coalition against the ALP in the form of dirt attacks on Kevin Rudd: they started with Brian Burke dinner affair and have broadened to mudslinging on the Opposition Leader's Catholic faith, his family's eviction from their farm, and the circumstances of his father's tragic death.

Bill Leak

It is a campaign that bears the hallmarks of the Republican style negative personal tactics in the US--though not as nasty; a campaign based on personal attacks that shifts attention away from issues of public concern. Since politics has become 24/7, 12-months-a-year campaigns in an increasingly polarized electorate, negative campaigning is set to become more central to political campaigning in the looming 2008 elections.

Dennis Glover, writing in The Australian describes the way the character bashing works:

The methods used to generate such material and channel it to the public, known in the trade as opposition research, are also well known: focus testing to identify the opponent's strengths to undermine and weaknesses to exploit; the establishment of a dirt unit to uncover irregularities about their past, including lists of enemies willing to talk to the press; the feeding of attack points to backbenchers and friendly journalists, to ensure it is all done at arm's length from the party leadership; and push polling and whispering campaigns to conduct character assassination under the radar.

The operation is designed to place Rudd under increasing psychological pressure until he cracks and reveals an unfitness for leadership---as Latham did with his 'will you lay off my family?" press conference. The game of politics is a social Darwinian survival of the fittest.

I presume that we will see increasing use of microtargeting with new media technology like blogs, podcasts and Internet banner ads, whilst the Coalition ads are more likely to t denigrate the personal character of the opposing candidate than those of the ALP.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:33 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 15, 2007

Seymour Hersch: The Redirection

In his The Redirection article in the New Yorker in early March Seymour Harris argues that in the past few months, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Harris says:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

There has been very little discussion of this in Australia, and as I gather from Tom Engelhardt over at Tom Dispatch, minimal discussion in the US--he talks in terms of the non-reaction to the Hersh piece. What, then, has happened to the Democrats? Are they asleep? Or don't they care that Washington, in fuelling Sunni-Shia tensions, was behind much of the sectarian violence in Iraq and Lebanon?

Clearly Iran's foreign policy is concerned to confront Washington's hegemonic schemes in the region. Harris is clear on the US tactics:

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran...The policy shift has brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into a new strategic embrace, largely because both countries see Iran as an existential threat....The Administration’s new policy for containing Iran seems to complicate its strategy for winning the war in Iraq.

For the Bush administration Iran is more dangerous and more provocative than the Sunni insurgents to American interests in Iraq. Hence the clandestine operations targeting Iran and creating strife among Arab minorities in southern Iran near the Iraqi border.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:23 PM | TrackBack

Australia from space

The NASA image indicates vegetation struggling in southeastern Australia in late 2006. Rainfall in southeastern Australia in 2006 was well below average, and average temperatures for the continent in November 2006 hit a record

South eastern Australia, 2006, NASA

The notes to the image help us to interpret the image in terms of the differences between native vegetation and cropland:

All the brown areas indicate less abundant vegetation than the average. Only small, faint areas of slightly above-average vegetation conditions (green) are visible in a few locations. Gray areas indicate patches of missing data, perhaps due to persistent clouds or extremely bright soils (such as dry, salt-covered lake beds.) In many cases, areas of natural vegetation fared better than agricultural lands, appearing yellowish (average) or very light brown (slightly below average).

In eastern Victoria and southern New South Wales, the vegetation of the Great Dividing Range Mountains, which run through Alpine and Kosciuszko National Parks, appears to be far closer to average conditions for this time of year than the vegetation in the inland grain-growing areas.

