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July 31, 2010

economic myths

One of the big myths of our time is the debt and deficit one. We are all consistently told that the government should balance its budget just like a household does, that persistent budget deficits are unsustainable and will lead to stagnant growth and even to sovereign defaults. Debt and budget deficits are bad for the resurgent austerity advocates.

This myth has been pushed by the Coalition and most professional free market economists since the global financial crisis These deficit hawks argue for lowering government deficits and debt in the midst of the current global economic recession, even though these orthodox economists don’t have a theory to explain the global financial crisis (since their models exclude the possibility of one).

Though they know that reducing the debt and the budget deficit through slashing public spending will create a heck of a lot of unemployment----unlike the Great Depression when they didn't know this --- their politics dictates that the market will continue its recovery without any additional government stimulus. Markets always work all the time, no matter what.

Government debt, they proclaim, is the spectre haunting Australia, not sagging global economic growth resulting from the global economy heading for a serious slowdown this year; a slowdown greased by the cutbacks in public spending in Europe that will shrink European economies, slow U.S. export growth thereby slowing China's exports.

The global financial crash of 2008 didn’t turn into another Great Depression because the government learned the importance of flooding the market with cash, thereby temporarily rescuing some stranded consumers and most big bankers. It makes sense to cut back debt and the budget deficit when the global economy is likely to grow at a rapid rate because unemployment will come down.

So what will drive global economic growth? China, of course, because of its insatiable demand for commodities, an its fiscal stimulus, working mostly through infrastructure investment, did a great job in terms of buffering the real economy in the face of declining world trade in 2008-09.

China is the leading candidate to be at the epicenter of the next boom. The bet is that China can keep its growth high enough to sustain the global economy while o not getting drawn into some sort of bubble.China will save the day. How? Their middle classes will eventually become so big and rich they can buy everything the nations of Europe and the US will be able to produce,

As of now China and India are still relying on net exports to America and Europe to fuel their growth!

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:28 AM | TrackBack

July 30, 2010

Labor troubles

I've just surfaced from a day or so setting up the home office in Adelaide to check out what's been happening in politics. Has there been anything of significance, apart from more policies converging and rumors of Labor rats scuttling the inner corridors of power?

What's the point of all the beating up of Rudd by those in Labor during an election? How does that help the media savvy ALP? Surely they need Rudd to help them with their campaign in Queensland, as he is their local boy made good. Isn't Queensland a key to the ALP winning the election? Isn't the ALP especially vulnerable in Queensland?

What is important in the long run is the dead hand of the NSW Right in the form of Senator Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar, the ALP national secretary. As Deborah Snow highlights the consequences of their being hooked on panicky politics driven by focus-group research are far reaching.

She quotes a source in the ALP thus:

Mark and Karl were absolutely insistent that Rudd had to dump the ETS [emissions trading scheme]. They pushed, prodded, cajoled and would not take 'no' for an answer. That was the big turning point in Kevin's standing with the voters.It's breathtaking now for Mark and Karl three months down the track to say, 'Well, you've lost the people, you've got to go.

This makes explicit what we had suspected. They represent the vested interests who oppose climate change reform. As Paul Krugman says:

If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines.

The NSW Right defends the coal industry. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in limits on greenhouse gas emissions with at most a small impact on the economy’s growth rate.

No doubt the ALP's response will be that its all a problem of communication, not the glaring shabbiness of the policy. They could have stated their green message more clearly, they would say, to blank faces in the audience.

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July 29, 2010

the election: its about marginal seats

The Coalition needs to pick up 17 seats to win a majority to govern outright, requiring a uniform 2.3 per cent swing. Queensland is the key because it has the most marginal seats on both sides of politics. There are 10 marginal seats held by Labor by less than 5 per cent, while the Coalition holds six seats regarded as marginal.

At Inside Story Norman Abjorensen comments on what has become increasingly obvious--- the election is about the unaligned voters in marginal electorates and has little to do with a conversation with the vast majority of us. It appears to be about the marginal seats in South East Queensland and western Sydney. Abjorensen comments:

this focus on unaligned voters hasn’t translated into an attempt by the major parties to convince more of us to buy their goods. It’s more a case of strategists identifying which particular voters in a handful of key electorates need to be persuaded to change or to repeat their vote from the last election. Instead of a national conversation on the big issues in which we can all take part, we have a series of private chats, informed via focus groups and local polling, that effectively exclude the vast majority of the population.

He comments that the problem, however, is that no two marginal seats are identical as they are highly local. Indeed, he adds, the issues in marginal seats might be highly antithetical. A key seat with a large number of environmentalists in inner Melbourne, say, might be vital, but so too might a seat in Tasmania where jobs are seen to be threatened by heavier environmental regulation.

The irony is that the federal election could be decided on the basis of regional and local issues in south-eastern Queensland, and yet we have little knowledge of what is happening around the local issues in these marginal seats.

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July 28, 2010

the election: smile and look positive

I have pretty much tuned out from the over-scripted and staged current election campaign, apart from listening to the headlines. I find it mind numbing in terms of its slogans and talking points of stopping the boats, end the waste, the Liberals obsession with deficits and debit, Labor's attempts at greenwash and the debate on population policy. Both sides are driven by their party polling research and that is essentially the same.

Bob Brown should have been a participant in the leaders debate. The Greens are in government in Tasmania and the ACT and they have something to offer on climate change that goes beyond the 'not yet.'

When are the two major parties going to realize that there is a now third force in Australian politics, which will soon exercise its balance of power through the Senate? Underneath all the waffle of the staged sound bites of safety first the political ground is shifting. We are moving beyond the two-party model.

In an op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald Ross Gittens makes two good observations about the election campaign. Gittens' first observation is that:

The paradoxical truth is that modern election campaigns are aimed at those who aren't much interested in the topic. Swinging voters are assumed to be completely self-interested and short-sighted, driven by emotion rather than intellect, ill-informed and easily conned by slogans and television ads...Hence all the nonsense we're hearing from both sides.

He says that for those of us who do take an intelligent interest, the best response is to conduct our own debate, ignoring the silliness as much as we can. That's good advice. Gittens' second observation is that:

This election is the battle of the scare campaigns. Pollies are trying to frighten us about big new taxes, the return of Work Choices, the threat from boat people, and deficits and debt. I've written a lot in recent times about why we don't need to be too worried by budget deficits and public debt.

What is needed is investment in urban infrastructure to improve the quality of life in our cities (eg., better public transport, people orientated inner city, better food etc ) and more sustainable.

Sustainable, for someone in southern Australia, means environmental sustainability, and that means doing something about water in the context of climate change. That means harvesting storm water and waste-water reuse as well as desalinisation plants.

What we don't know is how the federal and state governments are planning to make our cities more liveable and sustainable in the context of economic growth being the top priority and climate change. I suspect that there is not much planning.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:24 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

July 27, 2010

Wikileaks: The Afghan War Diary

The huge cache of secret US military files about the conflict in Afghanistan obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history.

The Afghan War Diary is a compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers, and mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related details.

The Afghan War Logs reveals how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency. Pakistan is an ally of America.

Western governments involved int he war iun Afghanistan, including Australia, have been less than forthcoming about what is taking place by putting a glossy face on the war, manipulating public opinion and suppressing the truth. Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, said that:

There is no single damning, single person, single mass killing. That's not the real story. The real story is that it's war. It's the continuing small events, the continuing deaths of civilians, children and soldiers...."Military units when self-reporting speak in another language, redefining civil casualties as insurgent casualties ... When US military report on other US military they tend to be more frank. When they report on ally military units, for the example the UK or the Polish, they're even more likely to be frank. But when they report on the Taliban then all evil comes out. Internal reporting is not accurate. The cover-up starts at the ground. The whole task is to make the war more palatable.

Though Wikileaks released the information to the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel Wikileaks is about the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it.

But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This counters the way that the National Security State hides itself behind an essentially absolute wall of secrecy to ensure that the citizenry remains largely ignorant of what it is really doing.

Though the war in Afghanistan is not winding down, but ramping up, it is going far worse than political officials have been publicly claiming. The Afghan War Diary shows why the US military campaign in Afghanistan has achieved so little success--too much civilian slaughter doesn't do much for winning the hearts and minds of Afghan civilians. The diary shows how futile the situation in Afghanistan is.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:35 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

July 26, 2010

kicking solar yet again

Australia may soon follow in the footsteps of other international markets with a 'cash for clunkers' program dubbed Cleaner Car Rebate, offering a $2000 boost to new car buyers trading in their old car.The ultimate aim is getting around 200,000 old vehicles off the nation's roads, and the program will offer a $2000 rebate on cars built before 1995. The rebate is part of a plan to cut vehicle emissions by one million tonnes, with mandatory emissions regulations to be introduced for new cars from 2015.

