« December 2011 | Main | February 2012 »
January 31, 2012
sacrifice, and more sacrifice
Giovanni Tiso, who runs the Bat Bean Beam weblog, has an interesting article in Overland entitled Europe’s perfect ruins. In it he addresses the neo-liberal narrative of the Euro sovereign debt crisis.
Tiso says that this narrative pits:
the profligate south versus the hard-working, virtuous, nose-to-the-grindstone north...the brutal austerity measures enacted in Portugal, Greece and Ireland (and, to a lesser extent so far, Spain and Italy) are a fitting punishment. The sin of profligacy, of living beyond one’s means, needs to be castigated: .. if [Greece] were relieved painlessly of its debt, then other economies in similar strife would have no incentive to cut expenditure and improve their fiscal position.
So Greece, and Italy, are forced adopt draconian measures that increased unemployment while benefits, services and public sector salaries were slashed in exchange for some relief for its creditors. If every country were as industrious and hard-working as Germany, then the entire euro- system could sustain itself indefinitely along a virtuous and prosperous path.
The flaw with this narrative says Tiso is the lack of automatic internal balancing mechanisms within the economic and monetary union.
As economist Michael Burke, and others, have noted, a region undergoing economic problems within a nation state, even a federated one, would automatically pay less tax on its reduced income and receive a larger slice of the overall state revenue in the form of increased social services and benefits. But the eurozone has no such facilities, leaving governments hit by the crisis powerless and their populations exposed to the repercussions.Apparently the architects of the monetary union, aware that no governance provisions had been made to enable the centralised political control of fiscal policy necessary in a crisis, rested their hopes on an expectation that such provisions would be created in response to a crisis.
The response to the crisis is that the core economies possessing the money for a bailout (ie. France and Germany) are free to dictate its conditions without being subject to a union-wide democratic process. The real enforcers of the draconian measures that policy-makers advocate are the financial markets.
For Italy or Greece to service their large debt requires a sufficient pool of creditors who trust in your capacity to keep up with the repayments. If the pool shrinks, the interest rates go up and lo!, suddenly you find that you really can’t pay back the money. Loss of confidence. Another round of austerity measures is required. More sacrifice to prevent the interest rates from climbing to 7% levels on its bonds, which would put Italy and Greece on the brink of bankruptcy.
More sacrifice is required for those on mid to low incomes: doing without modern hospitals, having to work longer, abolishing the indexation of pensions; less protection from arbitrary dismissal; tax on home ownership; increase in value-added tax. If interest rates on the bonds climb, then that means the financial markets have judged the austerity measures are not harsh enough.
The problem with the austerity measures is that it leads in the short and medium terms to shrinking output, less government revenue and therefore debt burdens that become unsustainable. That increases the probability of governments defaulting, thus threatening the solvency of banks across Europe.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:19 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
January 30, 2012
storm in a teacup
Ho hum. Another media beatup by the Canberra Media Gallery with the headlines of "Australia's day of disgrace" or commentary about a blight on our national day.
This beatup amplifies the Coalition's attack about a former staff member's (Tony Hodges) role in informing the tent embassy protesters via the intermediary of the ACT union leader Kim Sattler about Tony Abbott's whereabouts at The Lobby restaurant on Australia Day. Oh, and what Abbott said about the time of Aboriginal tent embassy being up. There's no evidence of a criminal act by Hodges, the AFP is not conducting an investigation, and Hodges has resigned.
The Coalition's outrage with its rhetoric of riots, mobs inflamed, greatest breach of security ever, thuggish violence etc is designed to undermine Gillard's political credibility. Their political framing is that it is all Gillard's fault etc , etc. It's just part of the warfare game of politics. It looks as if 2012 will be the same as 2011. The Canberra Media Gallery follows along, jazzing up a minor event.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra, circa 2006.
The Australia Day events are a media beatup because the AAP reported (1.35pm on Thursday) that ''Tony Abbott says it's time to move the Aboriginal tent embassy in Canberra''. Yet the media isn't critical about the right wing's media practices in heating up the political atmosphere, or the dog whistle about the riots being incited by the PM's office, or their simplistic and cartoonish representations. The Canberra media Gallery's narrative is one of Gillard leading the Labor government to extinction and they simply frame the pub gossip about a minor event in terms of 'will Gillard survive 2012'? Or when will Rudd challenge?
One infers from the media construction of a 'riot' by a 'mob' that was 'violent' that we have a media fabrication before us. The media now see it as their job to heat things up, deepen the party political divisions, and launch attacks on aboriginal activists. The cultural wars continue.
Underneath this political hothouse runs the thread of those who identify with settler Australia. They continu to justify the dispossession of indigenous Australians from their land by Britain, the colonization, applying English law to aborigines, and the decades of neglect. They continue to defend settler Australia against the black armband interpretation of Australian history.
