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January 31, 2011

politics as usual

The political year is in swing and the partisan rhetoric from the political noise machines is being cranked up. The blustering Nationals continue to denounce the Gillard Government for its failure to adopt the politics of austerity whilst continuing to hammer the government by demanding more handouts for regional Australia. Hammer hammer hammer.

Behind the ever increasing noise the tactic looks as if the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott is only going to amplify his style of opposing everything to make life for the government as tough as possible. The Coalition's belief is that the fall of Gillard is inevitable.

The strategy is for Abbott to be prime minister by the end of this year without facing an election and so the Coalition will make the life of the regional Independents---Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor--- as difficult as possible. Destroy them and the Gillard Government falls. Hammer, hammer hammer. Labor throws environmental programs overboard when the going gets tough in order to save its bacon.

We'd better get used to the noise about the incompetent, hopeless, useless Gillard Government, because there is going to be plenty of it. For instance in The Australian Mirko Bagaric, a professor at Deakin University, runs through the right wing talking points:

The only sound response to the flood damage is to defer or scrap other spending programs, especially non-essential items such as the National Broadband Network...the flood impost is exactly what you would expect from a government that has lost its way. One thing that is clear is that for the country to move forward for the benefit of working families, a fundamental shift is necessary in the approach to government policy delivery. That is not likely to happen under Gillard's stewardship.

The rhetoric around the NBN from the conservative noise machine is becoming ever more extreme as it goes way beyond the standard concerns about the internet. Bagaric adds that:

Gillard's only big-ticket item, the NBN, highlights her inadequacies. Governments should never use our taxes for projects that they can't prove will be good for us.It is not clear whether the internet is doing more harm than good to the human species. But what is incontestable is that it is a luxury, and that it is quick enough at present to accommodate all useful applications.Sure, the internet provides quicker access to information, but it has several disadvantages, many of which are just starting to emerge.

These are: most internet use relates to email, (anti-)social networking sites and trash searches, including music videos and porn; it is retrograde from a work and health perspective since online technologies make workers contactable 24/7, breaking the separation between work and family and social life; there are no positive educational outcomes as research suggests the internet is probably making us dumber etc etc.

What we have is an academic opposing an information economy and recycling old work. Bagariuc concludes on this note:

Gillard's persistence with her fanatical plan force us to pay $2000 each to improve a tool that makes us more stressed, dumber, fatter and less healthy is the ultimate proof that she is incapable of making decisions that have positive outcomes in the real world.

I presume that Bagariuc used the internet to send his opinion piece to The Australian to be published, and he is quite happy for us to read his pearls of wisdom online using the internet. The contradictions don't matter, do they? It's just hammer hammer hammer.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:21 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

January 30, 2011

Obama: anti-government Democrat?

In Obama, Incorporated in the New York Review of Books blog David Bromwich says that Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address was notable for:

the warmth with which he has embraced the premises of his opponents: in matters affecting public life and the economy, government is now said to be the problem, and private enterprise the solution; and far from deregulation having been a major cause of the financial collapse, the way to a healthy economy now lies through further deregulation. This rhetorical concession, adopted as a tactic, will turn against Obama as a strategy. The enormous budget cuts, for example, which he volunteered to make yet steeper will work against the ventures in job-creation which he has asked for without giving particulars.

Bromwhich adds that all Obama's general pledges now bear the stamp of the corporate ideology. This ideology assumes that the energy, initiative, and technical knowhow that contribute to our society the objects and experiences most valued by Americans originate in the private sector and are generally stunted, impaired, adulterated, or degraded by public supervision.

America, according to Obama “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world” through “free enterprise” in the private sector and by cuts—“taking responsibility for our deficit”—in government.

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January 29, 2011

Egypt: civil unrest

Mehdi Hasan in The truth about Egypt in the New Statesman says that the US and UK governments, aided and abetted by the US and UK media, might like us to believe that they are on the side of the protesters, fighting for their democratic rights and freedoms, and not on the side of the ageing, corrupt dictator, Hosni Mubarak, and his secret police trying to ride out the storm.

The reality, however, is that:

Mubarak is in power in Cairo with the west's blessing, approval, support, sponsorship, funding and arms. Democrat and Republican presidents, Labour and Conservative prime ministers, have all cosied up to Egypt's "secular" tyrant, a self-proclaimed but ineffective bulwark against "Islamic extremism", since he assumed the presidency in 1981.

What the West supports are the brutal dictators who are the main enemies of their people, now demonstrating against the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt.

Over decades the ‘Western’ powers not only propped up unaccountable, corrupt and despotic rulers but also allowed or prompted them to pursue policies which were highly unpopular with large domestic constituencies. While the US favours Egyptian political reform in theory, in practice it has propped up an authoritarian system for pragmatic reasons of national self-interest. It behaved in much the same way towards Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s, when Iraq was at war with Iran. A similar tacit bargain governs relations with Saudi Arabia. The US is part of the problem. The U.S. talk about human rights and international law does not apply to its closest allies--only to rogue states.

As Simon Tisdall points out in The Guardian:

In the final analysis, the US needs a friendly government in Cairo more than it needs a democratic one. Whether the issue is Israel-Palestine, Hamas and Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, security for Gulf oil supplies, Sudan, or the spread of Islamist fundamentalist ideas, Washington wants Egypt, the Arab world's most populous and influential country, in its corner. That's the political and geostrategic bottom line. In this sense, Egypt's demonstrators are not just fighting the regime. They are fighting Washington, too.

Egypt, like Yemen, faces the pressures of huge numbers of young people without jobs, growing outrage over abusive security forces, corrupt leaders, repressive political systems. Suspicion of American intentions runs deep and Mubarak's empty promises of reform are quickly seen through. The citizens’ protests in Egypt appear to be driven by domestic demands--concern about citizens’ living conditions within the borders of the Egyptian nation-state.

Will the popular discontent being expressed in the streets be able to challenge the government's authority, undermine the cohesion and loyalty of the Egyptian security forces, and render Mubarak's continued rule untenable? Or will Mubarak survive a few more days, manage popular discontent by making partial concessions on the economic issues while arbitrarily dismissing the political issues of the post colonial state (more democracy and less corruption and repression), the protest movement will falter, and the Mubarak regime can go back to the old status quo of governing through coercion, not consent?

Or will the Obama administration play a key role in talking Mubarak down? Keeping the U.S. military aid flowing dominates Mubarak's foreign policy, defined first and foremost in the region by its cold peace with Israel. Will the US pull the plug on the $1.3 billion military aid that enables the armed forces rule Egypt? The army will have to decide whether it stands with Mubarak or the people.

Update
Soumaya Ghannoushi in Arab states: a quagmire of tyranny says that:

Much of the turmoil plaguing the region today is traceable to its diseased political order.....Events in Tunisia, Egypt and – to a lesser extent – Algeria are harbingers of a change long impeded and postponed. Were it not for the international will to maintain the worn out status quo, what happened in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s could have occurred in the Arab region too. Its decrepit autocrats were allowed to stagger on, shedding their old skins and riding on the wave of rampant economic liberalism, which benefited the narrow interests of ruling families and their associates alone, and thrust the rest into a bottomless pit of poverty and marginalisation.

She says that the trouble is that an entity that has made coercion its raison d'etre and violence its sole means of survival has left itself no option but to sink deeper in the quagmire of tyranny.

Despite Barack Obama’s call for greater personal liberties and restoration of internet access in Egypt, it is clear that Washington would just as soon Mubarak presided over a transition to his successor.

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January 28, 2011

the irony

So the Gillard Government's one off flood levy to help pay for the $5.6 billion anticipated flood damages is relatively modest, temporary and progressive. The flood levy will fall on those who can pay; people earning less than $50,000, pensioners and those who have received a disaster recovery payment will be exempt. It will raise just $1.8 billion.

Gillard will meet the shortfall by deferring $1 billion worth of infrastructure programs and finding $2.8 billion by scrapping, raiding or "re-profiling" a dozen government programs, including those that were supposed to reduce emissions. How ironic. Cutting from climate programs to fix railways needed for Queensland's coal industry. That says it all.

In fairness, some of the programs abandoned were dogs. Few will mourn the loss of cash-for-clunkers, which would have done next to nothing for the environment. This was to pay $2000 to each motorist who traded in a pre-1995 car for a more fuel efficient one.The Green Start home energy assessment program that replaced Labor's Green Loans program will itself be axed and payments of the solar hot water rebate, solar homes and communities rebate and LPG car conversion grants will be capped.

That's half a billion dollars out of solar. Yet subsidies for fossil-fuel industries remained untouched. There is no shift to feed-in tariffs and loan guarantees. What does that do for the Gillard Government's credibility on climate change? So much for the development of the cleantech industry in Australia--nascent or infant industries need support.

The indications are that a carbon price with real bite – somewhere between $50 and $100 a tonne to generate the technologies that are needed in the future---is just not going to happen under a Gillard Government.