This is an excellent idea, as Australians own a lot of old motor cars, and those old cars guzzle a lot of petrol and they emit a lot of pollution. So how is this rebate to be paid for, given Labor's lean budget commitment? It is an expensive way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and it could be a subsidy for new 4 wheel drives.

'Cash for clunkers' will be funded by redirecting funds from the programs set up to increase the use of solar power and renewable energy, of course. Why isn't the money coming out of the subsidies to the polluting industries instead? These subsidies keep the cost of fossil fuel energy artificially low and make it harder for renewable energy to compete. They distort energy markets, encourage greater use of fossil fuels, create higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions and improve the profitability of energy companies that produce or use fossil fuels.

Electricity generation is the largest source of Australia’s internal greenhouse gas emissions, because of the high percentage of coal in the energy mix. It is also the easiest to transform to renewable energy.

Labor's climate change policy is a mess: it is ineffective and poorly targeted and it has little connection to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It is backing right away from putting a price on carbon and it is designed to strangle the emergence of a solar energy industry whilst pretending that it is supporting an infant industry.

Australian solar manufacturing has little chance of being at the forefront of the clean energy industry. It fears the impact on economic growth from a shift to a low carbon economy. Economic growth is the top priority of the state and it overrides other policy objectives, despite economic growth not delivering on its promise of well being.

Despite Australia being a sun-drenched country, other governments are making a much bigger effort to harness that solar power. Instead of focusing on the green jobs in the local solar industry, the focus is on the lost jobs in the fossil fuel industry. What has been decided by default is that Australia is not going to have an Australian manufacturing capability, and that instead of being net exporters of leading-edge renewable technology it is the importers of consumer goods in the clean energy area.

Although an ecologically sustainable and healthy energy system, based on efficient energy use and renewable energy sources, is now technologically and economically feasible for Australia, there is a lack of political will. Government energy policy since the Howard government aims to retard the development of energy from renewable electricity source, until such time as coal-fired power stations with CO2 capture and sequestration (and nuclear power stations for the Coalition) are available.

The argument is that given Australia's high level of fossil fuel reserves , it must remain substantially reliant on fossil fuels for energy needs and energy security. The argument is flawed. Australia also posses a high level of renewable resources in wind ans solar, but the Government does not argue that should therefore be reliant on these resources.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:07 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

July 25, 2010

Big Ag flexes its muscle

The Murray-Darling Basin Authority has delayed the release of its science-based report on future water allocations in the basin until after the election.

Irrigators --especially Big Ag--- are gearing up to fight the deep cuts they suspect will be made to their water allocations by questioning the independence of the authority and challenging the legitimacy of the basin plan when it is finally released. The delay helps the ALP avoid the backlash from irrigators, Big Ag and the Coalition attack over water cuts. The Nationals oppose any cuts in water rights, they are antagonistic to the Authority's charter emphasis the environment as well as agriculture and rural communities, and are hostile to efforts to return more water to the environment.

BigAg is not that interested in reforming agriculture----it is a subsidised industrial agriculture is an agricbusiness built around a chemically a saturated, water guzzling, biotech, export orientated agriculture that has little time for sustainable agriculture, organic farming or farmers markets. The latter is the province of small local farmers who are struggling to make ends meet.

As things stand today government policy, in spite of the basin plan, ensures that agribusiness, specifically biotech, stays central to Australian food policy both domestically and internationally. It also ensures that small farmers -- the supporters of the sustainable-food movement --- pose no real alternative to agribusiness.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:44 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

July 24, 2010

Mark Latham on the ALP

In "Labor's Fatal Flaws" in Friday's 'Review' section in the AFR Mark Latham, the former leader of the ALP, argues that the fatal flaw of federal Labor today is that the now policy-lite ALP is controlled by the factions. They understand politics in terms of leadership popularity and polling numbers, rather than good public policy.

This is an argument that I have a lot of sympathy with, and it goes some way to explaining the current policy-lite approach of Gillard Labor, which is run by the 'whatever it takes' NSW Right.

Their political strategy is to back away from any policy reform that is too unpopular or too risky with western Sydney. Western Sydney is their touchstone. It stands for the aspirational outer suburbia Australia, which is the real Australia.

Latham's argument, which reworks to Robert Michels' classic text Political Parties, is that the Labor Party has fallen:

under the control of the apparatchiks, men more committed to the the acquisition of power and social status than the radical reform of economic and social relations....Careerism becomes an end in itself, superseding the policy goals and idealism by which the party was initially founded.This is the irreconcilable nature of the social democratic project....Putting communications strategies ahead of sound public policy, for instance, drains Labor of its core beliefs and purpose. So to, the leadership revolving door, when the highest office holder in the party is so easily tossed aside, destroys traditional notions of loyalty and solidarity.

What the factions have achieved is to have made electoral popularity an all-consuming goal---not for the good of the nation, or even the broader labor movement, but out of self-interest. If Labor is out of power, its factional chiefs cannot access vital networks of patronage and support, the largess they require to to keep their underlings happy and under control. Panic sets in at the thought of Labor losing power, and their sub-faction losing the perks of office.

Latham adds that this is crisis of belief is evident in the current election campaign:

With a high level of policy convergence between the major parties, Labor has switched leaders in a desperate attempt to present something new and interesting to the electorate. With nothing distinctive to say on economic policy, schools funding reform, an independent foreign policy, n border protection, the Republic, community -building strategies, forestry conservation and the introduction of an emissions trading scheme or carbon tax, Gillard, in effect is the campaign. Labor's sole selling point, the only message it has left, is the freshness of its leadership.

He adds that this is no different to the way in which retailers try to entice people to buy their products by re-badging them with new packaging and position on the supermarket shelf.

Stripped of its traditions as a public policy crusader, Labor has become just another brand, another type of soap powder for political consumers---the syndrome Chifley warned against 60 years ago.

What Latham doesn't say is that the policy inherent in the new focus group packaging is conservative. It is more than taking a breather from change, resting for a while as it taking a breath and "step back". It is a substantive shift to right of centre as can be seen in education reform, with asylum seekers arriving by boat; and climate change.This step back is a shift to the Right based on a politics of fear and anxiety. The agenda is being set by the conservatives, and Labor is too timid to resist those advocating travelling down Toxic Lane.

The major exception to fear beating hope is the ALP's national broadband network, which the Coalition opposes because it is a public not a private investment; despite the clear market failure to deliver fast broadband across the nation and that the private sector cannot provide equitable access.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:52 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

July 23, 2010

Canberra watch: Gillard spins her retreat

The ALP is camouflaging Gillard's retreat on climate change with its citizens assembly to forge a national consensus on action on climate change and advisory panel of scientists to help inform its deliberations. I though t that parliament in a liberal democracy was the citizens' assembly. Does Gillard mean a big focus group?

Oh, Gillard also recommits Labor to carbon trading, and pledges that it will be introduced only when "the Australian economy is ready and when the Australian people are ready". That's in never never land.

What we have from the ALP is a poll-driven retreat covered by a public relations exercise designed to head off new versions of the opposition's "great, big, new tax on everything" campaign.The tougher emissions standards that will be implemented to ensure energy generation is "cleaner and greener"---standards that would ban the building of new "dirty" power stations ----do not apply to the 15 coal-fired power stations already on the drawing board in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia.

Labor would also spend $1 billion over 10 years to make it easier to connect renewable energy projects in remote regions to the national electricity grid. That should have been done a decade ago and it is designed to make the ALP look as if it is doing something when it isn't doing anything. The retreat is complete.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:59 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

July 22, 2010

The ABC's 24-hour news channel

The cash strapped ABC, is finally introducing a 24 hour news channel. It starts tonight and shifts to digital TV (HD). It is another example of how broadcasters have had to change and modernise to meet the fast-evolving demands of readers and advertisers.The national broadcaster has been dragging its feet on this, probably because it has lacked the resources and is over stretched.

Better late than never, given that they have the content and the charter. It is another necessary step into the digital age or economy. This is a media economy, in which the way that we use the internet, the mobile phone and iPad makes the half hour 7 pm News followed by the 7.30 Report an anachronism left over from the industrial age. The new digital platforms mean that we can follow a political crisis in real time on free-to-air and have access to more state based news.

Is this going to be more churnalism, regurgitation of press releases from within the State Circle beltway and journalists talking to other journalists endlessly repeated? The news now just bubbles along on the screens in airports, shopping malls, bus stations and squares so that we have chattering walls. The flow of news is now so incessant that an apathy towards the consumption of news is emerging, because the ratio of filler news to real news in the 24 hours news cycle is increasing.

Real news is simply not a ratings leader and the commercial mass media world is one in which journalistic principles are being thrown out the window in a frantic quest for ratings with junk news. In the 24/7 news world the ABC stands for independent free-to-air news, and as a competitor to Sky News and it will provide more fuel to the running feud between the ABC and News Corporation. Will the ABC's service mean a greater recognition that our local politics is increasingly shaped by global forces?

