Thursday, September 01, 2005
At Last - Bush the Bastard Tells The Truth!
Bush Gives New Reason for Iraq War: Says US must prevent oil fields from falling into hands of terrorists
By Jennifer Loven
Published on Wednesday, August 31, 2005 by the Associated Press
CORONADO, California - President Bush answered growing antiwar protests yesterday with a fresh reason for US troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the country's vast oil fields, which he said would otherwise fall under the control of terrorist extremists...
'If Zarqawi and [Osama] bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks," Bush said. ''They'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions. They could recruit more terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and our coalition."
© 2005 Associated Press
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Who Knows? Dubya Doesn't!
President Bush's Loss of Faith
The New York Times Editorial
29 August
It took President Bush a long time to break his summer vacation and acknowledge the pain that the families of fallen soldiers are feeling as the death toll in Iraq continues to climb. When he did, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Utah this week, he said exactly the wrong thing. In an address that repeatedly invoked Sept. 11 - the day that terrorists who had no discernable connection whatsoever to Iraq attacked targets on American soil - Mr. Bush offered a new reason for staying the course: to keep faith with the men and women who have already died in the war.
"We owe them something," Mr. Bush said. "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for." It was, as the mother of one fallen National Guardsman said, an argument that "makes no sense." No one wants young men and women to die just because others have already made the ultimate sacrifice. The families of the dead do not want that, any more than they want to see more soldiers die because politicians cannot bear to admit that they sent American
forces to war by mistake.
Most Americans believed that their country had invaded Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, but we know now that those weapons did not exist. If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion would have been stopped by a popular outcry, no matter what other motives the president and his advisers may have had.
It is also very clear, although the president has done his level best to muddy the picture, that Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11. Mr. Bush's insistence on making that link, over and over, is irresponsible. In fact, it was the American-led invasion that turned Iraq into a haven for Islamist extremists.
When Mr. Bush articulated his "comprehensive strategy" for responding to the threat of terrorism, he listed three aims: "protecting this homeland, taking the fight to the enemy and advancing freedom." The invasion of Iraq flunks the first two tests. But it did free the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator and may still provide an opportunity to inspire the rest of the Arab world with an example of democracy and religious toleration.
Right now, however, the Iraqi Assembly is dickering over a constitution draft that would not accomplish any of the American goals. It would fail to protect the rights of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority and the rights of women, and it would enshrine Islam as a main source of law. It could well lead to a fracturing of Iraq into an all but independent, and oil-rich, Kurdish homeland in the north and an oil-rich Shiite theocracy in the south, while the oil-poor centre was left to the disaffected Sunnis, the terrorists and the American troops. It's an outcome that would make the violent religious extremists very happy.
Preventing that kind of tragic last chapter is the only rational argument for continuing the American presence in Iraq. The president's strange declaration yesterday that the draft constitution would protect the rights of women and minorities, and his continuing attempts to clog the debate with misleading explanations, suggest his own lack of commitment to the only rationale for keeping American troops in Iraq - or, perhaps, his lack of faith in the likely outcome.
The New York Times Editorial
29 August
It took President Bush a long time to break his summer vacation and acknowledge the pain that the families of fallen soldiers are feeling as the death toll in Iraq continues to climb. When he did, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Utah this week, he said exactly the wrong thing. In an address that repeatedly invoked Sept. 11 - the day that terrorists who had no discernable connection whatsoever to Iraq attacked targets on American soil - Mr. Bush offered a new reason for staying the course: to keep faith with the men and women who have already died in the war.
"We owe them something," Mr. Bush said. "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for." It was, as the mother of one fallen National Guardsman said, an argument that "makes no sense." No one wants young men and women to die just because others have already made the ultimate sacrifice. The families of the dead do not want that, any more than they want to see more soldiers die because politicians cannot bear to admit that they sent American
forces to war by mistake.
Most Americans believed that their country had invaded Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, but we know now that those weapons did not exist. If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion would have been stopped by a popular outcry, no matter what other motives the president and his advisers may have had.
It is also very clear, although the president has done his level best to muddy the picture, that Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11. Mr. Bush's insistence on making that link, over and over, is irresponsible. In fact, it was the American-led invasion that turned Iraq into a haven for Islamist extremists.
When Mr. Bush articulated his "comprehensive strategy" for responding to the threat of terrorism, he listed three aims: "protecting this homeland, taking the fight to the enemy and advancing freedom." The invasion of Iraq flunks the first two tests. But it did free the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator and may still provide an opportunity to inspire the rest of the Arab world with an example of democracy and religious toleration.
Right now, however, the Iraqi Assembly is dickering over a constitution draft that would not accomplish any of the American goals. It would fail to protect the rights of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority and the rights of women, and it would enshrine Islam as a main source of law. It could well lead to a fracturing of Iraq into an all but independent, and oil-rich, Kurdish homeland in the north and an oil-rich Shiite theocracy in the south, while the oil-poor centre was left to the disaffected Sunnis, the terrorists and the American troops. It's an outcome that would make the violent religious extremists very happy.
Preventing that kind of tragic last chapter is the only rational argument for continuing the American presence in Iraq. The president's strange declaration yesterday that the draft constitution would protect the rights of women and minorities, and his continuing attempts to clog the debate with misleading explanations, suggest his own lack of commitment to the only rationale for keeping American troops in Iraq - or, perhaps, his lack of faith in the likely outcome.
Costello's Affair with Hillsong
[Australian Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, took umbrage at the comments of a recently-appointed Anglican Bishop which criticized the Coalition's anti-worker Workplace Relations "reforms." Peter, of course, is the darling of the Right-facing evangelical Hillsong Church, whose clergy were also guaranteed (by Labor Premier, Bob Carr) immunity from prosecution, if they slurred members of other faiths.]
