Posts Tagged ‘free markets’

Newer Entries »

The Energy Crisis

March 19, 2017

Updated Jan 2020 with hindsight, although the original arguments remain the same. Basically Irvine seems determined to excuse the Coalition or sidestep around their political commitments to fossil fuels, and she ignores the ecological crisis which is both largely caused by the energy being used, and impacts on our problems with energy.

This article developed from a comment on an article by Jessica Irvine in the Sydney Morning Herald “Energy crisis: The 9 questions you were too embarrassed to ask“.

Irvine argues that “The energy crisis – with all its mind-boggling complexity, jargon and science-y stuff – is something you’ll need to understand”

Point 1: She argues that there is an energy crisis in the sense of “reaching a ‘decisive moment’ or ‘a time of danger or great difficulty’,” but there is no widespread destruction as yet.

While there may be no destructive energy crisis, there is an ecological crisis which is growing, partly because of carbon emissions from energy sources. It is vital to keep the ecological crisis in focus as many other crises flow on from that.

Point 2: She states: “without meaning to be dramatic, death and a widespread blanket of darkness descending across the lands are not entirely off the cards.” We could have blackouts.

However, a blackout is not generally a crisis. With backup and delay, it is usually just a problem or an annoying inconvenience. However, the worse the ecological crisis gets, the more problems with energy supply become significant, and the more people will suffer or die as a result. Power can breakdown in fierce bushfires; emergency procedures can be disrupted at times of mass need; mobile phones can go off communications grids, etc. The economy and food supply will be hurt as well.

Point 3: She suggests that gas is one solution to renewable blackouts, as gas can be ramped up quickly.

Gas does not help when major powerlines are down due to storm or fire events, as in the South Australian crisis. There is, also, only one line into the Bega Valley for example. This increases vulnerability. We need more redundancy, and more power lines. This will help reduce problems from all sources, but it will probably involve government action. If we can afford new stadiums, publicly funded tollways, and moving museums for no good reason, then we should be able to afford that. However, the Coalition believes in privatization of energy for whatever reason, and it now seems unlikely the power companies will do what is needed, as they have not done this, despite massive investments for tax reasons.

There is currently a problem with gas supply in Australia, but that results from: a) gas companies deciding to supply gas to overseas contracts rather than local consumers, and: b) from gas power stations failing in the heat (from the ecological crisis). If we are to use gas (and gas still produces Green House Gas emissions, through burning and leakage), we need to control the gas companies, or have a state gas company, rather than have them control us.

Point 4: A point of agreement with the author. Coal is stupid, expensive and poisonous to people and the environment.

A carbon price may be useful, but it needs to be carefully thought out, and clear, to allow planning, and to recompense ordinary consumers. The original Carbon Price passed by the Australian Parliament in 2011 (the Clean Energy Act 2011) , did this, when it started in July 2012. It was repealed by the Coalition for no good reason.

Point 5: “Policy makers became so obsessed with getting a mechanism in place to drive lower emissions (and failing to do so) that they forgot to focus enough on ensuring adequate energy supply to keep the lights on.”

This is a real sidestep of the issues. The Coalition parties (both in government and opposition) became obsessed with defending fossil fuel companies and mining companies (rather than with getting any mechanism to drive lower emissions), and have actively worked to prevent alternate energy supplies from increasing, or lowering emissions. This specific criticism simply does not apply to the Coalition, as it assumes something which was not true. Labor may not have been much better, but it was better; it had policies.

Closing power stations, has happened for capitalist economic reasons, not because of government regulation or aims at emissions reduction. They were old. Refurbishing them would be so costly that the energy they would generate would have been largely too expensive on the market to break even.

Point 6: “You can expect to pay more, both as a taxpayer and an energy user,” because of government intervention.

The Coalition government’s main intervention from 2014 onwards has been to do nothing to reduce emissions, and to repeal the carbon price, which should have made coal powered electricity cheaper. It has not.

