105 thoughts on “Weekend reflections”

  1. In retrospect, neo-liberalism may have been at least as costly for humanity, as communism was. And, of course, it probably comes as no surprise that a number of libertarians had a previous existence as extreme leftists. This might suggest that they have great difficulty in maintaining a considered opinion.

  2. A good guide to how a particular creed of apparent nutters in 1947 at Mont Pellerin in Switzerland formed a religion then formed think tanks to gain both corporate tax concessions is George Monbiot’s How Did We Get Into This Mess? of August 2007.

    I said ‘apparent’ above, because Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” of 2007 was confirmation that most neo-liberals don’t even believe their theory. They realise that economic neo-liberalism is no more than a rationalisation for a means to transfer wealth out of the pockets of the majority of society into the pockets of a few.

    Strikingly, no means to ascertain the efficiencies of the claimed efficiencies of privatisation have ever been put in place prior to the flogging off of our assets. So, disproving the claims of efficiency gains is difficult for opponents of privatisation.

    Nevertheless it has been done, again and again, for example in that study by Professor Bob Walker commissioned by the Queensland Trade Union movement last year.

    The claimed efficiency gains of privatisation usually turn out to be either:

    1. Efficiencies that would have been gained anyway because of technological advances; or

    2. The shifting of costs, previously borne by the publicly owned corporations onto the broader community.

    The most striking examples of the latter is the elimination of apprenticeships, cadetships and other forms of on-the-job training offered by publicly owned corporations.

    This is the main cause of the skill shortage that we faced in the last decade and which Howard, and now Rudd, have used as an excuse to massively increase our immigration intake.

    Ironically, the cost of building infrastucture in order to accommodate the new arrivals necessitated by past privatisations has become yet a further excuse to continue privatisation as Premier Anna Bligh made clear in her justification for the fire sale:

    … a State with a rapidly growing population can’t afford to ease off building the infrastructure that supports our economy and community.

    Freelander wrote:
    @Peter T
    Daggett’s point that the will of the majority has almost invariably been ignored is valid. The neo-liberal ideologues pursued a policy of infiltrating both sides of politics, academia and the bureaucracy with the long term objective that their ideas would be carried out regardless of who the public voted for. And they succeeded with this surreptitious approach.

    And because they succeed in getting either side of politics to implement their agenda, they are able claim to be non-political status and and hence claim tax concessions.

    Those who are opposed to their agenda find it much harder to claim those same concessions.

  5. @Chris Warren

    Chris…the cuckoos in cloud finance land are coming home to roost arent they?.

    Recall these global financial firms sent salesmen all across the globe hawking their complex financial derivatives to governments and local councils sitting on pots of our taxes and rates. Gone are the days when prudence influenced government savings and lower returns meant safety and lower risk and it was the accepted paradigm that governments used to manage savings conservatively?.

    Oh no – all gone out the window and they launched our pooled taxes and rates into the best “financial products” the snappily dressed hawkers could offer (why get 5% when you can get 20% easily and hey guess what – its all hedged by us somehow in a way you will never understand and its completely risk free because its rated AAA by our mates in the agencies).

    So Governments across the globe, one after the other plied our funds into the hands of the merchant bankers army of suits and funds with strange names? Did they get private kickbacks for doing so? Were they in league with the banks? We will never know although we do know Goldman Sachs has been charged with fraud. Too little too late.

    The fallout is still falling.

  6. At least in the 19th Century snake oil salesmen got an occasional tar and feathering when the townspeople managed to catch up with them. Nowadays, unless the SEC is successful with Goldman Sachs and goes after the rest, they will continue to get away scot free.

  8. @Fran Barlow,

    Thanks for letting me know that my post was published. It was not published immediately, however, having been first placed in a moderation queue. All this has been duly noted in an update to my blog account of this. Hopefully, if my posts must be singled out for moderation, then at least they can eventually appear on LP from this point on.

    No doubt, Concerned Residents Against Milton’s Excessive Development, who need as much publicity as they can get for their meeting on Thursday night at 6.30PM at Milton State School, will also appreciate the publication of that post.

  9. My latest post to LP is also ‘awaiting modertion’. It was posted to the article “Left reasons to oppose the net filter #nocleanfeed”. As I think it is also likely to be of interest to people here, I thought I might post it here also. Here it is:

    AndyC is spot on when he writes (@59):

    Marks @ 57: “One of the problems with a net filter is that if and when the infrastructure is in place, it can be extended far beyond its initial reach.”

