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June 30, 2010
Palm Island: CMC Report
Recall that Mulrunji Doomadgee was found dead in his Palm Island cell on November 19, 2004 from injuries inflicted by arresting officer, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley that the police service in Queensland has a closed, self-protecting culture that looks after its own.
The legal system was seen to be complicit. Full and fair discussion of all the details of this case is being suppressed; full disclosure, disallowed. The police abuse, the lies and the cover-up indicate that Queensland's endemic racism weighs heavily on the present.
Two subsequent coronial inquiries have established that Hurley fell on Mulrunji on the concrete floor of the Palm Island police station, and that horrific, fatal injuries resulted: Mulrunji had four broken ribs, bruising to the head, a torn portal vein and his liver was torn in two. The finding by coroner Brian Hine last month was that Hurley's actions caused the injuries, but the coroner was unable to establish whether they were inflicted accidentally or deliberately.
A good question was asked by Palm Islander Brad Foster:
If Hurley and Mulrunji scuffled on the floor of the police station and it was Mulrunji who got up and walked away, and the police officer who died with four broken ribs and his liver torn in two, do you think we would still be waiting for justice?
What has been confirmed by the recent Crime and Misconduct Commission report into allegations of police misconduct is that the initial police investigation and the internal police review were seriously flawed in that they did not meet the standards required, by set operational procedures or community expectation.
More specifically, there have been double-standards, an unwillingness to publicly acknowledge failings on the part of the police, and a culture within the QPS that the best way to protect its reputation is to hide its shortcomings.
The investigations were characterised by double standards and an unwillingness to publicly acknowledge failings on the part of the police...he Police Commissioner has tolerated these self-protecting aspects of the culture and must be held accountable for the flawed Palm Island review. He supported and defended the police review process including the spirit and intent of the findings.
The inference is that the police have been evading the truth, protecting their own, and covering up the circumstances surrounding the violent death of an innocent man.
Unfortunately, the CMC findings will have little effect on the police service or the state government. That's because it has few powers. Its negative findings against police have been ignored before.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:33 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 29, 2010
the econocrats: here we go again
Karthik Athreya, a specialist in macroeconomics and consumer finance who works in the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, argues that Economics is Hard. Don’t Let Bloggers Tell You Otherwise. He says that:
The following is a letter to open-minded consumers of the economics blogosphere. In the wake of the recent financial crisis, bloggers seem unable to resist commentating routinely about economic events. It may always have been thus, but in recent times, the manifold dimensions of the financial crisis and associated recession have given a fillip to something bigger than a cottage industry. Examples include Matt Yglesias, John Stossel, Robert Samuelson, and Robert Reich. In what what follows I will argue that it is exceedingly unlikely that these authors have anything interesting to say about economic policy.
These authors, Athreya says, belong to the 'Macroeconomic policy is Easy: Only Idiots Don't Think So' movement, which also includes Paul Krugman and Brad Delong.
The argument is that econocrats as experts (PhD economists who publish research papers in referred journals) rule, and that the general public are simply being had by the bulk of the economic blogging crowd.
I'm sure that Athreya's argument is a commonly held amongst both the scientific economists in the academy and the econocrats in Treasury and the Reserve Bank in Australia; that only professional research economists should be allowed to discuss economics because, well, economics is really hard, and nobody else has a chance of understanding it or appreciating all the complexity of the discipline. Athreya puts it this way:
When a professional research economist thinks or talks about social insurance, unemployment, taxes, budget deficits, or sovereign debt, among other things, they almost always have a very precisely articulated model that has been vetted repeatedly for internal coherence.
Everybody else, not so much. And that 's the problem--what we get is the sophomoric musings of auto-didact or non-didact bloggers whose musings are just the speculations of untrained poseurs. In other words, economics bloggers are basically quacks, hardly worth paying attention to.
The assumption is that what economic policymakers do is economics (as a science) and he implies that political pundits trying to second-guess their decisions would be on a par with me trying to second-guess someone doing theoretical physics. But economic science is not what economic bloggers are doing or commenting upon.
I comment on economic events without any pretence of doing macreconomic theory (or science) and I do so because political discourse is structured around the economy, economic growth, jobs, inflation and employment. What this political discourse indicates is that economic is not about economics per se; it is about political economy in that it is economics plus politics. So we have public debates about what is the proper role of fiscal and monetary policy during a recession? What role should regulation play in govern the economy? How should the state govern the economy?
These kind of debates structure the way that we approach national economic policy. Bloggers are competent to comment on important public policy issues in the public sphere and they do so by examining the arguments. The economic bloggers mentioned above tend to offer better than average commentary than many journalists in the mainstream press.
One reason the economic bloggers have entered the public sphere is because, with few exceptions, Australian economists have not seriously addressed the issue climate change, which is the best policy to reduce greenhouse emissions (an ETS or a carbon tax) or the economic implications of the shift to a low carbon economy. Why their silence? Why the lack of a broad consensus on the merits proceeding with an emissions trading scheme.
Update
What is not recognized by Athreya is the crisis in neo-classical economics---pre-Keynesian theory after Keynes----which at its core holds that the consumer queen attempting to maximise her expected life time utility is the core actor and decision-maker, with all other actors and institutions subject to her whims and desires, especially within a competitive environment. This neither makes sense of what has happened with respect the global financial crisis and its aftermath, or of what should and could be done about it.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:43 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 28, 2010
Burchill: the blogger's fantasies
David Burchell continues to do his culture wars job at The Australian of playing of the bad elites versus the good ordinary Australians. In his latest column---Real people don't get besotted with prime ministers he ties this into The Australian's intense dislike, nay antagonism, towards political bloggers. Their conception of politics is the existential conflict based on the friend and enemy distinction.
Burchill says the latter, as political enthusiasts, are political romantics caught up in their own fantasies:
One of most curious aspects of the past three years has been the yawning and ever-growing gulf between the universe of the political enthusiast -- the blogging savants, the convulsive Facebook oracles, the haiku poets of the Twitterverse and their motley followers and hangers-on -- and the reality of those who have to grind their lives away in the dreary vicinities of power.
The former are consumed by that beguiling procession of fashionable delusions and fantasies that they project onto the screen.
Burchill, of course, exempts himself from being part the political enthusiast. He does not succumb to his sbeautiful private fantasies. He is in touch with the real world beyond the screen; the world of those hard working folk with sound common sense and their feet solidly on the ground (in western Sydney):
All across the land, public administrators, local Labor and trade union workers and businesspeople alike have been gnashing their teeth in frustration at a government grown so dysfunctional that it could no longer sustain attention in a single policy priority for more than a few days, and so careless that it could no longer keep track of its proliferating expenditures, despite the charade of fiscal prudence.The Australian, of course, has little time for the new voices in the public sphere especially when they are informed and are left of centre. We don't know what we are talking about, have little grasp of the national interest, and cannot even interpret the polls properly.
Burchill is bringing in Carl Schmitt's ideas into Australian conservatism. In Political Romanticism Schmitt writes:
In the romantic it is not reality that matters, but rather romantic productivity, which transforms everthing and makes it into the occasion for poetry. What the king and queen are in reality is intentionally ignored. Their function consists instead in being a point of departure for romantic feelings. The same holds for the beloved. From the standpoint of romanticism, therefore, it is simply not possible to distinguish between the king, the state, or the beloved. In the twilight of the emotions, they blend into one another. In both Novalis and Adam Müller, the state appears as the beloved, and the poeticizing of the science of finance that they bring off lies in the consideration that one should pay taxes to the state just as one gives presents to the beloved. (p. 126)
In Burchill's interpretation the romantic bloggers are all talk. They play at a liberal parlor game building their fictional edifices of words.
The only legitimate political commentators in the eyes of The Australian are the professional ones (especially those who work for The Australian) and who tell us what to think and what our politics should be. Their understanding of the public conversation about the political events of the day is that it is one conducted within the Canberra beltway by the professional media types in touch with the politicians and who have their finger on the political pulse of the nation. And that is the way it should be.
The Australian stands for the restoration against the democratic strands of the internet revolution. It also stands for the new austerity.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:04 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
June 27, 2010
Daily Show on Barak Obama
Jon Stewart began his show with an 8-minute monologue on Obama's executive power and civil liberties record which provided just some of the reasons why the strong condemnation of Obama so justified. He has affirmed policies that contradict what he promised to drop when he became President.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Respect My Authoritah | ||||
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Obama is basically abusing executive power--eg., abdication of its duty to hold officials accountable for illegal acts such as rendition.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:53 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
June 26, 2010
Afghanistan: McChrystal's counter-insurgency strategy
This is Rolling Stone's profile of America's senior commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, in which McCrystal made disparaging remarks about President Obama, his vice president Joe Biden and several other White House appointees. The general and his staff accused the US ambassador to Kabul of undermining the war, called the president's national security adviser "a joke", and mocked the vice-president, Joe Biden. Straight talking?