What is obscured by the media beat-up is the pressing issue of Aboriginal people moving from welfare dependence (with its associated deeply entrenched destructive behaviour that tolerates excessive alcohol abuse, domestic violence and school absenteeism) to take part in the market economy.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:26 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
January 26, 2012
Australia Day nationalism
At the street level at Victor Harbor the flag waving celebration of Australia Day is pretty close to being one big barbie and drinks with friends and family. The flags flying on Australia Day were more noticeable this year than last year. They were on cars, on flagpoles, draped over balconies and on t-shirts. I saw a young woman sporting an Australian flag bikini on the beach. The shops were selling all kinds of flag-emblazoned merchandise, that more often that not, were made in China. Attached to some flags was the slogan: “Love It Or Leave It.”
Is this nationalism----a love of country--- a counter to the triumph of global markets: a way of adapting to, and living with global capitalism? A re-assertion of the nation-state? A pride in being Australian? It's a puzzle since the Australian flag has a Union Jack in the top left corner. That signifies the country’s colonial status.
It's also a puzzle because January 26 is an odd day to celebrate a National Day--belonging to the nation with which we identify--- since it is the day of the arrival of the first fleet and therefore the establishment of the colony of NSW—what meaning does that have for Victorians or South Australians? Or West Australians? Or Tasmanians? How do they respond to 'love it or leave it'.
Australia Day is less about a date and more about national unity, national identity, and belonging. In nationalistic rhetoric the nation is often represented as living within a specific natural territory that has nurtured its people which in turn have gained special national characteristics from living off the land.
Often this understanding of love for country is coupled with the assertion that there are “real Australians,” as opposed to others who are held to be driving the country into a ditch. We could call this a Tea Party nationalism, as it is an ethnic based nationalism that excludes those deemed not to be ‘real Australians’.
Groups tend to define themselves not by reference to their own characteristics but by exclusion, that is, by comparison to “strangers.” The exclusion of the other in Australia has historically fractured along racist lines. This maybe a minority view, but its there, and it constantly surfaces around Aboriginal-Australians, Muslim-Australians and asylum seekers.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:24 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
January 25, 2012
energy politics
In Will the next GFC turn out Vic lights? Andrew Herington at Climate Spectator highlights the risk of stranded assets amongst the coal-fired power generator companies in Victoria:
In 2010 it was reported that the Latrobe Valley generators had a combined $9 billion in debt to be rolled over by 2015. Some power companies may already be close to insolvency, facing massive asset write downs on their power stations – in particular, Morwell, Hazelwood, Yallourn W and even Loy Yang A and B. The stark reality of the new carbon pricing regime is that, despite free credits being available in the early years, the viability of long-term operations will be closely scrutinised in 2012 as companies struggle with massive refinancing costs.
The context for this massive challenge on debt re-financing is the deregulation and privatisation of Victoria’s electricity industry, the emergence of world-wide banking credit crisis from events in Europe, and the declining quality of existing infrastructure – our 40-50 year-old coal-fired power stations have basically passed their use-by date.
This context highlights the struggle for control over this basic form of energy, which many have traditionally seen as an essential public service.
You can see why the powerful vested interests associated with the coal industry are fighting to prevent both the emergence of renewable energy technologies --solar and wind-- and increased energy efficiency. They have succeeded in ensuring that the carbon price,is too low for at least a decade to assist significantly in building the market for large-scale solar power.
The reason Australia has such a piecemeal and ineffective set of solar policies is the immense political power of Australia’s big greenhouse polluters--- the coal industry. This is an industry that receives huge continuing subsidies to the production and use of fossil fuels yet opposes subsidies to renewable sources of energy associated with the federal Renewable Energy Target and the remaining state-based feed-in tariffs.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 24, 2012
'War on the Internet' event: - Bernard Keane
The War on the Internet event, which was co-hosted by EFA and the Australian Greens, was held at Trades Hall in Melbourne on 21st January 2012. It featured:
Jacob Applebaum - leading computer security researcher and hacker
Bernard Keane - 'Crikey' journalist and author
Scott Ludlam - Senator for Western Australia and Greens spokesperson for Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy
Suelette Dreyfus - author and researcher on whistleblowing
This is a video of the talk by Bernard Keane:
War on the Internet event #1 - Bernard Keane from Electronic Frontiers Australia on Vimeo.
Keane's argument is about the conflict between the internet's interconnectedness and community and the hierarchy of corporations and governments. The latter respond to the challenges thrown up by the former with greater surveillance of internet communities and attacks on the flow of information. In the Australian context we have seen extra powers being given to ASIO in the Cyber Crime bill.
Keane has written e-book entitled The War on the Internet, which charts how the internet wars are impacting people online and examines the impact it is having on individuals, corporations, governments and democracy.
It chronicles the wave of attacks being launched by governments the world over on both the internet and its users. His taxonomy is: those by illegitimate regimes trying to protect themselves, those mounted in the name of national security, those mounted by or at the behest of powerful gatekeepers to protect old business models, and those aimed at cultural engineering.
The talk by Suelette Dreyfus about the surveillance society is here.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 23, 2012
backsliding on pokies reform
Pokies reform has ground to a slow grind. Andrew Wilkie did not have the numbers in the House of Representatives and the NSW backbench of the Labor Party was scared off by the campaign run by Clubs Australia against mandatory pre-commitment. It's another indication of the lack of political courage given the public support for pokies reform.