I was amused by Peter Costello’s recent hissy-fit when he was criticized for appearing on stage at Hillsong. Well, Peter, both liberal Christians and non-Christians (as I am) are very apprehensive about the Hillsongers and other happy-clappies like them, for at least three good reasons:-
1. Firstly, their apparent desire for a closeness, if not an actual unity, between Church and State is disturbing to those of us raised to a tradition of independence of mind. If the new Anglican Archbishop’s comments on the Great Leader’s [PM John Howard's] Workplace Relations ‘reforms’ disconcerted you, Peter, we liberal/lefties were positively soiling our nappies at comments from the likes of the Family First Party in the last election, such as that concerning burning lesbians at the stake like witches;
2. Secondly, rather than seeing it as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, the Hillsongers have converted GREED into a Christian Virtue. Hmm, maybe in the alternative universe whence they hail, it was Jesus, not Stalin, who told the peasants to enrich themselves;
3. Finally, the churches of the Right, as you put it, Peter, aim to foster, not the healthy tolerance of multiculturalism, much less the anything-goes mentally of the 1960s, but the insularity of the post–US-Civil-War Southern Baptist. In ascending order, the evangelicals preach condescension, then ignorance and fear and ultimately outright hatred of those whose beliefs differ in the slightest from their own.
But what really frightens us, Peter, is the utter lack of common humanity shown by politicians who see the happy-clappies merely as voters to be courted, and even promise that they should be allowed to malign other religious communities with impunity.
In short, Peter, we liberals despise the Hillsongers as sad and pathetic, no matter how many votes they represent for you or Bob Carr, and we will continue to despise them even as we are being dragged out to be burned at their stakes.
Monday, August 29, 2005
"One Nation" aka "One Notion"
[In the early 1990s a party arose in Australa called the "One Nation Party," preaching a nasty combination of racism, nationalism and economic populism. It died out, not because it lost its appeal, but because the Conservative Liberal/National Party Coalition subsumed many of its policy positions and combined racism with economic rationalism.]
Shadow of Hitler hangs over Hanson
By ANDREW HOPKINS
The ideas behind Pauline Hanson's One Nation party show a striking similarity to Hitler's Nazism.
Hanson has tapped a well-spring of discontent with economic-rationalist policies and mixed it with a poisonous stream of racism to form a dangerous ideological brew. It was an identical ideological brew which intoxicated the German people with such disastrous consequences.
Nazi is short for NAtion-al SoZIalistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party). National Socialism was an ideology designed to appeal simultaneously to fundamentally different groupings. Nationalism sees the nation as the collectivity whose interests are to be advanced, while socialism is the ideology of the working class. Hitler was certainly a nationalist. He spoke endlessly of the spirit and blood of the German people and of Gemeinschaft, that is, the community of all Germans. Jews, although they had lived in Germany for many generations, were defined as non-Germans, outsiders, excluded from this national community. By persecuting the Jews, Hitler bolstered the self-esteem of the in-group of blue-eyed, blond Germans, many of whom were feeling lost and frightened by the economic dislocation of the Depression.
The German working class at this time was attracted to communism. In order to co-opt this class, Hitler had somehow to establish socialist credentials. His solution was diabolically clever. The workers' enemies were the capitalists. And the capitalists were predominantly wealthy Jews, he told the workers. Hence, the German people and the working class faced one and the same enemy. Jews were to be fought in the name of both nationalism and socialism. The idea that Jewish capitalism was the enemy allowed Hitler to combine nationalism and socialism into a single ideology — Nazism.
The ideology of One Nation is identical. The title of the party is an appeal to the ideology of nationalism and Pauline Hanson regularly invokes images of national community. Her image of national community is defined by reference to outsiders who are to be excluded. "We are in danger of being swamped by Asians," she said in her maiden speech to Parliament. These days she is more careful. She is not against Australians of Asian origin, so long as they leave their cultures behind when they arrive here. These days, it is multiculturalism which is the enemy, not the individuals who may have come from other cultures. But the distinction is pointless.
Hanson's recent claim that she was Australia's mother and Australians were her children is a horrifyingly powerful symbol of this exclusionary principle. From a purely biological standpoint, the red-haired, white-skinned Hanson could not possibly be the mother of Aboriginal or Asian Australians. Her symbolism just doesn't work for these people. Are they therefore not Australians? That seems to be the implication. Her image resonates ominously with Hitler's comments about German blood, suggesting, as they do, a biological or genetic basis for national inclusion. Whether Hanson intended it or not, her symbolism subconsciously appeals to those white Australians who feel that their centrality in Australian society is now under threat.
But the similarities go further. Hanson's message is pitched at the working class: "Why do you think big business have supported [the GST]? Because it suits them right down to the ground. And it's about time they started paying their fair share of tax in Australia and not just the average workers and the battlers out there." Hanson represents the battlers. She is opposed to the political and business elites of Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. It is they who have thrust upon us the ideology of economic rationalism — competition policy, tariff reduction, privatisation and the rest — which has been so damaging to the battlers, in particular the farmers of Queensland. Pig farmers want protection from foreign competition, as do the cane farmers, but their interests have been swept aside by the dominant ideology of economic rationalism. No wonder they listen to her message.
But how is this brand of battler socialism to be reconciled with nationalism? I want to suggest that One Nation uses the same strategy as used by Hitler to equate the enemies of the battling classes with the enemies of the nation. Who, after all, are the political elites of the capital cities? Hanson calls them the cappuccino set. Real Australians drink tea. Real Australians drink beer and eat fish and chips. The political elites drink wine and eat pasta. They are clearly foreign influenced, if not actually foreign. The multiculturalism of the elites makes them the enemies of the monocultural nation. They are thus the enemies of the battlers and of the nation. The equation is complete — just as it was for Hitler.
We can see the same combination of nationalism and socialism in Hanson's comments on multinationals: "Too many multinationals come out here, rip off this country for what they can get out of it and leave our shores with the money that could be staying here in Australia ... That's what's happened to Australia where you've got 90 per cent of corporate Australia which is foreign owned."