These remarks have resulted in McChrystal's dismissal, with Obama's statement emphasizing military accountability to civilian authority.
The context is the post-9/11 legacy. Former President George Bush defined the US as a nation perpetually at war. The Pentagon produced a theory to suit: the Long War doctrine postulating unending conflict against ill-defined but ubiquitous enemies. This is the "normalisation of war" theory. Obama has inherited a toxic legacy of an ‘emergency' without a foreseeable end."
And so we have the counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan designed by McChrystal that blends civilian nation building with military combat. Killing insurgents, this doctrine holds, is not enough. Military victory is meaningless unless the population is won over. The path to that, the thinking goes, lies in showing people how good government can improve their daily lives.
McChrystal's counter-insurgency strategy requires convincing the local population to support a legitimate government and stop support for the insurgents. According to Peter Galbraith in The Guardian the strategy
aims to give the Afghan government space to win over the population in contested areas. The coalition's role is to clear the Taliban from a district and, for an interval, to provide security. The Afghan government is meant to use this breathing space to establish its authority, to put in place Afghan military and police forces, and initiate economic development projects demonstrating to the population the advantage of being on the government side. The goal is to win over the less committed Taliban and to encourage a population seeing tangible progress to rat out the hardliners.
Is the population turning against the Taliban?
It's not working. One core reason is the assumption is that the Afghan administration is capable of winning the loyalty of the population. Being “an adequate strategic partner is clearly not Karzai's government, which has a record of corruption and ineffectiveness. The US and the UK seem to feel there is no alternative to Karzai, pretend that he is a competent leader and dismiss critics like Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador in Afghanistan.
This pretence does not answer the central question: how can the counter-insurgency succeed without a credible partner? One solution is mentioned by David J. Morris here to re-focus the American mission on the initial problem that got them into Afghanistan in the first place:
preventing a major terrorist attack on the US homeland. The priority of the Biden-Bacevich approach is on destroying Al Qaeda, not the Taliban and its affiliated insurgent groups. It is a counterterrorism approach that would require at most 30,000 troops, not the current nation-building strategy which necessitates six times that many
That would mean questioning the Bush legacy of perpetual war that has resulted in the militarization of U.S. policy.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:03 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
June 25, 2010
Canberra watch: cutting deals
The dust has settled in Canberra, Parliament has taken a longish break and the Canberra Press Gallery is beavering away exploring every nuance of the mechanisms behind, and the reasons for, the Labor regicide.
The justification that Rudd Labor had "lost its way" provides fertile ground for interpretation, especially when the coup was organized by the power brokers and machine men of the Right faction (in Victoria, NSW and SA). Their poll driven agenda is a much tougher line on asylum seekers, a more low key approach to climate change, and rolling over on the mining tax.
Gillard's style will be different from Rudd's --more team play, common courtesy, consultation and negotiation. More chairperson of the Board than a dictatorial CEO.
If Rudd's execution was about the ALP retaining power, then the question comes: Can Gillard and Swan turn Labor's electoral slide around? They need to raise the ALP's primary vote and that can't be done on personal popularity, even if great expectations and high hopes rest on Gillard's shoulders.
Policy issues will have to come into play to raise the ALP's primary vote. Is there policy substance and direction? Is there a reform direction?
Can Gillard, Swan and Ferguson cut a deal with the miners? Gillard will presene herself asa listening and consultative leader. If they can cut a deal, then Abbott has lost his favourite punching bag, and is in danger of losing his key issue, the mining tax. The coalition has gone out on a limb for the big miners--- no new tax on miners (its gouging and ripoff) because the miners stand for risk, enterprise and incentive and are necessary to develop this country. Do the miners actually want to negotiate and compromise?
Mentioning the phrase 'we need to price carbon' in a never never future will not be enough for green orientated voters to return to Labor. Some kind of policy is needed, given Labor's history of being captured by the coal industry and heavy polluters on the emission trading scheme. The latter have no interest at all in paying for their carbon emissions.
Update
Stephen Bartholomeusz in Business Spectator says:
Gillard can’t ditch the tax and start again, nor concede the key changes to the tax demanded by the sector – in particular its retrospective application to past investment – without destroying Swan, which isn’t going to happen. Which suggests that, however genuine Gillard might be about wanting to negotiate, she actually doesn’t have any meaningful room to manoeuvre on the issues that really matter....Unless Gillard is prepared to negotiate both the headline rate and the retrospective nature of the tax she is boxed in by the political framework and the continuing presence of Swan.
Her desire to negotiate a compromise might be genuine but the practical realities of her position make that near-impossible.
Update 2
Leaks to the press (The Australian Financial Review) suggest that the federal government has approved a compromise offer on the controversial resource super profits tax (RSPT) and presented the plan to key mining firms for their feedback.The offer would reduce the impact of the RSPT by offering some exemptions on existing projects, as well as raising the level when the tax cuts in from the proposed six per cent. It would see an immediate write-off for new capital expenditure and allow for the taxing point to be set as close as possible to extraction.
Although the miners continue to say that the proposed mining tax threatens more than $23 billion in investment no major project has yet been scrapped and several have actually been advanced. The miners continue to threaten a restart of their campaign against the Gillard Government if they don't get what they want in a couple of weeks.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:21 PM | Comments (27) | TrackBack
June 24, 2010
a quick execution
Rudd's execution happened rather quick and it caught people by surprise, including me. I knew that Rudd was on the nose (in caucus and the electorate), that Labor (the backbench) was anxious about the bad polling, and that cabinet resented the overly bureaucratic Rudd as leader.
They resented Rudd's leadership style, the concentration of power in his personal office and the sidelining of cabinet and the factions and the caucus, but were resigned to it. But they feared going down with Rudd.
I thought that the media's talk of leadership challenge in the last week was speculation. I hadn't realized that Rudd's NSW rightwing faction had deserted him on mass because of his electoral unpopularity. Changing leaders, based on focus group polling, is the NSW Right's tactics par excellence.
Now Rudd's throat has been being slit without any blood being spilled (Rudd stood down) and close to an election--probably this October. Amazing how things change so quick. Sometimes it only takes a spark? Or the coup was long planned and Rudd's technocratic leadership had been under threat for weeks. He was damaged and increasingly seen as the hollow man. The factions judged that he had to be executed.
Will Rudd stay on in Cabinet? Will he return to the old position of foreign affairs? Was that his price for standing down and doing the right thing for his party?
From the ALP's perspective, Gillard is seen to provide the vital boost necessary to restore Labor's chances of victory at the next election. They have a better chance of holding government with Gillard that they would have with Rudd would have been their judgement.
I doubt that Labor will shift much from its pro-business and centre-right populist policies, even though Gillard is seen as the saviour of the ALP. We still have the dead hand of the NSW Right.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:20 AM | Comments (31) | TrackBack
June 23, 2010
Gittens on the media
In his remarks on the state of the media in The Sydney Morning Herald Ross Gittens says:
the media are tellers of stories. They're the industrialised equivalent of cavemen sitting around the fire at night swapping yarns. The telling of stories about other people meets one of our most primitive human needs. What it [the media] doesn't do, however, is give us an accurate picture of what's happening in the world.
So he feels compelled to warn us---as citizens in a democracy?--- to be careful about what we read, hear and see in the media. He gives recent examples to make his point.
Thanks for the warning Ross, but we already know that about the corporate media, and the way that it frames its stories in a crisis/crisis overcome narrative. Deception as standard practice is not news to us; nor is the way that the media uses the idea of as the fourth estate and the professionalism, fairness and objectivity of journalism to disguise or mask that deception.
We citizens realized long ago that in the market-driven media commercial interests rule, that the media have their own agenda, and that they tailor their stories to further that agenda. All this is common knowledge, as is the journalist's frame of politics as a strategic game played by individual politicians for personal advancement, gain or power.
This is one reason why we are giving up buying newspapers, scan them online, and are unwilling to pay for their digital content when they---eg., Murdoch's titles--- go behind their paywall. This is news as a business that is indifferent to, if not contemptuous of the well-being of public life and to the desire of citizens to improve their lot.
It's also why we have little time for the tabloid tendencies of television's junk news in an TV culture that is addicted to the values of “infotainment” over news. This junk has little relevance to our governance frame of politics of democracy and politicians solving the nation’s problems, because they do not address policy issues, the specifics of a reform package, or the implication for the way that Australians go about the business of governing themselves. They have little interest in the democracy deficit.
The internet is the new reality. It is not simply about putting up material, but about the relationship between the creator and the readers, between provider and consumer.The relationship between the creator and the readers in the old media is primarily one of distrust and skepticism. We citizens have inferred that public journalism, as advocated by Jay Rosen, is too much of a reach for media companies traded as part of a larger corporate holding on the stock exchange.