What we have is a delayed introduction to mandatory pre-commitment, slipping out to 2016, and only after a "full trial" of the measures in Canberra and the Australian Capital Territory from February 2013.
Mandatory pre-commitment has already been trialled in South Australia, in Queensland and in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia (see the Productivity Commission). These showed a significant number of gamers used the pre-commitment schemes to monitor and limit their daily expenditure. That means reduced income for the clubs.
Malcolm Farnsworth in Poker machine doublespeak at The Drum says that it was an expedient exercise in placating the powerful clubs industry, especially in New South Wales and Queensland:
the Government is utterly disingenuous about what's really going on.Clubs Australia has got its way again. Gillard has caved into its pressure just as surely as she rolled over for the mining industry when she watered down the mining tax.She has also caved into pressure from nervous members of the ALP caucus. As in so many other areas, the Government is incapable of fighting back in support of its policy positions. They prefer appeasement.
He states that the Gillard Labor Government couldn't even follow through on Gilllard written agreement with Wilkie and put the proposal to an up or down vote in the House. The numbers aren't there, Gillard says, but they ought to have fought for the reform.
I appreciate that the Gillard Govt is currently blamed for everything that happens or doesn't happen, but the ALP right wing power brokers, by cutting Wilkie loose in this way, will reinforce the negative perception fostered by the Coalition that this represents another broken promise. They opposition have a track record of successfully mining the vein of trust and conviction and the ALP continues to feed them.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:50 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
January 22, 2012
Republicans divided
Three different candidates have won the opening three contests in the Republican presidential primaries highlighting the fractured nature of the Republican party in 2012. With Santorum winning Iowa, Romney New Hampshire and Gingrich South Carolina, the battle now moves to Florida.
Although Romney has a double-digit poll lead in Florida, it may turn out that the selection process shapes up as a Romney-Gingrich battle set to be fought state by state, month by month. That would be media heaven.
We can wave Rick Santorum goodbye in the near future. He is almost broke so cannot fund an expensive ad campaign in Florida, and there is less support in the state for his brand of social conservatism popular with Christian evangelicals. Romney now faces a troubling reality: He’s lost two of the first three contests, with his only victory coming in what is essentially his home state.
Maybe the Florida result won’t prove much at all. The South Carolina primary firmly establishes the GOP contest as a two-man race, with the Tea Party wing of the party largely uniting around Gingrich and everyone else siding with Romney. Will the GOP’s noise machine respond to Gingrich’s win Saturday night with panic?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 21, 2012
a global economy
Australia is part of the global economy. Quarry Australia, for instance, is dependent on Chinese demand for raw materials for its economic growth and it has to live with Chinese forms investing in Australia's digital economy. Though Australians are happy to invest in property overseas--the cottage in southern France--they are uneasy about Asians buying property in Australia--despite the existence of Chinatown in most state capitols.
If we dig a little deeper we uncover the bedrock of racism: it's okay for Americans to buy the farm but not the Chinese embodied in the Spooner cartoon. This refers back to the colonial past before Federation in 1901 with Frederick McCubbin's Down on His Luck (1889), which depicts an unlucky gold prospector contemplating his future as he sits by a small campfire in the Australian bush. The gold prospector stands for the national character.
This was at a time when most miners worked for the big companies that increasingly controlled the mining industry, rather than for themselves, and secondly Chinese miners were not welcome in the Australian goldfields.
Many Chinese miners had initially landed in Robe, in South Australia and then made the long trek on foot to the goldfields of Victoria or New South Wales. Unlike the majority of immigrants who came seeking their fortune on the goldfields, the Chinese were greeted with fear and suspicion from the white miners.
Chinese miners were frequently harassed and attacked, but this violent resentment came to a head in the Lambing Flat Riots of 1861 and the Clunes Riot of 1873. Just after we in 1901 we have the 'White Australia' policy.
The white underpinnings of Australian nationalism runs deep like an underground river. Until the 1970s, Australian immigration policy ensured that non-white ‘undesirables’ would be prevented from migrating to Australia. It basically constructs a white fortress in an Anglo-American empire.; a construct that surfaces with the conservative's hostility to asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat.
The emergence of multiculturalism in the 1970s meant the construction of a different kind of Australian nationalism that was more open to the world. This openness was reinforced by the emergence of the internet and broadband, which allowed Australians to surf the world and their favourite overseas newspapers online.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:14 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
January 19, 2012
SOPA / PIPA
The US Congress is about to pass what has been called the internet censorship bill, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. The Senate is scheduled to vote on its version of the internet censorship bill on Tuesday, January 24th, and unless there are 41 senators to voice their opposition to allowing the bill to proceed, it is expected to pass.
The Obama White House has come out against it and some Republicans are now starting to come come out against the legislation. There is extensive online protest, some of it innovative.
Legislation called the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House are purported to be a way to crack down on online copyright infringement. In reality the bill is much broader. It would empower governments and corporations to take down virtually any website, create new liabilities and uncertainties for web innovators, and make the web less safe.
According to the varied and multitudinous reasons large numbers of sites and individuals are opposed to the bill, it betrays basic American tenets, such as free speech, prosperity, and national security. On top of all that, cybersecurity experts say it wouldn't stop copyright infringement.