This difference isn’t surprising since native vegetation is better adapted to Australia’s regularly occurring dry spells, whereas crops often depend on irrigation that can be difficult to sustain in drought conditions. The notes state something significant:

The difference in greenness between native vegetation and cropland may not just be because native vegetation is better adapted to drought, however. Research in southwestern Australia indicates that the replacement of dark-colored native vegetation with paler agricultural crops, such as wheat, has changed where rain falls. The large-scale, over-turning motion of heated air (convection) that produces rain clouds occurs less often over croplands than over native vegetation. Models and observations suggest that converting natural vegetation to croplands actually reduced the amount of rainfall in those areas. Perhaps a similar effect has taken place in the region pictured here, as well.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:00 AM | TrackBack

March 14, 2007

Peter Cullen at the Brisbane Institute

Peter Cullen is speaking at the Brisbane Institute tonight on the severe shortage of the precious resource of water. Many, including to Premier Beattie, respond to this shortage by throwing money at a few big projects, such as reviving the Bradfield Scheme. According to his speech notes in the Courier-Mail Cullen's argument is that:

The Murray-Darling Basin appears to be drying out. In the past six years inflows to the Murray River have been about 40 per cent of what has been recorded in the long term.This seems to be a combination of a drought that will eventually break, and climate shift that will not. Since the river was over-allocated before this happened, it is now clear that we are going to have to adjust to taking less water from the basin. Over-allocation means people do not get the volumes they anticipate, and the environment becomes degraded.

That is the history of water development in the Murray-Darling Basin. We have climate change at a time when our groundwater aquifers have just been emptied. That history indicates that the water crisis is not simply the result of historically variable rainfall being made more unpredictable by climate change, along with the pressures of population growth. The water problem is also a consequence of poor understanding and management of our water resources in the past.

Cullen adds:

It seems that with the climate shift we are now experiencing inflows to the basin that are about half what they were in earlier and wetter times, and it may be that the annual allocation of water will now only ever be about half of what the entitlement notionally says.This is how the system has always worked, and entitlement holders cannot expect to get access to water that doesn't exist, nor should they expect to pinch someone else's water, including that allocated to the environment.

That means an an efficient irrigation industry that can create enough wealth to pay its way and not rely on public subsidies re cheap water as it has in the past. It may well be that climate change will eliminate irrigation from many areas.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:05 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

rolling the dice

The US looks increasingly impotent to guarantee security or stability in Iraq--let alone democracy-- and is looking for a way out as the much heralded surge won't solve or stabilize anything. The Iraqi Maliki government is helpless and corrupt and is basically a client state of the US. How long will it last?


Garland

Israel is saying that the US should stand firm, that the US should confront Iran, and rally friendly Sunni regimes against Shiite Iran, as well as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Syrian government. Israel appears to accept as necessary the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have lost their lives since the Bush administration invaded their country in March 2003, the almost two million who may led to other countries, and the millions more have been displaced from their homes in ethnic-cleansing campaigns.

Will a Democrat Congress be able to rein in an imperial White House and its increasingly catastrophic policies in the Middle East?

Michael Lind in an article at Democracy Now entitled What next? US foreign policy after Bush says, in relation to the Iraq war that:

there are three interpretations of the war, each with its own implications for the policy that Washington should pursue. The first interpretation holds that the war is a purely local problem which can be solved within Iraq itself. The second holds that the war cannot be resolved without a broader regional settlement that includes the countries around and near Iraq, along with the US. The third is that neither a local nor a regional solution can succeed in Iraq without adequate diplomacy at the global level.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:00 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 13, 2007

politics for sale?

Is the Burke scandal in WA the tip of the iceberg?

Andrew Murray, the Democrat Senator from WA, argues that it is scandalous that political parties, which, after all, control the country, are totally unregulated:

They have less transparency than a tennis club. I think this is a very corrupt system. I stand to be corrected, but I cannot recall one single instance of improved accountability or transparency in political funding and disclosure initiated by the Federal Coalition Government in its years in office.

Politics is for sale. Party fund-raising is effectively a series of business deals, in which companies and individuals make donations to parties on the understanding of benefits flowing to them from government decisions.

There needs to be transparency as some lobby grroups, such as the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, is supportive of the Howard Government on any issue and rarely supports anything put forward by the federal Opposition or state Labor governments. Though this business group is presented presented in the media as objective commentators on economic policy (industrial relations and tax) they adopt a purely partisan political approach.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:17 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 12, 2007

Qantas in a globalised world

Once you privatise a publicly owned business in a globalised world, then that means the shareholders take over, the business is driven by the dynamics of the market, and it is susceptible to private equity takeover. What is put in place the foreign ownership cap for iconic companies--to ensure that there will always be a majority Australian ownership of Qantas.