If journalism provides much of the vernacular for the public policy dialogue between electors and the elected, is the old media still a primary site of political discourse in any liberal democracy? Are problems that receive prominent attention on the national news still become the problems viewers regard as the nation’s most pressing and serious? That used to be the case. Is it still?
One big problem with our truncated political discourse is that the sound-bites and one-liners of today’s journalism are offered up for consumption without any context, either historical or ideological. Television’s information culture treats public utterances as raw material. Within television’s paradigm, we no longer have news coverage, we have news assembly. The end product is a completely artificial dialogue, surreal and largely unconnected to truth.
The news media, in the main, have become the chroniclers of pseudo-events and image---junk news.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:41 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
June 22, 2010
Afghanistan: a fool's errand
There have been more deaths of SAS commandos in Afghanistan. And lots of deeply felt expressions of regret from ministers and politicians on both sides of politics. Expect more deaths and bodies they add. They then insist that the conflict is on the right course as they eye the rising American expectations for greater Australian involvement as the Dutch and Canadians pull out.
However, what the politicians say about the constant progress (painting a rosy-picture) often bears little resemblance to what happens on the ground in Afghanistan.
The core justification for Australia's involvement in this war is the Taliban providing a safe haven for terrorists, Al Qa’ida and the threat of a sanctuary and base for international terrorism, and the fact the conflict now involves Pakistan’s future stability. This then requires the defeat the Taliban and keeping Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan.
This justification barely stands up as no terrorist groups threaten Australia and al-Qaeda is now largely in Pakistan. The exit strategy is the Karzai regime standing on its own two feet, but that regime is corrupt and incompetent, and it stands little chance of ever truly being able to rule the country and keep the Taliban at bay. That means that the American military will have to stay there to "do the job" (whatever that is) for many years to come.
The Australians are there to support the Americans as an insurance policy for the Anzus alliance. But no minister will say this. We are offered a flurry of fictions whenever there are deaths with no attempt being made to address whether the NATO forces have the capacity to achieve the goals that have been set when there is no centralized state.
What is not being said much is that the war is not going well for the Americans. This means that Obama won't be able to "declare victory" next spring and start withdrawing troops next summer as he had planned.
Nor do many say that the decision to escalate in Afghanistan was a mistake. Our involvement there is a fool's errand that is rife with strategic contradictions, which is why we keep having "setbacks." The proper lesson to draw is not that it will be harder to get out; the proper message is that the sooner we do, the better.
Update
Anthony Bubalo at the Lowy Institute for International Policy says in The Age that both sides of politics have done a poor job in explaining why the war is crucial for Australia's security:
Explicitly and implicitly, Coalition and Labor governments have justified Australia's involvement in Afghanistan by narrow reference to terrorism and the needs of the US alliance. But almost a decade after the 9/11 attacks, this narrative has passed the time when a broader public - less obsessed than policy-makers with the finer details of counterterrorism strategy or alliance management - will accept it...If the government's justification for Australia's war is less and less compelling, then the only story left to tell is how and when we will leave.
There is a broader narrative of the importance of a stable Afghanistan in a region that is still a central node for international terrorism, a region that contains two nuclear powers (with a third on the way) and sits astride major trade and energy routes. I've only ever heard Malcolm Turnbull make reference to that narrative.eg. on the ABC's Q+A
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:02 AM | Comments (21) | TrackBack
June 21, 2010
Telstra accepts the inevitable
In a deal worth $11 billion Telstra has finally agreed to migrate its copper and cable broadband networks to Government-owned NBN Co. This eliminates Telstra as a fixed-line wholesale competitor to the Government-owned entity, allows Telstra to maintain its cable network exclusively for the purposes of its Pay TV joint venture, Foxtel, and frees Telstra from being required to meet most of its Universal Service Obligation costs.
Telstra lose their monopoly and a more level playing field has been created. The deal resolves Telstra’s monopoly, its integrated retail/wholesale nature, ensures a speedy and convenient fibre rollout through the use of Telstra’s ducts, and delivering the NBN a guaranteed massive customer base. Customers will benefit from service on an open-access basis (not just when it suits the incumbent monopolist), getting fibre broadband faster and with more competition.
This transforms Telstra from an engineering company which primarily builds and operates telecommunications networks into a retail service provider that needs to focus on delivering the best customer service and value-add products in Australia’s telco sector. The problem for Telstra is that it cannot compete with the likes of smaller telcos like iiNet, Internode or even Optus when it comes to customer service.
Telstra can now begin to transform itself into a structurally separated service company. No doubt Telstra will now focus on building its mobile infrastructure instead of fixed — due to the ACCC’s light regulation touch there.
The Coalition, of course, has continued with its naysaying and said that it would cancel the deal if elected. Presumably, they are opposed to the government owning the basic digital infrastructure, continue to see the national broadband network as a white elephant and a looming financial disaster.
However, their case is weaker now Telstra is on side. It also underplays the competitive boost provided by the structural separation of Telstra's wholesale operation from its retail arm and that fibre is the future even in a wireless world.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:03 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
June 20, 2010
BP: stonewalls before Congress
The media continues to provide images of dead wildlife, fouled marshes and beaches, losses to owners of employees and small businesses, and continuing reports that BP is putting the health of cleanup workers at risk by continuing to refuse to allow respirators to be used and providing inadequate safety training in the face of evidence of health risks.
BP has continued to deny reckless behaviour towards safety ---cutting corners to save money---to a hostile House energy and commerce committee. Despite BPs’ awful record of safety risks, the CEO, Tony Hayward, knew zilch--he wasn't party to individual decisions.
Dave Brown
It's the standard corporate defence--"I don't recall." That did nothing to assuage the anger in Congress. Hayward's stonewalling was partly an attempt to avoid admitting liability, with both civil and criminal charges a possibility. It has been estimated that the total cost of the spill could range from $40bn to $100bn, much more than the $20bn that BP has agreed to ringfence into an escrow fund.
Industry experts warned that the out-of-control well will go on spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico for the next two years or more if all attempts to contain or plug the gusher fail. The US government's present flow estimates is now up to 60,000 barrels a day or more. A relief well is the only sure way of stopping the gusher. Is this a case of gross negligence?
The problem for BP in this conflict of public good versus toxic industry is that it has not been straightforward with the government or the American people about the size of this spill. Ed Markey, the Democratic head of the House sub-committee on energy and the environment has said that "first they said it was 1,000 barrels, then they said it was 5,000 barrels, now we are up to 100,000 barrels."
So BP, with its horrid safety record, has misrepresented its commitment to turning a new leaf. Many however, are defending BP (corporate capitalism) by blaming the regulators. True, they didn’t do their job. But BP still bears primary responsibility for the oil spill.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:31 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
June 19, 2010
Israel: things have changed
David Shulman in Israel After the Flotilla Debacle in the New York Review of Books blog makes a couple of important points about contemporary Israel that are rarely made or acknowledged in Australia.
He says that it is important to understand the depth of the change that Israel has undergone since the present government came to power in the spring of 2009. First:
Netanyahu heads a government composed largely of settlers and their hard-core supporters on the right. Their policy toward Palestine and Palestinians rests upon two foundations: first, the prolongation, indeed, further entrenchment of the occupation, with the primary aim of absorbing more and more Palestinian land into Israel—a process we see advancing literally hour by hour and day by day in the West Bank. Second, there is the attempt to control the Palestinian civilian population by forcing them into fenced-off and discontinuous enclaves. Gaza is the biggest and most volatile of the latter,
He adds that there is another critical facet to the shift that has taken place. Under conditions of escalating religious nationalism (a Zionism that presses territorial claims, religious exclusivity and political extremism) Israeli dissent is being repressed, as a result of internal security now being in the hands of the ultra-right party Yisrael Beitenu, led by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
He adds that maintaining the occupation West Bank and Gaza Strip and the Gaza blockade is incompatible with making peace, and indeed indicates that the present Israeli leadership under Netanyahu has no interest in resolving the conflict.
The context in Australia is the campaign by the right wing leadership of Israeli lobby and the neocons campaign to portray Israel as on the very brink of annihilation. Israel’s preoccupation with Iran’s nuclear program stems from the fear that Iran would either use a nuclear weapon against Israel or give the bomb to one of its direct proxies, most likely Hezbollah. The neocons point to Tehran’s open hostility toward Jerusalem as they beat the drums of war.