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January 27, 2011

Obama's 2011 State of the Union address

Barack Obama has just a year left to govern before his next election contest and he faces a less-friendly Congress than in 2009. His State of the Union address made a strong argument for government intervention:

When we find rules that put an unnecessary burden on businesses, we will fix them. But I will not hesitate to create or enforce common-sense safeguards to protect the American people. That's what we've done in this country for more than a century. It's why our food is safe to eat, our water is safe to drink, and our air is safe to breathe. It's why we have speed limits and child labour laws. It's why last year, we put in place consumer protections against hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies and new rules to prevent another financial crisis. And it's why we passed reform that finally prevents the health insurance industry from exploiting patients.

It's a rebuttal of the Republican claim that government is "the problem" not the market. But on the economic issues that confront the US Obama played it both ways: We’re going to invest in the future — but we’re also going to freeze domestic spending.

The inference? We are not going to go down the politics of austerity road. He fused public investment and economic patriotism with his "Sputnik moment" term, to describe the United States' current standing on the world stage, presumably with a particular comparison to China's rising status as a dominant force in the global economy.

It's a strange analogy as United States is "no longer the 'exceptional nation,' as in America's past, or a 'beacon on the hill,' the leader of the free world, or the sole superpower.Presumably it meant the importance of investing in education, infrastructure, and basic research in order to build the nation’s long-term competitive capacities rather than creating bogeymen.

This is the Tea Party response---not the official Republican response--- from Rep. Michele Bachmann. this highlights the high unemployment in the US with its sense of urgency and outrage at Obama's perceived socialist state.

It's the politics of austerity that is advocated: the nation got into trouble because government became too large, and the answer is therefore to cut spending, cut taxes, and shrink the deficit. The politics of austerity is then linked to American exceptionalism. Is the reference to Iwo Jima in WW 2 an underhand reference to fighting Chinese totalitarianism in the name of American freedom and exceptionalism?

A key problem is that the bursting of the housing bubble put an end to Americans spending by using their homes as ATMs – leaving them without enough purchasing power to reboot the economy. So how does the state boost consumer spending by putting more money into the pockets average Americans?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:25 AM | TrackBack

January 26, 2011

Australia Day

If Australia Day is now a festival, it is also an excuse for commentators in the mainstream media to recycle their ideas about what it means to be Australian, and how are we different to the rest of the world. It provides a good opportunity for some critical reflection on Australian nationalism and patriotism.

In his Australia, it's Western, Christian and proud article on the ABC's Unleashed site Kevin Donnelly says that what we should be doing is celebrating Western civilisation, Christianity and Australia’s Anglo-Celtic heritage. Why? Well, that is what Australia is. He adds:

It’s ironic that when many talk of the clash between Islam and the West, and Australia is involved in wars against Islamic extremism in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we appear unwilling or incapable of teaching future generations about the unique nature of Western civilisation and the very values, beliefs and way of life that protect us and offers sanctuary to thousands from overseas.

His conservative conception of Australia is explicitly opposed to diversity and difference (code for multiculturalism ); the belief that all cultures are of equal value and worth; environmental values; and Australia being a part of Asia.

According to Donnelly, what makes Australia different then, is that it is part of the Anglosphere. Presumably, those who dispute this conception of nationalism in terms of the racism haunting mainstream Australia culture are the politically correct naysayers.

My core problem with Conservatives like Donnelly is that they rarely mention that current of racism that has haunted mainstream Australia culture since Federation. There is little critical reflection by Australian conservatives like Donnelly in which they analyse the way that their traditional conception of Australian political identity is based on an ethnic nationalism--Anglo-celtic, whiteness, Christianity? ---rather than civic patriotism.

My second problem with Australian conservatives is that they rarely discuss their political philosophy. Their default position appears to be an amalgam of free market liberalism and the Burkean conservative emphasis on tradition; but there is little acknowledgement that the great wrecker of tradition is the free market. On this interpretation of Australian conservatism, Donnelly is defending the conservative tradition--- British civilisation, Christianity and Australia’s Anglo-Celtic heritage---which is the Australia of the mid-20th century; a tradition that has been continually undermined by the global market's dependence on the international mobility of labour.

Update
Australia, as an open society, is for better or worse, a nation of immigrants. The core question then is this: is it possible to reconcile the conflicting imperatives of respect for cultural diversity and sustained democratic legitimacy? Donnelly and the Quadrant conservatives would say no. I would question their assumption of ethnic nationalism.

Ethnic nationalists can be said to advocate the public promotion of one identity, national identity, at the expense of other group identities, which will, therefore, be indirectly discriminated against. By using public institutions to foster a particular culture, ethnic nationalism may conflict with the principle of equal citizenship, and is likely to be intolerant of minority cultures.

Civic patriotism refers to a mainly political identity, whose political content makes it compatible with a variety of practices and beliefs, but whose thin particularistic form justifies citizens' commitment to specific institutions. This commitment is not so unconditional as to justify blind loyalty to one's own institutions, nor is it so absolute as to rule out certain forms of cosmopolitan citizenship.

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January 25, 2011

The Australian's advice to Tasmania

The Australian has delivered its judgement on Tasmanian politics. The new premier, Lara Giddings, must go for growth with practical plans, reduce government outlays and get the state back into surplus. Tasmania sorely needs to reduce its dependence on government spending.

How is this growth to be achieved? By standing up to The Greens of course. What else.

The editorial says:

The challenge for Ms Giddings is to demonstrate she has a plan to expand the economy, not just schemes to please the Greens. Her challenge is to manage the state in the interests of all Tasmanians, which inevitably means standing up to the Greens, first across the cabinet table and then on the hustings.

The implication is that going for growth is through austerity politics, privatization (selling Hydro Tasmania and Forestry Tasmania?), and allowing the private sector to do its magic, once the government gets out of the way with some good old slash and burn.

The implication is that the old style resource based growth is the way to go ---not the new fangled way of developing an information economy by installing the National Broadband Network and investing in education to improve school retention rates, as argued for the previous premier David Bartlett. Or turning Tasmania into a food bowl in the context of climate change.

Greg Barnes in State of crisis at the ABC'S Unleashed makes explicit what is implicit in The Australian's editorial. He says that Tasmania is in a mess:

Tasmania is again in crisis, as it was in 1989. Then Labor Premier Michael Field, ironically a long time mentor to Bartlett, slashed, restructured and reformed the role of government in his two and a half years of premier. If he had not done this, then it is unlikely that Tasmania would have survived as anything more than a Canberra dependant outpost. Giddings will have to look to Field’s example and she will have to bring the Greens with her. Tasmanians might not like the tough medicine but they cannot be spared it any longer.

Nothing is said about the reducing the corporate dependence on the public purse, a characteristic of Tasmanian style of corporatism.

An austerity politics is designed to derive a wedge into the Labor-Green alliance in a political context where the Liberal refuse to work with the Greens. I do not see how this kind of austerity politics will make the ALP more electorally popular.

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January 24, 2011

Hot pools of money

In The Monetary Threat to the Global Economy Jane D’Arista and Korkut Erturk say that much of the focus of crisis management policies so far have centered on resuscitating the financial system and injecting public spending. However:

Neither policy objective directly addresses the main source of global deflation, which is that the global imbalances are no longer being recycled effectively. The US has lost much of its capacity to absorb and recycle trade surpluses because both its households and banks face the ongoing threat of insolvency. That in a nutshell is the driving force behind the global deflationary trend. Substituting en-masse public spending for private consumption and putting banks on life support are at best stop-gap measures that cannot bring back what is broken. That is true even under the best case scenario where the confidence in the dollar holds up and banks are effectively cleansed of troubled assets.

The problem is not the global imbalances per se, but the unsustainable way in which they were absorbed and recycled.

The main challenge is to wane world demand of its dependence on US overspending given that the rising levels of both nonfinancial and financial debt has virtually destroyed its capacity to recycle global surpluses effectively.

Recycling trade surpluses or imbalances means that if you want to consume stuff from abroad, someone has to make it. And if it’s not going to be American workers, it’s going to be foreigners. But whoever it is, they wind up taking dollars when they sell it to the US. So pretty soon, these foreigners had a lot of dollars that they got in return for all the cheap goods Americans were buying at Walmart. The world was awash in liquidity. The enormous flow of money was recycled back into the US (through the big banks) and with the shift to financial deregulation, helped create America's massive debt pile-up.

As D’Arista anbd Erturk describe it:

it is not often recognized that the US credit boom that brought this about was at the same time perversely functional in recycling global trade surpluses. It was the means by which the ever expanding dollar reserves overseas could be loaned out in the US and, through US financial markets, to emerging economies and the rest of the world. However, as credit-induced investment/consumption booms could not be sustained for long in emerging economies, US households came to absorb an ever larger part of these global surpluses over time and thus became the epicentre of debt build up. This provided the fodder for financial innovation whichonly compounded the excessive credit growth that eventually wrecked households’ balance sheets and bankrupted banks

Hot pools of money flowing around the globe---liquid modernity are a pervasive source of global instability in that this instability of debt crisis is leading to declining standards of living around the world, which is resulting in civil and political unrest in Europe.