    Absolutely. This is my only important objection to compulsory filtering beyond speed issues, but as objecvtions go, it is final, non-negotiable and fatal. This is not a power that I want government to have, or to use.

    Anyone who actually believes Stephen Conroy’s stated reasons for implementing the filter, when he must know will have almost neglible impact upon child pornography, is astonishingly credulous.

    The obvious reason is to take out of our hands the one means that we have as ordinary citizens to expose the lies of Governments and corporations that they use to gain public acceptance of whatever their latest policy objective may be: another war, further curtailment of civil rights, further theft of public assets, high immigration, cutting back social spending, etc.

    While we have a free Internet we still stand a very good chance of being able to tell the truth to large numbers of people and thwarting the sociopathic objectives of the corporate sector.

    Once the filter is in place that right can be taken away from any group at the whim of the Government or any of its anonymous bureaucrats and, with the assured support of the corporate newsmedia, the Government will face little effort in concocting excuses to censor sites that it feels threatened by. The most likely excuse will be to simply deem certain groups as ‘terrorist’.

    Their success at convincing the majority of the public of the guilt of the clearly innocent Schapelle Corby is one of many clear illustrations, that I could cite, of the potential of the corporate media to abuse their power in such circumstance.

    The fact that this outrageous proposal has gotten this far against overwhelming public opposition and with no electoral mandate whatsoever is yet another illustration of just how broken Australian democracy actually is. This is but the latest of many examples in past decades of state and Federal Governments imposing “elite as opposed to popular views”on almost every major policy decision, to use Bob Hawke’s infamous words, as I have described elsewhere.

    The Internet Filter is a mortal threat to what remains of democracy in this country and it is time that it was treated as such, and every legal means to block this must be at least tried.

    Our elected representatives, both in the House of Representatives and in the Senate have proven time and time again that they cannot be trusted to serve the public interest. Any strategy purely dependent upon lobbying those representatives seems unlikely to succeed, particularly given that all the Labor representatives have chosen to allow themselves to be locked into supporting this at the outset, and the Coalition has become less and less outspoken against the filter.

    This is one issue that that those few representatives who claim to be on our side, being the Greens and Senator Nick Xenophon, must insist be put to the people in a referendum.

    They must without delay put to the Senate a motion that this issue be put to the Australian people as a referendum question.

    If Rudd and Gillard are willing to put their health reforms to the public in a referendum, and if Bligh is willing to put her silly proposal to split Queensland into differnt time zones to a referendum, there should be no reason why those Senators can not every bit as legitmately demand that Mandatory Internet Filtering be put to the public as a referendum.

    Thus far my approaches to Senator Scott Ludlam have been unsuccessful and he had refused to move that motion. However, if the anti-filtering movement were to raise their voices more loudly in suport of this, then there is every reason to hope that his mind can be changed.

    Then, either that motion will be carried and the demise of Internet Filtering in the forthcoming referendum will be assured, or, if to the contrary the motion is defeated, then at least the Australian public will know which Senators are not prepared to give the public the final say on this question and the Greens and Senator Nick Xenophon will have given the Australian public a very good reason to vote for them.

  10. Daggett, the moderation trick means they are able to say they’ve given you a say, when they have actually held you up for so long that the context of comment can be lost.
    Come on Fran , you know full well what goes on.
    The “host” is”legion”.

  11. @paul walter

    AIUI, in order to control spammers, the software is set up to distinguish IP addresses from email addies that have been passed as legit before. When you use dynamic IP, sometimes this triggers the spaminator until a moderator can lift it and add it to the database of IP addresses seen as valid.

    In the last seven days, a total of 8 of my posts there have been held up in this way. All of them eventually passed.

  12. Ahhh, Fran you are about.
    Given our “mumbers are fun” conversation of the other night, did you read Anne Summers on the yanks in SMH today?

  15. All seems like the My Struggle stuff of half a century ago (avoids godwinning), eh Tris?
    For that side of politics, its currently to do with something akin to early 1945, all seiges and ruin for the dregs left of the Hanson, Howard, Murdoch, Jones push of the nineties.

  16. Fran, they seem to have moved it to a back burner, at least online. The article was entitled, “Tea stands for trouble as unity goes to pot”, 17/4″. and deals in part with the conspiracy theory industry, then ponders “whither now” for a place that no longer seems to know where it’s going.