Jason Wilson in The Age has doubts about this move, given that the ABC is already over stretched:

The new station is being propped up with ''savings'' to be made elsewhere - by asking journalists to do more, by poaching personnel from their current posts elsewhere in the organisation and by recycling existing material.The problem is that the broadcaster is already noticeably overstretched. There are fewer foreign bureaus, local radio newsrooms have been pared back, and for years critics have been saying that for all Kerry O'Brien's doggedness, without solid investigative support his interviews on The 7.30 Report have become ritualistic. Four Corners still breaks occasional stories, but spends too many months of the year off the air.

He asks whether we as viewers - and voters - be prepared to put up with a continuing substandard performance across the broad sweep of news and current affairs offerings as the price of these corporate ambitions? The (relatively tiny) audience that wants continuous news can surely avail themselves of a pay-TV subscription or flick on the ABC's free News Radio.

The ABC, as a broadcaster, has little choice given that its coverage of the Rudd execution was flawed. It does need to step into the digital age, and that means a 24/7 television news services. However, Wilson says that we should ask questions about the size of the anticipated audience for this service — and about who will actually use it in a post-broadcast media world.

There’s every indication that other similar initiatives, like BBC 24 in the UK, have struggled to transcend that audience — which is also the group that Sky relies on for its daytime ratings here. A 24-hour ABC news network will likely be part of the smorgasbord of specialised material available to news junkies like me whose appetite for political content is effectively bottomless. It will, in other words, be largely serving a niche market which is already well catered for. Is this the best way to use the ABC’s finite resources?

Wilson wants the ABC to focus more on depth than shallow continuous coverage by, for example, renewing the investigative remit of 4 Corners in order that it might pursue a greater number of important, complex national stories, the ABC would be providing something that simply doesn’t exist elsewhere and which Australian democracy urgently needs. He also reckons that the ABC should develop its online offerings ---go hard on the ABC Local websites, pursue ABC Open, streamline online analysis offerings, and own that space.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:52 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

July 21, 2010

the emerging population debate

If election campaigns are exercises in marketing then the frame of the marketing in which the content messages are then poured to persuade us to vote for a particular party are undercut by a haunting differance or the trace of the past.

Workchoices for the Coalition is an obvious example. It is a spectre--something that is gone, or dead, but that refuses to be altogether absent; something that is not here, not now, but that continues to stain or contaminate or affect or impinge upon the here and now. Workchoices creepily returns at the very heart of its supposed absence like a zombie arising from its grave:

Hauntology means that the present exists only with respect to the past, and that society after the end of history begin to orient itself towards the "ghost" of the past.The ghost in the sustainable population debate that has emerged from the focus groups is the Whitlam Government in the 1970s, with its emphasis on urban infrastructure and liveable cities.

I emphasis emerging from the focus groups because no way of tackling unliveable cities has been put on the table. There is noting about continual urban expansion into good farmland; nothing about better public transport; nothing about rolling back the car etc. All we have is soothing words

No doubt the idea of hauntology goes back 1848 when Marx and Engels stated “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism” in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, by which they meant the looming threat of communism.

Derrida in his Spectres of Marx addressed the talk of the "new world order" and the "the end of history" in the 1970s and the recurrence of the continual attempt to exorcise the "spirit" represented by Marxism. Neoliberalism cannot exorcise the spectre of Marxism, even as the “end of history” results in the definitive triumph of the market. Derrida, in this text, was trying to describe the conditions of history and society in a post-utopian era: In the post-communist period we are haunted by the lost sense of an imagined future.

In Australian public life Gough Whitlam is a haunting figure: revered, mourned, despised. It is a spectre. Steven Shapiro in The Pinocchio Theory says that a:

specter is something that is not present, not real, not there, but that nonetheless enters into (and disrupts the closure and self-presence of) whatever is present, real, and there. The ghost addresses us, interrogates us with its voice and its gaze; it’s a call from Otherness to which we must respond, even though we are unable to adequately respond.

In terms of the sustainable population/liveable cities debate that is emerging we are haunted by the ghost of Whitlam. The ghost of Whitlam signifies how the present is haunted (as it were) by the future, as well as how it is haunted by the past.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:04 AM | Comments (32) | TrackBack

July 20, 2010

has social democracy exhausted itself?

The idea that the state can play a significant role in its citizens’ lives without imperiling their liberties is a core tenet of social democracy that the ALP has defended, and often breached. 'Defend' is a key word here.

The ALP is on the defensive ---preserving the institutions, legislation, services and rights that we have inherited from the 20th-century reform, most notably the welfare state which helped to civilise capitalism. It does by deploying a politics of fear. Defend is a key word because in the context of climate change traditional social democracy looks to have exhausted itself.

In this excerpt in the New York Review of Books from his Ill Fares the Land Tony Judt says:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

He adds that much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

He adds:

We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.

If in public policy social democrats believe in the possibility and virtue of collective action for the collective good, then they have failed badly in terms of addressing climate change. The ALP critiques those who extol the virtues of deregulation, the minimal state, and low taxation, defends the public sector on grounds of collective interest and challenges those in the Liberal Party and business who say that the point of life is to get rich and that governments exist to facilitate this.

But the ALP has beat a tactical retreat on climate change, even though Australia citizens need the resources of the state to adapt to global warming and they need the state to protect them from the consequences of a hot and parched world.

The ALP knows that climate change cannot be addressed by unregulated markets (unfettered capitalism) or individual action, but it has been crippled by fear from the campaign waged by the climate-change deniers who have rejected the science of global warming, embraced junk science and whose key bullet point is that global warming is some sort of giant intellectual fraud hatched by Leftists and Greenies to destroy industrial society.

Has social democracy exhausted itself?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:29 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

July 19, 2010

Burchell's tedious cliches

The cultural war run by The Australian in its partisan fashion over the last decade look as if it has run out of puff. This has been a culture war against Aboriginal self-determination, multiculturalism, postmodernism in education, the non-nuclear family and the environmental movement.

Maybe Mitchell and co think that, as conservatism is alive and well and thriving, they can just leave it to their odd commentator--such as David Burchell--- to pursue. To give credit where credit is due Burchell endeavors to do his best in fulfilling Murdoch's job requirements. The trouble is Burchell's best is not very good.

In his latest op-ed on the election ---Underwhelming war of words could get tedious ---he continues to play off healthy suburban and provincial Australians against the effete (or sickly ) inner city professionals in the classical culture wars style.

In the outer-urban and provincial Australia in which I live, there are hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions, of people whose tenor of life has not altered to any remarkable degree since their parents' days. They treasure their ageing V8 utes and winter dinners of fibrous roast beef served with Yorkshire pudding. They know in their hearts that Australia is God's own country, even if they've never left its shores. They still fondly imagine a trade apprenticeship to be a passport to a solid 50 years of the good life, in a cosy life-niche. And they nurture the comfortable conviction that just about everybody else in the country - aside from a few mildly amusing egg-heads who drive through their towns in Audis, Saabs and Subarus - feels more or less the same.

Oh dear, Burchell's forgotten about a plate of Tim-Tams arranged artfully on a white napkin! Seriously though he would have us believe that the working class in western Sydney (and Townsville?) has not changed since the 1980s, despite Australia's opening to the global economy and the emergence of 24/7 news.

Burchell's outer-urban and provincial Australians live in a time warp in poorly serviced regions without the internet, smart phones, McMansions, making the transition from tradie to self-employed, maxing out their credit cards, watching reality television, or exporting their products overseas. They live in the old local economy and the global economy has no effect on their daily lives including China. Nothing about being effected by a two speed economy (booming minerals depressed manufacturing). Let us call this Burchell's fiction.

Then we have Burchell's characterization of the inner city professionals in the global economy who drive through through the provincial towns in their Audis, Saabs and Subarus:

Contrariwise, in the bustling, cosmopolitan and yet still strangely lonely and characterless neighbourhoods of our inner cities, there are tens of thousands of earnest, highly strung folks whose work-lives are their avocation; whose "politics" stem from the innermost sanctum of their souls; and for whom the private economy is not the engine of prosperity, but a moral abomination on the scale of the slave trade.

The characterisation of former--the outer-urban and provincial Australians---is positive; whilst the characterisation of the latter--the inner city professionals--- is negative. The implication is that they are unAustralian because they do not share the values of old Australia. "UnAustralian" means subversive in the sense of undermining tradition, Western civilization and family values.

It's another of Burchell's fictions. The upwardly mobile are are in safe Labor and Liberal seats in the inner cities. A large part of the political class in the Liberal and Labor parties are inner city professionals; therefore their politics stems from he innermost sanctum of their souls and they see the economy as a moral abomination. The inner city IT professionals working in the global economy would not see their business as a moral abomination. Nor would they be anti-capitalist.