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January 23, 2011

Murdoch + media dominance

Murdoch, as is well known, uses News Corps power, to menace any government that stands in the way of his commercial ambitions or offends his basically conservative agenda. People fear the Murdoch press, and for politicians such a fear is compounded by the fact that Murdoch's newspapers can help swing elections. The News of the World phone-hacking scandal in the UK, which is set to gather pace, could start to undermine that power.

Martin Rowson

Henry Porter in Rupert Murdoch and the future of British media in The Guardian outlines a scenario of media dominance in Britain that could well apply to Australia in the near future.

Referring to Murdoch's bid to buy 100% ownership of BSkyB. Porter says:

The emergence of Sky's market power would be problem enough if it just affected the television industry, but what makes it a defining moment for Britain is how the financial and industrial strength in television interacts with News International's dominance of the newspaper industry. The Times, Sunday Times, Sun and News of the World together constitute 37% of UK newspaper circulation.Moreover, this is an industry struggling to find a viable business model as circulations fall and advertising revenues shrink. Cross-media ownership was an electric issue even in an era of stable technology; at a time of transformative technological change, it has become toxic because NI's [News International] television strength can come to the rescue of print in a way no other newspaper group can match

He adds that once NI gets 100% ownership of BSkyB, it will simply add its newspaper titles to the subscription television bundle to be received online. NI is the fourth-largest advertiser in the UK. Its marketing heft and industrial strength in pay TV will thus support its newspapers and the rest of the industry will be slaughtered.

Porter adds:

There is a convergence of TV and online usage and attractively priced online newspapers available via Sky as part of carefully designed packages for individual consumers will be irresistible...the prospect by 2020 is of an enfeebled newspaper industry in which NI titles command more than half the circulation and revenues and a television industry in which coverage of current affairs beyond a diminished BBC will be sporadic, thin and partisan.

The inference is that News Ltd 's strategic plan in Australia is to acquire more of Foxtel.

The question for media regulators is that if phone hacking was widespread on a Murdoch newspaper, why should the government allow News International's parent company to own even more of the UK media landscape?

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January 22, 2011

energy efficiency: a paradox

More energy efficient buildings are often suggested as one way to reduce the need for energy (electricity) produced by coal fired power stations and so can help reduce the effect of climate change.The key question is how effective these energy efficiency savings in the use of productive resources, will be.

John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York have a sobering interpretation of the logic of energy efficiency in a capitalist system in Monthly Review. Referring to the Jevons Paradox —the idea that increased energy (and material-resource) efficiency leads not to conservation but increased use— they say:

What is neglected, then, in simplistic notions that increased energy efficiency normally leads to increased energy savings overall, is the reality of the Jevons Paradox relationship—through which energy savings are used to promote new capital formation and the proliferation of commodities, demanding ever greater resources. Rather than an anomaly, the rule that efficiency increases energy and material use is integral to the “regime of capital” itself.

The result, they say, is the production of mountains upon mountains of commodities, cheapening unit costs and leading to greater squandering of material resources at the expense of the environment. Any slowdown in this process of ecological destruction, under the present system, spells economic disaster.

A sobering insight. The paradox is often brought up as a proof that conservation measures just won't work and so we should “live high now and let the future take care of itself.”

It not that energy or fuel efficiency is a bad thing. It is not. More energy efficient households, offices and cars are better because they reduce energy costs and use less energy. Improvements in technical efficiency increase the ranges of choices to consumers such that consumers are not worse off.

In economic language in order to achieve the same level of utility, the individual can consume less energy; or if we take the assumption of self interested consumers and maximization of utility seriously, they will not be satisfied with the same utility he/she reached earlier if he/she is able to reach a higher utility for the same expense. The problem with efficiency gains is that we inevitably reinvest them in additional consumption.

The inference that is drawn by Ecological economics is that, as increased efficiency, by itself, is unlikely to reduce energy use, so a sustainable energy policy must rely on other types of government interventions that that reduces demand (e.g., cap and trade, fuel tax or carbon tax).

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January 21, 2011

the same old mantra

The Coalition continue to remain policy light with naught to say on reform. Everything, it seems, can be solved by the dual policy of reducing taxes and cutting government expenditure.

Their response to the Queensland and Victorian floods, for instance, is to cut government spending to pay for the damage bill. The areas they have select for cutting are the national broadband network, and they propose selling off Medibank Private. It's the same old small government agenda of slashing wasteful public expenditure, even though they were all for big Government during their decade in power. Nothing at all is said about reform with respect to development on the floodplain or providing access to a universal affordable insurance for natural disasters.

So what does the Coalition have to say about future building in flood prone areas apart from building more and more dams? Does the Coalition actually reckon that it is economic madness to subsidize people's risk taking behavior in building/buying on a known flood plain?

Presumably they reckon the old tactic of attack attack is going to work, even though the Greens gain the balance of power in the Senate in 5 months time.

Yet the cost the burden rebuilding imposes on taxpayers--it looks like a levy will be introduced--- would obviously be smaller had a greater share of the assets been properly insured and tn greater detailed information about flood-proneness had been made public. Why not say something about that given the history of the failure of the Brisbane City Council to provide public information about future flood levels in its commissioned reports?

As things stand in the 'leave it to the market scenario' householders face the choice to either pay the high premium, take the risk without it, or move to places that won't flood. Levies (ie., taxes) are not the answer for the free market right who hang out in The Australian as the issue is one of responsibility in a world of risk.

The argument appears to be this. Making insurance compulsory is a form of subsidisation as the properties with no flood exposure would pay a premium component and subsidise the exposed properties. Why should those who live in the non-flood areas pay a levy to help those who do live on the flood plain? Why should their taxes go to free handouts to flood victims who did not have insurance or who opted out of a higher cover in favour of cheaper policies. And lets bash the Greens whilst we on the topic. It is fun.

This argument effectively denies the idea of market failure.

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January 20, 2011

flood insurance

I think that it a national disgrace that the inadequacy of insurance for floods means that many people are ruined, either because flood insurance is to expensive, the insurance companies avoid flood insurance; or they limit the coverage. It's a classic example of market failure. Many Queenslanders----40- 60 per cent-- for instance, were uninsured because they could not get the coverage where they lived.

It is an issue that needs to be addressed because people return to rebuild their homes on the flood plain that has inadequate protection from future floods. Given that the one in a hundred years flood no longer makes much sense, there is a need for some form of affordable national insurance for natural disasters (water damage, bush fires and earthquakes etc).

Such a low cost coverage scheme is what the Insurance Council opposes--in spite of the obvious market failure. What local insurers will more than likely do is use the floods to pass on double digit rises in premiums to consumers. The market will not address this issue nor will they do the necessary flood mapping (public information) or mitigation works.

This is an obvious example for government intervention into the market. Will the Gillard Labor Government have the courage to intervene?

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January 19, 2011

it's back to politics

The political holiday season is slowly coming to an end.

We have the Coalition finding yet another reason to attack the national broadband network (NBN) and have it scrapped. Abbott says that since the NBN is an unnecessary project--- a luxury that Australia cannot now afford---the money (its been inflated to $50 billion by the Coalition) should be diverted to the flood recovery in Queensland.

Why not cut money from defence if the priority is to save the budget surplus from an increase in expenditure? There are lots of efficiency savings to be made there. Why not roll back expenditure in the subsidy to private health insurance?

These are not goers for the Coalition--they'd block them in the Senate --- because Abbott is not interested in the budget surplus; he is using the floods to try to undermine a policy that is seen to both popular and successful for the ALP. So mud has to be thrown at it, in the hope that some of it sticks, whilst Abbott ensures the austerity (slash and burn) credentials remain with the Coalition. It's politics: --keeping Labor inside the big spender/high taxation box.

We have the Gillard Government's commitment to return to surplus by 2012-13 to be achieved by capping extra spending at 2%b real growth and banking the increased revenue revisions. If this commitment is locked in concrete---to avoid a Deficit--- then whyy not a temporary flood levy? That is what Howard did when he introduced a levy to fund a $500 million gun buyback in 1996, after the Port Arthur massacre. No doubt the Coalition will say cut spending not raise taxes.

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January 18, 2011

austerity politics

As I've mentioned in previous posts the politics of austerity is in full swing in Europe where it is targeting the welfare state. In Britain it is the National Health Service that is being targeted:--- the reforms of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrat Coalition mean that the new private entrants grow at the expense of the old state ones.