  17. @Freelander

    Tell me, in your studies of what actually goes on under the heading ‘neo-liberalism’, did you notice the phrase ‘moving forward’ being used a lot? Since this is a week-end thread, perhaps a bit of chatting about observations is allowed. I have a diagram where I mapped the actions of a (non-capitalist in the old language) corporate manager such that ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ are clearly distinguishable and the word ‘move’ has the rather precise meaning of managerial decision. The map shows that the managerial decisions correspond unambiguously to ‘moving backward’. Even with the help of this diagram, the said manager declared to want to move forward. This is one example of how I learned to appreciate the word ‘delusion’, used quite frequently on this blog-site. Not that long ago I reserved the word ‘delusion’ for the field of psychiatry. To put it milder, learning a foreign language is a trivial task when compared with trying to make sense out of what is going on in corporatist management talk. To introduce ‘balance’, I have come across many actual business people, as distinct from word merchants, who are similarly puzzled by this stuff.

    I’ve got more questions, but one at the time.

  19. @Fran Barlow,

    All that happened to me before. However, because I have been blocked for nearly 4 months contrary to undertaking made to me back in December not to block me, I must remain sceptical at least until I see a few of my posts pubished without moderation. As @paul walter pointed out, holding up a post for long enough can be effectively the same as censorship.

  20. @Ernestine Gross

    Moving forward is not a libertarian sourced piece of meaningless babble. Sure, I would not be surprised to hear libertarians using it because they tend to be pretty superficial and given to parroting choice phrases. “Moving forward” is simply yet another piece of empty but pretentious management speak. When I hear it, and it is very much in fashion at the moment, I cringe. I am tempted to say “as opposed to?” Almost always it is redundant because they are talking about going into the future and if they do have an option of going into the past I certainly would want to know about it. What is truly sad is that “moving forward” seems to be most frequently used by those on $300K or more. Hence, you hear it ad nauseam when someone ‘important’ is being interviewed, on TV or Radio. There the opportunity to say “as opposed to?” is not provided, and is never taken by the interviewer.

    Managers need to use a lot of pretentious meaningless language in proportion to how little they know about doing their job, which frequently is not much. As the gaining of a management job is typically on the basis of an interview and is poorly correlated to any performance, speaking the tribal language is a necessity to get the job. And getting the job is most important, as is being a loyal tribal member. Doing the job is not so important at all, especially if you have the requisite skills of avoiding the blame, and moving on to the next job before the you know what hits the you know what.

  21. Yes Ernestine G, Freelander, “onward and upwards:” onward, ever upward”
    Have you people forgotten your” Yes Minister” primers?

  22. @Ernestine Gross

    And frequently when the worst cases are found out to be the disasters they are, they are simply given a generous package and glowing references and assistance to get an even better job elsewhere, where they will inflict another round of chaos.

    Unfortunately, this increasingly seems to be the way things work in many Western bureaucracies, whether those bureaucracies are in large public corporations, academia, or government. I am sure all the financial institutions responsible for the GFS where ‘vigorously’ going forward, before, on, and after the day. Unfortunately remuneration seemed to similarly go forward numerically and into their bank accounts.

  23. @Freelander

    Thank you for your replies. Much appreciated. Just a clarifying question. Did you mean ‘liberertarians’ @20, p2 or neo-liberals?

  25. Freelander :libertarians and neo-liberals are synonymous

    I am not sure about that. ‘ism words’ tend to be chewing-gum words. Nevertheless, I seem to remember that JQ uses the term ‘neo-liberalism’ as a collective term for ‘economic rationalism’, Thatcherism, and Reagonomics’. The labels don’t matter to me. If you use the words ‘libertarians’ as synonymous with ‘neo-liberals’ then I only need to make clear that I am thinking about the period known in Australia as ‘economic rationalism’, which is partially characterised by ‘corporatism’ and ‘managerialism’.

    Again, thank you for your reply. I still have other questions but I don’t have time at present.

  26. @Freelander

    “Right-wing libertarians” are synonymous with neo-liberals.

    I have seen a lot of left-wing libertarians rage against neo-liberalism.

    In fact, all these terms are camouflage and weasel concepts.

  27. Chris Warren and Freelander, I am not educated in politics in the sense of political history (high school history is not sufficient in my opinion to form opinions worth while writing about on this blog). Economic history, which overlaps with politics, can be read with specific questions in mind. My focus was not on politics. I accept that the ‘-ism words’ are useful labels in context; shorthand labels to organise complex material. I just wanted to signal an ambiguity in my mind. What I find interesting is that people who come from various backgrounds have made similar observations and have similar concerns, even though words get in the way at times.

  28. @Freelander

    putting the prefix “neo” in front of something merely conveys the idea that the movement/category amounts to a new iteration of some prior (and typically defunct/discarded) movement category.

