Militarist Nationalism

Andrew Higgins

"Russian authorities whose legitimacy rests in large part on the celebration of martial triumphs, most notably over Nazi Germany in World War II but also over rebels in Syria."

So let's talk about legitimacy. In this context legitimacy is the agreed right to rule; the acceptance by the majority of the population of the ruler's right to govern and its' tacit agreement to obey and be governed by laws made by this ruler (which is to say his/her government). This applies no matter what political system is under consideration. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union Russia has devolved into a pseudo-democratic autocracy, similar to tsarism, but with Tsar Putin draped in the clothes of democracy. Legitimacy can only be dictated by an autocrat up to a point, as revealed by the collapse of tsarism last century; even then it needs a spark of circumstance to catalyse the process. Still, it is easier to manufacture legitimacy under Russian pseudo-democracy, than the versions practiced elsewhere.

In the above quote, Higgins points his finger at Russia, but this legitimacy thing is not restricted to the rivals of the USA. By the above definition there has not been a legitimately elected president for a majority of the past 4 or 5 elections, least of all Trump. Except for Obama, no president in the last 20-30 years has earned a majority of  the popular vote, so Trump has no legitimacy to govern and yet is allowed to continue.

So now let's talk about foundation myths; better yet, myths in general, and how they are used by political elites to maintain the status quo with them in control. Indeed myths, which take advantage of general manufactured ignorance in society and innate intellectual laziness, are one of the main tools at the disposal of governments, whereby they control the population.

Nationalism which culminated in the implosion of Europe through the industrialised World War of 1914-1945 is only harmful in its extreme form, as is the case with most things. A little bit of national pride and patriotism is not necessarily a bad thing. People have a sense of belonging to a group and are lifted by feelings of self-worth. Every brand of nationalism begins with a foundation myth. The Russian brand begins with what Higgins calls 'the celebration of martial triumphs' achieved in a sepia-tinged glorious mythical past. Most if not all foundation myths are martial in nature, so the US brand is couched in the War of Independence; the Australian brand in the Gallipoli Fiasco; the British in the colonial larceny of the 19th century etcetera. So these brands are militaristic in nature and seek to differentiate nations on the basis of  the size of their armies and armaments, thereby creating a hierarchy or world order of nations. You may have noticed that it's all starting to sound rather sinister.

Meanwhile the great Australian progressive journalist Van Badham has weighed into the fray with a piece in 'The Guardian' glorifying  the past of the Australian Labor Party:

"Don’t believe me? Consider what’s socially possible for the one-in-seven American households living in food poverty and compare it to the limitlessness of opportunity enjoyed by Donald Trump’s cabinet of billionaires. These uneven results are fomenting conditions in which the power of the billionaire class depends on the distractions of nationalism, racism and other forms of scapegoating to protect itself. With the election of Donald Trump, the tenets threaten to become structural." 

If you want sinister this is sinister bordering cynical conspiracy theory stuff laced with left-wing cliches. Higgins appears more balanced superficially. True balance must lie somewhere in between. Somewhere between 'a political ideology of some use in milder forms but harmfully self-destructive in concentrated form' and 'a distraction...a scapegoating to protect itself (the billionaire class)'

How do you create these myths? having created them how do you use them to create a reality in which you remain at the apex of the socio-political hierarchy? Historians explain societies in terms of estates. This concept dates back to the dark ages and basically means a tier in the social hierarchy. So: the first or highest tier is of course the Monarch; the nobles and clergy are probably of equal rank below that of the monarch; the third estate is usually recognised as the group composed of the peasants and the bourgeoisie; with reference to 18th century France, a fourth estate is usually tacked onto the end of this conceptual framework, The Media. This term refers to the means of conveying information to the populace. Manipulation of this fourth estate can create myths

"They (the Russian branch of the Jehovah's Witnesses) can be used to send a message.”

That message, it would seem, is that everyone needs to get with the Putin program — or risk being branded as an extremist for displaying indifference, never mind hostility, to the Kremlin’s drive to make Russia a great power again." 

Tipping Points

Jeff Sparrow

"In the past, activists sometimes suggested that climate politics transcended the old divisions between left and right. Even the greediest tycoon lived on the same planet as the rest of us. On that basis, the argument went, they could be won over in the fight to preserve it.