Yet this partisan rhetoric is what Burchell has been writing for The Australian for some time. His intellectual credibility has nosedived as a result. To his credit Burchell, in this op-ed, undercuts the standard duality of the cultural war by acknowledging that the great majority of Australians clearly do not fit either of these opposed pictures very closely:

Rather, they're in that vast, uncharted space between these extremes, a space suffused with vaguely nostalgic images of a kinder, simpler nation from a lost era, as well as with the sundry appurtenances of our imagined future - obscure Asian condiments in the kitchen, snatches of modernist decor, a TV the size of a ping-pong table that transmits the world news 24/7. In many respects, indeed, they hanker most of all to be told that these two aspects of our imagination are compatible - that we can remain tied to kith and kin, and to many of the values of our parents and ancestors, all the while cleaving to the promise of a new world that feeds on personal re-invention, endless self-adaption, and only half-glimpsed opportunities.

This, presumably is middle Australia, which is indifferent to the new values of sustainability in a world of climate change. Burchell wants us to believe that they so tied many of the values of our parents and ancestors that they have turned their back on, or are blind to, the new values of sustainability in the postmodern world of personal re-invention, endless self-adaption, and half-glimpsed opportunities.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:29 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

July 18, 2010

paying for good journalism

Joy Lo Dico at Prospect says that if we value good journalism, then we pay for it. According to Lo Dico that is Murdoch's challenge to internet users and consumers of news. The context is that our local and regional papers are withering away; regional television and radio news is hopelessly inadequate and our national papers are making losses that probably cannot be sustained for much longer. Hence Murdoch's paywall.

I have no problem with the general principle. However, it is not a simple either or: paying for news in opposition to the wider web ethos of “free”--- the idea that the internet should be an Eden where knowledge can be exchanged without a price attached.

My problems emerge with Murdoch's practice. He does not deliver good journalism, or to put it in market terms, a quality product. For instance, what is offered in Australian is partisan journalism of a conservative nature that is directed at undermining a Labor government. Why should I pay for that, even from The Australian, even if it is Australia's only national newspaper?

Lo Dico has a response to this kind of criticism:

So regardless of objections to Murdoch, there is every reason to hope that his scheme works—and you should support his paywalls on your blog, with your tweets and, most importantly, your credit cards.

It is undeniable that the business model for daily printed newspapers is in deep trouble, it is a crisis the media should solve. It is up to the various publishers to decide whether they need to go behind pay wall, or how they decide to make content operations profitable. If a newspaper decides to have a paywall, then the visits to the websites will drop off----by two thirds for The Times; and it may well be the case that we have the emergence of a journalism that may not require giant media corporation involvement.

As a consumer I buy what I consider to meet my taste, desires and needs. I have no obligation as a consumer in the information market to support Murdoch. I’ve got no problems with Murdoch creating a pay wall. It may well work for him, and it may keep his business operations in place and profitable My criticism with Murdoch is the way he thinks that the internet work: ie ., his belief that all newspapers can act in unison to keep their stories away and force users to pay, which just isn’t feasible and ignores the competitive nature of the news market.

This leads News Ltd to attack the ABC (and the BBC) because they are competitors who provide the news free. Mathew Lynn at the Sydney Morning Herald says:

It's too late to start charging for newspapers online. The content isn't good enough, and newspapers themselves are a product of technologies that simply don't work in a digital economy. All Murdoch is going to achieve with this move is to kill off one of the most famous media brands in the world.

That's Murdoch's problem. My problem is that his product is not worth the price he is asking----his newspapers have placed too little emphasis on substance, and too much on entertaining and exciting their readers. In contrast, As Tony Moore points out:

The ABC is grappling with how to transform itself from a paternalistic public broadcaster catering to a loyal if passive audience to a multi-channel narrow-caster, engaging diverse and conditional audiences that have an expectation that they will participate, or at least be consulted, in content creation.

They do have a sense of what the digital future might be.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:56 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

July 17, 2010

federal election called

As expected Julia Gillard has called the "game on" election-- for 21 August. For those interested here is a list of policy issues that are in play. Both major parties are light on policy say The Greens. I agree. Both are in retreat because of panic about reform.

Will Abbott make it to the centre of the electorate? Will Labor be able to hang on to its slender lead? Queensland is important as it contains a fifth of the country’s seats, it is volatile and has more than its share of marginal electorates.

George Megalogenis has an interesting analysis of the key regions on his blog:

Queensland matters above all in 2010 because this is where Labor has the most seats in danger: 10, from Brisbane, in the city centre, to the Cairns-based seat of Leichhardt. NSW is the next most interesting state, with another eight Labor marginals, plus two wild-cards.The breakdown of these 20 seats tells the basic story of the campaign.

He says that eight are in the sandbelt, down the east coast of Queensland and NSW; and eight are in the mortgage belts of Brisbane and Sydney. has an interesting analysis of the key regions on his blog:

Queensland matters above all in 2010 because this is where Labor has the most seats in danger: 10, from Brisbane, in the city centre, to the Cairns-based seat of Leichhardt. NSW is the next most interesting state, with another eight Labor marginals, plus two wild-cards.The breakdown of these 20 seats tells the basic story of the campaign.

He says that eight are in the sandbelt, down the east coast of Queensland and NSW; and eight are in the mortgage belts of Brisbane and Sydney.

Megalogenis adds that:

The sandbelt is where Labor has the least protection from dual-income families because they rub up against the Coalition’s grey voter, aged 50-plus.The older the seat, the more it looks like Abbott territory. The younger the seat, the more it lines up for Gillard.

He says that Labor had a larger following of women than men even before Gillard toppled Rudd. This election will test whether Labor, the party of the blue collar male, can turn gender on its head by relying on mum, not dad, for their majority.

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July 16, 2010

Canberra watch: Gillard's retreat

Julia Gillard's speech to the National Press Club was designed to show Gillard's record as a reformer in education and industrial relations and to point to the future reforms. I found it disappointing in understanding what "moving forward" slogan stands for policy wise. Moving forward to where?

Most of the Canberra Press Gallery commentary is about the Laurie Oaks bomb (based on a leak from Rudd) that reminds us of the nature of Australian politics.

In her speech Gillard says that the upcoming campaign will have strong elements of ‘clean' and ‘green' but above all else it will be very lean. So how will moving forward to clean and green be delivered, given that Gillard says that the context of heightened global uncertainty caused by the global financial crisis time for prudent and careful economic management. She adds:

In the 1980s and 1990s, Labor Governments led economic reform by recognising that in changing global conditions, only an open, market-driven economy could prosper. That meant floating the dollar, reducing tariffs, ensuring wage restraint and implementing sweeping competition policy reforms. But as conditions change again, we need more than economic stability to ensure future prosperity. We need active reforms to improve Australia's ability to compete, to make sure that all our assets are utilised productively, and to make the most of our value-adding capacity.

She adds that the sectors which may need renewal and reform are often those that were relatively untouched by the Hawke-Keating reforms - sectors like health and education that meet essential public needs, delivered largely within the domestic economy. There was no mention of energy at all.

The strategy is this:

As far as I am concerned, there is no inherent superiority in a public sector or a private sector provider – certainly not on ideological grounds. The challenge is not whether to combine public and private resources in these essential sectors, but how best to do it.Simply applying the extreme free-market medicine of liberalisation and privatisation without thought or care is not a solution. Maintaining an instinctive hostility towards the public sector and all it provides is equally wrong...the microeconomic challenges of the future are not a simplistic choice between the market and the state, but the more sophisticated challenges of market design so that we bring public and private resources together to deliver better services and increased productivity.

Despite the mention of strong elements of lean and green nothing was said about addressing climate change. The goal of public policy is increased prosperity and fairness.There was one mention of a sustainable economy being a goal:

Economic reform should benefit families, boost national prosperity, enable more Australians to enjoy the dignity of work and deliver a more competitive and sustainable economy. Over time, there should be a virtuous cycle between investment in human capital and resilient communities and economic growth.

The emphasis in the speech was on prosperity---advancing an agenda that moves Australia forward to a more productive, modern Australian economy; one whose dividend to Australians is better quality services, better quality jobs, more competitive firms, a better quality of life and greater financial security for the future. This is old Labor. It has little interest in making the shift to a low carbon economy. It is conservative Labor --- exemplified by Gillard's educational reforms which were about testing students not fostering critical thinking.

Labor has retreated from using the market as a mechanism to address greenhouse gas emissions. Gillard says that what matters is:

methodically working to create the conditions in which markets serve the public interest through vigorous competition, transparent information, the freedom to make choices and a responsiveness to the needs of service users.