As George Friedman points out at Stratfor:
A single point sums up the story of Israel and the Gaza blockade-runners: Not one Egyptian aircraft threatened the Israeli naval vessels, nor did any Syrian warship approach the intercept point. The Israelis could be certain of complete command of the sea and air without challenge. And this underscores how the Arab countries no longer have a military force that can challenge the Israelis, nor the will nor interest to acquire one. Where Egyptian and Syrian forces posed a profound threat to Israeli forces in 1973, no such threat exists now. Israel has a completely free hand in the region militarily; it does not have to take into account military counteraction. The threat posed by intifada, suicide bombers, rockets from Lebanon and Gaza, and Hezbollah fighters is real, but it does not threaten the survival of Israel the way the threat from Egypt and Syria once did (and the Israelis see actions like the Gaza blockade as actually reducing the threat of intifada, suicide bombers and rockets). Non-state actors simply lack the force needed to reach this threshold. When we search for the reasons behind Israeli actions, it is this singular military fact that explains Israeli decision-making.
Friedman adds that while there is no balance of power, the dominant nation can act freely. The problem with this is that doing so tends to force neighbors to try to create a balance of power.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 18, 2010
huh?
What is wrong with the Rudd Government? On the one hand, we have the passage of paid parental leave legislation that provides a mandatory paid leave for new parents (18 weeks of leave paid at the national minimum wage) for the first time. On the other hand, we have the removal of the National Funding Authority for health.
Remember how the $50 billion health and hospitals package was sold as an example of co-operative federalism, the biggest reform since Medicare, and an example of how Rudd Labor could solve the nation's health crisis? This reform package is now being undercut with the dismantling of the National Funding Authority, which was to oversee the distribution of Commonwealth health funding to the states.
Plans for the National Funding Authority were agreed to by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and also by premiers at the Council of Australian Governments summit on health reforms in April.The authority had been proposed to ensure health funding transparency between the Commonwealth and the states.If it has been dropped because it is not needed, then the health funding arrangements were not thought through.
Do I detect the hand of the NSW Right (Karl Bitar and Mark Arbib) here? One strong on (focus group) politics and weak on policy? Where is the strategy in health reform? What has happened to the challenge to the special interests of state governments and their health bureaucracies? There is little chance of establish a permanent, independent, professional and community-based statutory authority, an Australian health commission, similar to the Reserve Bank in the monetary field.
We know that after the collapse of the Copenhagen climate change talks and the decision of the Coalition to withdraw its support for the government's ETS, the Greens proposed adopting an interim arrangement - proposed by the government's own climate change advisor Ross Garnaut - which would have imposed a relatively small carbon tax until a more substantial price mechanism for carbon emissions could be agreed.The government however refused to discuss the proposal with the Greens.
What next in the roll back of reform?
We have the "education revolution" but it isn't going that far to address the negative effects of the inequality caused by globalization. Over the last 20 years that inequality has a consistent geographical spread in Adelaide and it is inter-generational.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:25 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
June 17, 2010
Canberra watch: the mining tax "disaster"
As Peter Brent at Mumble says the media's judgements about how a political party is “travelling” rest almost solely on the latest published opinion polls. The polls (Newspoll, ACNielsen, etc) are saying that Rudd Labor is in a bad way and that Abbott's Coalition has the rising momentum. The media are full of leadership speculation.
I watched Question Time all this week (whilst listening to some interesting music ) to assess the state of play amongst the parties in the context of the polls, and my judgement is that the Coalition did not do that well. The attack on the Resources Super Profits Tax looked oomph by the end of the week ---it run out of ammo---and the questions that increasingly replaced those on the RSPT were all over the place and lacked discipline.
The momentum in Question Time slowly turned the government's way. That leaves the noisy, outraged miners:
The consensus in the media is that the Rudd Government is being hammered, if not on the ropes, and it needs to cut a deal quick to save its political skin. It has already lost WA--to all intents and purposes--- and the Queensland marginals look decidedly shaky.
Is this the case?
The leaks from the negotiations indicate that the points at issue are to do with the transitional arrangements rather than dumping the tax. That has been the Rudd Government's position from day 1 and Big Mining, in spite of all the sound and fury of their media campaign, has not been able to shift that. So much for 'trash the tax'.
So it comes down to the issues at play in the negotiations---what BHP Billiton calls the three fundamental areas of concern with the Resources Super Profits Tax (RSPT):
1. the tax should not apply to existing projects
2. the effective tax rate should be one that ''retains Australia's international competitiveness''.
3. Stability arrangements for taxes and royalties for existing and new projects.
The royalty regime is to be replaced by the tax on super profits. The issue of Australia's international competitiveness is a furphy since the miners will stay here as long as there is a big demand for the iron ore and coal from China and other countries will shift to tax on profits regime.
So that leaves the first issue to be worked through. Big mining are demanding that Rudd and Swan give substantial ground on the retrospective elements of the tax. All the threats and hysteria--eg., in South Australia Whyalla will close down + Olympic Dam won't go ahead etc ---are directed at forcing the government to give substantial ground. All the leaks suggest that the transitional arrangements will be modified to get the tax regime right, not to roll over for the miners.
The miners, who are doing very well in the resources boom, are currently reduced to arguing that "uncertainity" is damaging their economic interests. Of course, they continue to equate their interest with Australia's national economic interest. Many others do not make that equation.
Update
Laurie Oaks in the Herald Sun says that he thinks that people have switched off, and if that is the case, nothing Rudd does will help. He adds:
We are now well past the point of acknowledging that there's a chance Labor could lose what not so long ago looked like an unloseable election.If next week's Newspoll confirms the depth of Labor's slump, the brutal truth is that the Rudd Government is very likely gone.
He adds that Labor is preparing itself for defeat and some of the more seasoned warriors believe it is unavoidable.
Rudd, to me, looks more and more like one of the hollowmen.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:35 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
June 16, 2010
journalism, news, democracy
The core argument that Alex Jones makes in his Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy is that traditional objective journalism is a bulwark of democracy; it is threatened by economic and technological change (forces outside the profession); and that to the extent that Americans ‘lose the news’, so they risk losing democracy itself.
Jones, who heads Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, argues (excerpts from the book) that the slow-motion collapse of traditional news-gathering media (broadcasters, news magazines, and newspapers) produce the "iron core of information" that sustains our democracy and fuels all the derivative media.
Without the iron core, no editorial page, columnist, op-ed artist, blogger, talk-show host, or aggregator will know what to say. Without the iron core, Jones fears, the public will have little clue about what governments, corporations, politicians, and the wealthy are up to. Quality "iron core" journalism nourishes democracy by keeping governments honest, assisting voters in making informed decisions at the ballot box, or stimulating political involvement.
The idea of "iron core" separates serious and important journalism from infotainment, celebrity gossip, spin or publicity and partisan comment. The iron core would only represent a small minority (15% says Jones) of the content in the traditional news-gathering media in Australia.
Jones argues that traditional, objective journalism primarily in newspapers (television —network, local, cable— is derivative media ) is the only thing preventing the public sphere from devolving into a ‘combination of advocacy, public relations, and individuals voices, even though traditional, objective journalism is a filter of of public conversation and is one shaped by the practices and ideology of media corporations.
Since the culture of Web journalism does not support in-depth news or investigative journalism Jones' map is one newspapers’ developing separate online businesses, with the owners of quality papers settling for lower than historic profit margins and renouncing slash-and-burn strategies.
This is how traditional journalists see themselves. They sense that their media world is dying, fear that Fox News stands for the new "journalism" and cannot imagine that new media might serve traditional journalistic functions---eg., writing about Question Time in the House of Representatives or on public policy such as health reform or the National Broadband Network----to foster political accountability. Their scenario is the “barbarians at the gate” one, as they cannot separate the iron core news from newspapers. Jones says:
My nightmare scenario is one of bankrupt newspapers, news by press release that is thinly disguised advocacy, scattered and ineffectual bands of former journalists and sincere amateurs whose work is left in obscurity, and a small cadre of high-priced newsletters that serve as an intelligence service of the rich and powerful.
Our present is emerging into this world and parts of it are very discernible---news by press release and the high-priced newsletters. I prefer the rough diverse democratic voices and the cacophony they create in the public sphere to yesterdays public sphere that was tightly patrolled by ‘objective’ elite and gendered news media of the he said she said journalism.
Update
Alex Jones in a debate on Bloggingheads.tv with Reason Editor-in-Chief Matt Welch:
We need a Bloggingheads.tv in Australia. It is an example of the new media.
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Obama on BP oil crisis
The political context for President Obama's first Oval Office address to the US nation is the mounting criticism of BP’s efforts to stop the spill, clean up the oil and compensate local business, a divided country and Congress; and the limitations of progressive liberalism.
Oval Office speeches are a focused and powerful tool meant to suggest the smack of political authority.They are usually made when a president is far less in control of events than he would like, making them as much about reassurance as solutions. Obama needed to assert his political authority over Big Oil because BP and the other oil companies want to continue offshore drilling for oil in places that events have shown exceed the government's ability to regulate.
At a grilling at the House of Representatives' energy and environment subcommittee on Capitol Hill the Big Oil executives said the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon and subsequent oil disaster was merely a fluke and that their companies operate safely and are adequately prepared to deal with any accidents that may occur.