Martin Rowson

It is Schumpter's process of creative destruction organized by a neo-liberal state. As the NHS budget shrinks, as new providers enter the market, some old ones will have to go to the wall. The new act gives the health secretary no authority to intervene: price competition, enforced by EU law, will alone ordain which services live or die. The market will be used to ensure that weak providers are forced out.

The hard edge to this politics of austerity is highlighted by Paul Krugman in reference to the politics espoused by the Republican Party in the US with respect to the reform the private health insurance system:

The key to understanding the G.O.P. analysis of health reform is that the party’s leaders are not, in fact, opposed to reform because they believe it will increase the deficit. Nor are they opposed because they seriously believe that it will be “job-killing” (which it won’t be). They’re against reform because it would cover the uninsured — and that’s something they just don’t want to do. And it’s not about the money. As I tried to explain in my last column, the modern G.O.P. has been taken over by an ideology in which the suffering of the unfortunate isn’t a proper concern of government, and alleviating that suffering at taxpayer expense is immoral, never mind how little it costs

This harshness is what I find hard to accept, especially when most people who are underinsured or uninsured today in the US are hard working, tax paying, currently employed people. Some have lost coverage due to the loss of a job during the economic crisis, but they are actively seeking employment, they aren't just lazy and wanting a free ride. They are self-employed, work for a company that doesn't offer health benefits, or live pay check to pay check and simply can not afford the rapidly rising cost of insurance or healthcare in the US.

Fifty million uninsured, the highest per-capita costs in the world, millions of people pushed into bankruptcy by medical bills, worse health outcomes than most of the industrialized world? Fundamental healthcare should be part of the social safety net in which in which affordable and universal healthcare is a given.

This is opposed because one of the Republican Party's tacit political principles is inequality. They accept that health care should be controlled by an team of insurance-company bureaucrats, whose bonuses and promotions depend on denying your claims and limiting your care.

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January 17, 2011

US + global dominance

John J. Mearsheimer's Imperial by Design in The National Interest argues that the US opted for a flawed grand strategy after the Cold War. From the Clinton administration on, the United States pursued global dominance, or what might alternatively be called global hegemony, which was not just doomed to fail, but likely to backfire in dangerous ways if it relied too heavily on military force to achieve its ambitious agenda.

He says that:

Global dominance has two broad objectives: maintaining American primacy, which means making sure that the United States remains the most powerful state in the international system; and spreading democracy across the globe, in effect, making the world over in America’s image. The underlying belief is that new liberal democracies will be peacefully inclined and pro-American, so the more the better. Of course, this means that Washington must care a lot about every country’s politics. With global dominance, no serious attempt is made to prioritize U.S. interests, because they are virtually limitless.

This grand strategy is “imperial” at its core; its proponents believe that the United States has the right as well as the responsibility to interfere in the politics of other countries.

There is, however, an important disagreement among global dominators about how best to achieve their strategy’s goals.

On one side are the neoconservatives, who believe that the United States can rely heavily on armed force to dominate and transform the globe, and that it can usually act unilaterally because American power is so great. Indeed, they tend to be openly contemptuous of Washington’s traditional allies as well as international institutions, which they view as forums where the Lilliputians tie down Gulliver.

George Bush pursued this strand after 9/11 as he planned to transform an entire region of the Middle East at the point of a gun.

The global war on terror meant that virtually every terrorist group on the planet—including those that had no beef with Washington—was the enemy of the US and had to be eliminated if we hoped to win what became known as the global war on terror, and that it was imperative for the United States to target these rogue states only actively supporting terrorist organizations but were also likely to provide terrorists with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) if it hoped to win the GWOT.

Mearsheimer says the alternative to neo-conservatism is liberal imperialism:

On the other side are the liberal imperialists, who are certainly willing to use the American military to do social engineering. But they are less confident than the neoconservatives about what can be achieved with force alone. Therefore, liberal imperialists believe that running the world requires the United States to work closely with allies and international institutions. Although they think that democracy has widespread appeal, liberal imperialists are usually less sanguine than the neoconservatives about the ease of exporting it to other states.

This strategy was adopted by both Bill Clinton and Barak Obama.

Instead of a grand strategy of global domination Mearsheimer advocates a strategy one of off shore balancing. This states that there are three regions of the world that are strategically important to the United States—Europe, Northeast Asia and the Persian Gulf.

It sees the United States’ principle goal as making sure no country dominates any of these areas as it dominates the Western Hemisphere. he best way to achieve that end is to rely on local powers to counter aspiring regional hegemons and otherwise keep U.S. military forces over the horizon. But if that proves impossible, American troops come from offshore to help do the job, and then leave once the potential hegemon is checked.

Its a more realistic strategy for an America as a declining power. The unipolar world is coming to an end, as the United States no longer has the economic capacity for an ambitious grand strategy to maintain a significant forward-leaning military presence in the three major regions of the globe (Europe, Northeast Asia and the Persian Gulf) and, if necessary, to wage two major regional wars at the same time. The strategy of offshore balancing is one way for America to navigate its decline.

The Northeast Asia region includes the challenge posed by China to the US.; a challenge emerging from China translating its economic might into military power and try to dominate Asia as the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere.

No American leader will accept that outcome, which means that Washington will seek to contain Beijing and prevent it from achieving regional hegemony. e United States to lead a balancing coalition against China that includes India, Japan, Russia, Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam, Australia and Indonesia.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:21 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

January 16, 2011

Obama's Tuscon speech

This is the video of President Obama's speech at a Memorial Service for the Victims of the Shooting in Tucson, Arizona. He is focusing on trying to repair America rather than the rest of the world. He has no choice.

The transcript is here.

Obama's rhetoric is quite different to the 'blood libel' rhetoric deployed Palin to suggest that Palin was being victimized and those who disagree are hateful, reprehensible leftists. In contrast, Obama says:

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better. To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy -- it did not -- but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.

The American Tea Party, represented by Palin, are not interested in a more civil and honest public discourse. Their eliminationist rhetoric of violence and hatred is designed to be divisive and to set people against each other. The Right believes that anger and polarization is good for the country because it will help deliver them to power.

Underneath this, as Paul Krugman points out, is the deep divide in American political morality The Republican Party no longer accepts the legitimacy of the welfare state whilst the Democrats want to expand it.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:59 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 15, 2011

King Coal rules

Australia has a contradictory de facto industry policy--support the mining industry and shift the economy to a low carbon one. It is contradictory because the attempt to set prices for global carbon emissions failed, due to ‘coal' – or, rather, the fact that coal is cheap and abundant, the mining industry is powerful, and the owners of coal mines and their clients are strongly opposed to any tax on carbon. Coal has been the engine of the economy for a very long time because it is cheap and abundant, and it provides cheap electricity for the economy.

The shift to a low carbon economy is as trans formative as the transformed from an agrarian to an industrial economy. In his Industrial Policy Comes Out of the Cold at Project Syndicate Justin Yifu Lin says that historical evidence shows that in countries that successfully transformed from an agrarian to an industrial economy – including those in Western Europe, North America, and, more recently, in East Asia – governments coordinated key investments by private firms that helped to launch new industries, and often provided incentives to pioneering firms. He adds:

the lesson from economic history and development is straightforward: government support aimed at upgrading and diversifying industry must be anchored in the requisite endowments. That way, once constraints on new industries are removed, private firms in those industries quickly become competitive domestically and internationally. The question then becomes how to identify competitive industries and how to formulate and implement policies to facilitate their development.

In Australia renewable energy industry is anchored in the requisite endowments. The question of how to formulate and implement policies to facilitate the development of the renewable energy industry is continually sidelined by the coal industry.

So we have ad hock mickey mouse proposals that are soon dumped, rather than a fully fledged industrial policy that deals with the transformation to a low carbon economy in a systematic way. The Coalition is dead set against any substantive action on climate change, such as pricing carbon.

King Coal have gotten used to doing things the way they wanted to do things. Their public stance is one of don't mess around with us, we're in charge here. This is not a dynamic industry, in the sense of innovation and change. They want to do things their way, they want to do things the old-fashioned way, they don't want to change, and they don't believe they need to.

This is an industry that is used to getting by on political muscle and not on compromise. It presents itself as a hapless collection of hard-working guys just trying to keep the lights on for us, as the Greens and the environmentalists are carrying out a “regulatory jihad” against coal. Coal is on the wrong side of the innovation curve — it is a 19th century fuel that has thrown itself into the 21st century with sheer political muscle.

The coal mining states--Queensland, NSW, Victoria-- do not see the need to think differently about their future because the era of coal is coming to its close. They are keeping up the fiction that the long term economic health of the state is dependent on coal. A fiction because these states are a resource colony for the rich mining corporations that are pulling the coal out of the ground as fast as possible. They are only interested in getting more years of profits from the black rock--- not the warming of the planet. That market failure the coal industry gladly supports in order to avoid any reasonable regulator regime. Why CO2 pollution is a great boon for civilization because it increases plant productivity. They are playing a short term game.