Alan Moir

Remaining globally competitive becomes the key objective and so it is no suprise that Qantas is looking to move " its long-haul heavy maintenance work overseas Air New Zealand and United Airlines have done the same. It is likely that jobs in catering, flight operations, administration, IT support services will also move offshore. They have to reduce costs in order to remain competitive.

So why protect Qantas, its high prices and gouging the Australian consumer? Why not adopt the price and performance mantra of private equity and, say that if Qantas is an airline run for private profit, then the government shouldn't continue its protection of a commercial operation from competition. So lets let Singapore Airlines compete in Australia and across the Pacific.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:40 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 11, 2007

limits of water restrictions?

The reserves of water for our capital continue to drop and the the next level of restrictions are due to cut in, which mean banning the outside use of water by domestic users. Melbourne's water storages are at 34.1 per cent, while the trigger point for stage 4 is 29.3 per cent. Storage levels are estimated to fall at a rate of 0.5 percentage points a week. Everyone is hoping for the autumn rains .

What I continue to find surprising, especially in Melbourne, is the policy of Brack's state government to restrict the domestic use to achieve a cut in water consumption --even to the point of having water officials patrolling the streets of Melbourne. Yet the savings achieved are but a drop in the ocean compared with industrial and farming use. Whilst people stand in the shower with a bucket so they can have water for their gardens industry and agriculture are not required to reduce their use of water.

As this report in The Age indicates Melbourne households are bracing for a compulsory total ban on watering gardens under stage 4 restrictions, that is likely to be in force in May. Whilst Melbourne households contemplate targets to cut consumption by 17.5 per cent

Industry will be asked to reduce water usage by just 1 per cent a year over the next 10 years asunder tougher water restrictions...In a move that puts increased pressure on domestic users, the demands on business are described by the State Government as "aspirational". This means industry will not be forced to achieve the 1 per cent saving and there will be no punishment for businesses that fail to meet the target....Industry and agriculture [which] use up to 30 per cent of Melbourne's water and industry [are] yet to face specific curbs on water use.

There is no balance of equitable sacrifice in this. Where is the greening of production? Why cannot industry recycle the rain water and the water that it uses?

The National Party isn't interested in taking real action on Australia’s water crisis. They have been opposed to any purchase by the Commonwealth of over-allocated water entitlements and refuse to accept that the problem of over-allocation was the most serious issue in the Murray Darling Basin. The big irrigation interests have been effective in lobbying the National Party to block this reform.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:08 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

March 10, 2007

Scooter Libby + rule of law

I see that Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post is following the Wall Street Journal's editorial page and calling for a presidential pardon for Scooter Libby. The basic apologist argument is that there was no crime... Therefore, there should have been no investigation. End of story.

The general strategy of the Bush administration apologists is control the media narrative, bury the obvious accountability moment, obscure the "cloud over Cheney," and discredit the legal process and manipulate the eventual outcome. Thus Krauthammer:

This is a case that never should have been brought, originating in the scandal that never was, in search of a crime -- violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- that even the prosecutor never alleged. That's the basis for a presidential pardon. It should have been granted long before this egregious case came to trial. It should be granted now without any further delay.

Libby's defence rested on Libby's weak memory despite the defense's opening statement that Libby "will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected". However, Libby refused to flip on Cheney, regularly described as Darth Cheney, and preferred to play the martyr. So Libby is the fire wall to protect Cheney and others, and the apologists and neocons are making sure that he stays the firewall.

As Christine Hardin Smith over at Firedoglake states:

Libby made a series of bad choices: he lied, repeatedly, to the FBI, to the Grand Jury under oath, all to cover up for the Vice President of the United States and for his own poor choices. For those poor choices of his own making, he was convicted by a unanimous vote of a jury of his peers, and he should pay the penalty for this. No one, no matter their station in life, no matter their connections or political affiliation — no one — should be allowed to repeatedly and manipulatively lie to a grand jury under oath or to criminal investigators without consequences. It is wrong, whomever may be doing it, and Libby is no exception to the rule of law.

