Progressive Utopia

Tim Dunlop

"And yet this is where we are heading, mere months into the first term of an Abbott government. We are, as a nation, being transformed from a society into an economy."

"Changes to superannuation that favour the rich over the low-paid; abolishing a pay rise for low-paid workers in the childcare sector; abandoning the Gonski reforms that set in place a more equitable funding scheme for public education; floating the idea of a Medicare co-payment for GP visits; gutting the NDIS: all of these point to a government trying to restructure the economy not for the benefit of the many but for enrichment of the few."

All of this stuff is absolutely 100% correct. The same state of existence as Europe with double-digit entrenched unemployment exacerbating an oversupply of labour driving wages down to where the elites like to have them: at subsistence level.

This is "The invisible hand of the market" in action. Adam Smith foresaw this effect and did not recommend its application but the mythology constructed by the elite to maintain its dominance extracts this phrase out of context and uses it for their purposes.

John Maynard Keynes envisaged a capitalist utopia where production in the capitalist market had been allowed to create a materialist abundance where all could live well and good. The advanced economies of the world have already achieved this utopia but it's effects are being held back by the devious tactics of the ruling elite because in such a utopia t.heir elite status may not necessarily be maintained.

We await our nirvana generated by the coming of a new leader of great charisma, insight, and ability.  

The Hypocracy of the LNP

The politics of deindustrialisation

"Equally importantly, every country that has ever become a successful manufacturing economy – including bastions of free market ideology like the UK and the US – did so with the help of a powerful, protective and supportive state.

Even if we accept and recognise that historical reality – and many don’t, of course – the question is whether such a role for governments is any longer appropriate when capital and companies can easily move around a supposedly borderless world. Workers on the production line at one of the rapidly diminishing band of multinational car producers in this country clearly think it is. They may have a point, despite the obvious self-interest.

While there are still things governments can do to assist or protect local producers if they choose to do so (as many states in competing economies still do), it is evident that the Coalition has decided that those businesses that cannot survive on their own probably shouldn’t. The Abbott government is plainly not persuaded by either the idea that manufacturing has special strategic qualities or that it should use taxpayers money to prop-up the ailing off-shoots of foreign companies."

Remember back during the election the flagrant promises by Friar Tuck of millions of jobs appearing out of nowhere? Yes it's the magic of the free market. Just free it up and all these wonderful things just happen. As I explained in a previous post, the market is a harlot. competitiveness is a learned trait and pure competition is monopolistic. This is because in each contest there is a winner and a loser, and as the contests multiply the number of winner becomes smaller and smaller.

The retreat to free markets has been happening sporadically for a long time now and has resulted in the oligopolies in the supply of many products we see today.

Manufacturing has been nurtured by protective governments at every stage of history. In fact it may be said to not exist if it is not fostered and nurtured by National Governments. I don't think the electorate voted for the abolition of manufacturing in Australia, but that will be the end result of LNP policies.

As for jobs, this fanciful idea that eliminating the emissions trading scheme will magically produce millions of jobs is nonsensically absurd.

Under this imbecilic government we are headed for double digit unemployment and may well be at war with Indonesia by the end of the year.      

Head in the Sand

More time on policy, less time on framing

"We cannot call this a "National Broadband Network" any more. That term is fundamentally redundant, when around 28 percent of Australian premises will not receive the infrastructure, and most of the rest will receive a watered down version highly dependent on Telstra's copper network."

A defining characteristic of conservative parties is an ideologically driven ignorance which is stubbornly clung to in the face of informed opinion, indeed demonstrated fact. Every expert in the field has stated that the FTTN technology is inferior and can not be updated but must be torn down and rebuilt when this factoid impinges on their collective brain cell. The experience in Germany proves this.

Likewise with global warming and climate change.

We need to be governed by light and reason, not by ideological ignorance.

"the major cause of this year's budget deficit was Joe Hockey's $8.8bn gift to the RBA... an amount of money...roughly equal to that spent by the government annually on higher education."

"It's even tougher to sell something as a budget emergency when you also say we have to wait six months before you'll do anything about it.

Most of the decisions have been handballed to the Commission of Audit, which is due to release its interim report by the end of this month."

As H. L. Mencken, the acerbic social critic of the 1920s, put it: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

And so it continues. LNP governments always do the same thing. Stop everything. Our obscenely rich supporters are not rich enough. We must create smoke and mirrors so we can make them richer at the expense of the poor. The unemployed have no voice: lets grind them further into the dust. What else can we cut? Oh I know: education. We don't want people educated. they might then be able to see through our smoke and mirrors and we wouldn't be able to fool them into electing us again. 
 

Just Another Recipe for Disaster

Would you dump rubbish in the Grand Canyon?

"Queensland Premier Campbell Newman has declared "we're in the coal business"."

"The thirst for the project comes from the Queensland government and the coal industry which are brazenly pushing to open up the Galilee Basin."

"Allowing a climate-driving coal-shipping superhighway to go ahead through the Reef will only add to the pressures the Reef is already facing from climate change, land-based pollution and crown of thorns starfish outbreaks."

This article is balanced and well-written and all that, and I congratulate this official Greenpeace Climate Campaigner on getting it published, but it is just so bland and ineffectual.

Let's be perfectly clear about this. Unless large deposits of fossil fuels such as those in the Galilee Basin (and the South China Sea,...and the Arctic Ocean) remain in the ground, this planet faces Catastrophic Climate Change, leading to the probable extinction of most of the present species on the planet, including the human race, and that every further gram of fossil fuel extracted and burnt intensifies this result.