The legislation is backed and largely written by the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) representing the so-called "content" industries – the ones represented by huge multimedia corporations which own movie studios, record labels and publishing houses including Rupert Murdoch who views it as Silicon Valley v Hollywood.
The legislation is another example of the influence of corporate money on American politics and the way that politicians shill for corporate interests in order to ensure a prosperous post-Congress career.
Clay Shirky says that the old media firms in the US dislike our willingness to share things with your friends, and with the world at large:
Sopa/Pipa would allow private companies to assert that a foreign site is "dedicated to theft of US property". Once a US media firm had made such an accusation, they could then black out the domain name of the accused site, so that if a user typed ReallyEvil.co.uk into their browser, nothing would happen (all of this could be based on an accusation: Sopa and Pipa seem to regard the niceties of a trial as an undue burden).
The scary bit of legalese is the idea that the law would apply not just to actual copyright violations (the nominal goal of the law) but to any site that was "facilitating the activities" of copyright infringement, a term nowhere defined but vague enough to include mentioning the existence of such sites, which is enough to make them findable.
A major hosting service (Blogger.com, for example) will contain many thousands of individual blog sites, a few of which may be fostering or practising piracy. But a DNS block would make the entire Blogger.com universe vanish--disappear from the internet by rendering them unfindable. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides other examples. The bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure.
Sopa and Pipa are, quite simply, an attempt to create a privatised form of international censorship. The content industries longstanding control of information and communications is threatened by the user-generated internet. So they aim to create an information monoculture where regimes work with corporations to control what we can read, hear and watch. The Internet will become increasingly 'sterile' and loaded with the agendas of the corporate world whilst voices of dissent become squeezed out.
The backlash against these bills has caused its sponsors to put them on hold. They will be retooled and represented when the opportunity is right.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:16 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
January 18, 2012
goodbye to pokie reform?
The signs are obvious. The Gillard Government is backing away from pokies reform---away from the mandatory pre-commitment scheme for poker machines.
The reason is twofold. First, once the Liberal MP Peter Slipper became the Speaker in the House of Representatives the Gillard Government is no longer dependent on the vote of Andrew Wilkie to remain in power. Secondly, the country independents were not willing to support Wilkies' mandatory pre-commitment scheme.
Andrew Wilkie had demanded that the minority Gillard government force players to set mandatory pre-commitment limits in return for his support for the government, rather than the alternative proposal for maximum bet limits of $1. Labor has dumped that agreement. Reducing the losses of problem gamblers would significantly impact on the profits of the pokies industry.
What is disclosed by the backing away from reform is just how much the ALP has been captured by the gambling industry, and how unwilling it is to address the issue of problem gamblers in a serious fashion. Labor doesn’t care about pokie addiction. No doubt we will hear lots of spin about the benefits of a voluntary pre-commitment system and how counselling really works.
What now? Postpone things to 2016. A fall back to the recommendations of the Productivity Commission's Report? This is a poker machine trial that could push a full reform package (a nationwide mandatory precommitment scheme) out to 2016.
Maybe the states can go it alone on on betting limits. Tasmania is one possibility. It sure won't be NSW because gambling revenue raised $1.7 billion in 2009-10 in that state.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:21 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
January 17, 2012
Reforming Medicare
In his opinion piece----What is wrong with Medicare? ---in the Medical Journal of Australia Tony D Webber argues that the lack of audit control and inability to adapt to change leads to massive waste. He estimates that 2–3 billion dollars are spent inappropriately each year.
One form the waste takes is the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS). This is riddled with misdirected incentives for practitioners, contains items that have not been reviewed despite advances in technology, and has many examples of good public policy thwarted by the MBS rules.
Webber, who is the Director of Professional Services Review that was established to protect the integrity of Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), says that:
In general practice, general practice management plans (GPMPs) and team care arrangements (TCAs) have created opportunities for a bonanza for some practices. Several practitioners I have reported on had admitted that their corporate owner had a business plan based on a defined number of these items claimed every week, irrespective of clinical need. Medicare Australia is also aware that a significant proportion of these plans are not carried out by a patient’s usual doctor’s practice.2 Anecdotally, claiming for clinically unnecessary GPMPs is significant throughout Australia. The policy intent of GPMPs was to provide a higher standard of care for patients with complicated chronic disease. While many doctors use these items appropriately for positive patient outcomes, a proportion of claimed items have added nothing materially to patient care.
Another form of waste that Webber highlights is the Howard government's Medicare Safety Net is one of the most poorly thought-through pieces of health legislation.
Despite its laudable policy intent — to help those with severe and chronic disease afford the cost of modern medical care — its implementation has gaping holes. The open-ended nature of the Safety Net offers the minority of unscrupulous and greedy practitioners opportunities to exploit it. After the Safety Net was introduced, a small group of obstetricians raised their fees for antenatal care from around $3000 to nearly $10 000. Such use of the Safety Net was perfectly legal, thanks to sloppily drafted legislation. During my time as Director of Professional Services Review, the Safety Net was used in effect to subsidise cosmetic procedures such as surgery for “designer vaginas” at $5000–$6000 each.The AMA, in responding to this criticism, accepted that there were some instances of abuse but argued that it was a matter of a few bad apples, common in every occupation, and not a systematic problem that runs through medical practice.
