Are They Petty? Or Are They Just Bog Stupid?
It turns out all that weird attacking of wind farms calling them ugly, was covering fire to cut investment into wind power in this country.
Treasurer Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann have issued the so-called green bank with a directive to change its investment mandate, prohibiting new wind funding. It's understood the directive was issued without the approval or knowledge of Environment Minister Greg Hunt, angering the minister.
The decision is another blow for the multibillion-dollar wind industry, which has just started to recover from the uncertainty created by the government's Renewable Energy Target review. Analysts say $8.7 billion is expected to be invested in wind power in the next five years, while the corporation has invested about $300 million in wind projects to date.
And international investors are warning the government's move sends a bad message about how safe it is to do business in Australia.
The directive is just the latest salvo in the government's attacks on the wind industry.
Good grief. So much for "Open for Business". We know they're fighting a rearguard action against the eventual move from fossil fuel to renewables that must inevitably take place so it's not that difficult to see that the top level of this government is deliberately mismanaging an issue to suit their crony-capitalist friends. But then there seems to be a belief in this government that Tony Abbott's own unpopularity gives him carte-blanche to just do what his cronies want because he's never going to be popular for ever doing the right things. If the electorate is not going to reward you for doing the right things, then it seems they're willing to damn the electorate and do their corporate masters' bidding and secure themselves a lucrative after-political-life.
Which is to say, under Tony Abbott, Australia's polity has become no better than Indonesia. At this point in time, we're Indonesia-without-the executions. This place only looks respectable to people because it's white middle-aged men in suits running these crappy policies up the flagpole. You'd think this was the 1950s - which is exactly what Tony Abbott wants. Tony Abbott only needs look to his own faith to see how far off base he is on the issue, in this day and age when the Pope issues encyclicals about protecting the environment and curbing carbon emissions, slamming corporate greed as the Devil's own Droppings. You sort of wonder how he can sustain his opposition to things like Renewable Energy and kinder treatment of asylum seekers on the basis of his religion and not listen to his Pope. Evidently, it has nothing to do with his faith, it's all to to do with uncompromising cultural prejudices.
Using Federal Money To Tar The Opposition
This lousy circus that is the Royal Commission into union corruption keeps rolling like an unwanted circus caravan, waiting to find its miserable end. Earlier in the piece it was Julia Gillard who fronted the commission to explain her time at Slater and Gordon working as an IR lawyer, wherein she might have been a little irregular with some paperwork. Now it is Bill Shorten in the dock, being asked whether he short-changed his union members to cut a deal with the business sector. It's kind of weird that the Abbott government is asking these questions, seemingly-suddenly-amazingly interested in the welfare of the rank and file union members. We'll put that bizarre irony aside for a moment and ask the simple rhetorical question, what does this look like?
It looks like one of those show trials seen in military juntas and theocratic councils when they put the opposition on trial for being the Opposition. The Kim Dynasty did this a lot (now they just shoot them). Malaysia keeps doing it to Anwar. The Gang of Four in Communist China did this sort of thing to purge the enemies of Maoism and ended up in their own show trial. It goes on in Iran to this day and heck, even South Korea does this to presidents who leave office at the end of term. What all those countries have in common is that they don't have democratically functioning states. Even the ones that purport to be democratic and have elections can't be said to be functioning properly if they're doing show trials of the opposition.
However, "a loyal opposition" is a difficult concept for a lot of countries that simply don't understand the adversarial system of law that developed in the English speaking world. Its underpinnings are culturally alien to them and so they concoct these kinds of show trials. It's a dead giveaway that they don't get democracy.
Imagine my grievance and dismay then to see the Opposition Leader of this land, sitting in the dock over this stupid political show trial in Australia; Australia, the once most progressive nation in the English speaking world, reduced to the spectacle of a political show trial. You'd think we were Indonesia-without-the-executions; but no, we're even worse than that because they've stopped doing these for now in a sign that they've begun to get democracy. Clearly, our own political leadership has lost the plot. The exasperation in that photo says it all.
What Yanis Varoufakis Has To Say About The Debt Deal For Greece
Pleiades sent in this nugget. Yanis Varoufakis has a piece in the Guardian.
In 2010, the Greek state became insolvent. Two options consistent with continuing membership of the eurozone presented themselves: the sensible one, that any decent banker would recommend – restructuring the debt and reforming the economy; and the toxic option – extending new loans to a bankrupt entity while pretending that it remains solvent.
Official Europe chose the second option, putting the bailing out of French and German banks exposed to Greek public debt above Greece’s socioeconomic viability. A debt restructure would have implied losses for the bankers on their Greek debt holdings.Keen to avoid confessing to parliaments that taxpayers would have to pay again for the banks by means of unsustainable new loans, EU officials presented the Greek state’s insolvency as a problem of illiquidity, and justified the “bailout” as a case of “solidarity” with the Greeks.
To frame the cynical transfer of irretrievable private losses on to the shoulders of taxpayers as an exercise in “tough love”, record austerity was imposed on Greece, whose national income, in turn – from which new and old debts had to be repaid – diminished by more than a quarter. It takes the mathematical expertise of a smart eight-year-old to know that this process could not end well.
Once the sordid operation was complete, Europe had automatically acquired another reason for refusing to discuss debt restructuring: it would now hit the pockets of European citizens! And so increasing doses of austerity were administered while the debt grew larger, forcing creditors to extend more loans in exchange for even more austerity.
And that's about as succinct as it can be put. In the 9 years since the GFC broke, I've had to think a fair bit about what the bail outs and Quantitative Easing meant. The best explanationI can give you is that it is an attempt to freeze the clock so that the participants in the world's greatest casinos have time to take their chips of the table and walk away without cashing in the losses, while the bill is sent to Joe Q Public. In the aftermath governments ran out of money do their normal government-y things, and so they committed to 'austerity' which further shrunk the economy and made things worse. Iceland, which refused to give the bankers a pass, has recovered nicely, which tells you something about all this glorious QE I II and 4Eva we've seen.
David Cameron of course did have one standup moment where he declared he would not balance the books of the United Kingdom on the backs of the poor and needy. It's a great line, whether he actually followed through on it or not. It perfectly describes what Germany is doing- balancing its own books on the backs of the poor and needy in Greece. Whether 'Grexit' happens or not, the world's sympathies are with the Greeks on this fact alone. If Grexit should happen, the Greeks at least would have a fighting chance. As for Deutsche Bank that has trillions in derivatives tied to Greek bonds, I don't think we'll give them much sympathy when it all blows up, and Angela Merkel has to clean up that mess.
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