Do not underestimate One Nation. There is an objective basis to its appeal. The battlers are hurting as a result of the policies of economic rationalism. The Democrats know this and Labor is slowly waking up to it. Even the National Party says it's listening, although it is doubtful that it can do much while it remains in coalition with the Liberals. Let us hope that the mainstream parties can respond to the battlers' concerns about economic rationalism in such a way as to undercut the appeal of National Socialism.
Dr Andrew Hopkins is from the Department of Sociology at the ANU.
By ANDREW HOPKINS
The ideas behind Pauline Hanson's One Nation party show a striking similarity to Hitler's Nazism.
Hanson has tapped a well-spring of discontent with economic-rationalist policies and mixed it with a poisonous stream of racism to form a dangerous ideological brew. It was an identical ideological brew which intoxicated the German people with such disastrous consequences.
Nazi is short for NAtion-al SoZIalistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party). National Socialism was an ideology designed to appeal simultaneously to fundamentally different groupings. Nationalism sees the nation as the collectivity whose interests are to be advanced, while socialism is the ideology of the working class. Hitler was certainly a nationalist. He spoke endlessly of the spirit and blood of the German people and of Gemeinschaft, that is, the community of all Germans. Jews, although they had lived in Germany for many generations, were defined as non-Germans, outsiders, excluded from this national community. By persecuting the Jews, Hitler bolstered the self-esteem of the in-group of blue-eyed, blond Germans, many of whom were feeling lost and frightened by the economic dislocation of the Depression.
The German working class at this time was attracted to communism. In order to co-opt this class, Hitler had somehow to establish socialist credentials. His solution was diabolically clever. The workers' enemies were the capitalists. And the capitalists were predominantly wealthy Jews, he told the workers. Hence, the German people and the working class faced one and the same enemy. Jews were to be fought in the name of both nationalism and socialism. The idea that Jewish capitalism was the enemy allowed Hitler to combine nationalism and socialism into a single ideology — Nazism.
The ideology of One Nation is identical. The title of the party is an appeal to the ideology of nationalism and Pauline Hanson regularly invokes images of national community. Her image of national community is defined by reference to outsiders who are to be excluded. "We are in danger of being swamped by Asians," she said in her maiden speech to Parliament. These days she is more careful. She is not against Australians of Asian origin, so long as they leave their cultures behind when they arrive here. These days, it is multiculturalism which is the enemy, not the individuals who may have come from other cultures. But the distinction is pointless.
Hanson's recent claim that she was Australia's mother and Australians were her children is a horrifyingly powerful symbol of this exclusionary principle. From a purely biological standpoint, the red-haired, white-skinned Hanson could not possibly be the mother of Aboriginal or Asian Australians. Her symbolism just doesn't work for these people. Are they therefore not Australians? That seems to be the implication. Her image resonates ominously with Hitler's comments about German blood, suggesting, as they do, a biological or genetic basis for national inclusion. Whether Hanson intended it or not, her symbolism subconsciously appeals to those white Australians who feel that their centrality in Australian society is now under threat.
But the similarities go further. Hanson's message is pitched at the working class: "Why do you think big business have supported [the GST]? Because it suits them right down to the ground. And it's about time they started paying their fair share of tax in Australia and not just the average workers and the battlers out there." Hanson represents the battlers. She is opposed to the political and business elites of Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. It is they who have thrust upon us the ideology of economic rationalism — competition policy, tariff reduction, privatisation and the rest — which has been so damaging to the battlers, in particular the farmers of Queensland. Pig farmers want protection from foreign competition, as do the cane farmers, but their interests have been swept aside by the dominant ideology of economic rationalism. No wonder they listen to her message.
But how is this brand of battler socialism to be reconciled with nationalism? I want to suggest that One Nation uses the same strategy as used by Hitler to equate the enemies of the battling classes with the enemies of the nation. Who, after all, are the political elites of the capital cities? Hanson calls them the cappuccino set. Real Australians drink tea. Real Australians drink beer and eat fish and chips. The political elites drink wine and eat pasta. They are clearly foreign influenced, if not actually foreign. The multiculturalism of the elites makes them the enemies of the monocultural nation. They are thus the enemies of the battlers and of the nation. The equation is complete — just as it was for Hitler.
We can see the same combination of nationalism and socialism in Hanson's comments on multinationals: "Too many multinationals come out here, rip off this country for what they can get out of it and leave our shores with the money that could be staying here in Australia ... That's what's happened to Australia where you've got 90 per cent of corporate Australia which is foreign owned."
Do not underestimate One Nation. There is an objective basis to its appeal. The battlers are hurting as a result of the policies of economic rationalism. The Democrats know this and Labor is slowly waking up to it. Even the National Party says it's listening, although it is doubtful that it can do much while it remains in coalition with the Liberals. Let us hope that the mainstream parties can respond to the battlers' concerns about economic rationalism in such a way as to undercut the appeal of National Socialism.
Dr Andrew Hopkins is from the Department of Sociology at the ANU.
New Zealand's "Illness"
[In the early 1990's New Zealand - the Shaky Isles - was under the thumb of an economic rationalist government. Kiwis soon kicked out their loonies, but the illness crossed the Tasman and is now firmly rooted here in Australia - though our loonies are even more extreme. Those who worship at the Shrine of Economics should read this article from the 1990s.]
Shaky isles could learn from Norway's stability
By LARRY ELLIOTT, in London
THE TROUBLE with social democracy is simple. Over the past 20 years social democrats have thought like Norwegians but acted like New Zealanders.
There was a time this would scarcely have mattered since both were shining beacons of the post-war social contract and Norway could almost be described as the New Zealand of the North Atlantic.
