Climate, technology and chaos Blog

Let’s think about a few things in Australia.

We have massive river disruption and dead fish because of handing water to agricultural corporations, apparently corrupt management and the rural party not wanting to look ‘green’.

We have coal mines contaminating limited water supplies near the city of Sydney and for the whole artesian basin which is vital for inland water.

We have coal mines being freed from any regulation which might help local people breathe easy.

We have high rise residential buildings cracking up because of privatized quality control.

We have right wing media lying about climate change and the ice caps.

We have a dying barrier reef.

We have taxpayers’ money being spent on roads which destroy houses and suburbs.

We have unfiltered pollution stacks concentrating road tunnel pollution onto residents and schools.

We have taxpayers’ money subsidizing coal and oil and road tolling.

We are encouraging deforestation and loss of natural habitat for even iconic animals like Koalas.

We have hospitals being demolished for property developers and replaced with hospitals an hours ride further away, so that people with heart attacks and strokes will suffer permanent damage.

We find it easy to spend lots of taxpayers’ money chasing up and impoverishing tends of thousands of people on welfare, but its too expensive to find out if private Aged care facilities, supported by the taxpayers, are starving their inmates to increase profit.

What does this all mean?

It is simple. The Right want to kill you for corporate profit. That’s it. That’s their coordinating policy – your death.

Exploitative systems nearly always justify themselves in terms of the superiority of the exploiters, and the benefits they provide to the exploited. The Spanish in South America and the East India Company in India, claimed they were bringing peace, religion, and civilization. At the worst they were ruling the “barbarians” justly.

Similarly, the benefactors of capitalism argue that wealth inequalities stem not from co-operation, inheritance, violent histories of theft and conquest, or the ability of powerful people to extract value from people who are forced to labour for others or starve, but because wealthy people are brilliant, talented, hard-working and virtuous, and everyone else is lesser.

This can happen because, loosely, capitalists form a ‘class’ which, while competing amongst themselves for status and advantage, aims to benefit, protect and justify what they do, while suppressing opposition. Their primary aim to take as much of the wealth in circulation as possible.

They do this by building a society in which those wealthy people support politicians, policies and laws that benefit them. They can further support and distribute the ideas which justify them, far better than any opposition, through ownership and control of media and the ability to support think-tanks. They can use governments to suppress alternate information (by acts such as prohibiting government scientists from speaking about climate change, getting records of ecological damage removed from official websites and so on). They have the money to make it very hard to challenge them. They tie the exploitation to attractive ideas like liberty, the benefits and virtue of hard work and so on. They can suppress the workers’ ability to co-operate to take some of the profit those workers generate back, which is the only power that workers have. They attempt to generate group polarisations, so the workers cannot unite as a whole in opposition to capitalism, merely to each other. They attack unions, use automation, deskilling, and so on to lower general wages. Do you really think that capitalists want to abolish minimum wages because they really think that this will increase workers’ income?

Historically, we had a relatively quiet capitalist class when they feared revolution from the workers, but over the last 50 or so years this fear has declined and they have moved back into overt dominance; they have nothing to fear, but Islamic fundamentalism, which has little attraction in the West, and can be used to scare Western populations into submission.

Capitalism encourages three main drives:

Capitalism is a political system, not just an economic system, and the political system it encourages is geared to plutocracy or rule by wealth. The more that wealth inequalities increase the more capitalism becomes plutocracy, and power relations favour the wealthy. Naturally it pretends to be virtue based, rather than based on exploitation or the use of power.

In the beginning, perhaps neoliberalism did have a belief in the virtues of private enterprise and in government inefficiency, but after 40 years of mess and profiteering, this can hardly be the case any more. For a long time it has been clear that privatisation exists to transfer public assets, public profit, taxpayers’ money and political power to the corporate sector.

Some of our local neoliberals use the term “Asset recycling” instead of privatization. This term shows the whole farce for what it is. There is no recycling. These assets are not waste that is being given to the private sector to revitalise, but are viable, useful and often profitable parts of public infrastructure and organisation that are being taken away from us precisely because they are useful, viable and profitable. How stupid does he think we are?

Even the supposed virtues of private enterprise are crushed by privatisation, as with the NSW Ports deal when competition between ports is suppressed by contract and legislation so as to benefit a favoured company. Many of the organisations that are privatised are monopolies, and there is no possibility of competition between the monopoly and new market entrants – for example airports, airport parking, or airport trains. The expense of building a competing airport is tremendous and unlikely to happen even if planning approval was given. The electricity grid also seems to be a monopoly for the same reason; the cost of setting up a new universal grid is enormous. So there is no competition with plenty of scope for profiteering.

We all know how well privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank has worked for the public good. The publicly owned bank provided competition, now the banks are in lock-sync to increase profits. In the old days, banks paid you to get access to your money, now with all the cost cutting allowed by the internet and computerization, and branch closure, you pay them to look after your money – and you cannot avoid using them.

Privatisation involves both surrendering power to the private sector, and over-valuing the private sector, so that what was once controllable in the general good, becomes sacrificed to profit and non-existant “private efficiency”, and what was public information which allowed performance to be evaluated becomes “commercial in confidence”.

Yes, that is right tax payers’ money goes to the private sector and we, the taxpayers, are not allowed to know how the money is spent, or whether its an improvement. As for selling the titles office, how secure is that now? We the taxpayers have to bail out these private organisations when they do stupid things. So where is the benefit? The profit goes to them, and the costs to us.

I read today, that some companies that benefit from neoliberal largess, such as Sydney Airport and Transurban (the latter receiving the gift of toll road Westconnex) have not paid taxes “since 2013-14 despite reporting billions of dollars in income” (‘One in four of Australia’s largest companies paid no tax last year’, SMH 13 December 2018). So these companies freeload even more on the rest of society, paying nothing to support the conditions that make them profitable. So its a total loss to the public.

Where does the money raised from privatisation go? Not to public coffers, but to other private companies, like the people running roughshod over the public in the way of Westconnex, which is then to be gifted to a toll company so that we not only give money to the private sector but we have a permanent tax on travel in Sydney.

Some money goes to massively inflated and useless rail projects which cannot merge with the overall rail system, and again have no competition. Indeed the sole purpose of some of these projects is to provide transport for development projects, while not serving other areas on the route.

The new privatized hospital in North Sydney is way too far from the Northern Beaches for safety. You will not get there in time if you have a stroke or heart attack, whereas you could probably have got to the hospitals which are being closed and sold off to developers. Can’t have nice land and views in the public domain or being used by ordinary sick people. The hospital is crashing already. People will end up with worse, and distant, service so that corporations can profit (in this case from people’s suffering).

All of this privatisation does help lower general wages and boost executive wages, because of the way these companies work and structure their income. – this the neoliberals think is a good thing. Thus the economy becomes depressed, because those who need money, and spend it, don’t get it.

These “shortcomings” are not minor as the author claims. Turning things over to the market only delivers profits for high-level executives, lack of information for the public (through commercial in-confidence arrangements), and pollution and destruction of the environment, air space and living space more generally. They turn power and public money over to the wealthy, and abdicate the general good and the idea of commons. They destroy the democratic process, and that is the whole point of neoliberalism.

The neoliberal right will not change their minds and stop privatization, because for them it was always about handing public property to the private sector, higher pay for corporate elites, the freedom to damage things without constraint, and freedom from challenge by the people.