In the speech Obama linked the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to environmental destruction, unemployment, to failed regulation, the US's dependency on oil and the need for clean energy.
Obama has done little on clean energy and his message is no more inaction. However, the US is in a bad way as a result of the global financial crisis. It is deeply in debt and unemployment is high and it looks to be long term since financial crises have historically spawned long periods of economic malaise. Don Peck says:
If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.
It is unclear what is the engine that will pull the U.S. back onto a strong growth path, given that for the foreseeable future, U.S. consumer demand is unlikely to propel strong economic growth. Where are the innovative new industries?
In his Oval Office speech Obama was defensive. It was an exercise in into damage control, not a circuit breaker. He reasserted his political authority over BP, but can he force BP to pay for the cleanup. Obama didn't say much about the need to move toward developing sources of clean energy and he avoided saying "It's time to put a price on carbon." Nor did he address the political resistance to this kind of reform from the Senate where the Senators from the oil and gas states just don't want this kind of radical shift in energy policy.
Update
The US president has wrung an agreement from BP executives to put $20bn (£13.6bn) into an independently managed compensation fund, with no cap on compensation BP may have to pay. BP will not pay dividends this year. Administration officials now admit that the flow of leaking oil could be 60,000 barrels a day.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 15, 2010
what's wrong with the political process?
Another two weeks of parliament. The final one before an election? Will it be an August election or one in October or November? My guess is October.
No doubt I will watch Question Tim this week. No doubt I will become frustrated at how this part of the political process in liberal democracy works, even though I know that Question Time is just political theatre designed for the television cameras. Try as I might, I cannot shake off the feeling that something is badly wrong with the political process.
The political process needs reform. But what reforms? To answer that requires identifying the problem, and I'm not sure what the problem(s) is (are). For the mainstream media the core problem is that Rudd is on the nose. He promised a lot on the way to power and his government has failed to deliver. So he needs to cut a deal quick with the miners or be replaced by either by Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott depending on your political bias. Problem sorted.
You change the people in the seats but things continue on as before. The political governance is more or less the same (apart from questions of style) even though the personalities change. So the problem lies deeper than personalities or the 24 hour media cycle.
Over at the ABC's Unleashed site John Hewson, in his Politics is a game, and rotten to the core opinion piece, puts his finger on a core problem:
It is a very real question whether our governments can actually govern anymore, with the power of vested interests, the shrillness of minorities, short-termism, and the superficiality of much of the media. It is even more significant to ask whether those who are elected are actually capable of governing.So much of what we call "governing" today is more about winning and keeping government, than it is about actually governing, more about politics and the politics of governing, than "the idea of government".
He adds that politics today is little more than a "game" played out in a 24-hour media cycle. The players will now virtually say or do what they believe is required to win the media on the day, or influence next week's polls.
That description identifies the problem as one of governance. It's rotten. Hewson forgets to mention that Rudd + Co did a good job on preventing the global economic crisis from impacting heavily on Australia in the form of a savage economic recession. But then Rudd+ Co failed badly on addressing climate change and the shift to a carbon economy. They simply gave up under pressure from the Greenhouse mafia.
If our political governance is rotten, then what is the solution? Hewson doesn't say, other than add that we have a political system that is in desperate need of reform on so many fronts, but that, those in the political game have no incentive to really change. So where the push for the reform of political system change come from?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:21 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
June 14, 2010
undermining democracy
In The Age Clive Hamilton makes an excellent point about the mining industry's outraged backlash over the Rudd Government's super profits resource tax in relation to democracy.
This adds to a point that Peter Martin had made earlier in the week:
If our government can't pull this off, can't exercise its sovereign right to introduce economic reform in the same way as have other governments when they reduced tariffs, taxed offshore petroleum and taxed goods and services, it will have diminished what is seen as possible.
Hamilton's point is about the exercise of power by multinational capital in a liberal democracy. He says:
A small group of obscenely rich people are acting in concert to bring down an elected government that wants to tax super profits. They want to install a new government sympathetic to their interests.
What we are seeing in its starkest form is a conflict between the raw power of capital and the public interest; a conflict that is disguised by the mining industry and the mega rich owners of capital saying that they are the victim:
The profits that mining companies make from extracting Australia's natural resources have soared, and the return going to the public hasn't kept pace. Even the mining lobby accepts this as well as the resources super profits tax being a better tax than the state mining royalties it will in effect replace.
The state mining royalties are calculated on the volume of dirt rather than dollars, and it has meant that the overall profit share from mining has turned dramatically in favour of resources companies. Now we are in the midst of a boom and the national government is exercising its ownership rights over the land. As the owner of the mineral resources the national government wants to increase the charge for the right to exploit those resources.
The response by the mining companies has been a fear campaign (all those jobs lost) marked by hysteria (communism in Canberra) and lies (eg., the super profits tax is retrospective). It has been supported by partisan hacks in the media ---Business Spectator comes immediately to mind, and "Robert Gottleibsen in particular.
Hamilton adds that:
The mining industry has been basking in its own success since its brilliantly successful campaign to defeat the introduction of an emissions trading system. It was an exercise in political thuggery rarely seen in this country. No remorse was felt over the direct thwarting of the popular will embodied in a government that won an election in which both main parties promised an emissions trading scheme.
He adds that the mutterings of Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer about the spread of communism in Australia are laughable for their paranoid absurdity. What we are in fact seeing is not an attack by the proletariat on the bourgeoisie, but the brutal assertion of power by the richest people in the country.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:57 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
June 13, 2010
trusting BP
In response to the backlash against BP in the US some British conservatives are wrapping the environmental vandalism in the flag----taking exception to the anti-British rhetoric that is permeating from America now and demanding that David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, stand up for BP, even though it is a global or multinational rather than a British company.
Martin Rowson
It was a case of boom now, deal with the environment later” strategy. It would seem that they Obama administration has trusted BP too much; they've interfered with both scientists and journalists trying to get a handle on what's going on; and they still don't seem to have a real handle on either the scope of the spill or how to respond to it.
So what has happening with respect to the cleanup? What BP is doing leaves a lot to be desired. Big Oil's narrative that instead of a world of “peak oil” with ever-depleting resources, technological innovation offered the promise of extending supplies for another generation is no longer so seductive.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:10 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
June 12, 2010
the Green virus?
I've stopped regarding The Australian as an authoritative voice on national issues and have come to regard it as the partisan voice of Australian conservatives with bile in their hearts, especially when it comes to the Australian Greens. Their rising electoral support, and the central role the Greens will probably play in the years ahead, must be causing Australian conservatives some anxious moments. So we can expect attacks on the "ideological dogma" of the Green to be launched from the pages of The Australian.
Some will come from the conservative women columnists, such as Miranda Devine, Janet Albrechtsen and Angela Shanahan. Shanahan is a Catholic moral conservative who voices the views of family-oriented women, supports the traditional family unit in opposition to the rampant individualism of civil society; natural law; the right to life of the unborn and sees feminism as an enemy.
In her Christians must boost immunity to Greens virus Shanahan fears that progressive Christians---the left-leaning Christian humanitarian brigade---could be:
infected by the Greens virus...for this group it is not the environment so much as the ostentatiously humanitarian credentials of the Greens that draw them away from the main parties. But the Greens are neither harmless nor a ginger group...They are notable for their impracticality: an odd mixture of do-goodism, libertarianism and almost totalitarian control on issues such as energy consumption. The Greens would be quite at home in Havana.
The reason? Why Peter Singer is their "inhouse philosopher" and in his writings he puts humans and animals on the same moral level, embraces animal liberation, supports abortion to term and euthanasia and even gives qualified support for infanticide. For Shanahan that is well down the road to eugenics. Remember the Nazis?
Singer's utilitarian arguments for this position? These are of no concern to Shanahan. It's just enough that The Greens adopt some of them (abortion and right-to-die legislation) and are are consistently anti-freedom of religion, are vehemently opposed to religious schools.They are unChristian. So don't vote Green. That's all that needs to be said.
Humanitarianism (of the utilitarian variety) is a problem for Shanahan because it separate politics from religion. In her Godless politics has gone too far for democracy in The Australian she says:
It always amuses me how little the opponents of religion understand the complex philosophical foundations of Western democracy and the debt they owe to religious philosophy in our understanding of the human being.Nor will they even concede that men and women of religious bent took on most of the great human rights battles of the past, such as the abolition of slavery and even the foundation of modern labour movements.Today, nowhere is this denial more evident than in the battle over human life, human rights and freedom of conscience.
Well that does away with the Enlightenment doesn't it.
The Greens stand for godless politics.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:00 AM | Comments (20) | TrackBack
June 11, 2010
fossil fuels forever
Americans, like Australians, need to start consuming less coal and oil given the process of climate change. With global warming dirty energy needs to be replaced by clean energy. The Americans are talking about it and considering some legislation. We shouldn't expect too much.