In reality, the environment’s always been a class issue. Climate change will devastate the poor – and the rich and the powerful will barely notice."

"a tipping point, a specific manifestation of the crisis so grotesque and so extreme as to force our leaders to respond." 

"The politicians and tycoons with their stock options and property portfolios will still find pleasant locales for their holidays, no matter how degraded the oceans become. They have as little personal stake in combating climate change as they do in fighting for housing affordability." 

"If the nationalism of right-wing populism inevitably feeds climate scepticism, protest against fossil fuels pushes in the direction of internationalism, fostering a common interest across national borders against the corporations and politicians despoiling the planet." 

Dana Milbank; The Washington Post

When are these curmudgeons going to get with the team, learn from mistakes, open their eyes. We live in a false crisis period of flux before the dawn of the Keynsian Capitalist Utopia (KCU). Keynes foresaw all of this, though perhaps not the fine detail or the complete ramifications.

The market has forced the low skilled onto the minimum wage, with little discretionary income. Economic activity involving the spending of money comes to a standstill. So growth almost freezes. In the mean time technology is on the verge of wiping out these very jobs. What will be the effect on the economy when 80% of the participants are so poor they can barley put food on the table. All of the companies making discretionary items (everything except clothes, food, heating perhaps; possibly electricity) 

There is no way the powers that be will allow this to happen, but people like these republicans seriously can not see the wood for the trees. They are blinkered by their neoliberal dogma so that they can not see any other way than what they have done before. They have lost the ability to learn from their mistakes

will go under. The economy will shrink down to a very basic level.

 The very definition of work will have to be redefined. Creativity, hopefully beyond the ability of AI for ever, will be at a premium. People can't survive in modern economies without spending money. The whole thing exists or doesn't on the basis of this fact. If people don't have sufficient spending money or work to earn it, the economy comes to a standstill and prices go into a nose-dive.

Experiments in Guaranteed Basic Income are being evaluated in Canada and other countries. This model taxes those who can afford it and pays everybody a living amount. The fear has always been that it wouldlead to a downward spiral in productivity with a resultant nosedive in growth. No evidence has emerged yet to this effect, indeed the results indicate neutral effect on productivity.

 

 Conservative forces worldwide are denying scientific evidence and making decisions on the basis of emotion and ignorant populist opinion. This is no good way to make decisions and is leading the world further down the dangerous road of extremism. This is what I mean when I say that we live in a period of flux. As the world gyrates around the edge of precipice of annihilation, people have to re-engage in politics. If everyone is fully engaged my faith tells me that good will prevail. More than ever our destiny is in the lap of God.

Abandon All Hope

So the federal election of 2016 is consigned to the dust bin of history and the peepole have spoken in their massively indecisive way with the delivery once again of a virtual hung parliament, Claytons hung, the hung parliament you have when you're not having a hung parliament. A massive outright majority of one to the conservative side. Of course if you ask SLOMO, aka Scott Morrison, our Claytons federal treasurer, the LNP won so massively that the majority could be rubbed in the oppositions' face like a pile of dog shit, and now the point of even looking at the Canberra shenanigans escapes me. We none-the-less need to learn something from the exercise.

SIHSECCN

Joelle Gergis ARC DECRA Climate Research Fellow, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

"A rapidly warming climate means that storms are now occurring in a “super-charged” atmosphere. As temperatures increase, so does the water-holding capacity of the lower atmosphere. The oceans are also warming, especially at the surface, driving up evaporation rates. Global average surface temperature has already risen by about 1℃ above pre-industrial levels, leading to an increase of 7% in the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere."

I have actually been blogging for several years now about this stuff and it basically stands to reason that a warmer atmosphere will have more water vapour. The 7% rise per mean degree Celsius rise cited here is surprisingly large, but then I am not a meteorologist. If the water vapour component rises it then is only a question of if, when and where extra rain will fall.

Global warming is cited as mean degree Celsius rise in surface ocean temperature. People who have studied mathematics at all will recall that the 'arithmetic mean' (called an average by non-mathematical people) is a measure of central tendency. As such, by definition, in a data set of temperature measurements at different geographical locations, data points  will adopt the normal distribution bell curve centred on this mean. Therefore, an equal number of data points will be above as below this mean value.