Using markets to serve the public interest has been rejected in terms of climate change and making the polluters pay for their greenhouse emissions.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:02 AM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

July 15, 2010

Jonathan Holmes on media bias

Jonathan Holmes writes perceptively about current journalism--as illustrated by his he said she said journalism article. In his latest Balance the scales column at The Drum he says that ABC journalists will:

be trying to implement the managing director's recent exhortation to his staff: It is a legitimate role firmly and impartially to scrutinise the records and the promises of those who want elective office at the time they are directly seeking the electors' nod. That's more easily said than done...An ABC journalist who, in a Federal Election campaign, decides to scrutinise the claims that politicians make, and especially a journalist who reports that one side is making factually justifiable statements, and the other is not, is laying themselves wide open. For however carefully researched, and objectively presented, stories like that will be accused of being 'unbalanced'; and a large number of viewers or listeners or readers, as well, of course, as the opposing party, will undoubtedly blame the supposed political bias of the individual journalist, or the program, or the ABC as a whole.

No doubt that is an accurate description of the political pressure and constraints under which ABC journalists operate today. So what to do about it? What is the best option?

Hiolmes says:

The best they can do is to strive to set their prejudices aside. I still believe that's a better solution than the alternative that has becoming fashionable in some quarters: that the whole charade of 'impartiality' should be abandoned in favour of frankly partisan journalism. That's fine for the blogosphere, not for the ABC.

Partisan journalism is fine for the blogosphere. Really? Isn't the Murdoch press--both tabloid and broadsheet--- the classic example of partisan journalism in Australia? They are the gold standard for says:

discounting the Australian Financial Review - The Australian is the only truly national newspaper we have. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are fixated on competing for the same parochial turf as their tabloid rivals, so there's a huge demand for proper, discursive discussion of national affairs. Instead we have coverage which often can't be read on face value. Discerning readers need to pick their way through a host of agendas and perceived or real prejudice to work out what they find credible.

If the ABC is unable to firmly and impartially to scrutinise the records and the promises of those who want elective office at the time they are directly seeking the electors' nod because of political constraints, then who is to do it? Who performs the role of the watchdog for democracy in the fourth estate in Australia?

Isn't this the function in the online public sphere increasingly being formed by Crikey and parts of the political blogosphere --more frequently, than say the Fairfax Press whose business model is slowly collapsing? In the mainstream press, which offers us the option of partisan journalism and the junk journalism that has embraced recycling media releases and infotainment, there are a few scrutinising journalists.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:48 PM | TrackBack

Big Pharma + academic medicine

Marcia Angellm, the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, has an article in the Boston Review on BIg Pharma and academic medicine. It is part of a series of articles or a forum run by the Boston Review on the impact of the pharmaceutical industry on medical training and science, and the responsibilities of physicians.

Angellm's argument is that financial conflicts of interest are a serious impediment to good medical research, education, and clinical practice. She says:

Over the past two or three decades....academia and industry have become deeply intertwined. Moreover, these links, though quite recent, are now largely accepted as inherent in medical research. So what’s wrong with that? Isn’t this just the sort of collaboration that leads to the development of important new medical treatments?

She answers thus:

Increasingly, industry is setting the research agenda in academic centers, and that agenda has more to do with industry’s mission than with the mission of the academy. Researchers and their institutions are focusing too much on targeted, applied research, mainly drug development, and not enough on non-targeted, basic research into the causes, mechanisms, and prevention of disease.

In addition to distorting the research agenda, there is overwhelming evidence that drug-company influence biases the research itself, primarily suppression of negative results.

She adds that one consequence is that doctors and their patients come to believe that for every ailment and discontent there is a drug, even when changes in lifestyle would be more effective. Big Pharma hires physicians to sell diseases.

No doubt ageing will be sold as a disease/illness state and we will be bombarded by anti-ageing messages with supplements and hormone treatments by anti-ageing medicine that is fast becoming big business. Anti-ageing medicine is dismissed as quackery by orthodox medicine--eg., on the use of growth hormone therapies in anti-aging medicine--- but orthodox medicine does turn a blind eye to its own corruption by Big Pharma, or the way that orthodox medicine is a business.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:07 AM | TrackBack

July 14, 2010

conservatism in the Christian Church

I've always been puzzled by the way that the Catholic and Anglican Church sets its face against modernity even though, as an institution, it is a part of the process of modernity. One could even talk in terms of Catholicism's "cold war with modernity" --a Catholic anti-modernism.

By modernity I mean the objective transformation of the social fabric unleashed by the advent of the capitalist world market which tears down feudal and ancestral limitations on a global scale, and psychologically the enlargement of life chances through the gradual freeing from fixed status hierarchies. Chronologically, this covers the period from the mid nineteenth century accelerating to the present and it gives rise to T a social order in which religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural life-form.

Martin Rowson

Most welcome this process as it means greater individual freedom. Not so the Christian Church. I should say that the Christian Church (Catholic and Anglican) tears itself into halves over the way that the movement of history in modernity challenges its fixed status hierarchies over secularism, freedom and the declining influence of Christianity in the West.

Nowhere is this resistance more evident in the way that it continues to cover up the sexual abuse of children by its priests. This is part of the wider sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

I realize that the power of the Church has been eroded by a growing sense of individual worth. Neither Protestantism nor Catholicism fare well when it comes to championing equality and human rights - especially for women and non-whites. The churches' record on supporting women's political enfranchisement is dismal. They sanctified a model that set men free to be active wage-earning heads of households while confining women to the unpaid labours of love, charity and domestic service.

It gives rise to the powerful and effective criticism of Christianity in the 20th century that it has been too closely identified with the rich and powerful, and too ready to legitimate the status quo. Christianity retains its commitment to a male God and priesthood, and the late 20th century has seen a renewed emphasis on male headship and female domestic submission, particularly in conservative Protestantism, along with a conservatism about sex and gender roles and campaigns against homosexuality.

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July 13, 2010

NBN: new service possibilities

It is to the credit of the ALP that, despite its stubbornness to a mandatory internet filter, it is still resolutely committed to building the National Broadband Network (NBN), one of Australia's biggest infrastructure projects.

The stated aim is to provide universal broadband access to all Australians, and deliver broadband services over optical fibre to 90% of all premises at a high-speed data rate of 100 Mb/s.The other 10% will be provided by wireless and satellite. It is a mark against the Coalition's negative strategy that they lack the vision to see that this kind of nation building infrastructure project will enable Australia to become an information/knowledge society. The Coalition does appear to be backward looking on the idea of a broadband enabled society.

The twenty-first century’s official image of the internet, like the nineteenth century’s image of the city, is always a picture of light and shadows. The case in favour of spending money on broadband and the good things must then be coupled with the appearance of decisive action dealing with the nasty things. What gets lost, and needs to be argued for is a digital understanding of fair use.

In his NBN 101: The Internet or applications? article on the national broadband network at Computer World James Hutchinson says that the University of Melbourne's Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES) provides numerous case studies and hypothetical examples of the possibilities afforded by the national broadband network in both private and public contexts, with the following conclusion:

The societal impact of the NBN will be profound. The ability to rapidly transfer information to any location via the NBN will transform health care in rural and remote areas. It will open up enormous new opportunities in distance education, it will provide new opportunities for business, entertainment, water resource management, energy conservation, and it will provide huge opportunities in science and technology. As a result, Australia will be able to develop new technologies, applications and services that will be in high demand as other nations follow Australia's lead.

The NBN enables a myriad of possibilities open up in the world wide web (the websites, hyperlinks and user interface) such as The Digital Panopticon: Convict Founders & Survivors of Tasmania that will enable us to rewrite our history.

As the transformation from industrial to informational capitalism continues other national archives will eventually go online, and become available for us to access from our computers in our studies and workplaces.

As far as I can make out the Coalition's justification for its opposition to the NBN, and its policy if it wins the next election and rolls back the work Labor has done on the NBN, is the neo-liberal one that there has been no business case, and that the infrastructure development is not profitable as a commercial venture. The Coalition's assumption is that it should be.So we have big government and little accountability.

The problem with this argument is that the NBC Co, the company charged with building the National Broadband Network (NBN), is not running a business trying to maximize the bottom line. It is building a national infrastructure that will provide a wholesale service for all ISP's to off us a wide variety of applications and services.

The national focus is still on building the network and has yet to shift to outlining the public good benefits that the NBN should deliver--eg., in e-health, online education and learning, improving our environmental management, and Australian online publics (distinct from the mainstream media) and democracy. Unfortunately, few in the government or the opposition are making arguments about how Australian society will be changed by high speed broadband. Ir will enable us to step beyond the world of Hollywood.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:38 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 12, 2010

Australia hesitates

The energy challenge facing Australia and the rest of the world is ultimately one of environmental, geopolitical, and resource sustainability. Copenhagen failed, even though the risks of climate change become more visible, increasing numbers of people have come to recognize that the longer we hesitate, the more expensive the problem becomes.

Dealing with climate change is dismissed by those opposed to shifting from a fossil fuel economy to a low carbon one as anti-growth, when it is the only viable growth strategy. Australia hesitates to make the shift. So does the Gillard Government, as it keeps lurching to the right in order to keep itself competitive with the Liberals, making mere gestures to the Left in the process.