Prices will continue to increase in the market as it exists, as companies continue to manipulate that market to increase profit. That is what companies do. That is why the prices have increased after the Carbon tax was repealed. We have a situation in which various companies are profiteering from the destruction of both our environment and Australia’s energy systems. This, is the main story, so let’s not forget it.

Point 7: South Australia is going towards renewables all alone and this disrupts a “cohesive and consistent cross-government legislative framework which provides a safe environment for private investment.” 

South Australia is going it alone because the Federal government has done little but attack them (mostly using false information) in order to defend fossil fuel companies, and has provided no help, or even moral support. Likewise, there has been no effort at all, to make any Commonwealth wide legislative framework for energy provision. Indeed the Coalition has fought against such a framework.

Essentially more states will have to go it alone if we want a solution under this Federal Government.

Point 8: Can we solve the problem with batteries, and are current batteries worth the price?

For Irvine, this just remains a question. Battery storage is still in development and will get better with more research – perhaps we should fund some? Batteries are still apparently cheaper and less destructive than the alternatives.

We might also think about a contract in which batteries get replaced with newer models as time passes. But that would not be supporting fossil fuel companies, so there is little chance of that.

Point 9: “As long as government remains in the business of picking winners, seemingly out of a hat, rather than sitting back and establishing the clear price signals needed for business to invest, Australians will pay more for power”

The Coalition government is in the business of picking losers that won’t challenge fossil fuel companies. The proposed new Snowy scheme will be overpriced, depend on water and snow we may not have because of climate change, and be powered by coal if at all possible. It seems like a massive waste of money, as you might expect.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Why is talk of ‘free markets’ beneficial for Corporate domination?

March 8, 2017

We have had about 40 years of politicians and media continually spruiking the benefits of free markets. During that time, we have seen a steady transfer of wealth to the exceedingly wealthy, a consolidation of ownership and control of the corporate sector, a decline in social mobility and a boost in state attempts to control ordinary people and reduce control over the corporate sector.

This result is not a coincidence. Indeed corporations sponsor free market think tanks. Corporate and think-tank self-interest justifies the idea that free market talk primarily supports their power and wealth.

Free market talk boosts corporate power as follows:

1) It makes business the only important part of society. Economics and “the market” matters, nothing else does. Therefore the desires of the business sector are vital and must be attended to, and protected, before anything else.

2) If people would like or need something, or it is socially important, but does not make a profit or interferes with corporate profit, then it is clearly not needed, or not of value. It can be also dismissed as impractical, because the market is the only mark of value and practicality.

3) Regulations which curtail or add work to business to favour the ordinary person are automatically bad. Regulations which control the ordinary person and protect big business are automatically good as they support standard business practice, which is the ultimate good. Unions are bad, business associations (and their ties with politicians) are wonderful.

4) The market can never be free, as regulation is required to protect ‘private property’ and contract, so there is always further to go in favour of reducing restrictions on the corporate sector and tightening its control.

5) Free market liberty allows people to compete on “equal terms” with corporations. Josephine Bloggs and BHP are equal in law and equal in their freedom to spend any amount of money to buy lawyers, politicians and that law. Who is surprised that most people don’t bother to challenge power?

6) Free market talk destroys commons, because commons are not private property owned by anyone, and nobody is responsible for theme. Therefore they must be transferred to the private sector as cheaply as possible to regularise everything. Consequently, the people lose property and power.

7) Government services can be contracted out to the private sector and the costs and benefits can be kept secret through commercial in confidence arrangements, as not having these would interfere with business and the free market.

8) Government services which cannot be privatised become punitive, as people should be using the market, and must be evil if they are not. Services to ordinary people are removed.

9) As profit is the only value, truth becomes that which makes a profit or supports established power, and thus the media has no obligations to anything but the propaganda interests of its corporate owners or their corporate friends.

10) Free market talk suggests Governments should do nothing and everything should be left to the elites with wealth. So we move into plutocracy, which reinforces the process by which everything is governed in favour of corporate elites.

