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May 11, 2009
Norman Abjorensen in Theirs or Ours on Inside Story says that though the Rudd Government's decision to defer its emissions trading scheme- ---delayed by twelve months to July 2011 and the big-polluting exporters receiving more compensation to help them adjust--- is probably good pragmatic politics on the part of the prime minister, it it is clear that the government has buckled to some powerful lobbying and some employment pressure that might be construed as blackmail. He adds:
The real losers, however, are the environment and the people. A less obvious, but equally important, loser in all of this is our increasingly enfeebled democracy – once again trashed by the corporate juggernaut. This just one more example of what the American political scientist, Carl Boggs, has called the corporate colonisation of society. A deal has been struck between self-interested business elites and a supposedly representative government that has effectively capitulated: the public – and the public interest – have simply been excluded from the equation.
He adds that the current hiatus, made under the convenient guise of the global recession, is merely a continuation of resistance by business to the very problem it has caused and singularly failed to address: By the late 1990s, verifiable and reputable scientific research had demonstrated the clear and present danger of global warming. The response from business was first to seek to obfuscate with a manufactured scepticism, disputing even the existence of the problem, and then to hijack governments and seek to discredit, marginalise and silence public interest advocates for urgent and drastic action....It is part, in a far broader sense, of capitalism’s greatest triumph, which is not the generation of abundance so much as its effective depoliticisation – and with that its removal from any form of public accountability or influence.
Th is kind of deal being done between government and business over the heads of the people has implications for democracy. It is not just that governments – ostensibly elected by and accountable to the people – are powerless in the face of business self-interest intransigence, but that the real public interest on climate change is without a voice.
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And this nexus between government and corporates is not only limited to environmental problems. these have engendered killed millions of people and created many financial depressions........