The political reality here is that the ALP is losing its social base as its policy agenda fades to blue grey, and the policy differences between Liberal and Labor become minimal under pressure from its NSW factional bosses. Sustainability is one of the casualties.

Given that the market fails to deal appropriately with environmental issues and that growth for growth's sake is no longer an option what is missing is a focus on the interface between ecology and economics instead of the neo-liberal over-focus on markets. There needs to be a recognition of the need for the economy to face the reality of biophysical limits--the limits to resource use, limits to input substitutability, and the uniqueness of energy as a productive input.

The ALP does not have the courage to take a critical look at the notion of growth. They are unable to both stimulate recovery in the wake of the global financial crisis and and at the same time improve the sustainability of the economy. They cannot, or are unwilling, to connect policies that enhance social and economic well‐being to environmental sustainability.

Germany is one country that plans to rid itself of both coal and nuclear energy source-dependence with some smart thinking about integrating renewable energy to ensure base load power:

It is smart thinking as it is connecting the dots and then runnign a pilot project to see whether renewables can deliver baseload power:

Connecting the dots is something the Gillard Government is unwilling to do. They are wrapped up in their dream about clean coal. The Coalition, in contrast, reckons that emissions free base load power can only delivered by nuclear power. Business want to be paid for energy efficiency and says no to a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme.

This unwillingness to cross the dots is all the more remarkable in that CSIRO's UltraBattery technology has the capability of overcoming the issue of intermittent power generation associated with wind and solar, which remains a fundamental road block for the widespread uptake of renewable energy resources such as these. The UltraBattery can be integrated into wind power systems to smooth intermittency and potentially 'time-shift' energy production to better match demand.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:18 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

July 11, 2010

Soros on the European economy

As Daniel Gros points out at Project Syndicate Europe continues to constitute the epicenter of Act II of the global financial crisis, which has now mutated into a sovereign-debt crisis within the eurozone. The distressed economies of Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, have been and are, in the sights of international financial markets.

The problems that underlie the crisis (the precarious state of Greek public finances and that of the Spanish real estate sector) have not been solved. Secondly, EU’s banking system is weakly capitalized that it cannot take any losses, while also being so interconnected that problems in one country quickly put the entire system at risk.

George Soros, in The Crisis & the Euro at The New York Review of Books, says that getting the European economy on a new, better course after the global financial crisis is running into difficulties:

The situation is eerily reminiscent of the 1930s. Doubts about sovereign credit are forcing reductions in budget deficits at a time when the banking system and the economy may not be strong enough to do without fiscal and monetary stimulus. Keynes taught us that budget deficits are essential for countercyclical policies in times of deflation, yet governments everywhere feel compelled to reduce them under pressure from the financial markets. Coming at a time when the Chinese authorities have also put on the brakes, this is liable to push the global economy into a slowdown or possibly a double dip. Europe, which weathered the first phase of the financial crisis relatively well, is now in the forefront of causing the downward pressure because of the problems connected with the common currency.

The fiscal cuts in Germany mean deeper fiscal cuts in Greece and Spain:-- a baffling policy choice at a time when Germany should be using its room for fiscal maneuver and its economic clout to create and enhance the demand that peripheral Europe needs in order to grow out of its misery.

Soros adds that:

Even more troubling is the fact that Germany is not only insisting on strict fiscal discipline for weaker countries but is also reducing its own fiscal deficit. When all countries are reducing deficits at a time of high unemployment they set in motion a downward deflationary spiral. Reductions in employment, tax receipts, and exports reinforce each other, ensuring that the targets will not be met and further reductions will be required. And even if budgetary targets were met, it is difficult to see how the weaker countries could regain their competitiveness and start growing again because, in the absence of exchange rate depreciation, the adjustment process would require reductions in wages and prices, producing deflation.

He adds that as long as there is no growth, the relative weight of the debt will continue to grow not only for the national debt but also for the commercial loans held by banks. This will make the banks even more reluctant to lend, compounding the downward pressures.

Adding to this is the possibility that global demand growth will not be sufficiently strong to support a self-sustained recovery in the eurozone. The future may be bleak for those western countries that have enjoyed centuries of economic and political domination. Their relative power is in decline and their relative economic position continues to deteriorate.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:47 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 10, 2010

work, laptops + blackberries

The inner city professional is a fixture of the political landscape, especially for those right wing conservatives and populists --eg., those in The Australian--- who dismiss this new class as cosmopolitan elitists disconnected from the common sense and working lives of the ordinary battling Australians who are the salt of the earth.

If we step behind this stereotypical thinking of the us versus them" cultural conflicts of the cultural wars, which divide up the population into warring tribes that then demonize each other, then what do we find?

One answer is this review of Dalton Conley's "Elsewhere, USA. This text refers to a class of people in fast capitalism who live their lives buffeted by the many streams of information coming to them via their BlackBerries (iPhones?) and laptops, where the old boundaries of ‘public’ and ‘private’ are shattered, and where work and leisure combined, and the e new ‘portable office’ is the norm. This is the lifestyle of white collar professionals employed in the knowledge and information economy at the beginning of the 21st century.

This is a completely different world to that of breadwinner husbands and breadmaker wives—as depicted in the television series Mad Men, which successfully dispels the conservative myth of the 1950s suburban picket fence as a golden age. It is one where all the spheres – home, work, social life – have collapsed into each other.

Today workplaces with in-house kitchens, gymnasiums and an assortment of personal services are standard fare in the corporate world (especially Google). This world is a whirlpool of constantly intersecting activities in which workers multi-task their way through every minute of the day, feeling ever pressed for time and on the move that is premised on the increased labor force participation of women. That increased participation is an enormous cultural shift.

Life today for this class is to be overscheduled, behind on work, and managing multiple data streams. Conley argues that by being multiple places at once—online, on the phone, where we physically are, on the worry list in our heads—toggling back and forth, we get no time to be “alone” and get to know ourselves. With the erosion of privacy comes the erosion of the private self.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:03 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

July 9, 2010

Canberra watch: political housekeeping

I've noticed that Julie Gillard, our new fang dangle PM, has been doing a bit of policy housekeeping in Canberra this last week or so --cleaning up the "dirty" issues that have been hurting federal Labor in the electorate, such as the mining tax and asylum seekers. The leaks say that the global warming issue will be cleaned up too--pushed under the carpet?

Get these slow burns off the agenda and the ALP sails home to a famous victory. Clever politics says the Canberra Press Gallery. The ALP was justified in removing a badly performing Rudd.

The trajectory of this kind of housekeeping is a marked shift to the Right: appease the multinational miners on the resources tax; appease the angry right wing populists on asylum seekers; and doing a bit of green wash on climate change (its real folks) to keep the ALP looking credible--- ie., not looking as if its been well and truely captured by the coal industry.

Clever tactics says the Canberra Gallery. This pushes the Coalition further to the right (so that Abbott looks extreme) and allows the ALP to stand firmly in the middle ground. This political strategy will ensure that the Gillard Government is elected.

That middle ground looks to be well inside the right of centre territory to me. The clearest indication of that is the reaffirmation that the mandatory internet filter to protect families will remain. What is rejected is education, policing of illegal material and targeted research on the internet and young people.This indicates politics not policy, a politics designed for those Christian populists who feel besieged by rapid change, and who talk about the threats to moral purity and the need to protect the family from “worldly dangers.”

They have, as Gillard put it, a set of concerns about the dark side of the new technology. The images of child abuse, child pornography are everywhere on the internet. This is not clever politics---it indicates that social conservatism is the heart of the ALP. That is what "western Sydney " as Labor heartland means.

For the Canberra Press Gallery, many of whom see themselves and each other as "players" in the "game" we now call politics, what matters is not the policy substance; rather it is the 24-hour contest between our political leaders to win the media on the day. John Hewson describes the politics this way in his Fourth Estate corrupting the political system at the ABC's The Drum:

This is a game where "winning" is everything, and where, increasingly, policy substance, values, ideas and ideologies don't matter. Where personalities, and "colour" and "movement" dominate, and where ability to "sell" or "spin", rather than merit or substance, are more valued and determinate.

What we have with this 24-hour politics of glitz and spin Hewson adds, are two candidates, devoid of real policy substance, claiming to "lead" us on significant moral issues, such as asylum seekers and climate change.

This leadership stuff is spin. We can decode that easily during an election. Only, now we know that once Gillard Labor regains power, they will not pick up the reform baton in in any substantive way, thanks to the heavy hand of the NSW Right. Federal Labor will spend most of its energy putting the brakes on the reform's required to adapt Australia to a rapidly changing world and improve the well being of the Australian population.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:09 AM | Comments (27) | TrackBack

July 8, 2010

Afghanistan: we are fighting Al Qaeda

If you recall the central reason why the US has invaded Afghanistan is to knock out Al Qaeda. Recall that the then Taliban regime provided a safe haven for Al Qaeda, and were Afghanistan to allow Al Qaeda to come back into Afghanistan, that clearly gives Al Qaeda a freedom of movement. Remember Bali?, says a government minister. So we have the justification for the never ending War on Terror against Islam.