There was a small chance to stabilise a 2 degree world when global warming due to the greenhouse effect entered mainstream consciousness. Remember that a 2 degree change in average surface temperature was all it took end the last ice age and produce our current conditions.

Now that chance has been blown out the window because nothing was done about the problem immediately. We will be lucky if we can stop it at a 4 degree world now and if we keep allowing fossil fuel extraction it won't even stop there.

So full marks for a good piece of journalism, but an official Greenpeace advocate should be advocating much more strongly.    

Abbinflation

Tony Abbott's inflation headache

"If inflation proves enduring this year, the Coalition will have to prevent any wage push from causing a breakout - and that means falling standards of living, writes David Llewellyn-Smith."

Inflation is the least of Abbott's worries. LNP economic policies are proven to create a low-employment economy with all its associated human suffering.

Mark my words. We will have double digit unemployment by the end of the calendar year and may well be at war with Indonesia.

If you want proof just look at EU data. Every country that succeeds with these policies does so at the cost of widespread unemployment. And it's not the vested interests or the drones they elect who suffer under these policies. It's the you-and-me common people.

Get used to it. Everyone has reverted to business as usual so the next economic crisis is just around the corner and the pundits are taking bets on whether the climate crisis will pre-or-post-date it. 

The Market is a Harlot

It's not just the rich who benefit from free markets

"In an unhampered, free-market economy, the distribution of income is wholly determined by the interplay of mutually beneficial market transactions between sellers and buyers.

Incomes are attained by selling goods and services to customers willing to pay for them, and suppliers who most closely meet the needs and desires of consumers are rewarded with revenues that more than cover production costs.

The resultant inequality, therefore, derives from the personal choices of the millions, or even billions, of participants in the market process"

This sort of absurd oversimplification is particularly prevalent in the pseudo-science of economics and always results in a false argument which creates a myth which in turn bolsters and recreates the status quo.

Firstly, an 'unhampered, free-market economy' is a contradiction-in-terms and an utter impossibility in the context of human interactions. The vested interests 'hamper' the market for their own benefit every day through the election and manipulation of their drones in government.

Secondly, I can think of a number of significant sources of income which have nothing to do with the selling of goods and services, not to mention the common goods which are shared and used by everyone free of charge, and therefore have no value according to this outdated oversimplified model.

I could go through this whole article and pick it to pieces, but you get the drift. The starting point is absurd so all that derives from it is also absurd.

So the title is true in an absurd sort of a way. It might more accurately be read as 'be happy and satisfied with the few crumbs which fall to you as we devour this crust of bread'.

There are way too many right-wing neo-liberal free-market extremists spreading this sort of drivel around and not enough realists to counter their absurd arguments. Even if there were sufficient numbers though, they would never make it into circulation to the major portion of the electorate because these people get their information from the mainstream media, and these are controlled by the vested interests who benefit from everyone believing this crap. If you say it enough times any lie becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Thus are the myths created which procreate the present reality and doom us to repeat the mistakes of the past.

But enough of this morbidity. Since the market is a harlot let's go have a bang.   

Is the light on the hill a mcmansion

Dethroning GDP as our measure of progress

"Whatever you think it is that makes life worth living, as Robert F Kennedy pointed out in 1968, it's almost a sure bet that it isn't measured by Gross Domestic Product, or GDP."

"One of the frontrunners to replace GDP is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)."

"While the unbridled pursuit of GDP growth has not done much to increase our well-being over the past few decades, it has been a triumph for big business and the finance sector, i.e. those who disproportionately benefit from raw economic activity. Not surprisingly, as a result of this windfall, these sectors - and the politicians who serve them - are likely to resist any move to a more comprehensive metric of national economic well-being."

Tim Dean succinctly and eloquently outlines this problem, which has been talked about and analysed and bandied about and then talked about and analysed some more, ad infinitum, since the sixties, just as the reality of the greenhouse effect due to it's basis in the physical characteristics of chemical bonds, and therefore global warming and climate change, has been, but still we maintain the status quo and vote conservative governments into office.

We are already doomed to at least a two degree world and probably worse. The last time there was a two degree change in the average global temperature the glaciers retreated from central North America and Europe. These are the sort of macro effects you can expect from only a two degree change. And yet we maintain the status quo and vote conservative governments into office.

It has been demonstrated that even a two degree world can not support the lives of  7-8 billion people. At least a billion people will have to be eliminated. But still we maintain the status quo and vote conservative governments into office.

You can't argue with physical laws. The very existence of our species is at stake, so we build bigger and bigger coal mines, coal trains and shipping facilities, extract crude oil from coal seams, and from the Arctic ocean-bed. But that's OK because we can always maintain the status quo and vote conservative governments into office.

David Suzuki visited Australia and spoke on ABC TV. He has been a voice crying in the wilderness for something like fifty years now. The commercial media take no interest at all. He has not abandoned all hope, as many futurists have. He said that we simply don't know enough to predict what is going to happen and described an example to illustrate what he means.

If we keep maintaining the status quo and voting conservative governments into office, we all have blood on our hands, and the answer is yes. I personally never vote conservative, so I can pretend to have washed my hands of this blood, but we are all collectively members of the electorate, and the electorate voted this government into office, so no one can escape responsibility completely.

Revolution or the status quo. which would you prefer?