    Thus, in art, “neoclassical” would be a return to usages of the “classical” period, perhaps inflected with contemporary themes/innovations etc … ditto neo-conservative

    Not uncommonly though, in lay usage, adding “neo” simply amounts to intellectual pretense — an attempt to suggest an insight into comparative features of the two movements/categories that the utterer lacks in practice.

  29. I thought that debate with conrad was more than a little odd. it is definitely a pity that it happened to be a chinese resources company that is buying the land, it would be simpler, and remove any whiff of xeno/sinophobia from the thread if it had just been an Australian resources company doing it.

    But these mining companies do this sort of thing all the time, buying up otherwise productive land. I would oppose the purchases on the grounds that it’s an effing coal mine, and destroying arable land, but on the basis that “them furriners are buying OUR LAND”, which was what many of you were saying, is just crap. If you believe in private property (which I generally tend to, when sober), then the land was freely bought and sold, at a good price, and the sellers are happy, non-coerced, they have every right to sell. Would you rather stop them selling for the highest price? are you going out there to buy their property, or would you like our taxes to fund your xenophobia?

    Of course, there will be externalities, this is a planning matter. Very hard to deal with in modern societies, there will be losers (and winners) apart from the property owners. Hopefully some of the royalties will be invested locally to ameliorate these. Still, good place to get a job there now.

    As for those of you arguing that we’re in fact poorer than we were thirty or fifty years ago, okaaay, you can believe what you want, that’s rather a quaint, fact-free position to hold. Here’s the HDI estimates for the last three decades. 0.871 to 0.970. Completely apart from the property bubble we’re currently living in, we’re wealthier, healthier, freer and more educated than ever before.

    We could have kept a manufacturing industry, paying too much for shoddy goods.

  30. @Chris Warren

    Libertarians, neo-liberals, etc. eschew particular labels distinguishing themselves by some particular label but not other equivalent labels. They also tend to revise which particlulare label they are comfortable wearing. They do this but not in a consistent or coherent manner. The motivation for these false and fine incoherent distinctions is that each libertarian believes itself to be an ‘individual’, and therefore somewhat unique, and thus, feels, she defies categorisation. All part of the disease. Nevertheless and despite any railing to the contrary by any of the disordered, these distinctions are illusory, as is their claim to relative uniqueness.

  31. @wilful

    Wilful

    You have missed the point. No-one is claiming;

    that we’re in fact poorer than we were thirty or fifty years ago, okaaay,

    The issue was conrad’s stupid assertion @26, viz:

    We’re miles richer than we were 30 years ago by any measure,

    Now you want to imply that people are just believing what ever they want! But surely if you read the relevant posts you would know that the key issue is that this assessment is based on rising per capita debt and Andrew Leigh’s recent research.

    If you look back, you will see that the issue was never presented as “believing whatever you want” or quaint fact-free position. I said that

    “If you want to take this issue seriously spend some time looking at bankruptcy trends, debt trends, and Andrew leigh’s latest work in increasing gap between rich and poor.”

    You choose to ignore this context – why? If you ignore debt and look at Australian material wealth then it looks like our living standard has risen, for example most people did not have a computer 30 years ago.

    But this is not the point. Anyone can get this result by increasing debt.

    Now you want to claim that there has been some increase, and you rather strangely point to:

    Between 1980 and 2007 Australia’s HDI rose by 0.40% annually from 0.871 to 0.970 today.

    So you want to argue the toss, based on decimal points of percentage growth! 1 in a thousand accuracy? Global growth statistics are not this robust. You data shows, to the nearest percent, that between 1980 and 2007, Australia’s HDI rose by 0%.

    In general, given all the exporting, profiteering, development, and associated activity, a improvement of less than half a percent annually over such a long tiome frame is effectively a flat-line. This does not place Australians “miles ahead” which was conrads peculiar statement. This was the point. QED.

    So why don’t you try and have another go – this time, for honesty’s sake, at least addressing the problem of increasing per-capita debt.

  32. @Freelander

    For what it is worth:

    Rightwing libertarians = “Randites” – Tea-Party tosspots

    Leftwing libertarians = “Anarchists” – hippie tosspots.

    These differences are not illusory, and each is quite unique relative to the other.

  33. Chris, in case your maths isn’t quite up to it (so it seems), that’s an 11 percent increase in HDI, to third in the world.

    I find it impossible to believe that someone can honestly think that we’re no better off than in 1980. On so many different measures, that is so obviously untrue. We live longer. We are healthier while we are alive. We eat more (too much often!). Absolute poverty has declined. Our houses are filled with stuff that we clearly want. We are more educated.