But, since the early 1980s, the paths of these two nations — which between them have a population scarcely bigger than that of Greater London — have deviated. Norway remains a deeply pre-monetarist redoubt, so much so that Keynesian demand management is not a museum piece but the whole basis on which economic policy is run. Real wages are controlled not by the crude instrument of higher unemployment but by an incomes policy known as the Stability Alternative.
New Zealand, by contrast, has become a laboratory for every crackpot laissez-faire notion considered too extreme to be road-tested even in Thatcher's Britain or Reagan's America.
The International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and just about every other part of the New World Order love the way New Zealand has slashed welfare, given the central bank governor a binding contract to hit an inflation target and removed legal recognition from unions.
Growth has been sluggish, unemployment remains high, the increase in inequality has been unmatched across the Western world. But the governments since 1984 have one achievement to their credit: they have created an underclass where none existed before.
The latest wheeze from New Zealand is a draft Code of Social and Family Responsibility, which suggests that the way to cope with the breakdown in society caused by total obeisance to the market may be to legislate in order to force New Zealanders to behave better. Having privatised the economy, the Government now wants to nationalise the people.
Little matter: its supporters say New Zealand can still teach us a thing or two. For example, far from suggesting that the blackout in Auckland was the result of sacking engineers to save money, the West should be focusing on how the owners of the privatised energy company enhanced shareholder value by downsizing its cost base.
So much, so obvious. The 1980s were the decade of right-wing hegemony across most of the West. Of the Group of Seven nations, only France had a leftist government, and even there Francois Mitterrand had to suffer periods of cohabitation with the right.
The late 1990s, by contrast, have seen the right in retreat. Of the four big economies in Europe, the Left holds or shares power in three, and may make it a full house when Germany goes to the polls in the autumn. The United States Democrats have occupied the White House since 1992.
Funnily enough, few policy-makers in London, Washington, Rome or Paris are beating a path to Oslo, where the Government appears to be breaking every conceivable rule of the new paradigm.
For a start, Norway is making no attempt to "modernise" its welfare state in the prescribed Clintonesque fashion of ending "welfare as we know it", which means dragooning the poor and the jobless into low-paid work. On the contrary, the Government in Oslo has the rather old-fashioned belief that generous maternity leave, decent pensions and unemployment pay at rather more than subsistence level are badges of a civilised country, not luxuries to be abandoned because multinational corporations say that they are unaffordable.
There are other features of the Norwegian model that are against the basic tenets of the new global model. There has been a carbon tax since 1991, forcing companies to be more energy efficient. The result is that emissions from Norway's chunk of the North Sea are only a quarter of those from Britain.
Visitors to the more northerly parts of Norway can see the full impact of a vigorous regional policy. The Government has moved its influential Polar Institute from Oslo to Tromso, which already has the world's most northerly university as a result of government fiat three decades ago.
But it is Norway's apostasy when it comes to economic policy that really sticks in the craw of the laissez-faire gurus because, far from signing up to the neo-liberal Full Monty of inflation targeting, deregulated pay bargaining, weak unions and a spurning of Keynesian demand management, the Norwegian Government acts as if Milton Friedman and the Chicago School had never existed. Policy, says the Ministry of Finance "is geared towards maintaining stable economic growth consistent with low price and wage inflation, while gradually achieving reductions in unemployment". Monetary policy is confined to keeping the exchange rate stable, while the central role of regulating growth is given to fiscal policy.
The Stability Alternative completes the picture. This is corporatism in all its glory, with centralised pay bargaining designed to ensure that the externally traded sector remains internationally competitive. The main labour organisation is seen not as the enemy but as an important social partner that can ensure wage moderation across the whole economy.
The baleful results of this heresy are there for all to see — growth over the past five years of double the European average, full employment and price stability. Of the three traditional tests of social democracy — jobs for all, reducing inequality and increasing democratic control over the economy — Norway passes them all.
Of course, there are those who argue that social democracy is a luxury that Norway can afford because it has all that lovely North Sea oil. Up to a point that is true. Without the oil revenues Norway would be running a sizeable current account deficit (although not nearly as big as New Zealand's).
But the non-oil economy in Norway is also booming, rising, on average, by 3.5 per cent a year since 1994. The lion's share of the oil money is being put into a special fund and invested abroad rather than being squandered — as was Britain's — on tax cuts.
There is a risk that it will all end in tears. Some policy-makers worry that Norway is heading for a classic boom-bust cycle, and there is certainly a need to tighten fiscal policy aggressively to compensate for the stimulative impact of monetary policy.
Norway provides a useful antidote to those who argue that globalisation has sounded the death knell for social democracy. The problem for social democrats is that, if they spurn the lessons of the Norwegian model, they will be drawn inexorably towards a (no doubt more humane) version of what is being offered in the southern hemisphere.
Comparing the recent record of Australia and New Zealand, John Quiggin says in the Oxford Review of Economic Performance: "In summary, the experience of the Australian and New Zealand Labour governments does not support the view that a combination of free-market economic policies and social democratic values represents a hopeful option for the labour movement. The tension between the two is evident and tends to increase the longer a Labour government remains in office." It's no good the left just thinking like Norwegians. It's got to act like Norwegians too.
— The Guardian
By LARRY ELLIOTT, in London
THE TROUBLE with social democracy is simple. Over the past 20 years social democrats have thought like Norwegians but acted like New Zealanders.
There was a time this would scarcely have mattered since both were shining beacons of the post-war social contract and Norway could almost be described as the New Zealand of the North Atlantic.
But, since the early 1980s, the paths of these two nations — which between them have a population scarcely bigger than that of Greater London — have deviated. Norway remains a deeply pre-monetarist redoubt, so much so that Keynesian demand management is not a museum piece but the whole basis on which economic policy is run. Real wages are controlled not by the crude instrument of higher unemployment but by an incomes policy known as the Stability Alternative.