That response ignores a structural flaw in Medicare the GP as gatekeeper with respect to team care arrangements (TCA's). The policy intention was to allow patients with chronic or terminal disease to receive previously unaffordable care to allied health pratictioners (podiatry, physiotherapy, psychology, chiropractic). Unfortunately, the Department of Health and Ageing (DoHA)
developed MBS items that create incentives to easily misuse and work around the MBS requirements, leading to their misuse by a proportion of both medical and allied health practitioners. Some practitioners consciously misuse the MBS occasionally, and some do so regularly. The policy intent could have been achieved by allowing direct referral, without financial incentive to the doctor. This measure alone would have saved the health budget well over a billion dollars over the life of the program. Instead, a monster was created, eroding the integrity of the health budget.
The politics of medicine require that the GP act, and be paid, as the gatekeeper of Medicare.
Another structural flaw in Medicare arises from the changing health problems associated with a changing society. Jim Gillespie says that the Medicare system was designed for a younger society when the problems in the health system revolved around very short episodes of disease. You went to a general practitioner if you had a sniffle or some other minor complaint. And the fee-for-service system works very well with such occasional contacts. Hospitals worked on an entirely separate system that dealt with very serious illness.
Today we are living healthier, longer lives, but an ageing society brings with it a greater burden of chronic disease. Instead of short episodes of illness, ending in death or cure, this growing burden comes from serious and continuing illnesses, such as diabetes, chronic heart disease, and respiratory illnesses. These need continuity of care and management.
The structural flaw is that the Medicare universal insurance system wasn’t designed to encourage continuity of care. Instead, it uses fee-for-service to fragment care into short episodes. Hence the need for reform. But the Australian health system is very hard to reform.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:38 AM | TrackBack
January 16, 2012
Eurozone's troubles deepen
From all accounts the effects of the imposed neoliberal austerity (a purging of the rottenness from the system) has resulted in Greece's economy being in shambles, its society in turmoil, and its finances ruined. Yet more cuts are coming even though a reform process based on a pillar of fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating since the economy shrinks, government revenue falls, and the debt is harder to repay.
Crisis management is the new normal in the EU, but as the EU lacks good mechanisms for crisis management, the European future looks bleak.
Greece is on its knees and its future looks to be one of fiscal bondage and discipline in a world where the economic centre has shift to east Asia-- notably India and China. The EU is now deep in recession and is likely to remain so for some time. Many sovereign states in the EU owe large amounts of debt and are likely unable to pay it all back. They desperately need economic growth but are forced to cut spending, hurting their near-term growth.
Merkel bnd Sarkozy's (or 'Merkozy's' ) austerity policies are imposed through EU summits, and the technocratic European Commission, and the non-European IMF, onto other EU countries. There is little democratic legitimacy in this.
In the Financial Times Wolfgang Munchau says that:
The eurozone itself has fallen into a spiral of downgrades, falling economic output, rising debt and further downgrades ... With each turn of the spiral, the financial and political costs of an effective resolution increase ... We have moved past the point where electorates and their representatives are willing to pay the ever-rising costs of repairing the system...Expectations are changing quickly, and so is the acceptance of a violent ending.
As Paul Krugman observes in his Keynes Was Right European nations like Greece and Ireland, who that have had to impose savage fiscal austerity as a condition for receiving emergency loans, have suffered Depression-level economic slumps, with real G.D.P. in both countries down by double digits.
However, it is unlikely that Keynesian aggregate demand management alone will lead to long-run sustained growth because the economic engines in the EU need a major overhaul to ensure long term growth that emerges from being connected to the economic centre of the global economy.
But its not just an economic crisis in the EU. The failing economic policies are now intertwining with democratic crisis and political fracturing across the EU, as the economic crisis becomes a deep crisis of European Union itself .
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:42 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
January 14, 2012
Politics and Television
What the media industry call "convergence" is all based on the realisation that, since the 1990s, most media – print, audio, video, graphics – have been reduced to the lowest common denominator: bits, the ones and zeroes of binary arithmetic. The TV industry assumed everything would converge on the television set in the living room.
The assumption where was that television industry was shaped in an era when broadcast (few-to-many) organisations were the dominant organizations in our media jungle. During this period electoral success required political parties to buy endless hours of expensive television time for commercials that advertise their virtues and, more often, roundly assail their opponents with often spurious claims. Television ruled and broadcasters shaped our viewing habits, changed our politics and determined how we spent much of our leisure time.
In Politics and Television: How To Level the Field in the blog of the New York Review of Books Max Frankel states in relation to the US that:
It has long been obvious that television ads dominate electioneering in America. Most of those thirty-second ads are glib at best but much of the time they are unfair smears of the opposition. And we all know that those sordid slanders work—the more negative the better—unless they are instantly answered with equally facile and equally expensive rebuttals.