    And all you have to say is that it’s all a chimera due to debt?

  34. @wilful

    Our houses are filled with stuff that we clearly want.

    And in many cases, stuff we wish we don’t want and hadn’t bought 😉

  36. @Chris Warren

    Agreed. The left wing libertarians are different and I wouldn’t really classify them in with the other lot. It is worth distinguishing between libertarian followers of Rand and the (right-wing) libertarians who do not follow her. And yes I suppose like a person with moles on their skin, each is different in their way with different distinguishing petty prejudices. But then we’re all unique, but some of us are more unique than others.

  37. wilful :
    Chris, in case your maths isn’t quite up to it (so it seems), that’s an 11 percent increase in HDI, to third in the world.

    Please show me where my maths seems not to be “up to it”.

    My statement was in effect: To the nearest percent – 0.4% is zero. QED.

    And all you have to say is that it’s all a chimera due to debt?

    Yes; If you refer back I said that anyone can get this wealth if they rely on increasing per capita debt. It is not a chimera.

    There are other factors, such as the increased participation of oppressed Third World labour in our domestic standard of living.

    But increased debt is the killer.

    If you ignore this you are only looking at short-term appearances, themselves based on the destruction of all Europe, and exploitation of (a somewhat angry) Third World.

    But of course, some would like to ignore debt. This is their mistake.

  39. @Fran Barlow
    Unfortunately Fran some of that stuff we dont want and wish we hadnt bought may also be full of toxins we didnt even know existed. Hey who cares about that except “hippie tosspots” LOL? Lets not talk about it… or someone might suggest Govts got off their tosspots and regulated the toxins out of consumer spending and that will cost jobs even though in a free market those lovely flexible workers are supposed to pick up, move and do something more productive.

  40. Neo liberalism is valorised, alibied infantile selfishness; “self will run riot”. It is at best a feeble justification for spite, meanness and self centred ness.
    Where is the decentering element in this dogma?”

  41. paul,
    How about we look at this another way? To put it in the sort of language you are employing, socialism is founded on a presumption that without someone exercising strong control over us, we will all descend into a valorised, alibied infantile selfishness; “self will run riot”. BTW – the socialists and the conservatives agree on this. They just cannot agree which field it is in which we will act in that way.
    What a sad, sorry way to look at your fellow human beings.
    In reality, though – liberals (or at least me, I cannot speak for all) tend to believe that humans are fully capable of behaving generally correctly when the restrictions of society are the main restrictions imposed on our freedom. I do not believe that we need strong government control of our lives to make us behave in a generally correct way.

  42. Na, just a few guidelines, to remind business that others maybe affected by their activities, as with the coal mining in the Hunter on 4 Corners last week, Andrew, #41.
    But they won’t follow them when they get their way on dereg. And when they have control of government apparatus, they get their sockpuppets in “government”, as functionary for big business, to no more exert themselves than fly to the moon, as the Carmel Tebbutt example demonstrated.
    You’d agree the amount of “wastage” in the global system is a factor in delaying the amelioration of third world poverty? And the development of sustainability as a necessary underpinning for the future?
    Now, back to Hartcher article in SMH concerning Goldman Sachs and Greece.

  43. @Fran Barlow

    True, much pretense in the neo-liberal. The liberal in it and libertarianism is simply a fraud. They certainly aren’t liberal. And they also lay claim to be in the tradition of various long deads who, because of their current state, can’t defend their legacy. All just a part of their spin.

    Look at the naughty boy above, claiming to be a “liberal”. Infantile selfishness is not exactly liberal. Neo and liberal are simply part of the spin.

  44. Freelander, its a very old theology now, derived of a mix of Ricardian tight-ass and Byronic romanticism.
    It is prior to the sort of insights that Marx, Freud, Weber, Durkheim and Darwin, et al offered in their later critiques of 19th century civilisation, as to human subjectivity and existence, even devaluing Neitzsche, in diluting from true freedom, reduced to egotism and narcissism. it is so part and parcel of our conceptual superstructures as they relate to system reification and individuation and commodification of “others”.
    Neoliberalism is preferable to liberalsim for the current system because that then can deny even the better impulses of old liberalism that sort to improve rather than just
    ‘hold on”, as with Hobbesians.

  46. No matter how bad evil self-centred or a complete a hole a person is, they like to feel good about themselves and morally justified. This is the role of many of these nastyism political philosophies.

  48. What I get from THAT, Freelander, is the need for the utmost “good times”, if not better, from now on…

Leave a comment