New Zealand, by contrast, has become a laboratory for every crackpot laissez-faire notion considered too extreme to be road-tested even in Thatcher's Britain or Reagan's America.
The International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and just about every other part of the New World Order love the way New Zealand has slashed welfare, given the central bank governor a binding contract to hit an inflation target and removed legal recognition from unions.
Growth has been sluggish, unemployment remains high, the increase in inequality has been unmatched across the Western world. But the governments since 1984 have one achievement to their credit: they have created an underclass where none existed before.
The latest wheeze from New Zealand is a draft Code of Social and Family Responsibility, which suggests that the way to cope with the breakdown in society caused by total obeisance to the market may be to legislate in order to force New Zealanders to behave better. Having privatised the economy, the Government now wants to nationalise the people.
Little matter: its supporters say New Zealand can still teach us a thing or two. For example, far from suggesting that the blackout in Auckland was the result of sacking engineers to save money, the West should be focusing on how the owners of the privatised energy company enhanced shareholder value by downsizing its cost base.
So much, so obvious. The 1980s were the decade of right-wing hegemony across most of the West. Of the Group of Seven nations, only France had a leftist government, and even there Francois Mitterrand had to suffer periods of cohabitation with the right.
The late 1990s, by contrast, have seen the right in retreat. Of the four big economies in Europe, the Left holds or shares power in three, and may make it a full house when Germany goes to the polls in the autumn. The United States Democrats have occupied the White House since 1992.
Funnily enough, few policy-makers in London, Washington, Rome or Paris are beating a path to Oslo, where the Government appears to be breaking every conceivable rule of the new paradigm.
For a start, Norway is making no attempt to "modernise" its welfare state in the prescribed Clintonesque fashion of ending "welfare as we know it", which means dragooning the poor and the jobless into low-paid work. On the contrary, the Government in Oslo has the rather old-fashioned belief that generous maternity leave, decent pensions and unemployment pay at rather more than subsistence level are badges of a civilised country, not luxuries to be abandoned because multinational corporations say that they are unaffordable.
There are other features of the Norwegian model that are against the basic tenets of the new global model. There has been a carbon tax since 1991, forcing companies to be more energy efficient. The result is that emissions from Norway's chunk of the North Sea are only a quarter of those from Britain.
Visitors to the more northerly parts of Norway can see the full impact of a vigorous regional policy. The Government has moved its influential Polar Institute from Oslo to Tromso, which already has the world's most northerly university as a result of government fiat three decades ago.
But it is Norway's apostasy when it comes to economic policy that really sticks in the craw of the laissez-faire gurus because, far from signing up to the neo-liberal Full Monty of inflation targeting, deregulated pay bargaining, weak unions and a spurning of Keynesian demand management, the Norwegian Government acts as if Milton Friedman and the Chicago School had never existed. Policy, says the Ministry of Finance "is geared towards maintaining stable economic growth consistent with low price and wage inflation, while gradually achieving reductions in unemployment". Monetary policy is confined to keeping the exchange rate stable, while the central role of regulating growth is given to fiscal policy.
The Stability Alternative completes the picture. This is corporatism in all its glory, with centralised pay bargaining designed to ensure that the externally traded sector remains internationally competitive. The main labour organisation is seen not as the enemy but as an important social partner that can ensure wage moderation across the whole economy.
The baleful results of this heresy are there for all to see — growth over the past five years of double the European average, full employment and price stability. Of the three traditional tests of social democracy — jobs for all, reducing inequality and increasing democratic control over the economy — Norway passes them all.
Of course, there are those who argue that social democracy is a luxury that Norway can afford because it has all that lovely North Sea oil. Up to a point that is true. Without the oil revenues Norway would be running a sizeable current account deficit (although not nearly as big as New Zealand's).
But the non-oil economy in Norway is also booming, rising, on average, by 3.5 per cent a year since 1994. The lion's share of the oil money is being put into a special fund and invested abroad rather than being squandered — as was Britain's — on tax cuts.
There is a risk that it will all end in tears. Some policy-makers worry that Norway is heading for a classic boom-bust cycle, and there is certainly a need to tighten fiscal policy aggressively to compensate for the stimulative impact of monetary policy.
Norway provides a useful antidote to those who argue that globalisation has sounded the death knell for social democracy. The problem for social democrats is that, if they spurn the lessons of the Norwegian model, they will be drawn inexorably towards a (no doubt more humane) version of what is being offered in the southern hemisphere.
Comparing the recent record of Australia and New Zealand, John Quiggin says in the Oxford Review of Economic Performance: "In summary, the experience of the Australian and New Zealand Labour governments does not support the view that a combination of free-market economic policies and social democratic values represents a hopeful option for the labour movement. The tension between the two is evident and tends to increase the longer a Labour government remains in office." It's no good the left just thinking like Norwegians. It's got to act like Norwegians too.
— The Guardian
Selling off the Family Silver
[This article, written in 2000, still rings true today. With the Howard government in control of the Senate and poised to 'sell off the silver' of Telstra, we need to reread it carefully.]
Howard driving us into decline
THE PRIME Minister, John Howard, wants to accelerate the already rapid sell-off of public Australian assets to the private sector, most notably by selling the rest of Telstra. He also wants Australia to become a major centre of the global financial system. Before we throw ourselves completely on the mercy of the global financial system, which already dominates the functioning of the private sector in Australia, we should know the nature of the beast.
Two facts about the global financial system suffice to reveal its true nature. First, according to William Greider (One World, Ready or Not, Penguin, 1997) the rate of trading of financial assets is sufficient to turn over the entire global stock (about $US24 million million) in 24 days. US Government bonds ($US2.6 million million) turn over in eight days.
This frantic trading pace clearly has nothing to do with the efficient allocation of capital into productive enterprises, as economists and governments would like us to believe. That legitimate goal would be served by turning over the stock every few years rather than every few weeks. Such a frenetic pace of trading can only be about speculation and exploitation.