It was judged that there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the individual charged committed the conduct specified in the indictment----that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby obstructed a grand jury investigation, lied to federal agents, and then lied to a grand jury. Libby threw sand in the face of the umpire so he couldn't see the play. Will Libby’s “protect the Vice President but not the President” strategy persuade Bush into a pardon, as Krauthammer appears to assume.

The political issue is the abuse of power by the highest executive branch officials and their stable of White House .staffers, lobbyists, Republican operatives and other surrogates. As Elizabeth de la Vega over at TomDispatch observes:

The criminal justice system was never intended by the framers of the Constitution to be the sole, or even primary, means of investigating and redressing what the late Congresswoman from Texas Barbara Jordan described during the Watergate investigations as "the misconduct of public men." On the contrary, it is Congress that is both entitled and obligated to oversee the conduct of the Executive Branch.

Does the Libby case open a window on the whole facade of power in the US, to disclose how the Republicans do not care about the rule of law and only care to preserves their own power. Will this disclosure motivate those who witnessed it to begin to look on their own lives and actions differently?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:29 AM | TrackBack

March 9, 2007

Questioning Zionism in Australia

I have referred to Independent Australian Jewish Voices --- a loose coalition of Jews who desire a civil public debate in the diaspora about the actions Israel --in previous posts. They argue that the Jewish establishment in Australia does not represent the full range of Jewish opinion, and they call for a more diverse debate about Israel and its government policies and actions.

Louise Adler, a member of the Independent Australian Jewish Voice, addresses the issue of the lack of diversity amongst Australian diasporic Jews.She says that this results when the critics of Israel's policies are reflexively characterised as anti-Semitic by those conservative Jews; ie., Likud style ones who recycle the views of the Israeli Government, or adopt a a pro-Zionist/anti-Palestinian view. Adler says that their

...argument, put simply, is that Israel is the Jewish homeland, a refuge for all Jews against incipient, ever-present anti-Semitism of both the Orient and the Occident.Today the duty of diaspora Jews is to support Israel against the Arab world's desire to drive the Jews into the sea and to reclaim Jerusalem. This political position is clearly the product of anxiety, predicated on the notion of Jews as victims. Critics of Israel are deemed to be both anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic. Debate has to be suppressed because Israel is forever on the precipice of annihilation and diaspora Jews should support the state, whether its position is right or wrong.

Questioning this argument in a public debate is a modest call in a liberal democracy that is based on the principles of free speech; yet, suprisingly, the conservative/Zionist Jews have responded by saying that it represents an unreasoning attack on Israel and the Australian Jewish community.

The angry response overlooks,forgets that "the Australian Jewish community" consists of diverse voices with different opinions.
Dr Colin Rubenstein, the executive director of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs, is reported in Australian Jewish News as describing the new coalition as “destructive” and said that it would help Israel’s enemies:

Despite the wording of the declaration, it is clearly being used as a publicity stunt by a minuscule number of Jewish-born individuals who have adopted the ugly but increasingly common belief that alone among the world’s nations, Israel has no right to exist.The claim that they put forward that all Jewish voices critical of Israeli policies are being ‘silenced’ is not only inane and untrue, but clearly plays into the conspiratorial mindset of the growing number of people who are violently hostile to both Israel’s existence and the Jewish community.

This is pretty extreme and misleading language when the petition of the Independent Australian Jewish Voices states:

We are committed to ensuring a just peace that recognises the legitimate national aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians with a solution that protects the human rights of all. We condemn violence by all parties, whether state-sanctioned or not. We believe that Israel's right to exist must be recognised and that Palestinians' right to a homeland must also be acknowledged.

Rubenstein favours a black and white view of complex issues. For instance, he argues that there is a serious problem in Australia and globally posed by an extremist totalitarian ideology generally known as Islamism. This he says:

asserts that all problems can be solved by the creation of a divinely sanctioned "caliphate", and that all means are justified in achieving this end. It also sets out to convince Muslims that Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims are inevitably and eternally hostile to all Muslims, and there is no alternative for Muslims except to join the Islamists in a ruthless struggle to the death against them.