11) Corporations will compete politically and legally if it gives them a competitive edge or subsidy. The more other sources of influence remove themselves from politics, the less likely will it be that corporations will face opposition from anything other than corporate sources. So pro-corporate laws get passed continually.

12) People are told, by almost all public sources, that governments are inefficient and useless and that there is no point them getting involved and trying to take over the State in their own interests rather than the interests of the wealthy.

13) The more people withdraw from participation in politics and the State, the more the governors become isolated from ‘the people’ and the more they depend on corporate money for their campaigning, so the more easily they are bought by the plutocrats.

14) Wealth becomes the primary source, and mark, of power and virtue. Everything else is inferior and to be dismissed, and the free market continues to be promoted above all else.

[It is true that free market people sometimes talk a lot about ‘liberty’, but they only mean the liberty of business to do as it likes. Everyone else has the ‘liberty’ to adapt to government by business.]

Tags:, ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

When did the Righteous start attacking Science?

February 28, 2017

Its probably complicated. It probably began with religions resisting evolution, to increase their inerrancy, and to avoid change. They could argue that by challenging religious accounts of the world and its development, science had become immoral. Then it moved into commerce. Business resisted being put to extra costs when science discovered health problems with their products. Smoking, for example, became branded as a right, a freedom, its health consequences denied.

So, it became relatively common to attack science for commercial and ideological purposes long before it became mainstream amidst the righteous. Indeed the right used to champion military and commercial science as the way of the future, just as much as the left.

However problems also arose from science, with scientists talking down to, and at, people, and arrogantly assuring them that their fears about technological projects were misplaced. The failure of official science was marked by the disasters of thalidomide, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the racist studies of infection, and so on. Commercial science, in particular, was governed by profit, not accuracy or safety. Then there was the use of science as a death machine – agent orange, napalm, nuclear weapons and so on – with little recompense to those damaged by it, or threatened by it. There were constant changes in medical recommendations, and a relatively high level of iatrogenic disease (disease generated by medical techniques). Consequently, even more people felt alienated from a science which affected their lives and which they had no input into.

Then, another big move occurred. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the State had expanded to include not only all men with property, but propertyless women, black people and so on, and by the late sixties and early seventies, ordinary people were active within that State, demanding equality, services and the end to elite authority. The righteous panicked.

Samuel Huntington wrote about this “democratic distemper” or “excess of democracy” in his report to the Trilateral commission on The Crisis of Democracy. The power of the people who should have power was being disturbed, chaos was emerging. His recommendation was to encourage voter apathy – to get people out of participating in the State.

This was achieved by encouraging distrust of government, so there was no point in people getting involved. The after events of Nixon was used to promote this idea of government as inherently corrupt, as was the Vietnam war. The free market was to be trusted rather than political action. Money and business were marks of virtue, everything else was pretense. You were to look after yourself and avoid government ‘interference’. You got out of politics that could impact the ruling class and just guarded your personal property. Even government action which looked like it might help you, was ‘interference’ and to be distrusted. This abrogation of participation and action, was portrayed as part of the way to end elite authority, with the only elites in this view being left wing or governmental – wealth was not a thing that defined elites or marked power differentials. Hence the eager funding of libertarian think tanks. This meant removing the knowledge we have about social action from the public domain. Social ‘science’ (such that it was) was declared to be interfering and communist etc.

These ideas promised to deliver liberty and prosperity for all. They couldn’t and didn’t.

We have had 35 to 40 years of them, and they have never delivered. Wages became stagnant, wealth was distributed to the rulers, social mobility collapsed, the State was used to impose restrictions on ordinary people, people became more alienated from governmental processes, commercial media saw their job as largely supporting this order, rather than any alternative, as they were part of the corporate class.

Growing failure meant scapegoats had to be found. It was said to be the fault of immigrants, the fault of intellectuals, the fault of minorities, the fact that we had not got 100% free markets. Anything but the fault of the ideology itself, or behaviour of the corporate class. Once it became clear that science implied that the social order was coming to an end through environmental destruction, it became important to attack science to continue the arrangement and entrench the power of the elites.