What we find in Australia are state governments, such as Queensland and Victoria, committed to a big expansion of coal exports, and to increasing dependence on fossil fuel energy. The need to find alternative sources of energy is almost an after thought as they happily consider new coal-fired power stations, digging coal out at an ever-faster rate and greater public subsidies. The Rudd Government supports the coal states.
You could say that our politicians have their head in the sand. Boosting coal production would undermine the Australia's position on climate change. Any action on making us less reliant on fossil fuels would be opposed by the Coalition and the mining industry with the clean energy process relentlessly driven by political and lobbying calculations.
Big coal has defeated the Rudd Government's cap and trade legislation and they were behind the campaign to mislead the public on the science behind climate change. They are opposed to the idea of putting mandatory curbs on emissions (regulation) rather than leaving it to technology to find a cleaner way to burn coal. Carbon pricing is dead.
Is there broad public support for making Australia less reliant on fossil fuels? A movement to counter Big Coal's position, which is that without coal (baseload power) we'd all be in the dark, and that environmentalism is a form of mental debility.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 10, 2010
BP: socializing the damage costs
BP gives the impression that the oil spill, which is in the process of trashing beaches, wetlands, wildlife ocean and fishing industry in the Gulf is the acceptable cost of doing business. The public deeply distrusts BP, with good reason, as its record to date has been cutting corners to make profits. BP (Bad Petroleum) is undoubtedly willing to cost the rest of the country a near infinite sum to preserve its future profits.
Rick Loomis, The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico is seen from a helicopter, Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2010
The era of cheap oil is over and we need to question the energy companies, governments, regulators and the International Energy Agency who are continually overstating how much accessible oil remains in the ground. We may well have entered the peak in oil production.
So we need to question BP's narrative, rather than say we are pretty happy with a modern, fossil-fuel based economy. We can begin to do this in terms of the external costs of oil production. The BP oil spill is now causing political ripples in Washington, and damage control in the form of limited "media access to the coastline.
George Monbiot in his recent The oil firms' profits ignore the real costs in The Guardian addresses the environmental damage caused by BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He says that:
BP's insurers will take a hit, as will the pension funds which invested so heavily in it; but, though some people are proposing costs of $40bn or even $60bn, I will bet the price of a barrel of crude that the company is still in business 10 years from now. Everything else – the ecosystems it blights, the fishing and tourist industries, a habitable climate – might collapse around it, but BP, like the banks, will be deemed too big to fail. Other people will pick up the costs
The economic and environmental damage will be socialized. That is how capitalism currently works, and the energy companies will make sure that this business -as-usual continues.
This oil spill now poses a real problem for the Obama administration. It wasn't going away, and Obama needs to do something about it, even if he can't plug the leak, given the regulatory capture by BP.
Update
Business -as-usual means the corruption of the regulator---the Minerals Management Service the agency in the Interior Department charged with safeguarding the environment from the ravages of drilling.
Tim Dickinson in The Spill, The Scandal and the President says that this agency has been allowing big oil industry to self-regulate for years. Big oil, in effect, ran the corrupt agency in the sense that whatever Big Oil wanted, they got. The Obama administration failed to clean the regulator up and they kept in place the crooked environmental guidelines the Bush administration implemented to favor the oil industry.
Dickinson says that in the application that BP submitted for its Deepwater Horizon well only two months after Obama took office BP claims:
that a spill is "unlikely" and states that it anticipates "no adverse impacts" to endangered wildlife or fisheries. Should a spill occur, it says, "no significant adverse impacts are expected" for the region's beaches, wetlands and coastal nesting birds. The company, noting that such elements are "not required" as part of the application, contains no scenario for a potential blowout, and no site-specific plan to respond to a spill...Among the sensitive species BP anticipates protecting in the semitropical Gulf? "Walruses" and other cold-water mammals, including sea otters and sea lions.
Though walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals do not live anywhere near the Gulf MMS gave the oil giant the go-ahead to drill in the Gulf without a comprehensive environmental review. This is Kafkaesque.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:52 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
June 9, 2010
Murray-Darling Basin: obstacles to reform
A more sustainable Murray-Darling Basin (reduced water allocations, greater environmental flows, better agricultural practices) has been on the agenda for several decades. The recent drought and climate change have made this more urgent, especially when the recent floods in Queensland will not reach the lower Murray.
There is not enough fresh water to keep the Lower Lakes artificially fresh any longer.
Many policy analysts were buoyed by the recent CoAG reforms which signalled a move to a more rational allocation of water resources and greater concern for the underlying requirements to maintain ecosystem health. The Commonwealth’s assumption of greater control over water policy has been justified on the grounds that a ‘national approach’ to the problems in the Murray-Darling Basin is required to resolve the ills of the Basin.
Reform is slow and difficult. The changes required are substantial--eg., the Wentworth Group estimates that irrigators will have to reduce the amount of water they take from the Murray-Darling by 30 per cent if the river is to return to an environmentally healthy state.
The Nationals and the National Farmers Federation oppose any attempt to favour the environment at the expense of the needs of rural communities and farmers. So do the state governments in practice, in spite of their often strong advocacy of the reform agenda. Their conception of reform states that increasing efficiency in agriculture can provide a solution to the water crisis in the Basin and result in ‘wins’ for all players. Water-use efficiency’ is portrayed as an environmental saviour and thus deserving of support from the public purse.
One of the major obstacles to a mire sustainable basin is is Victoria's attempts to keep as much of the River Murray water for its own irrigators in the Shepparton and central Goulburn foodbowl area and to take River Murray Water for Melbourne through its north south pipeline. This takes the form of a $2 billion food bowl modernisation of the rundown existing irrigation system--spun as a national building project by the Brumpy Government.
That means it is in the national interest akin to the Snowy Mountains scheme and the Commonwealth has agreed to fund 90 per cent of the project costs. Is it?
The "water-use efficiency" policy of the food bowl project is one designed to save water through public investment in new irrigation infrastructure (more subsidies) rather than reducing water allocations to irrigators and so shrink the irrigation system. It is a subsidy because the irrigators are only paying around $100 million of the $2 billion cost; a subsidy designed to prevent Victorian irrigation districts being forced to close down.
It is dubious policy because it is investing in infrastructure for farms that will eventually be rationalised; the claimed water savings from improved irrigation infrastructure are just not there; and what are deemed leakage actually seeps back to underground aquifers pumped by farmers and to the river. There is lot of mythology surrounding irrigation efficiency and increased productivity and in all probability we may well be left with a whole heap of irrigation infrastructure that will sit there like a giant white elephant.
What this shows is that state governments have generally resisted calls for national control of water resources, unless coupled with substantial financial incentives usually from the commonwealth. Decision-making at the state level also encourages excessive investment in local water-saving projects since this maintains the resource, and the benefits that accompany that resource, in a given jurisdiction.
In this decision making irrigators, have been, and still are, being put ahead of environmental needs.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:49 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
June 8, 2010
Rudd Labor on the nose
The problems for Rudd Labor, it would seem, go beyond the glossy sheen of the new wearing off. People are deserting the ALP because they are disenchanted; the ALP's primary vote is down in the mid-30s and the main beneficiaries are The Greens. Rudd Labor is now lagging behind the Abbott-led Coalition.
Abbott's tactic of consistent and relentless opposition to the government on everything has been able to make the Coalition look credible, which is no small feat. Will the Coalition shift to the electoral centre, now that it has a sniff of victory?
So far the collapse in electoral support for the ALP is interpreted as a protest vote that is being parked with the Greens, but, as it is soft, it will drift back to the Government due to an incumbency bias. These protest votes, which are a response to Rudd's shelving of plans for carbon emissions trading, are seen as inevitably returning to the ALP through preferences.
Therefore Rudd Labor's electoral strategy needs to shift to the Right, occupy the middle ground (regional Queensland, outer Melbourne, the western suburbs of Sydney and push Abbott's Coalition back towards its angry conservative base.
That electoral strategy it is argued is the best one for getting re-elected with its record of competence, limited reform and a minimal second term agenda. So we can expect a new hospital, ring road, vocational training college or research centre in the marginal seats and much heated rhetoric about the Coalition's return to Workchoices and embrace of slash and burn economics.
What if the Green preferences are not flowing back to the ALP? What if some are flowing to the Coalition? Say 60-40? Not all Green voters come the ALP.
However, the longer term consequence undercuts the "inevitable" drift of Green votes back to the ALP, since there is the long term increasing drift away from the straitjacket of the major parties. This is coupled to an increasing recognition of the need for a third party that represents greater political difference to what is currently offered by Labor and the Coalition. This will eventually result in a hung Parliament --Independents and Greens in the House of Representatives--and/or the Greens holding the balance of power in the Senate. A Green Senate beckons.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:18 AM | Comments (21) | TrackBack
June 7, 2010
Burchill's moral decomposition thesis
In Flotilla rallies terror cheer squad David Burchill continues his weekly campaign in the pages of The Australian against his former political friends----the left intelligentsia. These are now his enemies. Burchill's frame in this op-ed is the terror-friendly, nay pro-terror, flotilla.