He sees moderate (ie liberal) Muslims as playing into the hands of the fundamentalists.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:19 PM | TrackBack

March 8, 2007

corruption + the lobby industry

John Warhurst in an op-ed in the Canberra Times addresses the implications of corruption in the lobbying industry, which I have raised here. He says that:

Burke and Grill's activities themselves are, to my mind, more important in the long run than the question of the links between the twice-disgraced Burke and Kevin Rudd and/or Senator Ian Campbell, to name just two. What they reveal is the depths to which such senior public figures, a former premier and former senior minister respectively, have fallen ... What they also reveal is the weakness of the public office-holders, especially ministers, and businessmen who have dealt with the corrupt lobbyists.

The mention of corruption points toward something rotten. Warhurst then mentions well known recent examples across the nation to show that the corruption is systematic within the lobby industry as opposed to a few rotten apples. However, Parliament appears to be little interested in wiping off the taint of corruption-- to clean up lobbyists' act and rein in the influence of corrupting practices, such as 'you get us a $1 million dollar deal' and we'll raise $50,000 for your campaign coffers.

Warhurst goes on to say that:

All political parties must take some share of the blame for this state of affairs. The prevailing political culture appears to condone it or at least regards it as a necessary evil. But Labor must take the larger share of the responsibility for the current situation. This added culpability may be just because it holds office in all eight state and territory governments (mathematically that would be so); but its record in this regard is truly awful. It needs to clean up its act.

Federal Labor could take the lead on this. Will it embrace the opportunity to show its reform creditionals? It has shown little inclination to ensure that a more comprehensive lobbyist disclosure regime operates in our liberal democracy. However, Kevin Rudd says a comprehensive national register of lobbyists, listing their clients and the politicians they meet, is needed to "clear up" their activities.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:03 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

accountability in Washington

The US news is that former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was convicted Tuesday of obstruction, perjury and lying to the FBI in an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity. Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and a well-connected neoconservative, was accused of lying and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters.

I presume that there will be political damage resulting from this trial.

Andrew Sullivan comments

Something is rotten in the heart of Washington; and it lies in the vice-president's office. The salience of this case is obvious. What it is really about - what it has always been about - is whether this administration deliberately misled the American people about WMD intelligence before the war. The risks Cheney took to attack Wilson, the insane over-reaction that otherwise very smart men in this administration engaged in to rebut a relatively trivial issue: all this strongly implies the fact they were terrified that the full details of their pre-war WMD knowledge would come out. Fitzgerald could smell this. He was right to pursue it, and to prove that a brilliant, intelligent, sane man like Libby would risk jail to protect his bosses. What was he really trying to hide?

This conviction breaks the pattern of the Bush administration being mostly insulated from aggressive congressional oversight and prosecutorial investigation. The rule of law has claimed on of its own, despite the Bush's administration radical theories of executive power and the unprecedented wall of secrecy behind which it has operated.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:03 AM | TrackBack

March 7, 2007

Gittens on the limits of economics

Ross Gittens says that new book, Gittinomics, helps us to master the capitalist system rather than be victim. Making it work for you, not you for it, is good advice. In explaining this in the Sydney Morning Herald he outlines the limits of economics:

Economists are experts in one important but limited aspect of life: the material. No one knows better than they do how best to maximise our production and consumption of goods and services. When a community follows their advice - as we pretty much have been for the past 25 years - it gets rich.

However,

...most economists know little about the question of fairness and, for the most part, ignore it. Press them and they'll tell you frankly that it's outside their area of competence. Likewise, they're largely oblivious to the social and spiritual aspects of life. Will the policies they advocate damage family life, for instance? Sorry, never given it any thought. Why don't you consult a social worker or a priest.... Economists' advice is one-dimensional. When we give that advice primacy and fail to meld it with the advice of experts in other areas, we risk becoming a richer but more socially dysfunctional society.

Of course, you could always reduce society to the market, or say that society should be run as a market.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:36 AM | TrackBack

March 6, 2007

defining lefty extremism

I've always been unsure of what lefty means these days for our cultural conservatives over at Quadrant who are part of an authoritarian political movement. I've suspected them of looking back to 1968--living in the past as it were. By this I mean that they see the world through the eyes of 1968, tend to run social liberal and non-liberal left together, and see the contemporary world of nations in terms of their cold war scenario of totalitarianism versus freedom. This is a movement based on unquestioning Manichean certainties, an endless stigmatization of the whole array of Enemies as decadent, depraved and weak, and which views the left as being consumed by envy, resentment and hate.