Big Coal is more powerful today than ever. As Jeff Goodell points out:

The triumph of coal is deeply connected with an anti-science agenda, and always has been. Over the years, the industry has argued that.... air pollution from coal plants doesn’t cause an increase in heart attacks; that mercury, a potent neurotoxin emitted from coal plants, does not cause neurological damage; that mountaintop removal mining does not hurt the environment; and that burning coal does not heat up the atmosphere. All these arguments fly in the face of science — and, often, in the face of common sense. But it doesn’t matter. Coal is an empire of denial.

They are playing a short term game of block, block, block and talking up the state subsidizing nuclear power. "Clean coal" increasingly looks to be a promotional slogan designed to help spiff up coal’s image from a relic of the nineteenth century to a viable fuel source for the twenty-first century.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:04 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

January 14, 2011

Eurozone: in crisis

Paul Krugman has a long and interesting article on the Eurozone in the New York Times magazine that questions the viability of the Euro project. Europe is in deep crisis — because its proudest achievement, the single currency adopted by most European nations, is now in danger.

Krugman's argument is that Europe lacks the institutions needed to make a common currency workable. He says:

when the single European currency was first proposed, an obvious question was whether it would work as well as the dollar does here in America. And the answer, clearly, was no — for exactly the reasons the Ireland-Nevada comparison illustrates. Europe isn’t fiscally integrated: German taxpayers don’t automatically pick up part of the tab for Greek pensions or Irish bank bailouts. And while Europeans have the legal right to move freely in search of jobs, in practice imperfect cultural integration — above all, the lack of a common language — makes workers less geographically mobile than their American counterparts.

As in the US the bubble burst in 2008.The peripheral economies of Europe---Greece, Ireland, Portugal --- had borrowed much more than they could really afford to pay back. First Greece, then Ireland, became caught up in a vicious financial circle: as potential lenders lost confidence, the interest rates that they had to pay on the debt rose, undermining future prospects, leading to a further loss of confidence and even higher interest rates.

Krugman says:

it’s the euro itself that makes Spain and Ireland so vulnerable. For membership in the euro means that these countries have to deflate their way back to competitiveness, with all the pain that implies.The trouble with deflation isn’t just the coordination problem Milton Friedman highlighted, in which it’s hard to get wages and prices down when everyone wants someone else to move first. Even when countries successfully drive down wages, which is now happening in all the euro-crisis countries, they run into another problem: incomes are falling, but debt is not... so debtors have to meet the same obligations with a smaller income; to do this, they have to cut spending even more, further depressing the economy.

The policy solution has not been one of Greece or Ireland leaving the Eurozone and returning to their own currencies. It has been one of harsh fiscal austerity in an effort to regain the market’s confidence, backed in Greece and Ireland by official loans intended to buy time until private lenders regain confidence.

The markets don’t expect Greece and Ireland to pay their debts in full. They are expecting some kind of debt restructuring, that could bring the vicious circle of falling confidence and rising interest costs to an end, potentially making internal devaluation a workable if brutal strategy. The austerity strategy demanded by the Germans is for Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain to tough it out:

Governments that can’t borrow on the private market will receive loans from the rest of Europe — but only on stiff terms: people talk about Ireland getting a “bailout,” but it has to pay almost 6 percent interest on that emergency loan. There will be no E-bonds; there will be no transfer union...it will be an ugly process, leaving much of Europe deeply depressed for years to come. There will be political repercussions too, as the European public sees the continent’s institutions as being — depending on where they sit — either in the business of bailing out deadbeats or acting as agents of heartless bill collectors.

Krugman's judgement is that the odds are that the current tough-it-out strategy won’t work even in the narrow sense of avoiding default and devaluation — and the fact that it won’t work will become obvious sooner rather than later.

At that point, Europe’s stronger nations---France and Germany--- will have to make a choice: saving the Euro-project or allowing Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain to default on their debts and the French and German banks take a haircut.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:32 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

January 13, 2011

US: a political culture of paranoia

In Dangerous outcomes from a culture of paranoia in the Washington Post Harold Meyerson makes a good point about about the political rhetoric of the Right in the US. This populist conservatism sees politics in terms of being a war that has been started by the other side--- the liberals.

Steve Bell

Meyerson focuses on the conservative's political depiction of the other Americans as dark conspirators, as the enemy, or as as evil aliens in the vitriolic incivility of American political discourse, as heard on talk radio and cable channels such as Fox News. It is the paranoid characteristic of American political culture that he is interested in.

He says:

The primary problem with the political discourse of the right in today's America isn't that it incites violence per se. It's that it implants and reinforces paranoid fears about the government and conservatism's domestic adversaries. Much of the culture and thinking of the American right - the mainstream as well as the fringe - has descended into paranoid suppositions about the government, the Democrats and the president. This is not to say that the left wing doesn't have a paranoid fringe, too. But by every available measure, it's the right where conspiracy theories have exploded.

The imputation of lurking totalitarianism, alien ideologies, and subversion of liberties to liberals and moderates has become the default rhetoric of the right. That doesn't make Beck, Palin or Rupert Murdoch and their ilk responsible for Tucson. But it does make them responsible for promoting a paranoid culture that makes America a more divided and dangerous land.

You can see that paranoia operating in Sarah Palin's response to the criticism of her warlike political rhetoric. This was more than using the language ---eg., "blood libel"--- designed to grab headlines. For Palin it is the criticism of her violent rhetoric that's the problem, not the violent rhetoric itself. She is the victim---nay a martyr (I am a persecuted and righteous innocent). She was simply “speaking up and speaking out in peaceful dissent.” The pundits who attacked her were “those who embrace evil and call it good.” That puts her in the middle of a cosmic struggle, with the forces of evil arrayed against her.

The killing of six innocents and the injuring of 14 more including a Congresswoman are a mere backdrop to her perceived continued victimization by the amorphous liberal establishment who embrace evil. 'They'-- the liberals, nay the socialists in the government and the media --- are trying to silence her. Her suffering is in the same order as the Jews in medieval Christian Europe. That's paranoia---she is in a cosmic struggle, with the forces of evil arrayed against her.

This apocalyptic tone tosses civility in politics out the window. The political divide has become so sharp that everything is now black and white: eg., for Palin her critics are using nasty words to incite violence against here.

Fear sells. Republicans believe they have the majority of the public on their side and that the Obama agenda is an attempt to change America against the will of the people. However, the key to who will win in 2012 is probably the economy.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:54 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

January 12, 2011

fixing limits for the growth of a city?

A defence of suburbia --American style. They have become more diverse and they are becoming economic powerhouses. Fair enough, but suburbs today still mean cities sprawling across the landscape, with some of them becoming increasingly bloated, congested and polluted with their transformation into large urban agglomerations (eg., south east Queensland) and mega cities eg., Mexico City or Shanghai.

Should cities just keep growing? Or should they be governed so they develop within limits?

We have the argument that living in compact, well-planned, walkable and integrated cities is part of the solution to the issue of economic development and environmental sustainability. Paul James observes:

Imagine a boundary to the city—some European cities have them—where the suburbs are edged by permanent forests and grasslands for leisure use, and by agricultural land for feeding the city. Imagine a series of compact and dense urban centres, punctuated by parks and threaded by bicycle and walking paths that give easy access for work and leisure.

But no limits are being placed around the edges of Australian cities. They continue to sprawl. Developers rule. Hence the alternative position of "well-managed" cities looks to be more feasible.

Chetan Vaidya says:

Thus, rather than restricting city growth, urban strategy should focus on harnessing the benefits of urban growth by managing it well, ensuring improved and equitable service provision and promoting good governance. Planners of sustainable and inclusive cities need to review urban planning practices and approaches, be aware of resource constraints, and identify innovative approaches that are more responsive to current and future urbanisation challenges.

Managing cities means managing them for a goal---such as an innovative, liveable and sustainable city. What once used to be called sustainable development.

This then raises another question? Who actually governs our cities? In Australia it appears to be the state politicians but we soon realize that they are largely acting on behalf of the interest of the developers --private capital. The justification? It's usually something along the lines of endless growth and profitable investment. The economic model underpining this is one that advocates smashed the power of labor and deregulated finance so that the financial system that can put investment funds in the right place and the right time in order to ensure new rounds of capital accumulation.

Capitalism is permanently in flux as it constantly renewing itself in a process of what Schumpeter termed ‘creative destruction’. The question is whether Australia has a state that is capable of making the long-term investments in 21st-century infrastructure needed to provide avenues for profitability and growth, to say nothing of establishing social programs that raise the living standards and purchasing power of the middle and working classes.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:37 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 11, 2011

Queensland floods: Living on the floodplain

The floods that have swept through Emerald, Rockhampton, Toowoomba, the Lockyer Valley region, Ipswich and now Brisbane have seen 38 regions across Queensland being declared a natural disaster area. The floods are the result from a switch from El Niño to La Niña.