In this interview Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Leiter says that:

in Afghanistan, you have a certain number, a relatively small number, 50 to 100. I think we have in Pakistan a larger number. [In Pakistan there are] Upwards—more than 300, I would say. And I think the key has been not going after every foot soldier—although that can be very important. … but more critically … trying to decimate Al Qaeda’s leadership ranks. I think we’ve had a lot of success there.

Let's stop there and think about what is being said. 9 years of war, all those deaths, the bombing of the Afghan countryside and billions of dollars to fight under 500 people?

500 people folks and that's from the horses mouth. No wonder John Faulkner tossed it in as Minister of Defence and returned to the back bench. The gap between the problem and the military response is so great that not even a man as loyal to the Labor Party as Faulkner could stomach the spin required to cover the yawning gap.

Leiter concedes the bleeding obvious that is denied by the Australian Governments from Howard onwards: that the military actions in Afghanistan have the opposite effect of what is supposedly intended: namely, these actions are what motivate so much of the recent Terrorism) that is cited to justify those policies:

Well I certainly will not try to argue that some of our actions have not led to some people being radicalized. I think that’s a given … That doesn’t mean you don’t do it. That means you craft a fuller strategy to explain why you’re doing that and try to minimize the likelihood that individuals are going to be radicalized.

How do you minimize that likelihood? Have a hit list of people to assassinate--the U.S. government through the Department of Defense goes out and attempts to target and kill people, a lot of people, who haven’t been indicted. Or a counter-insurgency strategy that is failing.

My guess is that a summer of discontent and uncertainty over the Afghanistan war will unfold in America because the war in Afghanistan not going so well and the rationale behind the war today become increasingly unclear. Why is the USA fighting in Afghanistan? Or Australia for that matter?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:33 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

July 7, 2010

on "pearls of wisdom"

Paul Kelly is considered the doyen of the Canberra Press Gallery. He has the track record to justify speaking to us from his Olympian heights about the shape of Australia, its history, problems and future. Kelly writes his op-eds and we all read them for the pearls of wisdom and nuggets of insight. He offers PM's advice about how best to govern the country, and they listen attentively as he one of News Ltd's quality journalists that we should be willing to pay big bucks to read.

Or so Murdoch would like us to believe. Should we? Well, Kelly has just written his usual penetrating article on the population issue that offers free advice to the PM. The best way to understand the issues is in terms of whether one should plan to throttle back economic growth in the cause of environmental restraint and adds:

The policy problem is obvious: the need for better integration between the immigration program and social, transport, environmental and infrastructure provision, much of which involves state governments. This is where Australia must lift its planning and governance.

Les ignore the "throttle back economic growth" bit and focus on the integration bit. What is the best way to approach that? The Gillard Government says it is in terms of sustainability.

So what policy advice does Kelly offer in terms of sustainable and integration? Clarity is need he decrees. The new Sustainable Population Minister Tony Burke, in his June 28 Lateline interview,

raised the false bogy of "some sort of unlimited, unconstrained" growth, and said Gillard gave a high priority to "carrying capacity" but wanted a skilled migration program to meet the needs of business. People were entitled to be confused...In the past, Gillard has flirted with the notion of "carrying capacity". In her speech yesterday, she rejected an immigration policy driven by "an arbitrary single number". Presumably, this is Gillard as a new PM rejecting any population cap based on the loopy "carrying capacity" concept. If this slogan was given credence, Australia's immigration future would be thrown wide open and Labor would face a new round of political grief.The idea that Australia could not "carry" 36 million people is absurd. Yet nobody doubts the ability of environmentalists to construct principles that make this seem untenable.

So the ecological concept of "carrying capacity" is loopy because it means that Australia could not "carry" 36 million people, which is evidently absurd. Presumably, these comments are what News Ltd calls pearls of wisdom and nuggets of insight into the nature of things.

Let's explore Kelly's integration of the immigration program and social, transport, environmental and infrastructure provision from the sustainable and carrying capacity perspective. Take Adelaide. Its growth --economic and population---is limited by the shortage of water. We all know that. Why is there a limit on water? Because too much water was taken out of the River Murray by irrigators so that the river no longer flows as a river. Secondly, Adelaide is going to get less water and become much hotter because of global warming that is caused the coal fired power stations that fuel economic growth. That 's what environmental degradation means in Adelaide.

So the idea of carrying capacity is far from loopy for someone living in Adelaide. Kelly doesn't even begin to engage with the idea of the number of individuals who can be supported in a given area within natural resource limits, and without degrading the natural social, cultural and economic environment for present and future generations.

Nor does Kelly explore the links between economic growth, carrying capacity, and the environment. He doesn't even seem to be aware that a flaw with neoclassical economics is that it promotes economic growth with little regard to the environmental consequences. He assumes that economic growth is good for the environment, and isn't aware that the economic solution to environmental degradation is to compel firms to pay for the environmental and social costs of their actions.

Now Murdoch reckons we are willing to pay to read Kelly's junk, such as this kind of superfical reporting and tired polemics? More fool Murdoch. He doesn't even know the significance of 'googling.'

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:32 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

July 6, 2010

here we go again

So we are back to the Pacific Solution to asylum seekers with the Gillard Government, only it is not a Pacific Solution ---it is a regional processing centre in East Timor. From where I stand the effect is the same-- to send asylum claimants to a handy and none-too-appealing offshore destination to await processing.

The appeal to the xenophobic voters in marginal seats in western Sydney and elsewhere, who are demanding a hard line on those asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat, is the same as Howard's. Apparently the public or political debate on asylum seekers is somehow being constrained by political correctness that is equated with self-censorship. Isn't that what Howard used to say?

Gary Sauer-Thompson, watching for the boat people, Victor Harbor, 2010

Victor Harbor is definitely John Howard's One Nation conservative territory. It's Anglo-Saxon, white and very Christian in a fundamentalist sense--in the sense that the evangelical Christians believe that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs, talk a lot about Intelligent Design, are anti-science and want their creationism taught in classrooms. They are frightened by economic insecurity, threats to moral purity and the gradual disappearance of a national white Christian culture. They want to restoring the nation to some moment when the country was white and safe and to protect the family from “worldly dangers.”

The poodles and I have been doing our bit each morning for the nation since we've been down at Victor Harbor this week.We are out before dawn walking along the cliff tops checking for the boats that the press say are coming. I have to report that we ain't seen no boat people. We've seen the fishing men in their boats, but no patrol boats protecting us from the nasty people whom the Murdoch Press constantly tell us are out to destroy all that we hold dear and true. But we do hear the many dog whistles and they are loud and clear in the still morning air. There are so many, its kinda confusing.

Labor is definitely rattled, even though it is going to take a long time (20 years) to fill the MCG with asylum seekers at present rates of arrival. They are less than 1.5 per cent of new migrants. That's not the point though is it. It's the spectre of the White Australia policy that haunts us.

The asylum seekers arriving by boat are the Other. They threaten us because they are not like us. They--the Hazaras---are from Afghanistan while the others--- the Tamil Tigers---are from Sri Lanka. They don't adjust into the Australian way of life. We've lost control of our borders. We need to close the borders by whatever means are necessary. This Islamophobic narrative in western Sydney says that Australia needs to close the borders to the Islam invasion and to defend the Judao-Christian heritage that is the sturdy foundation of our constitution.

The bottom line of the two ''solutions'' is the same: install a deterrent by taking all boat arrivals to another country. The irony is that the return to Fortress Australia is coming from a Labor party that once condemned John Howard's Pacific solution.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:26 AM | Comments (28) | TrackBack

July 5, 2010

time for the party to stop

I'm on holidays at Victor Harbor and doing some photography. So posting will be light for this week.

Australia appears to be insulated from what is happening in Europe: call for cutbacks in public spending, savage budget cuts in response to the big budget deficits run up by government to prevent a recession (or is it a depression?) and saving the big banks from the global financial crisis they caused.

We have the new austerity voices in Australia--eg., the Coalition and News Ltd--but the mining boom is cushioning us, and keeping the neo-liberal slashers and burners at bay. If Europe is shrinking its economy, then Australia has the option of growing its way out of the budget deficit problem.

Martin Rowson

The UK, for instance, is facing future cuts to public spending up to 40% according to the Treasury.

Or is that a scare campaign designed to create a panic about the deficit so as to soften up the voters to a harsh "spending review"?

In Europe--and probably in the US--- it would appear that the politicians have decided that the financial sector can be rescued only by cutting back social spending on social security, health care and education, bolstered by more privatization and sell-offs. Apparently, they, as good utilitarians, reckon this is worth the price.