A consequence of this is that there will be geographical locations which become wetter, as our self-induced human-species-existential-climate-change nightmare (SIHSECCN) unfolds, and also those which become drier. For the wetter/drier dichotomy one can substitute hotter/colder.

So an element of luck is introduced to the universe of human suffering. If you are lucky you will occupy land which gets cooler, but as mean global temperatures continue to rise these spots will comprise half of the land area. it's a poisoned chalice anyway because those who occupy the cooler spots will be conquered and/or subjugated by those who occupy the hotter regions.

Australia was once called the lucky country in a tongue-in-cheek book title. Now we will see how tongue-in-cheek this actually was.

As an afterthought: since we are forced live a cutthroat neoliberal existence, where are all the budding little entrepreneurs damming the floodwaters and selling the extra water back into the market? Probably the same place as the ones paving the deserts with solar panels and selling pristine electricity to the general population. In the future.

Trouble with Bubbles

Timo Henckel Research Associate, Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Australian National University

Yes, Autumn is upon us again and the ides of march only passed a few weeks ago, so what a good time for the battle of the b-word to go bounding around the balustrades of the political discourse once again? This article is an eloquent explanation of asset bubbles in general, why this discourse never goes away and the characteristic of macroeconomics which draws me to it, sewn together with a succinct summary of cutting edge psychological macroeconomics. Anyone who is trying to comprehend economics to a level sufficient to understand the news should read this.

Essentially, the discourse never goes away because this field of study, probably more so than any other, is divided into political schools which are for ever in conflict with each other. So we have the 'Saltwater' school centred around the Ivy League Universities of the New England region in the USA, championed by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, of 'The Conscience of a Liberal' fame; the 'Freshwater' school centred around Chicago, championed by Joseph Stiglitz with the US Federal Reserve as its mouthpiece; the 'Austrian' school, centred on the EU, championed by Angela Merkel; and last but not least, at the cutting edge of  understanding, the school which has no name at this stage, but has a strong Australian contribution, which I shall now dub the 'Keensian' school after its Australian contributor, my friend Steve Keen centred in England. There are probably other schools in this turbulent field which I have missed but I think these are the main ones.

The Saltwater school is neo-Keynsian, fairly closely following the tenets espoused by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930's in response to The Great Depression, and put into practice by FDR in the New Deal of those years. It practices a legally regulated market, laissez-faire government in the good times but intervention in the market to correct market failure when necessary, redistribution of wealth through taxation leading to an optimisation of social justice. As presently practiced in the Nordic Countries, its political expression is Democratic Socialism.

Favourite of the right-wing of the political spectrum, the Freshwater school is neo-classical in that it promotes economic paradigms which predate the Keynsian revolution and in fact go back to the 19th century. It promotes the idea of an unregulated market and minimal government intervention in the market. Since its inception the USA has conducted a huge experiment in socio-economic engineering by applying these principles to its society, until the shock of the Great Depression forced Keynsian ideas to the fore and the New Deal was born. When the New Deal principles stopped working in the 1970's (remember stagflation headlines) freshwater economists such as Milton Friedman hijacked macroeconomic practicum ushering in the great socio-economic experiment of the past 30-odd years beginning with Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Politically, this school expresses the neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologies.

Another love-child of the right, the Austrian school, draws heavily on the work of  Friedrich von Hayek and his seminal work "The Road to Serfdom" (1944, University of Chicago Press). It is characterised by austerity policies and insists on budget and trade surpluses and is practiced in parts of Europe. Hayek wrote this in reaction to the work of  Keynes and it has been adopted by the right of the political spectrum as its guiding light.

Finally we have the Keensian school. A critique of the classical paradigm of economics has been ongoing since the publication of "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith in 1776, which forms part of the bedrock of modern macroeconomics to this day. Many of the assumptions on which modern economics is based are vastly over-simplified. In the theoretical 'market' all practitioners are assumed to be perfectly rational 'utility optimisers', meaning everybody in the market acts in a rational way to increase their wealth. The Keensian school recognises this assumption as utter nonsense because all practitioners are human beings who do not always act rationally, and employs modern psychology to attempt to better predict market behaviour, so that governments can proactively intervene in markets to smooth the massive gyrations characteristic of these things.

Henckel summarises this new field thus:

"This misconception is the consequence of human behaviour and traits that depart from the fully rational paradigm so often assumed in formal economics. Instead, as behavioural economists argue, people exhibit a number of biases.