He adds that a rational people looking for fairness in their politics would have long ago demanded that television time be made available at no cost and apportioned equally among rival candidates.
Frankel adds:
But no one expects that any such arrangement is now possible. Political ads are jealously guarded as a major source of income by television stations. And what passes for news on most TV channels gives short shrift to most political campaigns except perhaps to “cover” the advertising combat.
This is another way in which the media has failed citizens in a liberal democracy--it fails to provide comprehensive and serious account of serious news as distinct from infotainment.
An example of this in Australia is how the television industry media grabs represents Tony Abbott in hard hat and yellow vest standing in battler country raging about the carbon tax will destroy the country and ruin us all via the pressures on the cost of living. No attempt is made by the televisual media to unpack the distortions, misrepresentations and lies about carbon pricing. We just have the media grab of Abbott saying Whyalla will be wiped out. They just toss the stories in and wash their hands of the ethics.
The tabloid form of the televisual industry is often the purveyor of misinformation and misrepresentation in their stories (eg., "whipping up a climate of fear of Islam) and it has little interest in self-criticism about its process of dumbing down as its audience fragments across the internet. There any no financial penalties (heavy fines) for lying by regulators in Australia. There ought to be.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 13, 2012
South Australia: a new era?
Mike Rann and Kevin Foley have finally gone after a decade of running South Australia. The achievements of their Labor Government for the state during this period have been mostly buried beneath media spin including all the nonsense about having to maintain the state's Triple A rating. There was so much spin during this period that it came to define the Labor government itself; so much so that it lost credibility and public trust.
Can the Labor Government under Jay Weatherill reinvent itself whilst ensuring that car manufacturing (Holden) stays in SA? The argument for ongoing subsidies and government bailouts to a global car industry is that a manufacturing base prevents Australia from being the quarry for the Asia Pacific.
The car is a big issue in SA politics---and it is not limited to General Motors Holden's plans to pull up stakes. Adelaide is car centric. For instance, the lack of comprehensive, long-term public transport plan for the state means that Adelaide City Council vision of an open, liveable city frequented by bikes, pedestrians and public transport commuters not swamped by slow-moving cars remains just a vision.
Business---ie Rundle Mall--- resist the reduction of on-street parking so as to allow footpaths to be widened and enhance pedestrian activity. Why? Shoppers will be slugged an extra cost to use multistory car parks. So they shop in the suburbs. The overheated rhetoric from the car owners is that a reduction in on-street parking means bleeding consumers dry and closing Adelaide down. The car is sacred.
One of the reasons the car is sacred is because of the low density suburbia built on the urban fringe, thereby forcing people into cars on on our now congested roads.
So I don't expect much to change with the e Labor government apart the style.The most we can expect is competent administration.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:39 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 12, 2012
a radically changing internet
Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It places the nasties of the internet in the middle of his analysis. The nasties are not just porn or spam. It's the viruses. The openness of the net means that as we load new software on our PCs more and more often that software is rogue—harvesting computing cycles from a PC in order to attack others, stealing personal information, steal network bandwidth or simply frying the PC. Then crash--the blue screen of death.
There have been two responses to the worsening security problem on computers to open platforms. The first reaction to the abuses of openness is to try to lock things down--- which Apple first took with the initial iPhone. No outside code at all was allowed on the phone; all the software on it was Apple’s.
The second model is premised on shifting more and more of software our away from our own devices and into the Internet’s “cloud.” Ztittrain says that:
These technologies can let geeky outsiders build upon them just as they could with PCs, but in a highly controlled and contingent way. This is iPhone 2.0: an iPod on steroids, with a thriving market for software written by outsiders that must be approved by and funneled through Apple. It’s also Web 2.0 software-as-service ventures like the Facebook platform and Google Apps, where an application popular one day can be banished the next.
This shift to stable, controlled form is likely the future of computing and networking. It is a wholesale revision to the open or generative Internet and PC environment we’ve experienced for the past thirty years: an environment designed to accept any contribution that followed a basic set of rules (either coded for a particular operating system, or respecting the protocols of the Internet).
Zittrain says that :
It’s important to realize that a cloud-based setup like Google Docs or APIs, or Facebook’s platform offer control similar to that of a managed device like an iPhone or a Kindle. All represent the movement of technology from product to service. Providers of a product have little to say about it after it changes hands. Providers of services are different: they don’t go away, and a choice of one over another can have lingering implications for months and even years.
Apples iPhone 2.0 model runs outside code after approval. Though third-party developers are welcome to write software for the phone, users could only install software on a phone only if it was offered through Apple’s iPhone App Store. Developers were to be accredited by Apple, and each individual app was to be vetted. Apps that emulated or even improved on Apple’s own apps weren’t allowed.
So the the app store provides a rough filter for bad code, and accountability against its makers if something goes wrong even after it’s been approved. It's a gated world as the ability to limit code is what makes for the ability to control content. Tech companies are in the business of approving, one by one, the text, images, and sounds that we are permitted to find and experience on our most common portals to the networked world.