He says:
Of all of the sad, tawdry features of the Gaza flotilla incident, surely none is sadder or tawdrier than the immediate assumption, leapt upon by so many people of good intentions, that the Israeli state is in the business of killing unarmed civilians, for the pure sadistic pleasure of it. This view of Israel as a kind of devil-state, the spirit of evil made incarnate in the world, has been around in educated opinion since at least the late 1960s, when it buttressed the then-enthusiasm of the Western Left for the Palestine Liberation Organisation....Two generations of militants taught themselves that intoxicating Manichean logic, according to which the blacker one paints one's spiritual enemy, the more sheer awfulness one can tolerate in one's friends. And all the while one can feel oneself to be as pure and unsullied as a Cistercian monk.
Burchill's big theme is the moral decomposition of the progressive intelligentsia in his lifetime. What he forgets to add is that many of the Western Left defended Israel in the 1960s and slowly become more critical as a result of the conduct of successive Israeli governments towards the Palestinian people.
This kind of history is of no concern to his moral decomposition thesis. His argument is that the western Left now supports Hamas and al-Qa'ida, but they do not have the moral courage to chant Viva Hamas! Victory to the throat-slitters! Go the child-bombers! In other words they have joined the jackals.
There is not one word in Burchill's op-ed about the awful conditions in Gaza, the Israeli blockade of Gaza, or the settlements which can be distinguished from the actions of Hamas, a fundamentalist Muslim organization that was created by Israel in the 1970s and 1980s to split the Palestinian movement and fight Fatah. We can also distinguish Hamas from the idea of Palestinain human rights.
Such messy considerations do not fit into Burchill's Manichean view of the world. Nor does he have any criticism—not a word--of Israeli policies and behavior towards the Palestinians. Does that mean Burchill thinks that Israeli violence against Gaza is justified?
Presumably, Burchill is in favour of the blockade of the evil doers. The neo-con justification would be that it prevents Hamas, and its backer, Iran, from triggering a larger war from Gaza; it isolates Hamas and allows Israelis to live in (relative) safety. The Australian Right stands with Israel (a free nation) as it tries to enforce the blockade against terror. William Kristol in Murdoch's The Weekly Standard states the Right's sentiment:
The dispute over this terror-friendly flotilla is about more than policy toward Gaza. It is about more than Israel. It is about whether the West has the will to defend itself against its enemies. It is about showing (to paraphrase William Gladstone) that the resources of civilization against terror are by no means exhausted.
On this account the flotilla was an act of aggression rather than a political statement aimed at weakening Israel’s embargo of Gaza.
The implication of this position is that a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would actually increase the threats to Israel in that a Palestinian state ight create a sanctuary for terrorist organizations, which could use its territory, with or without its knowledge and cooperation, to develop and deploy a nuclear bomb on Israel's borders and near major population centers.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:05 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
June 5, 2010
Israel becomes more isolated
Despite the process of delegitimization of Israel that is happening, I've pretty much given up on the peace process in the Middle East as the Israeli siege of Gaza becomes the hot-button issue in the Muslim world.
The Israeli propaganda machine, official and private, has been running full throttle in the last few days justifying the assault on the Mavi Marmara ferry that was part of the aid convoy to Gaza. The slaughter of civilians is justified as a military necessity or somehow the fault of the other side. Opponents are demonised as bloodthirsty terrorists or terrorist-lovers (meaning: anyone who opposes Israeli policy). An alternative account from those on board.
Martin Rowson
This Israeli propaganda--is there any other word for it?---which is recycled by the Australian Israeli lobby has failed to prevent the focus of global attention on the blockade of the Gaza strip. Israel is determined to maintain control of Gaza even if the consequences of the commando-raid--- in which nine of the on-board activists were killed and thirty wounded - results in the fracturing of the relationship between Turkey and Israel.
Turkish-Israeli relations have been deteriorating since the IDF’s assault on Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009; Turkey’s relationships with Iran and Syria have improved concomitantly.
In his Israel: the Alternative essay in the New York Review of Books (2003) Tony Judt argued that modern Zionism was manifestation of 19th-century ethnic nationalism, which he judged increasingly inappropriate to the post-modern, globalized world of the 21st century. Israel was increasingly an "anachronism," and he suggested that a brighter future lay in replacing Zionism's ethno-religious exclusiveness with a more inclusive liberal democracy. In other words, Israel should evolve into a multi-ethnic liberal democracy instead of remaining an explicitly "Jewish state."
The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.
Israel has become even more of a Jewish state since 2010 as the embrace of Zionism's ethno-religious exclusiveness becomes ever tighter as Israel increasingly and clearly moving to the right---eg., the Israeli Foreign Minister's (Avigdor Lieberman) crusade to humiliate, disenfranchise, and perhaps even eventually expel Arab Israelis. and the Prime Ministers (Benjamin Netanyahu) deep-seated hostility to a Palestinian state.
The US is still Israel's friend, in that it is reflexively supporting Israel against near-universal international criticism over the blockade of Gaza and its attack on the aid convoy. However, if Obama is to rebuild relations with the world's Muslim communities post Bush, then he needs to address the ongoing blockade of Gaza and ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid to Palestinians.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:03 PM | Comments (22) | TrackBack
June 4, 2010
politics SA style
Politics in South Australia is mostly about management---competent and relatively mistake-free administration----of the economy and the consequences of globalization on manufacturing and the industrial working class The big issues of the day are never about the place of South Australia in a globalized world or making Adelaide more sustainable.
They are about rebuilding a public hospital or a sports stadium. These issues stand in, or a re placeholders, for the revitalization of a rust bucket industrial city with a declining manufacturing base.
It is the proposed redevelopment of the Adelaide Oval that is the current hot button issue. Should it be done? Is it being done on the cheap? Has Treasurer 'slash and burn' Foley mislead everyone about knowing that the estimates of project costs were in excess of the $450 million Government commitment? Should Foley resign?
David Nason in The Australian puts the standard case that what is best for football is not necessarily what is best for South Australia.
Adelaide has a wonderful old-style food market and some March Madness fizz with a bike race, car race and an arts festival that's holding its own.But after that Adelaide doesn't give Croweaters too much to crow about. No amount of government cheering can hide the fact that Adelaide's business culture is flat, its street culture essentially bogan and young people are still dying to get out.
Fair enough. Adelaide is is need of revitalization and urban regeneration. Nason's solution is a sports stadium in the city:
footy's long-overdue relocation to the city from the outer suburban wasteland of West Lakes holds the promise of a renaissance...the influx of 50,000 local and interstate footy fans each weekend for seven months a year is a massive opportunity...If the sporting experience is classy....investors will turn Adelaide's sleazy and near-derelict west end into a totally modern city experience with exciting new shops, restaurants and hotels. And once all this is established, bigger businesses will look more favourably on Adelaide and what it has to offer.
It's the footy fans who will give Adelaide a vibrant CBD--not the people who live in the city and the business that service their needs. It is the opposite to Richard Florida's creative class urban development.
The trouble with sports-led urban regeneration is that such redevelopment is being done on the cheap by the Rann Government. The numbers don't stack up to rebuild a 50,000-seat stadium to host AFL, World Cup soccer and cricket for $450m. Another problem is that the sports stadium will take all the money away from other projects to help revitalize the CBD, such as redesigning Victoria Square.
More seriously though, urban regeneration comes from increasing the people who live in the CBD as opposed to just dropping in once a week for a few hours. Adelaide's sleazy and near-derelict west end is changing due to increasing numbers of people living there and the large numbers of international students. Football and cricket place their own interests first and have little concern for the more substanbive need to reinvigorate the city.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:56 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
June 3, 2010
parliamentary supremacy + political corruption
A.V. Dicey formulated the comprehensive theory of the concept of parliamentary sovereignty or supremacy that we have inherited from the UK. In Dicey’s view, parliamentary sovereignty is a two-pronged concept.
It means first, that Parliament may make or unmake any law whatsoever; and secondly, that the law does not recognise any other person or body as having the right to override or set aside that legislation. To say that the Parliament is sovereign implies that it is above the other branches of government, moving towards the concentration of political (not corporate) power in a single authority.
One problem with the concept of parliamentary sovereignty or supremacy inherited from the UK is its lack of limitations on legislative power and the lack of accountability of Parliament itself. To whom is parliament accountable in Australia? Its self-regulation. Parliament regulates itself.