If we take the ratio of weeks to years as a rough measure, it means that only a very small fraction of the financial trading, perhaps 2 per cent, serves the larger interests of the economy and society. The other 98 per cent or so is for the benefit of financial exploiters and gamblers, and of the brokers who cream something off every transaction.
Most of this trading is in the hands of a very small community: 30 to 50 of the world's largest banks and a handful of major brokerages, according to Greider. This means that the system is serving a very narrow range of interests, and it means that it is very unstable. A small shift in the perceptions of a few people can dramatically affect the global market, as recent events have borne out.
The second fact about the global financial system is that the expected rate of return on investments is 10 to 15 per cent, even 20 per cent, according to Will Button (The State We're In, Vintage, 1996). Few enterprises can sustain such a rate. If wealth really was being created at that rate, the economy should be bounding along at a growth rate of 10 per cent or more. Even by the defective measure of gross domestic product, growth rates have been only a few per cent.
If wealth is not being created at the rate of 15 per cent a year, the only other way to extract such a return is to cut costs. This means, for example, firing half your employees and expecting the same amount of work still to be done. It means reducing wages and benefits. It means cutting out long-term research and development and minimising plant modernisation. It means unsustainable farming practices, soil depletion and erosion, and massive doses of insecticides.
In other words, the rates of return demanded by the financial sector degrade private and public infrastructure, natural assets and long-term productivity. The financial sector does not invest, it exploits. As a result, our ability to create wealth is steadily declining.
Not surprisingly, our wealth is also declining. The New Economics Foundation in Britain has constructed an Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare. This avoids some of the obvious absurdities of the gross domestic product, such as counting pollution and car-crash repairs as positive and ignoring volunteer and home work. It shows that the real wealth of Britons has declined by about 20 per cent since the beginning of the Thatcher era in the late 1970s.
Even by the misleading standard economic measures, the Australian economy has performed unimpressively in the 15 years of the Hawke-Keating-Howard era of economic "rationalism", as has been documented by Stephen Bell (Ungovern-ing the Economy, Oxford, 1997). Comparing pre-1974 with post-1974, annual GDP growth has been 3.4 per cent compared with 5.2 per cent, the current-account deficit nearly doubled and unemployment went from 1.3 per cent to 8.5 per cent. The Howard Government's claimed improvements in these figures are quite marginal.
Many Australians would agree that our quality of life is declining, like Britain's. Job insecurity is increasing rapidly and employment is becoming increasingly stressful for those who do have jobs. Basic government services such as public health and education are being seriously cut.
Private services are also declining as banks and other large enterprises "rationalise" their branches and customer services away. Try telephoning almost any large organisation. The professionally recorded voice will assure you that "Your call is important to us", but see how long it takes you to get through the telephone queue to a real person.
THE power of the financial system comes from its ability to move money very easily. If a manager fails to provide shareholders with the expected return, they can easily move their money somewhere else. The company's share price will then fall, its available capital will decline and it will be even less able to meet the short-term demands of the financial market.
Hutton uses the phrase "short-termism" to describe this effect of unfettered financial markets. The financial system strongly biases management away from long-term productive investment and towards short-term exploitation — of employees, of customers, of company assets and of the environment.
It doesn't have to be this way. In Japan and Germany, capital is tied to the long-term interests of enterprises by various financial, management and social arrangements, according to Hutton. Their particular arrangements do not have to be perfect, nor perfectly suited to Australia's very different society, for the point to be made — it is possible to harness finance productively for the benefit of society.
There is another force driving the rush of privatisation in Australia. It is that all of our governments are selling off public assets to balance their budgets. They do this to hide from voters their drastic failure to properly manage public affairs. They also use the proceeds to bribe segments of electorate.
Even if it were true that privatised enterprises would function as well as their public predecessors, governments obviously cannot sustain this practice. They are merely postponing the reckoning that will come when they run out of things to sell.
IT IS widely and correctly perceived that the appreciation of Telstra shares by about 100 percent in its first year of partial privatisation represents a Government-imposed transfer of wealth from all Australians to a 20 per cent minority who are wealthy enough to have bought Telstra shares at a bargain price. Less polite but equally accurate descriptions would be that it was a rip-off or Government-sanctioned theft.
Mr Howard's proposal to sell the rest of Telstra will transfer more wealth from the poor and the middle class to the already wealthy. He is attempting to buy off Telstra employees and existing shareholders with promises of discounted shares. Evidently he calculates that more swinging voters will swallow this snake oil than will reject it, but the pieces of Telstra he is promising are not his to give away: they belong to all of us.
Similarly, Mr Howard's proposal to offer the global financial system incentives to operate more freely in Australia will merely increase the rate of exploitation and decline of the Australian economy, society and environment.
A minority of Australians will do very well, and the rest of us will become economic vassals with fewer and fewer options. Our formerly prosperous and relatively tolerant and open-hearted society will descend ever more rapidly into division, bitterness and conflict.
The Howard Government has no idea how to make Australia productive and wealthy in the long term, even if that is its intention. The main things it has to offer are schemes to extract wealth from the many and hand it to the few. It is actively and rapidly destroying such productive means as Australia still has.
Geoff Davies is a Senior Fellow at the Australian National University.
THE PRIME Minister, John Howard, wants to accelerate the already rapid sell-off of public Australian assets to the private sector, most notably by selling the rest of Telstra. He also wants Australia to become a major centre of the global financial system. Before we throw ourselves completely on the mercy of the global financial system, which already dominates the functioning of the private sector in Australia, we should know the nature of the beast.
Two facts about the global financial system suffice to reveal its true nature. First, according to William Greider (One World, Ready or Not, Penguin, 1997) the rate of trading of financial assets is sufficient to turn over the entire global stock (about $US24 million million) in 24 days. US Government bonds ($US2.6 million million) turn over in eight days.