The App Store model has boomeranged back to the PC. There’s now an App Store for the Mac to match that of the iPhone and iPad, and it carries the same battery of restrictions.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 11, 2012
The Republican circus
The Republicans are engaged in using the primaries to sort out who they want to stand against Obama in the 2012 presidential elections. Mitt Romney, their current front runner, isn't liked by the social conservative movement wing at all. Rick (sex cop) Santorium is their man.
However, Mitt Romney will be the nominee against a Democrat president increasingly noted for his cave-ins to regressive Republican brinkmanship, bargaining by obstructionism and normal legislative maneuvering by threats to close down government.
No doubt the Tea Party Republican movement in South Carolina will try to launch an all out assault on Romney with very nasty attack adverts. Romney is potentially vulnerable to the Christian evangelical right as he is a Mormon, a moderate and East Coast establishment. Evangelical Christians are opposed to global warming, evolution and also committed to reducing taxes, reducing the deficit and shrinking the government.
Romney's track record is to jettison previous principles having flip-flopped on healthcare and abortion in order to get votes. The Tea party see this as an example of Romney’s synthetic and calculating persona, the sense that he somehow embodies everything that’s false and impenetrable about the parties in Washington
The Republican political strategy has been to offer red meat to the conservative base (a Southern rural populism that has repeatedly attacked American democracy in order to get its way) to get into power; and once in power, to allow the financial (Wall Street) ) and corporate elite (big business) to do what they want to do without scrutiny, some tax incentives for the rich 1% and lots of corporate welfare. What is a definite no no is to embrace an economic populism that highlights how free wheeling capitalism is really destructive for huge segments of the population. That's class warfare and it has to be avoided in favour of cultural warfare against liberalism.
The Republican candidates are cheerleaders for financial capitalism of the most brutal sort; they love to bash public institutions, public goods and the public welfare for poor Americans; and they avoid talking about the economic crisis that is hurting so many Americans. There is no doubt that the Republican candidates will probably embrace the nasty side of southern populism to try and defeat Romney. But they are divided, so is the Tea Party Movement in South Carolina. The latter is loose and leaderless, a disjointed collection of local chapters and agendas.
This Republican reality TV show, should be quite a circus. South Carolina will not be the firewall that blocks Romney. Romney will, in all likelihood, steel a victory in South Carolina and cemented his hold on the nomination, because the social conservatives candidates will split the conservative vote.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:02 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
January 10, 2012
goodbye Kodak?
According to the Wall Street Journal Eastman Kodak is readying its papers to seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Kodak, based in Rochester, N.Y., claims to have invented digital photography in 1975 but it ceded that market to competitors such as Nikon, Sony and Canon. It hung onto its identity, film, and watched it fade before its eyes. Kodak has been trying to offload its patents--selling its intellectual property to avoid bankruptcy.
The general explanation for Kodak's corporate failure and demise is that, like Polaroid, it failed to adapt to rapidly changing business models and had fallen behind the technology curve. Its outdated model was outdated. Was this due to:
a failure to innovate; or
a failure to anticipate the shift from analogue to digital cameras; or
a failure to compete with the rise of cameras in mobile phones.
Kodak makes a good study for a strategic business analysis or case study such as this one by George Mendes.
David Glance in his Killing the Kodak moment … is the iPhone really to blame? at the The Conversation argues that:
Where Kodak did fail is in not understanding what people take photographs for, and what they do with photos once they have taken them..In the days of film cameras, personal photography was principally about holding on to personal memories, with photos usually ending up in a shoebox. But recent research by anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists suggests personal photography has moved from being mostly a tool for remembering, to one of emphasising communication and our individual identities.
Hello Facebook, goodbye Kodak.
Glance adds that the real accelerator for the frictionless sharing of photos has been:
the ability to instantly upload photographs to social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and to blog software such as Posterous and Tumblr ... Sharing a photo in this way is more about communication and less about remembering. The photo usually has some commentary .... and is “liked” and commented on by friends and others with whom it is shared.
Glance argues that since the real value in photography today is the software and platforms used for sharing and distribution so Kodak’s moment might have passed.
Mendes argues that Kodak is an example of repeat strategic failure – it was unable to grasp the future of digital quickly enough, and even when it did so, it was implemented too slowly under a continuous change strategy and ultimately it did not fit coherently as a core competency.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:25 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 9, 2012
phrasing-out of fossil fuels?
The coal industry (ie the big mining mining companies) still call the shot on energy policy in Australia. This is in spite of the carbon dioxide emissions from coal fired power plants being the biggest source of man made CO2 emissions, or the awareness by the Gillard Government that we need to keep global temperature rise below 2ºC (compared to pre-industrial levels). Climate change is, in the words of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen.
It would appear that the government has in part been seduced by an illusion of “clean coal” as part of Australia's energy future. “Clean coal” is still a major public relations offensive by the coal industry that includes a number of dubious “technological fixes” that they claim make burning coal safe for the climate.
It's largely a major public relations offensive because the coal industry is not that serious in terms of investing in "clean coal" and the technology won’t be ready for at least another 20 years. So we just have some vague promises that cover up the blocs and resistance to the reform to cut carbon emissions and achieving economic growth by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and energy efficiency.