These include, for example, the desire to find information that agrees with their existing beliefs (called confirmation bias) or the tendency to form decisions based on the most readily available information (called availability bias). People experience and seek to resolve their discomfort when they have two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values and they also employ simple abstractions in thinking about complex problems and events (framing).

People are poor intuitive statisticians and care more about avoiding losses than about experiencing gains (called loss aversion). The list of flaws in human behaviour goes on. Moreover, humans, social animals that we are, compete with and emulate our peers, herd like sheep and act on rumours."

Asset bubbles are a market failure. It is a function of government to correct market failures in such a way as to minimise social pain caused by them. It would make a lot of sense if economists, the supposed experts in such things, told us how to go about this. Instead here we have full admission from one of its highest academic practitioners that there is no agreed definition of  'asset bubble', and if you can't define it, you can't say for certain that one exists; and if one doesn't exist, then why would you do anything about it? This sounds a lot like a justification for laissez-faire government. It plays strait into the hands of right-wing parties.

"Economists disagree on how to define a bubble, or even whether bubbles exist. Intuitively, a bubble (and this applies to any asset, not just real estate) exists when the price of an asset is over-inflated relative to some benchmark. And here’s the rub: no one can agree on what that benchmark should be." 

As mentioned above, the modern academic field of economics started with the publication of  "The Wealth of Nations" (Smith, Adam, 1776). With close to a century's head start, the modern academic field of physical science began with the publication of "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (Newton, Sir Isaac, 1728{English}, 1687{New Latin}). Thus began a rivalry and jealousy that has lasted nearly 250 years. Economist looked on physical scientists, with their higher social standing; their absolute physical laws; their precise mathematical tools; their evidence-based scientific method, and were overcome with envy, so they endeavoured to mimic them.

You see economics had always been classed as a 'social' science, not a 'real' science at all, and economists wanted to be seen as real scientists, so economic theoreticians, from the start, adopted the bits of physical science they thought would make them look more like real scientists. Physics uses precise mathematical tools they saw:  "if we use precise mathematical tools too everyone will think we are real scientists", they thought to themselves. You can hopefully perceive desperation holding back my innate urge to unleash caustic wit in waves of ridicule upon this entire pretentious practice.

So this is why I find this topic so interesting.

My primary training is in physical science. I became aware of economics quite late, but have studied both of these fields to a high level. At masters level the economics being taught was laughable from a scientific perspective. I have to think this is the highest level of economics available. All of the bits of scientific methodology which make it work are tossed into the dustbin by economists. For nearly 250 years they have focused on the one aspect of physics they think will deliver them the status of true science: precise mathematical tools delivering absolute economic laws. This article shows that they can't even get the basics right. When a scientist says 'precise' that person means all the words, variables and concepts used have exact, black-and-white definitions, agreed and understood by all scientists. Asset bubbles have no definition of this sort, so any attempt to use precise mathematical tools to describe or analyse them is doomed.

This is not the only example: in fact economics is riddled with ambiguous concepts and abused methodology, but I shall leave it to my illustrious readers to find more.

In its quest to become a real science economics continues to evolve. It straddles the nexus between precise, austere, rational, logical, austere reality and messy, ambiguous, irrational, emotional, human reality. One day the twain may be met.    

    

The Old Australian Cultural Cringe

Ross Gittins

Ross Gittins knows his stuff and this article makes a great case against the business tax cuts. Why do something that only benefits foreign companies??? Same reason we don't have a minerals super profits tax (or at least a resource rent tax). Same reason we allow foreign companies to ruin our farmland and drinking water with fracking and the great barrier reef with coal mining. Fake government that won't stand up to the lobby groups.

This is just another expression of that 'old Australian cultural cringe' which the coalition in particular is addicted to. They live in the past when Britain ruled the waves and Australia was just a supplier of raw materials for the factories of the mother country, except now we can just substitute 'Big Business' for 'Britain' and a spade becomes a spade. They have sacrificed our sovereignty on the alter of capitalism.

It comes to the point where we don't control our own property, our own destiny, our own lives. Control has been handed to the big multinationals. All they have to say is 'give us special treatment or we will take our business elsewhere', and people swallow this bunkum. So what if they do?