This frantic trading pace clearly has nothing to do with the efficient allocation of capital into productive enterprises, as economists and governments would like us to believe. That legitimate goal would be served by turning over the stock every few years rather than every few weeks. Such a frenetic pace of trading can only be about speculation and exploitation.
If we take the ratio of weeks to years as a rough measure, it means that only a very small fraction of the financial trading, perhaps 2 per cent, serves the larger interests of the economy and society. The other 98 per cent or so is for the benefit of financial exploiters and gamblers, and of the brokers who cream something off every transaction.
Most of this trading is in the hands of a very small community: 30 to 50 of the world's largest banks and a handful of major brokerages, according to Greider. This means that the system is serving a very narrow range of interests, and it means that it is very unstable. A small shift in the perceptions of a few people can dramatically affect the global market, as recent events have borne out.
The second fact about the global financial system is that the expected rate of return on investments is 10 to 15 per cent, even 20 per cent, according to Will Button (The State We're In, Vintage, 1996). Few enterprises can sustain such a rate. If wealth really was being created at that rate, the economy should be bounding along at a growth rate of 10 per cent or more. Even by the defective measure of gross domestic product, growth rates have been only a few per cent.
If wealth is not being created at the rate of 15 per cent a year, the only other way to extract such a return is to cut costs. This means, for example, firing half your employees and expecting the same amount of work still to be done. It means reducing wages and benefits. It means cutting out long-term research and development and minimising plant modernisation. It means unsustainable farming practices, soil depletion and erosion, and massive doses of insecticides.
In other words, the rates of return demanded by the financial sector degrade private and public infrastructure, natural assets and long-term productivity. The financial sector does not invest, it exploits. As a result, our ability to create wealth is steadily declining.
Not surprisingly, our wealth is also declining. The New Economics Foundation in Britain has constructed an Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare. This avoids some of the obvious absurdities of the gross domestic product, such as counting pollution and car-crash repairs as positive and ignoring volunteer and home work. It shows that the real wealth of Britons has declined by about 20 per cent since the beginning of the Thatcher era in the late 1970s.
Even by the misleading standard economic measures, the Australian economy has performed unimpressively in the 15 years of the Hawke-Keating-Howard era of economic "rationalism", as has been documented by Stephen Bell (Ungovern-ing the Economy, Oxford, 1997). Comparing pre-1974 with post-1974, annual GDP growth has been 3.4 per cent compared with 5.2 per cent, the current-account deficit nearly doubled and unemployment went from 1.3 per cent to 8.5 per cent. The Howard Government's claimed improvements in these figures are quite marginal.
Many Australians would agree that our quality of life is declining, like Britain's. Job insecurity is increasing rapidly and employment is becoming increasingly stressful for those who do have jobs. Basic government services such as public health and education are being seriously cut.
Private services are also declining as banks and other large enterprises "rationalise" their branches and customer services away. Try telephoning almost any large organisation. The professionally recorded voice will assure you that "Your call is important to us", but see how long it takes you to get through the telephone queue to a real person.
THE power of the financial system comes from its ability to move money very easily. If a manager fails to provide shareholders with the expected return, they can easily move their money somewhere else. The company's share price will then fall, its available capital will decline and it will be even less able to meet the short-term demands of the financial market.
Hutton uses the phrase "short-termism" to describe this effect of unfettered financial markets. The financial system strongly biases management away from long-term productive investment and towards short-term exploitation — of employees, of customers, of company assets and of the environment.
It doesn't have to be this way. In Japan and Germany, capital is tied to the long-term interests of enterprises by various financial, management and social arrangements, according to Hutton. Their particular arrangements do not have to be perfect, nor perfectly suited to Australia's very different society, for the point to be made — it is possible to harness finance productively for the benefit of society.
There is another force driving the rush of privatisation in Australia. It is that all of our governments are selling off public assets to balance their budgets. They do this to hide from voters their drastic failure to properly manage public affairs. They also use the proceeds to bribe segments of electorate.
Even if it were true that privatised enterprises would function as well as their public predecessors, governments obviously cannot sustain this practice. They are merely postponing the reckoning that will come when they run out of things to sell.
IT IS widely and correctly perceived that the appreciation of Telstra shares by about 100 percent in its first year of partial privatisation represents a Government-imposed transfer of wealth from all Australians to a 20 per cent minority who are wealthy enough to have bought Telstra shares at a bargain price. Less polite but equally accurate descriptions would be that it was a rip-off or Government-sanctioned theft.
Mr Howard's proposal to sell the rest of Telstra will transfer more wealth from the poor and the middle class to the already wealthy. He is attempting to buy off Telstra employees and existing shareholders with promises of discounted shares. Evidently he calculates that more swinging voters will swallow this snake oil than will reject it, but the pieces of Telstra he is promising are not his to give away: they belong to all of us.
Similarly, Mr Howard's proposal to offer the global financial system incentives to operate more freely in Australia will merely increase the rate of exploitation and decline of the Australian economy, society and environment.
A minority of Australians will do very well, and the rest of us will become economic vassals with fewer and fewer options. Our formerly prosperous and relatively tolerant and open-hearted society will descend ever more rapidly into division, bitterness and conflict.
The Howard Government has no idea how to make Australia productive and wealthy in the long term, even if that is its intention. The main things it has to offer are schemes to extract wealth from the many and hand it to the few. It is actively and rapidly destroying such productive means as Australia still has.
Geoff Davies is a Senior Fellow at the Australian National University.
Loony Christians
Robertson's 'Fatwa'
by Eric Margolis
by Eric Margolis
Published on Sunday, August 28, 2005 by the Toronto Sun
Reverend Pat Robertson took time off last week from promoting a new protein pancake mix and scourging "ungodly" sodomites, Muslims, and Democrats to suggest the U.S. should assassinate Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez.
Unveiling a new bogeyman of far right paranoia, Robertson claimed Chavez was masterminding a sinister Muslim-Communist conspiracy against Christian America.