This switch is one reason why Australia has these big swings in climate from dry to wet and back again. What causes the switch is not known, but it is thought to arise from the complex interaction of ocean and atmospheric circulations.

Rob Maccoll, Rockhampton in flood from the air, Courier-Mail, 2011

Glancing through the gallery of readers photos at the Australian indicates that the multi-billion damage caused by this flood event in Queensland is largely due to more and more people living in flood plains and farming in areas that historically have flooded.

Whitelightbringer's footage of East Creek near Chalk Drive / Chalk Lane rising and washing away lots of cars during Flash Flood in Toowoomba on Monday 10 January 2011.

So the finger can be pointed at the people who made the zoning decisions. They should not be left off the hook by the talk about building dams to capture the water flows so their storages can be used for future wealth creation by Big Ag. It's what the Nationals and their court jester( Barnaby Joyce) mean by humans taming nature.

The real problems of climate change are still ahead---the scenario for southern Australia is for warmer temperatures and less rainfall, except for north-west Australia. It is still unclear under the switch from El Niño to La Niña and back again will be effected by climate change. Will the cycle become more frequent and more intense?

Update
The Brisbane River has already broken its banks in parts of the city and evacuations are underway in some suburbs. The water has entirely engulfed the lower promenade at Eagle Street Pier, in the city’s entertainment precinct, flooding dozens of restaurants and threatening many more. The CBD was a virtual ghost town this morning.The power is being cut in the CBD.

This is a map of the flood modelling on the Brisbane City Council website. At this stage the flood has killed 14, while around 74 are missing. Unfortunately, more are expected.

If predictions are right, the floods starting to affect Brisbane could be worse than the 1974 floods, given the wall of water bearing down on Brisbane. The Brisbane River hasn't peaked--there's all that water still to come down from the Lockyer Valley (tomorrow morning?); water is being released from the Wivenhoe Daminto the Brisbane River and the king tides peak on Friday.

Almost 20,000 homes in Brisbane will be flooded by early tomorrow morning when the surging waters are expected to reach around 5.5 metres, which is just higher than the '74 flood. (The Brisbane River peaked this morning at 4.46 metres, more than a metre below the predicted peak of 5.5 metres.)

Tim Wimborne, Brisbane River, Reuters, 2011

So why allow development in known flood prone areas? What happened to the investment in flood control infrastructure when the need was apparent in the lower lying suburbs of Brisbane? After all, Brisbane is a city built in a mangrove swamp on a floodplain, and it was flooded in 1974.

Update2
The torrential rain from the concentrated storm fell on already saturated ground in the region west of Brisbane. With nowhere to go, the water formed intense flash floods that ripped through the Lockyer Valley. The water then drains east, pushing several rivers past major flood stage, and eventually ends up in the sea.

So many people in Brisbane are living on a flood plain without flood insurance or proper development controls in low lying areas. They are sitting ducks. How did this happen? This looks to be a failure of local and state government.

Update3
Hedley Thomas in Alarming report on Brisbane River risks covered up in The Australian informs us of what happened in Brisbane with development in low lying areas. He says:

A secret report by scientific and engineering experts warned of significantly greater risks of vast destruction from Brisbane River flooding - and raised grave concerns with the Queensland government and the city's council a decade ago.But the recommendations in the report for radical changes in planning strategy, emergency plans and transparency about the true flood levels for Brisbane were rejected and the report was covered up.

That report was the comprehensive 1999 Brisbane River Flood Study. The Brisbane City Council adopted a "no change, maintain status quo" strategy -- despite its expert review advising that such a strategy was "poor".

Tim Wimborne, Brisbane River water front Reuters, 2011

Thomas says:

the council had permitted the development of thousands of properties whose owners were led to believe they would be out of harm's way in a flood on the scale of 1974....In the debate that followed its leaking it emerged that misplaced faith by governments and residents in the flood mitigation potential of Wivenhoe Dam played into the hands of property developers, who were profitably turning low-lying swaths of Brisbane into expensive housing.

Campbell Newman, the current Mayor, campaigned against the Labor Council's secrecy over the flood study and he radically overhauled policies to warn the public of the severe risk of another major Brisbane River flood. But the developments had already happened.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:10 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

junk food + shock advertising

In his Fight against fat: when advertising goes bad at the ABC's Unleashed Paul Harrison makes two good points about attempts to address the obesity problem in Australia. The cost of obesity in Australia is estimated at $8.3 billion a year and will be a major cause of rising health expenditure in the next 20 years. This means less for schools, education, transport and welfare.

A major proportion of the current generation may not live as long as their parents. And while they survive, they will create a heavier cost burden on society through medications, surgery, consultations and lost productivity.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Hungry Jack's, 2010

Harrison's first point is that we are eating nearly 25 per cent more processed food (high fat, high sugar, and high salt) but have not really changed our activity levels. The second point relates to the advertising designed to shock Australians into giving up junk food and sugary soft drinks. The strategy is is to:

Frighten the masses. Give 'em the facts. Change their behaviour...But shock advertising, on its own, is unlikely to have the desired effect of getting people to stop eating junk food and eating more healthily... ads that were designed to trigger guilt amongst the target market actually triggered a defensive processing mechanism ... However, the bigger problem in relation to obesity, and the more difficult one to counter, has been the growing sophistication of all facets of marketing to create an environment where highly processed and energy dense food is easily available to those living in developed countries.

Shock advertising can work, but it has to be more than a couple of scary images, followed by an educational message. What is required is a change in our behavior.

Harrison adds that:

Over the past 30 years, consumers have been encouraged to eat more through highly sophisticated marketing activities, which includes supply chain management allowing easy access to convenience and processed food, lower pricing, including better "value" and longer perishability of processed foods, as well as integrated marketing campaigns that encourage consumers to purchase and consume foods that provide a high fat, high sugar, and high salt "hit".

I guess that people kinda know the problem and they are uncomfortable with being overweight and obese, but they find it difficult to address the problem through changing their diet and increasing their exercise. Radical changes are required in everyday life. It is at this point that people need help.

There is a lot of content buried in "policy interventions" and "change programs". What does that mean over and above industry self-regulation on big food issues such as trans fats and labelling? Does it mean subsidizing fitness memberships should be seriously because diet alone will provide limited results? Medicalizing the problem may seem counterproductive to public health officials; but it it forces us to realize the complexity of obesity and appreciate that it is not solely based on individual behavior.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:55 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

January 10, 2011

Sarah Palin's political rhetoric

American history is littered with examples of people pulling out a gun in politics. It appears normal. The baseline level of gun murder is high in the US. Arizona’s gun laws stand out as among the most permissive in the country.

Jared Loughner's shooting of Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, along with 17 others including U.S. District Court Judge John Roll and a 9-year-old child in Tucson Arizona, is just the latest.

Arizona has one of the most active Tea Party movements of any state in the US and it has become a haven for the radical right. When President Obama took office Arizona's anti-immigrant right fused with extreme elements of the religious right under the Tea Party banner. In Tea party in the Sonora: For the future of G.O.P. governance, look to Arizona in Harpers Ken Silverstein says:

there is, in fact, one place where the results of Tea Party governance has already been tested: Arizona, where the Tea Party is arguably the ruling party. Less driven by issues of national security, on the one hand, or moral values on the other, Arizonan conservatives are largely obsessed with taxes and immigration—also the twin fixations of Tea Partiers, who, like Arizonans, are disproportionately white and older.

No government is their political philosophy and the solution to an economic crisis is to cut taxes and public services including mental health ones. Republicans control f both the Legislature and the governor’s office and the state government faces bankruptcy.

The Arizona shooting raises the issues of fiery political rhetoric and political violence. Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement's rhetoric is filled with battle imagery. It is constantly about attack, conflict, combat, "enemy territory", "Big Guns", battle----"Don't retreat, reload" says Palin.

The language of war ---armed revolution ---has become an integral part of the language of politics on the American Right. The paranoid and conspiratorial style of politics is much more mainstream, especially with Beck and Fox News, than it is on the left.

There is an undercurrent of virulence and anger and violence in American politics. As George Packer in The New Yorker observes:

for the past two years, many conservative leaders, activists, and media figures have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents. Not just arguing against their opponents, but doing everything possible to turn them into enemies of the country and cast them out beyond the pale. Instead of “soft on defense,” one routinely hears the words “treason” and “traitor.” The President isn't a big-government liberal—he's a socialist who wants to impose tyranny. He's also, according to a minority of Republicans, including elected officials, an impostor.

The relentlessly hostile rhetoric structured around anger, hatred, and division is the new normal. An example of violent political discourse through the use of overblown imagery and over-heated rhetoric.

Paul Krugman makes an interesting point:

You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.

