Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
Witness the new heights of absurdity and waste of the Australian Open (tennis).
The Open has become has become a multi-event extravaganza extending over three weeks. Clearly, it’s all about corporate commercialisation and fleecing the rubes with over-priced seats, food, under-whelming and inane commentary and idiotic novelty events. If our society has all this money to waste on promenading around over-priced precincts and then watching a little yellow ball sail back and forth over a net for hours on end, then we must have already fully solved our climate change, health, welfare, education, housing affordability and homelessness crises (to name a few). Oh wait, we haven’t.
“The Victorian government has invested almost $1 billion in upgrading Melbourne Park, home of the Australian Open over the past decade. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Victorian government provided a $100 million taxpayer bailout to Tennis Australia to keep it solvent. This consisted of a $63 million cash payment and a $43 million loan which was later forgiven. There is also event operational, transport and logistic support provided by government.” (These examples in this paragraph taken from Google AI and slightly re-worded).
A society which has manifest runaway problems, as outlined above, (climate change, health, welfare, education, housing affordability and homelessness crises), cannot afford to throw away money and therefore resources on such circuses as the AO and professional sports in general (football, Olympics, Grand Prix etc. etc.). The fact that we do this is another sign of our bread and circuses mentality and the promotion and subsidisation of climate-destroying, society destroying, over-consumption and tourism. This is nothing less than another sign of our end-of-epoch, terminal societal and civilizational corruption leading to total national and global collapse.
None of this is sustainable. The collapse is getting very close.
A few striking claims I came across recently. I had to check and I found out they were true at least according to Google AI. Illustrated here by the AI answers themselves.
Plenty of lessons to be drawn from these in an interconnected global system. If you destroy a country, the people can’t support themselves. Der! Then other countries have to help support them or else permit mass deaths. That’s patently obvious, so why do we destroy countries? US in Afghanistan, Russia in Ukraine? Israel in Gaza? US in Greenland, soon?
Also, if you permit excess people movements without proper controls, you promote the likelihood of (further) pandemics and accelerate climate change from all the fossil fuel consumption involved. So why do we permit it? Why do we do it?
Could the rise in billionaire wealth (absolutely and relatively) be related to the first two points? There are clearly big profits (for some) in war and in the astonishingly rapid revival of travel after the Covid-19 pandemic was falsely declared over. Remember, they were scrapping cruise ships only 5 years ago or so.
I think countries being destroyed, peoples being erased and the climate being destroyed are not things that the majority of people globally want to see. So why do these policies get enacted? Clearly an elite, or a clique of elites, drive and cause these events. That’s really the only explanation we can arrive at. Follow the money, as they say. The billionaires and their enablers drive it. Equally as clearly, the majority, or at least the majority in already developed countries are made compliant and complicit with this program with lesser temptations and rewards but temptations and rewards still significant and alluring to them. But how does this all happen? How does it work?
We have to look at the networking system, the system that confers control to the elite(s) and transmits impulse, impetus, influence, cause. That system is “Capital as Power” or CasP. The originating theorists of CasP are Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler.
CasP does nothing less than abolish economics in all the (false) forms it is currently understood. A big claim which I make for Bichler and Nitzan. I am not sure whether or not they would make the claim in that way. B&N solve not so much the Value Controversy in Marxism (though they essentially do that too), they solve the Capital Controversy in Classical and Neoclassical economics. They do so by abolishing certain fundamental fallacies embedded in Classical and Neoclassical economics. They do so in an entirely empirical and scientific manner.
It’s not my place to paraphrase their theories here. You must read their works and their school’s works comprehensively, in the original. I always advocate reading comprehensively in the original, for political economy, for moral philosophy and for philosophy in general.
For myself, I will only say in summary that matters are so bad in the world that the only explanation can be that all extant mainstream political economy, theoretical and applied, must be fundamentally wrong. There really can be no other explanation. The empirical outcomes, the endless spiral to complete disaster, compel the conclusion. Nothing less than a complete instauration, a complete renewal of political economy theory from the fundamentals and foundations upwards can play a role in changing matters from the ideational end. Many factors are now changing things from the non-ideational end. We can only understand and guide this change to something better than a comprehensive and catastrophic collapse, if that is still possible, by a complete renewal and change of our understanding in these matters.
The problem with the US isn’t just Trump, its the vast army of enablers.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DT1tDBsAL5d/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==