Here is one explicit account of left extremism. It is an American account given by Joe Klein over at Time. He says that his definition of a left-wing extremist is one who exhibits many, but not necessarily all, of the following attributes:

--believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.

--believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.

--believes that the decision to go to war in Iraq was not an individual case of monumental stupidity, but a consequence of America’s fundamental imperialistic nature.

--tends to blame America for the failures of others—i.e. the failure of our NATO allies to fulfill their responsibilities in Afghanistan.

--doesn’t believe that capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, is the best liberal idea in human history.

--believes American society is fundamentally unfair (as opposed to having unfair aspects that need improvement).

--believes that eternal problems like crime and poverty are the primarily the fault of society.

--believes that America isn’t really a democracy.

--believes that corporations are fundamentally evil.

--believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world.

--is intolerant of good ideas when they come from conservative sources.

--dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

--regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.

Swearing? Believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world? Lefty extremists would need to include Marxists if it is to have meaning, yet Marxists think in terms of the contradictions of a revolutionary capitalism not corporate conspiracies controlling the world ! Secularism does not have anything to do with being anti-religion. In its standard definition, it refers to the "separation of church/mosque and state."

I reckon Klein is actually gunning for social liberals.

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March 5, 2007

wobbles, corrections and triggers

The then-US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said in congressional testimony regarding the panic selling of the 1987 US stock-market crash:

"Why were stocks going down? Because people were selling. Why were people selling? Because stocks were going down."

For those who make their living in markets, the logic is impeccable. However, there is the little question of why. What causes this turbulence in stockmarkets ? Why, for instance, was $US800 billion wiped from the US stockmarket last week? Could it be the Delphic Greenspan's 'irrational exuberance'? If not, could it be a little bit of pricing for risk?

The commentary in the western press --including that of the Australian Financial Review-- points the finger at China--athe 9% decline in the Shanghai market last Tuesday. The financial pundits just talk in terms of links not causes, and wrap it up in a lot of spin about the stockmarket wobbles providing opportunities to buy. London and New York are protecting their interest as centres of global finance. The more astute pundits say that the fall in Chinese markets was the trigger for US selling. Or was that a contagion rather than a trigger?

So what was the dynamic underlying the US market that was triggered by Shanghai Tuesday? How about fear? Fear about defaults in the US' sub-prime mortgage market from rising interest rates and falling house prices spreading. The fear that the meltdown of these mortgages will create a massive credit crunch in short order. And the US has an an auto recession and a manufacturing recession. Even Alan Greenspan is talking in terms of the possibilities of recession in the US and in the global economy.

How come the Australian market has wiped out the 2007 gains?Just caught up in the general contagion of pent-up fear in global share markets? Just following Wall Street? Markets feeding on themselves? The laws of gravity as the AFR usefully surmises?

Could global volatility have something to do with the way that the innovative private equity forms work: buy it, strip it, flip it? Or the hedge fund boom with its wild West type of regulation?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:46 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Political lobbying --Brian Burke style

Why does the Canberra Press Gallery focus almost exclusively on the Rudd issue and not on political lobbying? Why is the latter ignored, when Brian Burke stands for the deep corruption at the heart to political lobbying? Don't we need an accountability framework that regulates the lobbying industry?

Alan Moir

There seems to be an assumption amongst the Canberra Press Gallery that lobbying is the preferred mean for exerting political influence in Australian liberal democracies and corruption the preferred one in Indonesia. Lobbying and corruption don't mix in Australia, even though Brian Burke indicates the very opposite. Isn't Brian Burke Australia's equivalent of Jack Abramoff in the US? Or is Perth seen as the capital for political corruption, and that is all that needs to be said?

The Canberra Press Gallery--eg., Matt Price in The Australia talks in terms of Burke's perverted political influence whilst saying that Burke and Grill were deftly able to cut through endless red tape and set up meetings with key bureaucrats and MPs. So when--ie., at what point--does legitimate lobbying become perverted lobbying and the Westminster system in Western Australia becomes compromised? What sort of accountability framework to regulate the lobby industry do we need?