As Shaun Murray points out in It is the coal barons, not activists, who threaten society:
the current federal government legislation to buy out and close 2000 megawatts of brown-coal generation, and no doubt caused political fallout for the coal industry and its political allies. It is unsurprising that the coal industry would flex its political muscle in response, demanding tougher laws to deter such effective advocacy...For years, it has successfully curtailed government action to combat climate change.
Emissions from energy make up about two-thirds of Australia’s total carbon footprint and are set to skyrocket if we don’t take further action. Coal is inherently a dirty fuel and it is the most polluting way to generate electricity. In Australia, open cast mines make up 80 percent of mines and results in environmental damages to water supplies and destroyed habitats yet it is environmental activists who are seen as a threat to energy security.
It is winemakers, horsebreeders, local residents and citizens are now saying no to coal mine expansion and new coal fired power stations and yes to a transition to renewable energy. In contrast, Martin Ferguson, the federal resources mInister, assumes green and growth cannot go together--he doesn't believe in green growth.
Likewise the free market crowd for whom freedom means governments getting out of the way of corporations and that any regulation leads us down Hayek’s road to serfdom. For them climate science is kryptonite since the reality that humans are causing the climate to warm, with potentially catastrophic results, really does demand radical government intervention in the market, as well as collective action on an unprecedented scale. ZClimate denialism has become a core identity issue on the right.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:44 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
January 5, 2012
media futures
Dean Starkman in Confidence Game: The limited vision of the news gurus in the Columbia Journalism Review takes on what he calls the future-of-news (FON) consensus developed by Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen and others. This he says holds that:
the future points toward a network-driven system of journalism in which news organizations will play a decreasingly important role. News won’t be collected and delivered in the traditional sense. It will be assembled, shared, and to an increasing degree, even gathered, by a sophisticated readership, one that is so active that the word “readership” will no longer apply. Let’s call it a user-ship or, better, a community. This is an interconnected world in which boundaries between storyteller and audience dissolve into a conversation between equal parties, the implication being that the conversation between reporter and reader was a hierarchical relationship, as opposed to, say, a simple division of labor.
He states that the FON consensus is anti-institutional, as it holds that old institutions must wither to make way for the networked future. Its major flaw is that it little to say about public-service journalism; indeed in many ways it is antithetical to it as they extol peer production and volunteerism in a network society that is less hierarchical, more democratic, more collaborative, freer, even more authentic—from the world that preceded it.
With reference to public-interest reporting Starkman says:
Public-interest reporting isn’t just another tab on the home page. It is a core value, the thing that builds trust, sets agendas, clarifies public understanding, challenges powerful institutions, and generates reform. It is, in the end, the point.
Starkman's position is a Burkean one: a defense of institutional tradition as a store of embedded wisdom, arguing for the continued relevance of existing news organizations, especially newspapers, in something very close to their current form.
Consequently resources ought to be expended shoring up existing media institutions because journalism needs its own institutions for the simple reason that it reports on institutions much larger than itself. Media institutions not only provide reporters resources and backup, the best ones create valuable news cultures by aggregating people of a certain mindset.
The problem that I have with this kind of defence is that very few media institutions practice public service journalism -- its a rarity. Most journalism takes the form of infotainment or partisan political commentary; operates within narrow intellectual boundaries; favours 'he said she said' analysis; avoids public policy issues; and doesn't even bother with facts anymore. Honestly, not much public-interest reporting is produced in Australia's existing media institutions.
Starkman downplays this aspect of our media institutions, even though it the new normal.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 4, 2012
the floating hat
Climate change denialism is being mugged by the reality of global warming causing sea levels to creep up and stronger waves and currents eating away at the coastline.
Climate change denialism is still politically strong and this power places constraints on reform attempts--eg., the Obama administration know they need to act. But they can’t act, or at least they can’t act at the scale necessary to really change the energy situation. Republicans won’t let them. The White House couldn’t get the emissions trading scheme legislation through Congress.
The other aspect of this power is that the media has played a major role in legitimising climate change denialism and the right -wing commentariat has in the Murdoch press has underpinned this up with anti-science irrationalism.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:28 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
January 3, 2012
Europe: facing a "lost decade"?
Across-the-board austerity will weigh heavily on the economic growth in the eurozone and beyond. The politicians' contorted efforts to placate the financial markets results in austerity being piled on austerity. Demand is depressed, economies contract and this makes it harder, not easier for governments to repay their debts Europe's future is one of a prolonged period of stagnation and deflation.
Even if Europe's financial system is stabilised and the eurozone holds together the fragile eurozone banks are likely to cut back lending to Europe's households and businesses.
Britain's path path towards isolation means that it can longer to be influential in Europe and balance the power of France and Germany. Britain’s self-exclusion has weakened the position of many of the smaller member-states of the EU: when EU institutions weaken, they are more likely to be pushed around by France and Germany. France and Germany, the dominant countries in the fiscal compact, are hostile to the European Commission and favour a more ‘inter-governmental’ Europe.
Fiscal austerity alone will not solve the crisis and it has become part of the crisis. What the eurozone needs is economic growth, and at a time when the European economy faces an acute risk of depression, the eurozone still has no economic growth strategy.