There is an enormous tide of frustration is fueling American politics coupled to the emergence of a political culture — on blogs and Twitter and cable television — that so loudly and readily reinforces the dark visions of political extremists, often for profit or political gain.

If politics is warfare, then people will die. Jared Lee Loughner’s killing spree has rekindled a long-running debate about political discourse in the United States. The American Right does have a rhetoric problem. During the last election their rhetoric was that they were "patriots" who where "resisting" "tyranny" in the spirit of past American freedom fighters.Their consistent narrative was of the potential necessity of violent revolution against a government that was not merely going the wrong direction, but actively trying to forcibly oppress them.

Do they believe their own violent war rhetoric, or do they think that politics is just a game and what they say is nonsense?

Update
After nearly a week of silence and waves of bad press about her violent rhetoric Sarah Palin responds to the critics of her political rhetoric -- and it's a defiant response:

The text is here, and is the core paragraph is:

Vigorous and spirited public debates during elections are among our most cherished traditions. And after the election, we shake hands and get back to work, and often both sides find common ground back in D.C. and elsewhere. If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country, you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

The critics of her political rhetoric --ie., media and pundits-- "manufacture a blood libel". That reaches back to the Nazis or the Christian medieval anti-Semites. It is a false accusation based on fear and ignorance that Jews murder children to use their blood in religious rituals. Gabrielle Gifford is Arizona's first Jewish congresswoman.

That inflammatory phrase---meaning 'I'm a victim of a blood libel'--- speaks to the Republican base and is designed to further increase the polarization in a divided nation. The interpretation by the base is that Palin is falsely accused. Palin---the self-described "pit bull in lipstick"--- has put her own sense of victimhood front and center. She is a victim of hate not the speaker of hate, and she is "reloading " on her enemies for the criticism of her political rhetoric.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:30 AM | Comments (25) | TrackBack

overseas online shopping is "un-Australian"!

I've been watching the big retailers (Myer, David Jones, Harvey Norman and Borders) publicity campaign against those of us who shop online overseas instead of buying from the local retailer. Their campaign---its all about the jobs being lost--- suggests that the difference is the lack of GST on overseas goods under $1000. They are pressuring the Gillard Government to axe the GST-free threshold on imports under $1000.

Yet this only affects about 3 per cent of retail spending. The real issue is poor service, lack of choice and double the prices, if not more, on imported goods. It is cheaper to buy Japanese camera gear or film online from the US than either online or in-store in Australia:

Digital capitalism is going to effect the retail industry in the same way that it has the music industry, Hollywood, and the newspaper industry--a major transformation. That means they can no longer get away with double the price when the Australian and American dollar are at parity. Why should we pay double the price?

The global economy is here to stay and it will grow. That means the retailers profit margins are going to be reduced and they need to offer an online store if they want to grow their business. Australian consumers have wised up to the price gouging that has gone on for decades--they have become informed. It is the retailers who are living in a time warp.

Update
Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase "creative destruction" to describe the process of churn whereby old companies, technologies, and industries die, to be replaced by new ones. Border's for instance, is an American firm that has never really successfully transitioned to digital, leaving it with a lot of physical inventory and real estate assets in the US that are rapidly becoming albatrosses with declining sales.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:01 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

January 9, 2011

universities + the neo-liberal state

In The Grim Threat to British Universities in The New York Review of Books Simon Head describes the neo-liberal mode of governance of higher education in the UK:

From the late 1980s onward the system has been fostered by both Conservative and Labour governments, reflecting a consensus among the political parties that, to provide value for the taxpayer, the academy must deliver its research “output” with a speed and reliability resembling that of the corporate world and also deliver research that will somehow be useful to the British public and private sectors, strengthening the latter’s performance in the global marketplace. Governments in Britain can act this way because all British universities but one—the University of Buckingham—depend heavily on the state for their funds for research, and so are in a poor position to insist on their right to determine their own research priorities.

This description also applies to Australia---the intervention of the neo-liberal state in the management of academic research has created a bureaucracy of command and control that links the UK Treasury, at the top, all the way down to the scholars at the base—researchers working away in libraries, archives, and laboratories. The system has markedly shifted the balance of power in British universities from academics to managers.

Head says that the imposition of the corporate model restructures academic work:

by treating the universities as if they were the research division of Great Britain Inc., the UK government and HEFCE have relegated the scholar to the lower echelons of a corporate hierarchy, surrounding him or her with hoards of managerial busybodies bristling with benchmarks, incentives, and penalties.

On the teaching side we have the emergence of a flexible, low-cost workforce that can be hired and fired at will, that can be made to work longer or shorter hours as the market dictates, and that is in a poor position to demand higher pay.

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January 8, 2011

The Australian's hypocrisy

An editorial in The Australian---The great power of Adam Smith's invisible mouse--- celebrates digital capitalism in no uncertain terms:

We live in an age where the internet provides a marketplace that is the nearest thing yet to a classical economist's utopia, the perfect market where individuals have perfect information and where there is perfect competition available with a click of a computer mouse. It is a time where new and nimble entrepreneurs can compete with, and beat, enormous organisations that have dominated markets for decades. It is an era where entrepreneurs create new uses for digital devices that their inventors did not envisage. Most important, we live in an epoch when capitalism is doing what Adam Smith understood in the 18th century it one day would: improving the lives of ordinary people by providing them with the power to buy the best products at the most competitive possible prices. One of the enduring criticisms of classical economics is that consumers have never had all the information they needed to make rational decisions -- they do now.

So why has The Australian done all it can to attack the Gillard Government for building the national broadband network infrastructure? Why oppose the infrastructure that would enable ordinary people to buy the best products at the most competitive possible prices?

Why is it silent about the News of the World's systematic phone hacking in the UK. After all News of the World is owned by News Corp. Imagine the response by Murdoch's papers if the BBC or the ABC had routinely engaged in phone hacking "persons of interest".

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January 7, 2011

Republican Attack Machine

Fox News commentators are enthusiastic about the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The Republicans are fired up with fundamentalist anger, and many of the new ones are and unashamedly in the employ of corporate America. The task the Republicannsa have set themselves is to pull down to pull up the major planks of the Obama's legislative agenda.

Martin Rowson

The Democrats will be forced into protection mode whilst the Republicans talk about cutting taxes without having to make up for the lost government revenue in spending cuts. That will increase the budget deficit. So much for the Republican rhetoric about vowing to reduce the deficit, slash government spending, and balance the budget.

The Republicans are double talking as they are also saying that Americans would not stand for any further increases in the debt limit by the Democrats unless they saw decisive spending cuts.They are hypocrites because under George Bush the Republicans had abandoned any pretense of fiscal sanity, and were throwing everything they could -- wars, Medicare expansion, tax cuts, No Child Left Behind -- on the national charge card for future generations to worry about. Bush's voodoo economics added $5 trillion to the debt in just eight years.

I guess the Republicans could propose to privatize the government bureaucracy in order to slash government spending. The country is currently experiencing its worst economic downturn in 70 years with more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or having given up looking for work altogether as the Republicans launch their attack to cut entitlements on Social Security and Medicare even though they ran ads during the election campaign slamming the Democrats for cutting Medicare to reduce the deficit.

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January 6, 2011

Big Ag: delay water reforms

Big Ag has found another reason to block water reform in the Murray-Darling Basin. National Farmers Federation president Jock Laurie says that the enormous volume of water flowing into the system from the Queensland rains buys the government time to sit back and make sure they get this right.

Getting it right for Big Ag and its political allies -eg., Senator Barnaby Joyce and the Nationals ---means ensuring precedence is not given to the environment over the needs of rural communities and food producers. Decoded that means stopping the reform process to reduce the over allocations that continue to benefit Big Ag. How will they argue? That recent flood events indicates that there is enough water in the basin for everyone?

That reform process, as outlined in the Murray-Darling Basin Authority's (MDBA) recently released guide, recommends buying back 3000-4000 gigalitres of water from the allocations of farm irrigators - or up to 37 per cent of entitlements - in an effort to protect the ecological health of the basin that has been devastated by low to no river flows.

The rhetoric is that the Guide's one option of taking back water is currently a plan which risks the future of river, farms and people. The Greens and their talk of environmental sustainability are the enemy. There is no need for any cuts to irrigation use as the capital cities such as Melbourne and Adelaide can reduce their use of River Murray water. It is senseless to have water flowing out to sea when Big Ag can use it to make profits from agricultural exports.

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January 5, 2011

US politics: Obama on the ropes?

In Where Do We Go from Here? in the New York Review of Books Paul Krugman and Robin Wells respond to the 2010 Congressional elections in which the Democrats were trounced and the Republicans gained control of the House and have effective blocking power in the Senate. They ask:

Was this disaster caused by reactions to the awful economy—an economy that Obama believes he saved, but not sufficiently to please voters? Or was it, as the Republicans believe, a repudiation of Obama and all that he and Nancy Pelosi stand for?