The bombastic Chavez seriously bugs Washington by badmouthing President George Bush and U.S. policy towards Cuba and Iraq. He compares "capitalismo" to Dracula and Jack the Ripper.
However, Chavez is not a communist but a democratic populist demagogue like Argentina's Juan Peron. Venezuela is America's fifth-largest supplier of oil. In 2002, the Bush administration mounted an anti-Chavez coup that fizzled.
A huge international rumpus followed Robertson's comments, forcing him to apologize. The ravings of a religious crackpot wouldn't merit note, except that Robertson is a former presidential candidate and speaks for many members of the Christian evangelical right.
A shrewd businessman, he founded the 2-million-member Christian Coalition, America's most influential right-wing protestant group. His Christian Broadcasting Network raked in a reported $200 million in donations last year, which calls to mind George Carlin's quip: "If God is so all-powerful, why does he always need money?"
Robertson is even right, sometimes. He warned Bush that God had told him Iraq would be a mess.
But Ayatollah Robertson's latest "fatwa" brought embarrassed silence from the president and most evangelical leaders. The best the White House could come up with was lamely calling his ravings "unfortunate."
Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld piously noted, "We do not assassinate foreign leaders." I guess trying to kill Saddam Hussein and his family by a Pearl Harbor-style surprise bombing attack in March, 2003 does not count.
Robertson's call to murder cast a spotlight on the growing power of the loopy religious far right, grouped under the banner of the Christian Coalition, which has grown into one of the most powerful political lobbies in America.
Robertson's supporters are the single largest block of pro-Bush supporters and a core constituency for the war in Iraq. Nine out of 10 evangelicals voted for Bush.
The Coalition has largely intimidated the weak-kneed U.S. Congress. Christian fundamentalists now control a third of all national Republican state committee posts, and 41 of 51 Republican senators received a 100% approval rating from the Coalition.
Not all evangelicals belong to the hard right. Many blasted Robertson. But many think pretty much like Rev. Pat -- and believe the U.S. must become a Protestant fundamentalist theocracy and impose dominion over the globe by military force. Such militant cultists often sound just like the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists.
These "Christian Zionists," who are allies of the Israel's hardline settler movement, also urge expansion of Israel and in gathering all Jews to the Holy Land. When this happens, they believe, the "end of days" will occur and the Earth will be destroyed (along with Jews and other non-Christians).
For these cheery folk, there's no reason to worry about growing deficit, environmental destruction or resource depletion. Who cares? The world will soon end with a big bang.
We rarely see these militants because most are hidden away in deepest Bush Country: Trailer parks, the backwoods, NASCAR tracks, remote suburbs, and strip malls. But they now seem to have replaced fat-cat country club golfers as the Republican Party's leading voter constituency.
Reverend Pat Robertson took time off last week from promoting a new protein pancake mix and scourging "ungodly" sodomites, Muslims, and Democrats to suggest the U.S. should assassinate Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez.
Unveiling a new bogeyman of far right paranoia, Robertson claimed Chavez was masterminding a sinister Muslim-Communist conspiracy against Christian America.
The bombastic Chavez seriously bugs Washington by badmouthing President George Bush and U.S. policy towards Cuba and Iraq. He compares "capitalismo" to Dracula and Jack the Ripper.
However, Chavez is not a communist but a democratic populist demagogue like Argentina's Juan Peron. Venezuela is America's fifth-largest supplier of oil. In 2002, the Bush administration mounted an anti-Chavez coup that fizzled.
A huge international rumpus followed Robertson's comments, forcing him to apologize. The ravings of a religious crackpot wouldn't merit note, except that Robertson is a former presidential candidate and speaks for many members of the Christian evangelical right.
A shrewd businessman, he founded the 2-million-member Christian Coalition, America's most influential right-wing protestant group. His Christian Broadcasting Network raked in a reported $200 million in donations last year, which calls to mind George Carlin's quip: "If God is so all-powerful, why does he always need money?"
Robertson is even right, sometimes. He warned Bush that God had told him Iraq would be a mess.
But Ayatollah Robertson's latest "fatwa" brought embarrassed silence from the president and most evangelical leaders. The best the White House could come up with was lamely calling his ravings "unfortunate."
Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld piously noted, "We do not assassinate foreign leaders." I guess trying to kill Saddam Hussein and his family by a Pearl Harbor-style surprise bombing attack in March, 2003 does not count.
Robertson's call to murder cast a spotlight on the growing power of the loopy religious far right, grouped under the banner of the Christian Coalition, which has grown into one of the most powerful political lobbies in America.
Robertson's supporters are the single largest block of pro-Bush supporters and a core constituency for the war in Iraq. Nine out of 10 evangelicals voted for Bush.
The Coalition has largely intimidated the weak-kneed U.S. Congress. Christian fundamentalists now control a third of all national Republican state committee posts, and 41 of 51 Republican senators received a 100% approval rating from the Coalition.
Not all evangelicals belong to the hard right. Many blasted Robertson. But many think pretty much like Rev. Pat -- and believe the U.S. must become a Protestant fundamentalist theocracy and impose dominion over the globe by military force. Such militant cultists often sound just like the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists.
These "Christian Zionists," who are allies of the Israel's hardline settler movement, also urge expansion of Israel and in gathering all Jews to the Holy Land. When this happens, they believe, the "end of days" will occur and the Earth will be destroyed (along with Jews and other non-Christians).
For these cheery folk, there's no reason to worry about growing deficit, environmental destruction or resource depletion. Who cares? The world will soon end with a big bang.
We rarely see these militants because most are hidden away in deepest Bush Country: Trailer parks, the backwoods, NASCAR tracks, remote suburbs, and strip malls. But they now seem to have replaced fat-cat country club golfers as the Republican Party's leading voter constituency.
© 2005 Toronto Sun