The attack made use of techniques pioneered by tobacco, religion, libertarians, and so on. It fitted in with the official ideology, by making your freedom the freedom to be anti-science and anti-the-authority-of-knowledge. It supposedly demonstrated your ability to think against the grain (as it agreed with the ruling ideology). It allowed political action and involvement against those who criticised the elites. It gave people some sense of importance in the alienated world they lived in….

It helped save the power of the rulers for a bit longer, and they gamble that they will be rich enough to ride out the coming troubles, as money gives you everything…. at least so they think.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Fake News

February 15, 2017

What would be being said if we had a vaguely left wing media?

This is my attempt an opinion piece for such a fictitious venue.

The situation is dire. For the last nearly 40 years both mainstream parties have been pursuing the neoliberal vision of endless vaunting of free markets and business. They have repeatedly said that acting on these assumptions will lead to greater liberty and efficiency. Here at the Global Left we recognise that these predictions have always been wrong or were possibly deliberate lies to begin with. On the other hand, our own predictions about neoliberalism have been validated. With its enforcement; the economy has become permanently unstable, the median wage has stagnated, most ordinary jobs are insecure, industry has closed down, social security and education have been eviscerated, government services for ordinary people have declined or become punitive, public/collective property has been sold off, business fraud is mainstream, welfare for corporations has increased, business competition has declined, the tax burden has shifted to the middle class, people have become alienated from politics, every policy is decided by whether it profits established business, virtue and values go out the window, the right has started culture wars because it needs to distract people from reality, and there is a general retreat from democracy into authoritarianism.

By now we have plenty of experience of ‘privatisation’ and of ‘public-private’ partnerships, and we know what this means. Invariably in privatisation, income for the high-level executives increases magnificently, the workers who provide the service are cut back, maintenance and resilience decrease, services for ordinary people decrease, and prices increase. In public private partnerships we suddenly find it impossible to find out how much we the tax-payers are paying or what we have given the company because of ‘commercial in-confidence’. What a wonderful arrangement – for business. Nothing for us.

This is, we might suspect, the kind of situation ‘free markets’ always lead to.

We have also learnt, if we needed to, that capitalism is completely unable to deal with ecological crisis because it is too tied up in maintaining business as usual or profit, and it is the main cause of the problems. Put simply the response of capitalism to ecological crisis has been to hire people to lie for it, and pretend there is no problem. Neoliberalism is still loudly cheered on by business funded think tanks, as despite its overt failure to deliver for the people, it does deliver for the corporate sector. Neoliberal governments have also tried to supress knowledge, stopping public servants from mentioning climate change, forbidding scientists from speaking in public, destroying libraries, clearing websites of information, trying to stop research funding. You might think that this would attract attention among those who claim to be suspicious of governments, but it apparently doesn’t.

Corporations have lots of money to throw about and purchase liars, because of the political restructuring which has gifted them with a much greater share of the wealth generated by their workers, and because ‘truth’ has become whatever makes a profit. Most of the media is also owned by the corporate sector, acts in that sector’s self-interest and takes this propaganda for granted. Neoliberalism has proved of wondrous benefit to corporations, but a curse to everyone else. We say that capitalism is strong and does not need the coddling it gets from neoliberals. Indeed it is better for it to face its customers as equals.

As we all should know, the Great Economic crisis of 2008 onwards was primarily caused by two factors: firstly financial corporations joined together extremely risky investments and sounder investments and sold them as ‘safe’ with the full approval of credit ratings agencies; secondly the mortgage industry deceptively sold people mortgages which they could not pay off with the aim of repossessing their houses and selling them for more than they were mortgaged for, taking the repayments with them. These two frauds were combined to make an even more unstable product which people were encouraged to invest in. The whole basis for the booming economy and the resulting collapse was fraud, and having so much money which was not going into wages or to the productive economy. Neoliberals sat back and cheered the triumph of the free market and claimed the only problem was that there were still some regulations which tried to prevent fraud. President Bush’s solution was to throw tax payers money at the elite benefactors from the fraud, without any oversight. President Obama was declared a socialist for asking these corporations to treat further tax payer monies as loans. A real socialist would have made sure the money got to the ordinary folk being defrauded, so they could keep their homes at the rates they agreed to, and not be losing their life savings and be thrown onto the streets, even when mortgage companies could not produce the paperwork that gave them the right to throw people out.

In the US, Donald Trump correctly diagnosed the dissatisfaction of working America with this neoliberal economic mess.  However, as we predicted, he is trying to fix it with more of the ‘solutions’ that caused the problems in the first place: tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, removal of regulations which tried to prevent corporations from poisoning people, removal of regulations the previous president re-introduced which tried to make corporations even vaguely responsible for the fraud and deception they carried out, cut backs to welfare programs and increased spending on the military. This is made more attractive by a little protectionism promised on the side, but not yet delivered; and we can be sure that when it is delivered, it will be delivered to protect useless or powerful companies.

Let us be clear, tax cuts for corporations do not generate jobs, they simply lead to higher executive salaries, more money for stock holders and more money to gamble on financial markets. In neoliberalism, mainstream ‘jobs’ are simply a cost to be eliminated.

By preserving the problem, President Trump has not ‘drained the swamp’ of his cabinet, but brought new infections. He has business finance controlled by representatives of financial corporations, environment by polluters, and so on. Mr. Trump will not do anything that will endanger his apparent business interests or the business interests of those he is allied to; to hell with anyone else. He is, of course, continuing the culture war, to try and convince his supporters he has something in common with them. Hopefully this is failing and, as we can see, many people are protesting and standing firm for American tradition and the rule of law, rather than the rule of presidential whim.

It is ever the way that the ruling class will cling to their basis for power, even when it is bringing about general destruction.

During the primaries, we tried to ignore Trump and, when that was impossible, covered his business scandals and incompetancies, especially the ways that he cheerfully sacrificed his workers and creditors for his own benefit. We covered his obvious vengefulness (which increases the probability of war and governmental repression of his enemies), his inability to understand ecological issues, and all his other lazy ignorance, but the rest of the media gave him free publicity, or asked him questions about his favourite bible verse. His reply “an eye for an eye” did show something about him, but it was not elaborated.

In Australia we warned that Tony Abbott was not going to be an improvement on Julia Gillard. He was a hardline neoliberal head kicker, who wanted to impose his version of Catholicism on everyone. However, our rivals in the Murdoch Empire and the Fairfax Flutter, did their absolute best to promote him, rewrite his past, and attack Gillard and Labor. The result was as we expected. We ended up with a Prime Minister with a marvelous sense of his own entitlement and completely unable to negotiate. His first budget collapsed under the weight of this inability, the number of election promises it broke, and the attempt to fix Australia’s debt by kicking ordinary Australians and making them carry the burden. Furthermore, as we might expect, he fled from the environmental crisis into support for the coal industry at all costs, with the added bonus of attacking renewable energy whenever possible. It is conceivable that he headed the worst, most delusional, government in Australia’s history.

We had hoped that when this self-generated political crisis reached breaking point that Malcolm Turnbull might take his party into some vague encounter with reality, but so far he has knelt before the lunatic and failed right and refused to do anything to tackle our problems. He continues the fixed genuflection towards capital and wealth, as is most clearly shown by his staunch attack on minor union fraud, as contrasted with his happiness for the banks to regulate themselves when almost every other week the business pages fill with stories about the latest fraud and deception against small customers. These financial frauds have amounted to billions. If real, as alleged, they are major crimes, and yet nothing is to be done. Similarly we have revealed how large companies are routinely defrauding workers of their legal wages. But nothing is to be done.

Such large scale theft by business is of no concern to the government at all, indeed they are more likely to make it retrospectively legal than they are to prosecute. Neoliberalism implies the doctrine that if a business is big enough, then any fraud is acceptable if it primarily affects ordinary people. Profit is God. Class war on ordinary people is a duty. We say, profit is useful but it is not everything.

What can we do? As we have said, in Australia, Labor is a neoliberal party of a slightly less rigorous bent than the current government. When in government they failed to take on the mining corporations, they failed to promote their own climate policies, they did nothing to recapture tax revenue lost through various corporate tricks. They spend as much time attacking the Greens as they do attacking the Government. However, they are clearly better than the current bunch of incompetent, endlessly self-pleased baboons. So we would suggest that you vote for them in the lower house and press them to shed this stupid affectation that corporate business is the only valuable social and individual activity. For the upper house vote Green. The Greens do not have the experience of government that Labor does (although any ignorance, intransigence and stupidity is less a problem for them than it is for Trump as many of them have some experience and don’t have to engage in self-deception to the same extent), but they will at least attempt to recognise that we live in a time which requires urgent change and not endless thumb twiddling and praise of CEOs.

You too can get out in the streets and protest, write to your MPs talk to your friends, participate. Democracy is about participation. The government depends on you. It is your servant, however much neoliberals want it to be your boss. Don’t allow them to shout you down and talk you out of politics. Organise locally, get your community involved in deciding their future, rather than leaving it to the corporate sector. If you are not the solution, then you are betraying your children or other people’s children. In the terms of a well-known Hopi Indian speech: “You are the people you are waiting for”.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Neoliberal Rorts

February 5, 2017
In Australia, politicians from all sides do things like rort expenses. However those on the right seem particularly prone to do this as a group and in a big way. Why?

We could argue that they are stupid. After all, after one important politician loses her position because she chartered a helicopter to make a 20 minute car drive (or whatever) to a party fund raising event, it could seem problematic to charter an aircraft to fly a normal commercial car route? Apparently not.

While it is tempting to dismiss the right as inherently stupid, I don’t think this can be done. They do not seem stupid.

What is probably the problem is that the right is composed almost entirely of ‘neoliberals’; that is people who think that the free market is good/god, and that wealthy people should be rewarded and poorer people punished. Wealth is the only value, and it should reward virtue.

As they are virtuous people (because they believe in , defend, and act on neoliberal principles) it follows that they should be entitled to wealth like corporate executives are.

So by claiming transport costs, holidays in resorts, or charter flights on the taxpayers, they are not being criminal, or stupid, they are simply carrying out the principles of neoliberalism.

In the same way, automating Centrelink and fishing for overpayment or threatening people on social security (what we now know as “robodebt”) is also part of neoliberalism. According to the theories and hopes of the right, virtuous people, living in the market, should always have a full time job, and if they don’t they are rorting the system and should be punished.

Of course robodebt primarily punishes those people who have managed to “have a go” and get some work, no matter how small, but, in neoliberalism, punishment of relative poverty is always appropriate.

Politicians on the right are also more prone to lying, because of their commitment to neoliberalism, as the only evaluation is profit. Whatever makes a profit is true.

The reality is that giving corporations more power through free market talk and tax cuts has not delivered liberty or prosperity for most people, as was promised. It has delivered stagnant wages, a punitive state, ecological destruction and cultural warfare (as a distraction).

If the right accepted this truth, then they would have to recognize that the last 35 years of right wing policy has failed, and they would have to change. It is easier to continue to lie and rort the system, while hoping they will survive, even if their electorate does not.

So the argument is that they rort because they are dedicated in hope to a failed system and its values. For them, there is still no alternative which would maintain the power and wealth of the establishment. They rort to make neoliberalism true.

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Economics, Reality and Renewable Energy

November 22, 2016

I keep reading things like: “In a showdown between political ideology and economic reality … you want to be betting on economic reality,” or other statements implying that capitalism and business will save us.

That makes it seem that people do think that pro-corporate organisations like the Republicans in the US, really do believe in ‘small government’ and ‘free markets’, rather than in using those words as slogans to support action in favour of established corporate power. Republicans have already changed ‘economic reality’ to reflect their position and probably will keep doing so. This is not about respecting reality, rationality or getting the best results for ‘working people’.

The new US government can, for example, encourage companies who provide grid power to charge more for connecting to places/homes with renewable power to prevent ‘freeloading’ on profits. They can tax renewable usage, or put import tariffs on essential materials or parts for renewables. They can decide renewables are dangerous to workers, hazardous to public health (wind farm syndrome, why not a solar power syndrome?), or bad for ‘baseload’, and slap difficult regulations on them. They can put taxes on the use of land for renewables. They can use infrastructure development to subsidise coal mines, fracking and gas leaks. They can use the same monies to build, or sudsidise, new coal power stations as vital to the economy. They can pretend that they already have clean coal, or give billions to research clean coal without checking that money gets spent on research (other than market research). They can remove all anti-pollution enforcement as that hinders the economy. They can decide that protestors against these moves, are more vulnerable to jail, or police beatings, or face increased and bankrupting fines; or they can legislate that protestors are terrorists. They can decide that protest should not occur on private property as that is trespassing, and that all space is private property. I’m sure they are more ingenious than me, so they can find even more reasons to hinder and halt renewables and their supporters.

If they can ignore the reality of climate change, they can skew the economy towards fossil fuels.

In terms of Ken Mcleod’s ‘fourfold’ the mythos of capitalist economics is misleading at best, and this produces misleading understanding and action and a restricted psyche.

Not only does our economics depend on the idea of individuals primarily competing with each other, it tends to make profit the only good, and usually the profit of those who are already profiting. It therefore tends to generate a plutocracy and a ‘selfish personality’ repressing human cooperativeness, or long term interest. It pretends that economic activity is not tied in with State activity and control of the State; however, in reality economics is always a political as well as a business struggle. Hence the likely possibility of Republicans acting against renewable energy, which largely involves newer companies, to support those who have already invested in their party and who already hold power in the State.

The ideology of the free market is not interested in recognizing power differentials in the market, or everyone’s survival and cannot be, because that would be to recognize that the ideology does not work in the way it claims to work – which is not to say that reasonably free markets cannot be useful, but that they get corrupted, and that they are not the only good.

If you want renewables you may need to organize, and think about new more constructive  myths and economics.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

The American Crisis

November 12, 2016

Let us be clear. America is in the crisis it is in today because since the Reagan years the Republican Party has systematically stripped away power from ordinary people and given it to big business. They have done this by pretending that the corporately controlled ‘free market’ always delivers the best results, and that anything which impinges upon big businesses’s liberty to do what it wants is evil.

In the course of this operation they have had to pretend that reality is not real. Hence the attacks on science, and any kind of non pro-corporate knowledge. Hence the pretense that many established businesses are not destroying the world we live in. They have attempted to distract people from the growing realisation that the ‘free market’ system is not delivering its promises, by encouraging hatred of fellow Americans though ‘race pride’ or by curtailing the liberties of ‘minorities’ to act openly. They use anti-abortion and ant-gay rhetoric to win over evangelicals to the worship of Mammon and the destruction of God’s creation. They have systematically opposed any attempts by Democrats to lessen the effects of business dominance, until the Democrats gave up or joined in.

This devotion to corporate power, and ‘free markets’ is why the corporate sector gets so much subsidy, why you pay proportionately more tax than big businesses, why so many jobs went overseas, why illegal immigrants work for crap wages, why inner cities are desolate wastelands, why corporations got bailed out after the financial crisis and what tens of thousands of Americans lost their homes through shonky contracts and pro-business laws.

This is the reality.

Will Trump break with the Republican fantasy? Probably not, as he has benefitted from it.

However, people can remember the origin of the problem and work towards ending the cause.

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Newer Entries »