They respond by saying that there’s a lot of evidence to support the idea that the results were mainly attributable to the economy, then add:

even if it was the economy, there’s no guarantee that 2012 will be any better. The economy may not improve—in part because the new Republican House majority will oppose any policy that might make things better. And the Obama administration has consistently made the worst politically of a bad economy, overpromising, underdelivering, and seemingly going out of its way to alienate those who should be its supporters.

If a tough, skillful political team might be able to win even in the face of such economic weakness, then the Obama team has demonstrated neither toughness nor skill. So the odds are not good for a startling political comeback.

The Republican policymakers see increasing economic hardship as the path to election glory in November and it is extremely unlikely that Democrats can undertake any further fiscal stimulus. Krugman and Wells say that:

the Democrats can put Republicans on the spot, resisting calls for austerity and making the case, repeatedly, that the GOP is standing in the way of necessary action. The fight over renewal of unemployment benefits should be only the start. Democrats can also denounce Republican attacks on the Federal Reserve and defend the Fed’s independence. They can resist attempts to turn back health care reform, on both humanitarian and long-term budgeting grounds, as health care reform is the critical factor in reining in the long-term budget deficit.

They add that Democrats can also force the Republican agenda into the open. On issue after issue, the public favors what is in fact the Democratic position over what is in fact the Republican position—but Democrats gain little from this preference, because voters don’t know what either party actually stands for.

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January 4, 2011

Facebook + social networks

Social network sites such as Facebook rely almost entirely on users posting personal information that is then shared with a network of “friends” through newsfeed stories. They have adopted new techniques to facilitate unpaid content production and publishing for users--the processes of content production and publication are simplified at the level of the user interface, which comprises the ’symbolic handles’ such as buttons, text box, scrolling devices, etc. Our cultural discourse is shifting from printed pages to networked screens.

Wall Street---ie., Goldman Sachs--- reckons Facebook, the social networking site, is hot. The company is valued at $50 billion, making Facebook now worth more than companies like eBay, Yahoo and Time Warner. Facebook is now flush with cash.

Web 2.0 has come of age --- we now inhabit digital networks of the networked information economy. These Web 2.0 spaces--Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and MySpace-- are increasingly being commercialised by Facebook + Google. In fact the open-source movement has been incorporated into a capitalist digital economy.

Establishing a new – and free – Facebook account lays the ground work for the growth of one’s social network. In exchange for this service, Facebook reserves the right to use information provided about users – who they are friends with, what their preferences are, what they read or consult – in order to share such information with third parties. YouTube likewise relies on freely and voluntarily produced videos to attract people and sell audiences to the advertising industry, among other marketing techniques, such as promoting partners’ videos.

The economic model of ‘Web 2.0′ is based on promoting the desire to share and exchange things, an attempt to make profits from the voluntary collaboration of its users and its potential for compiling data and making them available to the public.

However, the corporate colonization arguments do not provide an entirely adequate model for understanding Web 2.0., since commercial Web 2.0 spaces such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are important sites of cultural exchange and discussion. They have become more than a nerd's world, as the virtual has become the everyday.

In Generation Why? in the New York Review of Books Zadie Smith says:

Or maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous. For all these reasons I quit Facebook about two months after I’d joined it. As with all seriously addictive things, giving up proved to be immeasurably harder than starting. I kept changing my mind: Facebook remains the greatest distraction from work I’ve ever had, and I loved it for that. I think a lot of people love it for that.

Web 2.0 is like a black hole. We are "locked in" the software which shapes our conduct.

Smith, who is reviewing David Fincher's film The Social Network argues that:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

Smith yearns for a world of a private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and—which is more important—to herself. Person as mystery with a rich interior. So we should struggle against Facebook's denuded networked selves.

Surely our profile on Facebook is a public mask--one that is socially constructed by the technocultural dynamics present through the software platform and the user generated content of human actors. We are developing complex digital identities (remixing?), and we are more than subjects online.

We can argue this without embracing Smith's person as mystery position.

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January 3, 2011

Detroit: left to die?

American capitalism is a strange system when Detroit, the centre of a once-thriving metropolis in the most powerful nation on earth, becomes a ghost town of decaying buildings and streets. Detroit, the industrial capital of the 20th Century, which played a fundamental role shaping the modern world, has been left to die.

Yves Marchand+Romain Meffre, St Christopher House, ex-Public Library, from The ruins of Detroit

This decline of a major American city, is also the decline of the American Dream into some kind of post-apocalyptic present: a city of urban ruins resulting from the collapse of the automobile industry into bankruptcy. What exists are the remnants of the passing of an empire.

Thomas J Sugrue, who provides the introductory essay to The ruins of Detroit, says:

The abandoned factories, the eerily vacant schools, the rotting houses, and gutted skyscrapers that Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre chronicle are the artefacts of Detroit's astonishing rise as a global capital of capitalism and its even more extraordinary descent into ruin, a place where the boundaries between the American dream and the American nightmare, between prosperity and poverty, between the permanent and the ephemeral are powerfully and painfully visible. No place epitomises the creative and destructive forces of modernity more than Detroit, past and present.

Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension.

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January 2, 2011

austerity politics

The politics of austerity in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and recession leading to a new round of cutting expenditures policies that will almost surely lead to weaker national and global economies and a marked slowdown in the pace of recovery. This austerity also involves stripping away ihe safety net for people (the welfare state), whilst strengthening the safety net for firm (corporate welfare).

The aim of austerity politics is to benefit those at the top, or the corporate and other special interests that have come to dominate the policymaking of liberal democracies.

Martin Rowson Pied Piper

As Jeffrey D. Sachs points out in the US this slashing of public spending in order to begin reducing the deficit by the Republican Party leaves defence spending untouched.They don't even want to reduce spending by ending the useless war in Afghanistan

He says:

The US budget deficit is enormous and unsustainable. The poor are squeezed by cuts in social programs and a weak job market. One in eight Americans depends on Food Stamps to eat. Yet, despite these circumstances, one political party wants to gut tax revenues altogether, and the other is easily dragged along, against its better instincts, out of concern for keeping its rich contributors happy.

What is not on the agenda is closing the budget deficit in part by raising taxes on the rich. The Republicans are out to prevent that by any means.

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January 1, 2011

The Australian: contradications

This is a visual representation of The Australian's picture of the Gillard Government. What is surprising is that the national broadband network is missing from the cartoon. This is surprising, given that the NBN is central to the Gillard Government's understanding of national politics and that 2010 was the year of the NBN.

No matter. The editorial---A New Year wish: more digital visionaries---plugs the hole. It acknowledges that the internet/digital revolution is transforming the economy, that this revolution will affect the jobs and economic wellbeing of Australians, that digital technology destroys and creates, and that this carries huge economic potential as well as challenge.

It argues that instead of the Government trying to protect us from the forces of globalisation the job of government is to put the macro settings in place to give business the flexibility to respond to rapid change.The market will determine the direction.

Then the hammer comes:

The $35 billion NBN is seen by Labor as "important infrastructure" that "will change our way of life", yet it is being rolled out without proof that it will improve productivity. The government touts the health and education services to be delivered by the NBN, but the project is not commercially viable and it is far from certain that it will generate the new businesses its advocates claim. Labor has put all its policy eggs in the NBN basket, but it is at best a risky response to such a huge challenge. Australia needs more digital visionaries, not cable-laying nerds, to truly exploit the digital revolution. We need broad thinkers, not just more broadband.

Surely it is up to business and the market entrepreneurs to respond to the disruption of the media industry with innovation---new entrants offering a mix of telephony, broadband and video services? After all, that Hayekian idea is a central meme of The Australian's conception of a market society, despite it's determined attempts to try to block the building of the NBN.

In The Australian's own words "the job of government is to put the macro settings in place to give business the flexibility to respond to rapid change." This is a central tenet of The Australian's defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against what it claims are the horrors of socialist and collectivist thought that lead us to the road to serfdom as sure as night follows day. In Hayek's view:

the role of government should be limited to ensuring that markets work, and to providing a parsimonious level of welfare. Governments which intervene in markets are heading down what Hayek described as the slippery slope of totalitarianism, for the only freedom worthy of the name is market freedom. The only institution to be quarantined from the market is the family, though Hayek gives no justification for this view and his definition of ‘family' is confined to a small group separated from the wider world. When we step outside the white picket fence we leave behind values such as compassion, friendship and solidarity. All transactions are market transactions; there is no point in doing anything for anyone else, unless it's part of a market exchange.

So it is the entrepreneurs in the self-regulating market who are the visionaries. Entrepreneurs are often at the forefront of innovation. They possess a unique set of skills that lends itself to inspired invention and driven change. Innovation is the driving force of capitalism and economic growth and entrepreneurs are the heroes of capitalism.

Consequently, the finger can be pointed at The Australian for its lack of vision. But The Australian is not noted for self-criticism is it.

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