Bryan Gould points out that Nick Clegg seems to have gone along with the basic strategy of cutting the deficit, come what may, without firing a shot. He asks some good questions:

How else to explain the extraordinary spectacle of a supposedly left-of-centre party and its leader tamely endorsing a budget strategy that is positively perverse and that threatens a re-run of the global recession that similar neoliberal doctrine produced less than two years ago? How is it that a financial crisis that failed to become a full-scale depression only because governments and therefore the taxpayers bailed out the failed financial institutions has become the launching-pad for savage cuts in public spending and a punitive scaling-back in the role of government?

Why should anyone believe that throwing people out of work, and then cutting the support available to the unemployed, will somehow set the economy back on its feet? Why should anyone believe that the government's finances – including an indebtedness massively increased by the billions spent on the bailouts – can be restored by ensuring that tax revenues are depleted because economic activity is flattened?

He adds that those with a knowledge of economic history will know that George Osborne is all too faithfully following in the footsteps of those like Herbert Hoover who followed similar policies in 1932 and plunged us all into depression.

It’s capitalism that presents itself as having dissolved all illusions and exposed the underlying reality of things. Late capitalism is all about ceaseless reinvention, nothing is solid, everything is mutable. And yet late capitalism is alsosabout recapitulation, homogeneity, minimally different commodities. Capitalism is a bizarre mix of the ultra-modern and the archaic.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:15 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 4, 2010

Greenspan on climate change

Alan Greenspan in devoting two pages in the 531 pages of his memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, to the climate issue, illustrates the neoliberal minimization of the issue. What needs to be defended is the free-market ideology that rejects strong regulation of the economy.

His first tactic is minimization of the issue. He has “little doubt” that climate change is real and human induced (p. 454). But he offers merely one proposal to address the issue: an increase in the gasoline tax to protect America’s energy “security”.

There is no commitment about the need for state investments and subsidies to recast the infrastructure of consumption in the zones of transportation, housing, and power production; no urgency to cooperate with other states and international organizations to protect the earth’s forest and ocean systems, though both are key absorbers of carbon dioxide. No exploration of how changes on these fronts could also empower constituencies who seek to foster a positive and timely austerity of material desire.

Hence, his second tactic is evasion, because a robust engagement would throw his key assumptions about market control of investment, consumption, and work into disarray, and he would have to think more carefully about the need for new relays between collective patterns of consumption and state policies. What is his explicit reason for such a tactic? He says that the worst climate effects are scheduled to occur after the period he has “selected” for analysis, from today to 2030! Hence, the third tactic: deferral.

So we have neoliberal minimization coupled to corporate self-interest that functions to prevent action on climate change through a pricing of carbon. Laissez faire capitalism is a refuge for those who maintain that human can and should master and exploit nature.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:21 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 3, 2010

Criticism of US counterinsurgency

In Against counterinsurgency in Afghanistan in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Hugh Gusterton says that the US's counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is failing because it is an inherently flawed project. He says:

historically, counterinsurgency campaigns have almost always failed. This is especially so when the counterinsurgents are foreign troops fighting on the insurgents' territory. The U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Vietnam failed. The Soviet counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan failed (as did the British one about a century earlier). The British counterinsurgency campaigns in Northern Ireland and Kenya failed. The white Rhodesians' counterinsurgency campaign against black guerrillas failed. And the French counterinsurgency campaign in Algeria failed--although that has not stopped the U.S. military from building their current doctrine around the theories of David Galula, one of the leaders of that failed campaign. A rare example of success is the recent Sri Lankan campaign against the Tamil Tigers, but success was achieved by a government on its own territory following a military strategy of exterminist ferocity. Surely the U.S. does not want to go down that path, does it?

He adds that In what was until recently called the "Global War on Terror," counterinsurgency plays the sort of framing and orienting role that containment and deterrence played in the Cold War. The U.S. military is already thinking about future counterinsurgency campaigns in Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines.

Afghanistan is at the beginning, not the end, of the counterinsurgency road on the U.S. military horizon. His argument is that counterinsurgency has failed in Afghanistan:

not because of flaws in its execution but because, as I have argued before, counterinsurgency campaigns almost inevitably contain within themselves the seeds of their own failure. Counterinsurgency forces stand little chance of defeating the insurgents without large numbers of troops, but the presence of foreign troops inevitably excites nationalist hostility from the local population; the more foreign troops there are, the more hostility there will be. Also, the more troops there are, the more military casualties there will be, and this undermines support for counterinsurgency at home--as we are now seeing in the UK and the U.S

He adds that counterinsurgency campaigns also benefit from being allied to a strong and popular local government. Almost by definition, a leader who relies on external occupying troops for his power will be seen as a foreign puppet and will be compromised in the eyes of his people.

The inference? The US should get out.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:22 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

July 2, 2010

Karl Rove + the Big Miners

David Bromwich in his review in the New York Review of Books of Karl Rove's Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight quotes Rove and then comments:

“To be successful,” he [Rove] explains, “an attack must be perceived as both fair and relevant, backed with credible evidence, and launched at the right time.” The half-truth here is “credible evidence.” Rove means evidence that only appears credible, evidence that sprays fast enough and drips far enough to resist removal from the popular mind even when the whole truth comes out later on.

The Big Miners campaign against the Rudd Government's emissions trading scheme and RSPT is an illustration of Karl Rove's point about dirty tricks.

The miners evidence--about the collapse of mining and sovereign risk--- only appeared credible, but it sprayed fast enough and dripped far enough to resist removal from the popular mind even when the whole truth comes out later on. There was no sovereign risk.

No doubt the "credible evidence" in conservative political history will barely mention what is left out---the truth of the matter--as they seek to undermine Gillard's political fix that has cut the ground underneath the Coalition's partisan bloodlust and attack on the RSPT.

There is no concern for fostering democracy or public discourse here by those on the Right defending their own self-interest.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:26 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

July 1, 2010

Canberra watch: dividing the miners

From the various reports in the mainstream press we know that negotiations between the Gillard Government and the mining industry over the Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT) are taking place in Canberra. All we know that is the talks have been "constructive and disciplined approach that is being taken by both sides". And that's all. Nobody is talking. No leaks.

What we don't really know is the government's political strategy in dealing with this conflict. Is it one of divide and rule? Where is the in-depth analysis and expert insight that enables us citizens to understand what is happening behind the closed doors and covered windows?

If you dig around a bit then you discover that the Gillard Government is trying to split the industry eg., changing the RSPT so that it would carve out the prospective coal seam gas-fed export LNG projects in Queensland, which would be covered by something akin to the existing petroleum resource rent tax.

Another strategy is to make concessions to the big miners to show that their hostility to that RSPT is unreasonable and self-interested; say by raise the controversial uplift factor in the tax from the government bond rate of less than 6 per cent to the 11 per cent or so.

Stephen Bartholomeusz in Business Spectator states that a political strategy had been developed by Rudd and Swan before Gillard displaced Rudd:

It was designed to fragment the hitherto united industry opposition to the RSPT, isolating BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Xstrata and the other big miners and enabling the government to portray them as obdurate and greedy and absolutely committed to not paying a "fairer" share of tax.The mining industry campaign would lose a lot of its potency if the industry’s solidarity was broken and it was being prosecuted only by a relative handful of the biggest players.

Bartholomeusz adds that such a politically driven strategy would be a breach of Gillard’s promise to negotiate in good faith. He adds that the RSPT:

was a just a naked grab for cash, akin to the partial nationalisation of the big end of the sector, largely without compensation, which would have undermined its stability, frozen new projects, decimated the smaller miners and driven capital offshore.

I'm not persuaded by the argument since politics lies at the very heart of these negotiations. The core issue is who runs the country: a democratically elected government or big multinational corporations concerned with their profitability. This is what the big miners have to accept---that here has to be an industry-specific profits-based tax for the public good ---as they press for concessions in their negotiations.

Update
The ABC is reporting that the Government is willing to water down the original deal put forward by former prime minister Kevin Rudd and The Treasurer, Wayne Swan. It says that is understood a deal could include lifting the rate at which the super profits tax kicks from 6 per cent to about 12 per cent and making the rules more generous for existing mines.

We will have to wait until tomorrow. My fear is that the increase in superannuation contribution (lifting compulsory superannuation contributions from nine to 12 per cent) has gone west. Let's hope the changes are to the company tax rather than superannuation. Business should bear the brunt of the miners desire to keep their profits.

Update
The renamed Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) will apply only to iron ore and coal in Australia, and will be capped at 30 per cent rather than the original 40 per cent proposed. Oil and gas projects will come under the current Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT) regime to all Australian onshore and offshore oil and gas projects, including the North West Shelf. The new ''super profits'' tax will only kick in when profit exceeds the long-term bond rate plus 7 per cent.This reduces the expected revenues by $1.5 billion.

The deal builds on that hammered out in the final days of Kevin Rudd. Lifting compulsory superannuation contributions from nine to 12 per cent is an important step.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:48 AM | Comments (18) | TrackBack