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May 30, 2010
Paul Krugman has an interesting article in the New York Times entitled The Old Enemies that has some relevance to Australia, where the miners are digging into their deep pockets in order to beat up the Rudd Government over its proposed resource super-profits tax.
Krugman says:
They’re as mad as hell, and they’re not going to take this anymore. Am I talking about the Tea Partiers? No, I’m talking about the corporations...corporate interests are balking at even modest changes from the permissiveness of the Bush era...what President Obama and his party now face isn’t just, or even mainly, an opposition grounded in right-wing populism. For grass-roots anger is being channeled and exploited by corporate interests, which will be the big winners if the G.O.P. does well in November.
Isn't this happening in Australia with the mining corporations? They are as mad as hell over an emissions trading scheme to address global warming and the proposed new resources tax. They have the Murdoch media onside and the Coalition in their pocket.
No doubt the mining industry's money is flowing into the Liberal Party's coffers.
Will the grass roots ---the battlers --rebel? Unlikely. They'll be fobbed off with identity politics says Krugman:
If this sounds familiar, it should: it’s the same formula the right has been using for a generation. Use identity politics to whip up the base; then, when the election is over, give priority to the concerns of your corporate donors. Run as the candidate of “real Americans,” not those soft-on-terror East coast liberals; then, once you’ve won, declare that you have a mandate to privatize Social Security.
The Australian Right's embrace of populism under Abbott is a populism that is sympathetic to big corporations such as the multinational miners who are so full of sound and fury.
What Krugman doesn't say is that the strategy is to polarize the electorate and so shrink the middle ground. As Paul Kelly says in The Australian:
The middle ground that is the bedrock for successful Labor governance and policy reform is being pulled apart. This is a new phenomenon and a negation of the politics of the past generation...The centre is weakening; votes are moving to the polarities; populists on both the Right and Left carry sway.This undermines the basis for middle-ground Labor reformism. If this phenomenon became the new trend, the policy consequences would be far-reaching.
Is it becoming the new trend? Kelly is persuaded. I'm yet to be convinced.
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Oh how proud we used to be of our healthy cynicism. How we used to crow about our mistrust of authority and our disregard for the powerful elite. How we loved to heap scorn upon the gentry.
But now we're just a nation of aspirationals, right?