Can we talk in terms of gangster capitalism yet? Is that what is emerging in WA?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:05 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 4, 2007

Israel: cracks in the American wall?

Richard Silverston A Breath of Fresh Air op-ed in The Guardian draws attention to the way that Barack Osma transgresses the American political discourse on the Israel and Palesintine conflict:

at this point, Barack Obama's views on Israel are such a breath of fresh air. Unlike Hillary [Clinton] he hasn't entirely swallowed the AIPAC line. While he defends Israel as strongly as any candidate, he also speaks to the suffering of the Palestinians. And normally, presidential candidates either can't or won't express sympathy for anyone but Israelis during a campaign.

What we have, says Silverston, is a top-tier candidate independent enough to have a serious, balanced position with regard to the Middle East - one that embraces both Israelis and Palestinians - and isn't written by the hard-line pro-Israel AIPAC.

Jabra Stavro, Violence in Palestine and Iraq, 2007

But how long can Obama speak differently in the US about the Israeli Palestinian conflict? This report on Electronic Intifada says not much.

Ha'aretz Washington correspondent Shmuel Rosner, after listening to Baracjk Osma's speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Chicago on 2 March concluded that Obama:

"sounded as strong as Clinton, as supportive as Bush, as friendly as Giuliani. At least rhetorically, Obama passed any test anyone might have wanted him to pass. So, he is pro-Israel. Period."

Barack's speech notes are here. he backs away from his 60 Minutes interview in which he'd come out in favor of negotiations with Iran and Syria. Silverston explores the nuances in the speech here. Does the speech read as that of a candidate who intends to follow in the Carter/Cinton tradition and bring Israelis and Palestinians to the table?

Update: 5 February
On an Australian note on this issue I notice that a forum for dissident and independent Jewish voices in Australia is gathering pace. It is good to see diverse Jewish voices that are willing to be critical of the actions of Israeli state at a time when criticism of Israel is automatically assumed to be anti-Semitism.

More diversity is needed when conservatives in Australia willingly embrace the latest neo-con offering in the form of Melanie Phillips for the Quadrant Lecture about 'Londonistan'---'a state of mind, when people not only seek to appease but come to believe and absorb the ideas and assumptions of the enemy that intends to destroy them.'

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:18 PM | TrackBack

March 3, 2007

the hand of history

It's sometimes known as the Iraq syndrome. The UK is caught up in it, as is America. Though not Australia. It refers to the US or the UK trying to control another country by force of arms. The current syndrome is overlaid by the history of Vietnam.

Teal

Conservatives have a real problem with the syndrome: they read it as a sign of national weakness. Only conservatives (Republicans in the US, Liberals in Australia) have the hard-headedness and the backbone to face the menace that is Islamic terrorism which is everywhere. Their cure for the Vietnam syndrome was an unabashed, militant nationalism and a broad rightward turn in the life of the United States, with its contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.

The conservatives now face the Iraq syndrome.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:23 PM | TrackBack

March 2, 2007

a political firestorm?

It had to happen. Kevin Rudd's squeaky clean image (good Christian family man) was too good to last. It is now tarnished by guilt by association with a scandal ridden Brian Burke. Rudd's political honeymoon is over. He's a politician---albeit a clever one---like any other.

Bill Leak

I saw yesterday's question time where Rudd's three meetings with Burke in 2005 organised by Graeme Edwards was thrown in his face, and then linked to the Rudd's leadership ambitions as a potential challenger to WA-based Labor leader Kim Beazley. Anyone who is fingered by, or seeks help from, Burke is morally and politically compromised, claimed Peter Costello. It was a case of throwing dirt (innuendo--touting for favours for leadership is the implication) at Rudd's bad judgment and hoping that some of the mud sticks.

The Coalition charge is that Rudd looks 'shifty' --walks both sides of the streets-- and they now have something to work with. The media loves it. What is not mentioned by the Canberra Press Gallery is the unregulated lobby industry in which former politicians from both sides of politics work in in their life after politics. John Warhurst in the Canberra Times makes a distinction in lobbying between that which is secretive and self-interested and that which is public and altruistic that is concerned to make a contribution t to the betterment of society. Of the former, Warhurst says:

The self-interested faces belong to individuals like the secretary of the Victorian Police Union, Paul Mullett, and the former premier of Western Australia, Brian Burke. It shows how lobbying is so commonplace that it becomes business as usual. Special interests don't just allow the parliamentary or ministerial due process to take its course. They get heavily involved in attempting to influence the process in any legitimate way they can.

Yet little is said about this kind of lobbying in the media, despite their knowledge about how a great many decisions are shaped behind closed doors and without the interest groups having to face public scrutiny of their claims and arguments. Very little is said about the need to regulate the lobbying industry amongst politicians, even though it is ALP policy.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:45 AM | Comments (23) | TrackBack

March 1, 2007

Barry Jones: truth to power

In an op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald. Barry Jones paints a bleak but realistic picture of the political process. It is an edited excerpt of the eighth Manning Clark Lecture, which Jones will deliver at the National Library tonight.

The op-ed is short and to the point. Jones says:

Ideology has largely dropped out of politics, to be replaced by convergence. Oppositions have generally ceased to oppose, or propose an alternative basis for policy, and the concept that "there is no alternative" has been broadly accepted. Parliament has lost much of its moral authority and the public service has adopted the cult of managerialism and been increasingly partisan, committed to promoting the government "line".

That is the old Tweedledum Tweedledee view of politics updated into an account of a profound transformation of political life as the administration of things. What then of public reason? What then of critique?

Jones addresses these questions by considering the effects of the dominance of publicity in public life:

Universities have been forced to become trading corporations, the media are preoccupied with infotainment, while lobbying and the use of consultants ensures that vested interest is more influential than community interest. Public life is dominated by the black arts of "spin" and "framing": the concept of the dialectic in which alternative cases, based on evidence, are debated vigorously has become anachronistic. Appeals to emotion, especially fear and gullibility, and to immediate economic or cultural self-interest ("wedge politics") are exploited cynically and ruthlessly. Establishing the truth of a complex proposition (evolution, stem cell research, climate change, going to war in Iraq, industrial relations changes) is less significant than how simple arguments, once called "propaganda", can be sold.

It is a picture that fills in the details of Hannah Arendt's view of politics in modernity.

So how does Jones respond to this bleak account? Minimally. He says that 'Australia must make a commitment to restoring the primacy of reason, rejecting a paranoid view of history and "telling truth to power". ' How can we do this. Does blogging help in this? Don't bloggers plug away with their media criticisms, their political critiques , and their demands for greater accountability from the political and media institutions that have been so profoundly failing the country? Or does he view the blogosphere as a frivolous and inconsequential echo chamber?

Jones' "telling truth to power" connects to Foucault, who sees "the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of 'science' and 'ideology,' but in terms of 'truth' and 'power", and who holds that the question of how to deal with and determine truth is at the base of political and social strife.

Foucault explored truth to power in terms of an account of power relations in which power flows simultaneously in different directions and different volumes according to the various forms of "power relations" in the "network" of power exchange. The political mode of goverannce is successful because it creates truth::

The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn't outside power, or lacking in power … truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it includes regular effects of power.

Foucault argues that each society creates a "regime of truth" according to its beliefs, values, and mores. Foucault identifies the creation of truth in contemporary western society with five traits: the centering of truth on scientific discourse, accountability of truth to economic and political forces, the "diffusion and consumption" of truth via societal apparatuses, the control of the distribution of truth by "political and economic apparatuses," and the fact that it is "the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation." "Truth," is the construct of the political and economic forces that command the majority of the power within the societal web.

Since there is no truly universal truth so intellectuals cannot convey universal truth. The intellectual must specialize, specify, so that he/she can be connected to one of the truth-generating apparatuses of the society. Thus Al Gore is traveling around the world telling us how we must fundamentally change our civilization due to the threat of global warming. Another example is bloggers watching the media and detecting and criticizing the lack of adversarial reporting.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:06 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack