The First Myth

This myth that both parties are as bad as each other is bunkum. If both parties are the same why bother changing your vote. It's promulgated by the conservatives to maintain the status quo where they have a stranglehold on power. 

What they are doing to this country is so destructive. Much more and there will be no way back and we will wind up as an irrelevant backwater whose only value is its willingness to bend over and be raped for its raw materials. 

To take just one example, our coal reserves have zero value in a world that doesn't burn coal to produce energy. Even right now technology is being produced to generate electricity without burning fossil fuels. LNP policy is to continue with coal, defund education so that we lack the skills to contribute to this technological revolution, and deny us a fibre network fore internet delivery making us physically unable to head in this direction, while the political elites run around wasting money on useless junkets for them and their families and friends.

The reality is that the only alternative to an LNP government is an ALP government or some sort of coalition of the left. I am now a member of the ALP even though my position in the political spectrum is well to the left. Politics is about compromise and it is when extremists come to power who refuse to compromise at all that bad things happen.

Back in 2011 I gave the electorate the benefit of the doubt. The poor people were just hoodwinked into believing the LNP myths racism and misogyny by a conservative controlled mainstream media. It's not their fault I thought. The forces of light just need to campaign harder.

I've  now decided that the people really are sheeple, too stupid to think logically, recognise evidence- based reasoning, easily frightened through misinformation and post truth reality put out by elite-controlled MSM, and at the end of the day too lazy to be bothered to think. I have some sympathy for them. Really their reality has been formed by the wrecking-ball extremist neoliberal policies pursued by western "democracies" since 1980. This discredited  ideology is based on myths and false assumptions. I've been rattling on about this fact for more than eight years now.

As a card-carrying member of the ALP I am in a position to know a few things you may not be aware of. The ALP has reformed itself to some degree at least. They are about grass roots campaigning now and there are significant points of difference which should be considered when deciding who to vote fore. There is an outstanding progressive policy agenda but the following needs to be implement in addition to this.

The ALP needs to throw off its starry-eyed grass-roots political naivety and realise how biased this so-called "democracy" has become towards the ruling kleptocracy, keeping it perpetually in power to the extreme detriment to our society; our spiritual and material well-being. They should aggressively publicise this simple message:

"The LNP is the party of the rich. They represent the interests of the rich. If you are not rich NEVER VOTE FOR THIS PARTY"

Things change and people need to change accordingly
.
Pardon me but my soapbox just disintegrated

End of an Era

Van Badham

She's always a good read, and possibly betters me on eloquence, but this is one of my pet topics, which I've been blogging on about for years, so here we go again.

"Neoliberal economic policy has defined the Australian Labor party as much as it has their opponents for the past few decades, yet now Labor’s once-fiercest neoliberal champions have come to disavow it. 

The conspicuous lack of outcry, keening or ceremonial hand-wringing around the end of this era is perhaps attributable to Ben Chifley’s example. “It’s no good crying over spilt milk,” the former Labor prime minister once advised, “all we can do is bail up another cow.”"

Neo-liberalism, and its obsession with 'free' markets, was devised in an era when the US was economically competitive. In open competition, an assumed innate characteristic of 'free' markets - a total imaginary theoretical construct since true free markets have never existed at a macroeconomic level; and may not actually be possible in the real world - the US would almost always win. Trumpism is an admission that this is no longer the case.

If we count the beginning of the great neo-liberal economic experiment as coincident with the election of Ronald Reagan in the US in 1980, it's been running for 37 years now and the early regulatory response to the GFC really marks the beginning of the reaction against it. Van cites twenty years. In the US this experiment has been running a lot longer. US society is really the result of a long-running experiment in neo-liberal socio-economic engineering. You would have to say that the results are in and, as predicted by theory, they don't really look too good.

Too understand these things we have to go back to the 70's. Remember the oil shock which caused a phenomenon headlined as 'stagflation' which completely bamboozled the economists of the time to such an extent that we saw conservative president Nixon implement a wage/price freeze, something more in character with a command economy. This really marks the end of the halcyon postwar period of Keynesian New Deal economic policy which contributed to the rise of functional welfare states in much of the West.

In the field of economics the Keynesian New Dealers had controlled policy since 1929 while the classical economists were easily blamed for the Great Depression and therefore in disrepute. Suddenly 'stagflation' (inflation without GDP growth) was happening and the Keynesians could not explain it nor recommend a cure. Off they went to their ivory towers to ponder this puzzle, scratching their heads in consternation, vacating the political discourse.

Enter Milton Friedman, scion of what was now called the neoclassical school of economics, what Paul Krugman calls the 'Freshwater' school    

On the Balance of Probabilities

You can't trust the veracity of any information issuing from the white house and the way it is going no one will be able to tell truth from fiction pretty soon. People will have to read everything, especially in the blogs and social media, and weigh up the balance of probabilities to come to a conclusion about where the truth lies. Who has time for that?

The background to all this is the press conference given by Trump's press secretary in the wake of the inauguration. Each sentence was a demonstrable lie.  The journalists sat there, swallowed these  lies without any enquiry or analysis, and regurgitated them intact back out into the mainstream media. Even the ABC just showed the guy standing there describing a post-truth fantasy reality with a straight face, in a monotone. Even though this body language sets the alarm bells ringing, I didn't know for certain the statements were suspect until I checked out twitter. I still don't know the exact reality.

It all comes down to the inauguration. Was there the biggest crowd in history as Trump would have us believe or was there a meagre turnout bolstered by hire-a-crowd extras bussed in and paid for with Trump's obscene wealth? No doubt the truth falls somewhere between these two extremes but the balance-of-probabilities method becomes inapplicable in a hyper-polarised political environment as has now developed.

Journalism was once the guardian of truth. Journalists need to step up and do their jobs better. The media scrum facing this Trumpic fantasy needed to grill the guy to expose the lies. Now that would be entertaining. Imagine the response if he were confronted with an alternative version. Would he sweat? Would he dissemble? Would he disappear in a puff of post-truth smoke?

I've never actually looked at the Nazi propaganda of Joseph Goebbels but I suspect there would be striking similarities to this stuff. Basically it all comes down to the fact that, if you scream a lie loudly enough and often enough, it becomes the truth. It's all getting so Orwellian. We will need Trump-speak translators installed in all our devices.

Here is an analysis by a former Presidential press secretary:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2wCbaBXAAApIyq.jpg:large   

An example of the sort of ridicule floating around 

Sean Spicer releases new photo showing true size of crowd for Trump's inauguration



and some serious analysis from a news source of high reputation.

Jeffrey Goldberg ‏@JeffreyGoldberg  19h19 hours ago

.@fordm deconstructs Sean Spicer's false claims (via @TheAtlantic):

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/inauguration-crowd-size/514058/

There is still no way to judge the balance of probability. Trump is an extremist. His behaviour mirrors that of a spoilt child. The alternative view may be equally extreme. How are we to judge which is more probable? The contrasting images above purporting to be of the Obama inauguration of 2008 on the right and Trump's on the left have been portrayed as simply one image before it started and another when it was in full swing. who are we to believe?

One tool of the propagandist is the creation of doubt in the minds of the target, so this portrayal is suspect especially because the source then proceeded to criticise the media as not to be trusted. For me past performance and reputation are the key to balancing the probability. The Atlantic has been around a long time and built up an extremely high reputation for truth and integrity. On the balance of probabilities I'll go with them 

Hindsight

With the benefit of hindsight the 2016 US Presidential election turned out to be between the democrats, representing the stutus quo vadis, more of the same, the establishment; and Trump, a populist demagogue of the far right. So it was a battle between the far right and the center. The far right won because Trump said polpulist, radical things that made people vote for him because they were fed up with business as usual and wanted to vote for radical far right populism.

Bernie Sanders was about as far left as you can get in US politics and was also a populist in the strict sense of the word, funded as his campaign was by grass roots support. His views and policies are really only centre-left but would have been portrayed as radical left, and many of his supporters came out when he didn't win the nomination saying that, given the choice beween a vote for Clinton, a vote for Trump or not voting at all, they would not vote at all.

The electorate was in the mood to punish the establishment by electing a radical. They were given the choice between the establishment and the radical right. If Sanders had been allowed to win the nomination the choice would have been between a rightwing radical and a leftwing radical. A radical was going to win in any event and only the radical of the right was available as a choice. The result was really a forgone conclusion.

The DNC had polling to indicate  this state of the electorate but chose Clinton and therefore must shoulder some of the blame; but aside from that how can you call a system democratic  where

      "The party has won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential
        elections",

but not won the presidency in five of them?