The defenders of parliamentary sovereignty refer the doctrine of separation of powers, and say that the government of the day is very accountable to the people. We can toss them out in an election if we don't like them, or think that their standard of conduct is low. Elections are the ultimate test of accountability.
This, however, doesn't address the problem of the corruption of the political process and MP's that goes beyond the fiddling of their individual expense accounts. Victoria and NSW shows branch staking, vote buying, MP's in the pocket of special interests, payment for access to ministers, lobbying, MP's using their position to cut financial deals on the side. Peter Martin, in reviwing Jeffrey Ian Ross's The Dynamics of Political Crime says:
political corruption, which "usually includes accepting or soliciting bribes (i.e., usually money or some other economic benefit, like a gift or service)." The reason that this is a political crime is that "The citizen's trust has been violated," with citizens being the ultimate victims. The three main groups involved in political corruption are politicians, police and government regulators, but others such as judges can participate too.Political corruption is damaging to public trust because it means that the people who are passing and enforcing laws are the ones who are breaking them
Victoria and South Australia are currently the only two states in Australia without an independent corruption commission, and Brumby and Rann's intransigence on this is leaving them increasingly isolated and vulnerable to opposition claims that they must have something to hide. They do. They are protecting their corrupt MP's.
Brumby has backflipped and established a Victorian Integrity and Anti-Corruption Commission (VIACC). As Peter Faris points out in The Australian:
It seems the VIACC cannot investigate corrupt politicians or their staff: this is to be dealt with by yet a new person, the Parliamentary Integrity Commissioner, who reports upwards to (you guessed it) politicians in the form of the Parliamentary Privileges Committee.Brumby has been avoiding corruption reforms because most of the public corruption (apart from the police) involves Labor politicians, local councillors and their staff. It is obviously important to protect the Labor pollies before a tight election. This has been done by excluding politicians from investigation by VIACC. VIACC cannot choose to initiate any such investigations. This has been left to the PI Commissioner who, if he chooses, may refer serious allegations to VIACC.
So we still have self regulation.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:18 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 2, 2010
the anti-burqa movement
On the ABC's Q+ A this week the spectre of the niqab and the burqa appeared along with the issue of its banning. In recent months, several European governments (Belgium, France, Italy) have begun to legislate restrictions on both the niqab, a face veil that leaves the area around the eyes clear and is usually combined with a full body covering, and the burqa, which covers the entire face and body, leaving just a mesh screen to see through.
On the right, the veil and burqa is seen as a threat to Australian and in particular a mono culture (Christian?) culture; a symbol of a foreign, belligerent faith community, the "other" - even though few Muslim women wear it-- and a security issue.
It is not just conservatives uncomfortable with multiculturalism who say that the veiling of the face is inherently suspicious and that it may even be a threat to national security. It an issue that crosses the left right divide.
On the left the burqa is seen as a repressive garment that subjugates women and violates their rights. The burqa, the niqab, or any clothing that covers the whole female body including the face, is a powerful symbol of the oppression and subjugation of Muslim women. It is an obvious reminder of how the Taliban, who required women to wear the burqa, systematically abused the fundamental rights and freedoms of Afghan women, leaving them with the lowest life expectancy in the region and highest rates of maternal death.
The ban is being sold by both Right and left as a measure to liberate oppressed Muslim women from the “walking prison” of their burqas that undermines their dignity. It is a divisive issue--- for instance I like the headscarf but I'm uneasy with the burka. The scarf cannot simply be written off as a symbol of oppression, and wearing the headscarf represents her choice to practice her religion while still participating actively in Australian society.
Laurie Penny, blogging at the New Statesman, says:
perhaps the most fundamental question about the veil debate... is not to what extent the veil can be considered oppressive, but whether it is ever justifiable for men to mandate how women should look, dress and behave in the name of cultural preservation. Male culture has always chosen to define itself by how it permits its women to dress and behave....In seeking to restrict the free choice of women to dress as they please, whether in a burqa, a bolero or a binbag, European governments are not protecting women but mounting a paranoid defense of their own right to determine feminine behavior.
In this debate the voices of Muslim women are strangely absent.
What is raised is the issue of individual freedom, individual rights and liberalism in the context of the anti-immigrant backlash and the xenophobic element in the post 9/11 environment. Banning the burqa fundamentally undermines the rights of Muslim women who have made a free and informed decision to wear such coverings, and value the space to practice their religion in public. It also undermines gender equality and tolerance.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:14 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
June 1, 2010
end the Gaza blockade
Israeli armed commandos attack on the Mavi Marmara that was part of the Gaza Freedom flotilla. This attack, which resulted in the death of 9 Palestine solidarity activists, was a military action against civilian craft in international waters. Irrespective of what the US does beyond its standard spin when Israel crosses the line, Australia should call for the end of Israel's blockade of Gaza and not just its easing. So should the UN Security Council.
Steve Bell
Israel's narrative of self-defensive is undercut by there being no evidence so far that the convoy's six vessels constituted a threat to Israel's security. The evidence indicates that the ships were carrying construction materials, electric wheelchairs, cancer medicine, milk powder and water purifiers for Gaza's people. Israel's Gaza blockade, which was imposed in June 2007, has stopped the Palestinians in Gaza from receiving such aid.
Israel says the blockade is designed to prevent weapons from being smuggled into the enclave so as to prevent Hamas from rearming. It is a part of a strategy to undermine and destroy Hamas, and to punish the Palestinian people for electing and supporting Hamas. Its publicity machine claims that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, that the occupation of Gaza has ended, and that the flotilla is a violent attack on Israeli sovereignty.
This spin will not prevent Israel's increasing isolation in the international community. George Friedman in Flotillas and the Wars of Public Opinion at Stratfor says:
The Turkish flotilla aimed to replicate the Exodus story or, more precisely, to define the global image of Israel in the same way the Zionists defined the image that they wanted to project...the flotilla was designed to achieve two ends. The first is to divide Israel and Western governments by shifting public opinion against Israel. The second is to create a political crisis inside Israel between those who feel that Israel’s increasing isolation over the Gaza issue is dangerous versus those who think any weakening of resolve is dangerous.
This sort of warfare has nothing to do with fairness. It has to do with controlling public perception and using that public perception to shape foreign policy around the world. In this case, the issue will be whether the deaths were necessary. The Israeli argument of provocation will have limited traction. Israel is just not large enough to withstand extended isolation.
Stephen Walt asks a good question:
How are we supposed to think about a country that has nuclear weapons, a superb army, an increasingly prosperous economy, and great technological sophistication, yet keeps more than a million people under siege in Gaza, denies political rights to millions more on the West Bank, is committed to expanding settlements there, and whose leaders feel little compunction about using deadly force not merely against well-armed enemies, but also against innocent civilians and international peace activists, while at the same time portraying itself as a blameless victim? Something has gone terribly wrong with the Zionist dream.
Israel has become a regional hegemon and an occupying power--a theologically-motivated regional superpower with a nuclear arsenal.
The Netanyahu Likud Coalition Government has turned away from, and rejected, liberal democratic values (one person, one vote, human rights, equal citizenship) is deeply opposed to a Palestinian state; explicitly advocates a Jewish state; wants to revoke the citizenship of Israeli Arabs, strips Israeli Arabs of legal protection; and says that Israeli Arabs don’t deserve full citizenship and West Bank Palestinians don’t deserve human rights.
In spite of this the Australian Jewish lobby (eg., the AIJAC) persists in saying that Israel is a state in which all its leaders--including Avigdor Lieberman ---- cherish democracy and yearn for peace. It is an image increasingly at odds with political reality.
Israel's attack on an aid flotilla is an outcome of the failed policy in trying to isolate the Hamas government which controls the Gaza strip and thus turn the population against it. Whether the siege of Gaza is lifted or sustained is up to Washington. If, when Netanyahu finally meets Obama, the US president was to say the embargo must end, Israel would have no choice. The siege of Gaza can only continue with US support and thus far, Obama refuses to withdraw that support.
Update
The United Nations Security Council has instructed Israel to lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip, calling the siege “not sustainable.” Egypt has re-opened the Rafah crossing indefinitely. Steve Clemmons at The Washington Note says that it the event was more than things getting out of hand.
From a distance, what seems to be happening is that Israel is ratcheting up its test of what it can do in the confines of the US-Israel relationship. It is testing to see whether there exist any limits or conditionality on Israeli behavior at all. Israel believes that the Obama team is weak -- and is pushing aggressively to compel the US to tolerate anything the State of Israel does as a signal to the rest of the Middle East that is itself clamoring for any sign that the Obama administration is willing to put some muscle and substantive action behind the President's Cairo speech and other comments to the governments and people in the Arab world.
The pressure for change in the Middle East is building as Turkey, an emerging regional power, takes a more pro-active role in the region whilst settler violence and fanaticism continues to grow within Israel, pushing Israeli politics in an illiberal direction.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:08 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack