View From The Couch - 28/Jun/2016

Election 2016 Goes On

And just like that we're into the final week before we go to vote. After all the weeks of misrepresentative argumentation and assigning prior blame to people that can't be held accountable, after mischaracterising the policies of governments past and the contexts in which they were formed, we're going to head to the polls next Saturday none the wiser and less informed than we need to be. This must be the most confused, stupid, irrational election in a very long time; I can't recall one as irrational and idiotic in my lifetime of voting. We are reaching peak stupid when it comes to the political discourse in this nation.

As such, one would think the incumbents are going to win. Which is a real tragedy that will have a deep impact on our polity for years to come.

Part of the problem is that you really can't trust these people at all. Especially after the 2013 election where by Tony Abbott spectacularly promised not to make cuts to specific things like health and education and then promptly went back on all his promises the moment he got into power. The Liberal Party has not really explained itself why they had to so flagrantly break their election promises, nor have they acquitted themselves particularly well For having done so. Worse still they haven't changed course from Tony Abbott's disastrous direction-setting as Malcolm Turnbull has steadfastly stuck to the same stupid policies.  

The ALP aren't exactly mounting a great challenge.  It's competent - but it's going to need to be a bit more than competent to get that 4.5% uniform swing. The fear is that Bill Shorten is trying to get close but not necessarily to win, and ask the party for another shot after a narrow loss. It's a wonder that they just don't go for the jugular with facts given just how incompetent and awful the incumbents have been.

When you look at the Brexit vote and the rise of Trump in the USA, it appears that the victory of slogan-over-substance delivered by Tony Abbott was in fact an early salvo in the rancorous kinds of elections where radical rhetoric muscles into the middle of the political discourse. The self-defeating protest vote that installed Tony Abbott over the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd ALP government is the very same kind of self-defeating protest vote that delivered Donald Trump as the nominee of the Republicans as well as voted the UK right out of the EU.

The best news about this election is that at the very least we're not about to do something drastic because we've already done that in 2013 and hopefully have the hindsight to know that was crap. But you never know. These candidates are ordinary enough to fuck up even that sad silver lining.

How Bad Is It Really?

Skarp sent me a link from The Economist today, probably to alert me to the fact that Brexit really is alarming - not merely disquieting of disturbing, or perhaps eyebrow-raising. It is the full skid, brown an stinky.

People are trying to put a smiley face on the utterly untenable Brexit situation. By people I mean journalists and politicians and spokespeople for the finance sector. The reality is that the ructions caused by the Brexit vote re already besting the kinds of records set in August 2008 when the US congress decided not to hand over the TARP payments to bail out the banks at the height of the liquidity crisis. For all this talk about scaremongering, one would like to ask just exactly were people expecting when they advocated Brexit?

Here's a quick look at what the British leadership looks like right now:

Sixty hours have gone by since a puffy-eyed David Cameron appeared outside 10 Downing Street and announced his resignation. The pound has tumbled. Investment decisions have been suspended; already firms talk of moving operations overseas. Britain’s EU commissioner has resigned. Sensitive political acts—the Chilcot report’s publication, decisions on a new London airport runway and the renewal of Britain’s nuclear deterrent—are looming. European leaders are shuttling about the continent meeting and discussing what to do next. Those more sympathetic to Britain are looking for signs from London of how they can usefully influence discussions. At home mounting evidence suggests a spike in racist and xenophobic attacks on immigrants. Scotland is heading for another independence referendum. Northern Ireland’s peace settlement may hang by a thread. 

But at the top of British politics, a vacuum yawns wide. The phones are ringing, but no one is picking up. 

Mr Cameron has said nothing since Friday morning. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, has been silent. (This afternoon I texted several of his advisers to ask whether he would make a statement before the markets open tomorrow. As I write this I have received no replies.) The prime minister’s loyalist allies in Westminster and in the media are largely mute. 

Apart from ashen-faced, mumbled statements from the Vote Leave headquarters on Friday, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove have also ducked the limelight; Mr Johnson is meeting friends and allies today, June 26th, at his house near Oxford in what are believed to be talks about his impending leadership bid. Neither seems to have the foggiest as to what should happen next. Today Mr Gove’s wife committed to Facebook the hope that “clever people” might offer to “lend their advice and expertise.” And Mr Johnson’s sister, Rachel, tweeted: “Everyone keeps saying ‘we are where we are’ but nobody seems to have the slightest clue where that is.”

I thought that alone would fill you with joy. If that's not whacky-disheartening enough, there's a report that a British nuclear sub has made port at Gibraltar to exert pressure on the Spanish not to attack. Like, hullo! Brexit surely doesn't mean the UK goes on war footing with the EU. Who the hell is running the show?

This whole process of Brexit clearly wasn't thought through let alone war-gamed or tested. You know I've been talking to reasonable people explaining to me why they thought the UK should leave the EU and why they voted that way, but truth be known they probably thought about the whole thing a whole lot more than the idiotic advocates Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. It's rapidly becoming clear these idiots have no plan (never even saw the point of one), and as such Britain is more rudderless and adrift rather than proudly sailing forth out of the EU.

The people who have been explaining to me the rationale for voting Brexit are actually rationalising a bad decision with great skill and imagination. It's crap. It's the full load of shit that's hit the biggest fan in the world and the shit is flying all over the planet as we speak.
As politics goes, this is a well-thrusted custard.
Bravo Stupid.

The Dinosaurs Scream At The Incoming Asteroid...

Michael Moore had an interview with Owen Jones in the lead up to the Brexit vote in which he likened the British desire to leave the Eu as being like a Premier League football club wanting to leave the Premier League, relegating itself out. In the same interview he likened the people voting for a Brexit to the sorts of people voting for Donald Trump and said that most of the time the demagogues represented the dying wails of the reign of the straight white man. That it was like dinosaurs screaming at the Incoming asteroid, "build a wall!"

The fact is that the demographic change is happening and with it will come a new generation of thinkers, writers, and most importantly voters. They will think and enact things that this current set of status quo politicians cannot imagine let alone enact. And if you fear the future, you just might put your foot down and scream with Michael Moore's dinosaurs, "build a wall!"

That got me to thinking about the demographic divide on many issues which, in usual discussion starts off with the difference on things like gay marriage, but more importantly cover things like education and health. The segment of people voting for the likes of Bernie Sanders are young. The segment of population in Australia that supports gay marriage is young.

These issues might be contested heavily in the future if they were divided along ideological lines but It turns out they are not. That means these issues will inevitably go the way the young people want it in the future. The urge to leave the EU because one is a Euro-sceptic and make  as the urge to vote for Trump who promises to make "America Great Again" (which has been lampooned as "make America White Again"), and even to the extent that Australians can be persuaded that locking up asylum seekers on Manus and Nauru is a good idea. In the not too distant future when there are more of the young than the old again, it will flip.

In the mean time the current regime of dinosaurs will try and stack things in their favour as much as possible, trying to build barricades - heck, build walls. These are all rearguard actions of an older mindset. There are still enough dinosaurs fighting the rearguard action, staving off the future in, say, the DNC as there are in-reconstructed racists and crackpots on the right who pushed Trump into the limelight. Equally they are in the Tories in the UK and LNP here in Australia. The LNP are so anti-progressive they are determined to be absolutely regressive - but they just can't get the youth vote doing that.

To that extent I am more optimistic than pessimistic About the future. It's a real shame Bernie Sanders won't get up this year as the Democratic Nominee, for instance - but something is going to come from the enormous movement he has built. Something like climate change denial is a sport for the intellectually dishonest, but the phenomenon itself is advancing inexorably. At some point in the future, the young voters of today will have the numbers to get their politicians in who will not only institute proper policies but maybe even find the means to reverse decades of carbon emissions.

I have to admit, I am secretly hoping this is the election where it changes over and the Australian dinosaurs are consigned to history.

Speaking Of The Great Wall Of Trump...

I had the funny insight given to me this month:
The Chinese built their Great Wall to keep the barbarians out. But they sure didn't try to charge the cost of building that wall onto the barbarians.

Even More Reflections On Brexit

Day 3 After Brexit

It's certainly strange that I have so much to write about the Brexit referendum vote even three days after the event. Part of the difficulty in getting my head around it has been just how unexpected the outcome was, given the advantages EU membership conferred upon the UK.

Extraordinary also is the immense buyer's remorse being expressed by those who voted 'Leave' as a protest vote, only to find out they won. This dovetails with the strange report where Google searches for the EU went up after the vote closed, as people sought to find out what they have left. In other news related, Cornwall has sought confirmation that indeed the money they used to get from the EU would be replaced by the British government. This would be a fair cop if you had voted to stay and then against your wish been made to leave. What's particularly rich about this one is that Cornwall overwhelmingly voted to leave.

Northern Ireland is one of those issues that could turn into a disaster. The Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to long hostilities was underpinned by the EU laws and agreements whereby one side got just enough to be Ireland and the other side got be just enough to still be the UK, but there would have to be no border because they were all in the EU. That's now gone. It could very well slip-slide back into the chaos that was the Troubles with checkpoints guns and the lot (would you like some fries with your bombs?).  The horrors long thought to have been left behind in history just might come back - all thanks to this vote.

Nicola Sturgeon has already signalled a second referendum to keep Scotland in the EU which means secession from the UK. It's funny how the last Scotish referendum was argued as a session from the UK, and defeated because of the possibility of being kicked out of the EU. The Flow of ironies never cease.  This may all go to show how referenda in general are  more destructive to the polity than previously thought.

And so the news trickles in.
There was an observation made that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove didn't exactly look too excited by the outcome - more surprised and perhaps like deer in the headlights as history comes charging towards them. After all the unbelievable scuttlebutt is that Johnson might be the successor to Cameron. And Johnson being Johnson he would be aware of how difficult and mountainous the tags would be to actually managed the messy divorce with the EU, and that he would be charged with all the social costs. He would be stepping in to captain the Titanic having steered it in to the iceberg, having assured everybody on board that the iceberg represented no threat, and that the Titanic was unsinkable.
Maybe.

I'm not there; I'm not a citizen; and I sure don't have the vote in the matter, but had I been asked I would have offered remain was a better option. I've been searching my own feelings on this as it has been so unexpected that the Leave vote would win. The more I turn over the morsels of information I can find, the more I'm inclined to think the case for leaving was not made, and perhaps overstated its alleged advantages. Some people might even describe it as being built on outright lies. Let's face it, Nigel Farage was quick to rescind the £350m he was supposedly going to hand the NHS.

Farage might think he is steering the country into his vision of the future, but it's really a nostalgia trip. That being the case, the ultimate bit of the nostalgia trip might object to losing a chunk of her wealth and her realm...

Her Majesty's Role To Play

One thing I had not thought about is what the hell Her Majesty thinks of all this. Yes, as a constitutional monarch, she doesn't get a say in it, but let's face it - she is the Queen. Will she sit idly by and rubber stamp the referendum result into law? It's hypothetical but what if Her Majesty simply does not approve of the measures and refuses to sign off?  This is actually a curious question from a historic point of view.

The Brexit vote has the likely outcome of splitting apart the United Kingdom. And as per speculation during the Scotland referendum last time, Her Majesty would remain constitutional monarch to these countries, some of which will want to stay in the EU, and England which has opted out. The question then is does Her Majesty want to be the Monarch who presided over the breaking up of the United Kingdom? And if not, just how far would she be willing to go to stop it?

Writing as an Australian, I am reflecting on the rather vast 'reserve powers' of the Crown that removed Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister - and while nobody can quite claim Her Majesty had an active role in it (we know she was a sounding board as was Prince Charles), her crown certainly had the authority to make that political action stick. So what happens if the next Prime Minister puts through the bill to ratify the referendum and turns up at Buckingham Palace to have it signed off and the Queen refuses to sign? Or she actively vetoes the bill using her reserve powers? It would be utterly in-democratic, but it would preserve the status quo.

It might be inconceivable but again, from an Australian point of view, this is not a stretch. She likely has the power and authority to (pardon the pun) scotch this whole deal. If she null-and-voids the referendum result, thus keeping the UK in the EU, it would take the sharp edge off Scotland's desire to leave and solve the problem of Northern Ireland and the eventual break up of the realm. It would be a move that would hark back to Charles I or King John with its unilateral authoritarianism, but if Queen Elizabeth II wants to preserve the realm, the she might just have to bring out the bazooka. It may even start a civil war - after all, that was what happened with King John and Charles I - but the Queen as an institution is not the Queen for nothing.

It's hard to say if there is such resolve in a 90year old monarch in the Twentyfirst Century. Her reign has been successful exactly because her thoughts on politics are opaque. We simply do not know what she makes of all this business. I'm not much of a Royal-Watcher. I don't really care about the Royal family at all except as a curious historic artefact, but I do wonder what their household has been like in the last 72hours. I'm sure they would be cussing the name of David Cameron that brought about these terrible circumstances, and then turning to advice on just how much power they still have to stop this thing. Just remember, if her authority can dislodge a Prime Minister in the Commonwealth, it sure can whack some bill that emerges from popular referendum.

Let's just say, if I were a Conservative MP that didn't want Brexit to happen, you may well think that I would be talking to the Palace about such options, "but I couldn't possibly say". The ultimate 1%-er is Her Majesty the Queen, Elizabeth II. In turn, if Boris Johnson is indeed the next Prime Minister, and he really wants this Brexit as advertised, he might well need to have the resolve of Oliver Cromwell rather than the nationalist Ra-Ra of Winston Churchill. We'll certainly see.

More Thoughts On The Brexit Vote

David Cameron Opened The Door For The Far Right

It's been a couple of days since Brexit happened and I'm still trying to digest it's meaning. Some people are blaming ignorance and fear but I don't believe that covers the surge of votes that took it to the majority. Issues like the NHS have been raised but by the same token UKIP leader Nigel Farage was quick to backpedal from his £350m pledge towards shoring up the NHS.

The Tories really can't claim the vote a victory because it cost them their leader and Prime Minister. Indeed, in the tussle between rightists, the culturally inclined rightists seem to have beat out the economically minded rightists. David Cameron should go down as the worst Prime Minister in British history since Neville Chamberlain when he came home waving a piece of paper with Adolf Hitler's name on it.

And there it is, the rather uncomfortable reminder of the time the far right got centre stage in politics. Adolf Hitler of course snuck into the Weimar Republic government by dressing up his politics as a kind of conservatism - just enough to get Hindemburg to make him a partner in government. I know some of you will jump up and down and say "Ah! Godwin's Law. You brought up Nazis so this blog entry is without merit!" - but that is the very problem: The Far Right have clenched a legitimacy they need out to have been given, and they got it through David Cameron essentially kicking an own goal.

Is Farage Hitler? No. Maybe I should say No, not yet. Yet the stench of fascism and intolerance reeks in the outcome of the referendum, so much so you have to pinch your nose and pretend it is not there just to talk about the outcome in economic terms. My own view is, if it smells like shit, it probably is shit - no need to go tasting it. David Cameron is going to go down as the Prime Minister who let the Far Right into the middle of government, out of his own sheer desperation to stay in power. It's not a good thing.

Everybody Struggles For Relevance, Some More Than Others

The British Labour Party are obviously feeling like the referendum was a loss.   The worse aspect of this might be just how irrelevant they've become in Thatcherite England. Consider for a moment just how much of a sell-out Tony Blair's government was for a leftist concern. Add in the years of Thatcher herself and John Major, as well as David Cameron's stint, and you get the picture of the UK essentially living out the Neo-liberal economic programme for over a generation - 37 years if you count back to Thatcher's first win.

It's been a long time since the Labour Party sounded like the Labour Party.  Of course it doesn't hide the fact that they are very short on experience. The left utterly failed to shore up its base because the truth is that Blair-ite Labour sold those people down the river in order to win a government resembling the Tories. There's a credibility gap in going back to the very same demographic and asking them to support even more of the globalisation and free trade that has decimated those communities.

Arguably, there's a lesson right there for the left in Australia. The Rudd-Ian move to the social right carried within it the seeds of future disconnect with the ALP base.  There's a limit to what kind of political solutions can be achieved if you meet the Tories half way. Especially if the Tories insist on going far out to the right. This problem is also present in the current US elections where the Clinotnian compromises of the 1990s are not sufficient for the Democrat base because they amounted to selling out the base. The base is angry enough it would like to vote Sanders, but is willing to withdraw its support for Clinton, even in the face of Donald Trump. It is a pattern repeating around the world, whether it be the rise of both Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece, or Podemos in Spain.

It's unclear whether the ALP under Bill Shorten can reconnect with its base. Certainly the Rudd-Gillard ALP government made a hash of it, and justifiably earned the scorned it received. The lesson in all of this is that the left struggles for relevance the more it has sold out its base in the last 40years. The credibility gap is simply too big.

What's Wrong With The Euro Zone?

In all of this I decided I'd have a quick think for myself what bothers me about the Euro Zone as it is constructed. The obvious problem is how the GFC revealed the structural problem of how the Euro currency itself is set up, and particularly how it pertains to Greece. Greece is in dire straits because it has large debts, but also because it cannot devalue its currency to balance out its relative weakness of its economy in comparison to the economy of Germany and France.

While this problem was not a problem for the UK who insisted on keeping the pound in the 90s, the fact that the Euro Zone as a whole is pushing globalisation in a way that would beggar the poorer economies is a problem. It's interesting to see if Scotland really think their welfare state would fare any better under Germany's auspices than George Osbourne. Judging from the way Greece has been handled, the last thing you might want to have is Germans in charge of your welfare state.

In general, the Euro Zone has demonstrated that some states are more equal than others. Young Greeks would do well to abandon Greece and head for Paris, Berlin and London for opportunities. Yet this reveals a structure whereby the UK contributes to the Euro but cannot directly assist Greece, all the while having to take on board economic migrants that are created largely out of the austerity that Germany insists upon. And while Germany's insistence on Greek austerity has varying degrees of legitimacy attached to it, one would think such claims would not be accepted in many parts of England suffering under the Cameron-Osbourne austerity policies of its own.

If you add in the fact that Eastern European nations have entered the Euro  exporting massive deflationary forces with their cheap labour, and with Turkey under Erdogan wanting to join, it's very much a good question as to whether it is a club within which the UK would want to stay. If that seems 'xenophobic' to some, it ought to be asked who benefits more from 'xenophilia' and blind acceptance of this cheap labour that is destroying labour value in the UK. Why should the working class continue to cop to the waves of globalisation that seemingly does not care about regional UK? It's simply not as clear cut as saying the rejection of the European Union is ergo xenophobia.

Imagine if you will, that there was a Pacific equivalent of the EU, but without the US. It might look like Australia, NZ, Canada, with the North Eastern Asian countries Japan, Taiwan South Korea. Add in the ASEAN nations, and you would have a pretty big trade bloc. The problem is labour prices across this region would be depressed because labour is very inexpensive in ASEAN. If there is free movement of people in this bloc, it's hard not to imagine there would be a flood of people heading for Sydney, Tokyo, Taipei, Vancouver, Auckland.  And if that cheap labour was depressing the wages of people in Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Canada and New Zealand, it wouldn't be very difficult to imagine a movement built upon getting out of such an arrangement.

The fact that there isn't such a bloc tells you a lot already, but it would have to be extremely obtuse to pretend the European Union which mainly featured France, Germany, Holland Denmark Spain and Italy at its start, is a very different proposition today when it also includes much of the old Eastern bloc, Greece and soon Turkey.

The Future The Young Did Not Want

Something like 70% and more of the younger voters voted to remain. It is the kind of number that reminds us of the support for Bernie Sanders among the younger voters. And just as Sanders didn't get their candidate, the younger voters of the U.K. Got the outcome they didn't want but have to live with, for much longer than older voters.

It is a stark demographic picture where Gen-X and Gen-Y combined could not beat the Baby Boomers and older generations. It's hard to tell what the fallout from this aspect of the referendum will be. One thing I can say is that we're not shooting each other in the streets in some civil war, because that's where the Spanish ended up in the years during the Great Depression. With any luck we won't be glomming into a World War.

Whatever else that can be said about it, on a demographic level, the Brexit vote is not a step towards the future, it's a blind shuffle back towards an imagined past that is not there. It's doubtful it existed and it's doubtful it will come to be as Nigel Farage seems to think. Now that David Cameron has had to resign, there will likely be an election in the UK by the end of the year. One wonders how the next vote will work out for the Tories. I can't imagine this is going to be good.

The World Of The Elite Consensus Is Ending

It's been pointed out elsewhere that the 1% who have all the money and power see borders very differently to ordinary people. The 1% move freely across borders with their capital. Compared to that, people who hang their hats on the sad identity politic of nationalism seem very quaint. This might be because in the past the 1% had their wars where they sent the people to fight and bleed for them on the basis that borders were important. It strikes me that it is somewhat silly of the elites to then be confronted by a popular vote - a revolt even - where they vote is ostensibly in favour of borders.

The promises of Free Trade are quite enticing. The problem however is that in many parts of the developed world, it means that in exchange for cheaper products, you lose your jobs to people in poorer countries. And the Elites, the 1%, the Tories and the big end of town dress up this exchange as a matter of productivity and competitiveness, but in reality it is an exchange the Elites have made, to sell down the future of their own people back home.

If the problem of the idiotic, uneducated, atavistic identity politics of such movements headlined by Farage and Boris Johnson and Donald Trump (and we should add Pauline Hanson to this pile) seems pernicious, it may very well be because the 1% have overly downplayed the importance of borders and identity, having sold it to the very same people as something of inherent value. What the Brexit vote shows is that the people won't be railroaded forever. If the benefits of "hands-across-the-waters" friendship is that everybody's living standards go down to a lower level, a lower common denominator, then you can't fault the people who say "bugger that, I'm keeping what's mine."
It's not quite as idiotic as it looks.

More tellingly, the Brexit vote reveals the middle is broken in British politics. If enough of the people in the middle are willing to throw their lot in with the likes of Farage, if enough of the working people who would have traditionally been Labour Party supporters vote with Boris Johnson, then whatever consensus that might have been in place may as well be pronounced dead. Of course in Australia, we've seen the broken middle consensus with the election of Tony Abbott in 2013, so it's not as if we don't know what this looks like. It's going to be a Carnivale of bad political judgment until such time the public gets another vote. Fortunately for us, Australia goes to the polls next weekend. Let us hope we can restore a sense of consensus by voting out this truly moronic Coalition Government.

Holy Smokes It's A Brexit

More Surprising Than The GFC Itself

What do you make of this result? If a month ago the notion of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union seemed like a non-issue, it all of a sudden heated up today as the polls closed an lo and behold the UK had voted to exit the EU. It's a staggering result that flies in the face oft only the rhetoric or accepted wisdom or common sense. Nigel Farage went from being a joke and a potential footnote in history to being the face of the man who rallied petty nationalism and jingoism to reverse the historic decision for the UK to join the EC in the first place.

Pollsters are looking really bad out of all this. Not only did they screw up the last election, they totally misread the public mood for this referendum. Also looking bad is David Cameron who called on the referendum and pitched for the 'remain' camp. In fact the majority of the British Parliament would support remaining in the EU so it will be curious to see how that respond to the outcome.

The vote result has caused chaos across global markets including the ASX where $50billion was wiped off the bourse today. That's like a regular day during the GFC for losses but still, you get the feeling that people are taking money out of markets just to feel like they're doing something. Also in the news today was the collapse of the Pound Sterling which has sunk to levels not seen since 1985.

All that being said, I did get a more nuanced whiff of just what was ailing the common voter in England, who were keen to tell me on Facebook just how much the rule of Brussels rankled with them, as well as just how much of a strain Europeans were putting on the NHS. If the British were going to protect the NHS, they had to - they argued - quit on the EU. There were other issues as well, such as just who these people in Brussels were to be making such sweeping laws ("un-eleced filth!") that supersede national sovereign laws of a land, and how such laws were handing over fishing right in waters around the UK to landlocked countries like Hungary.

Really, it wasn't really to do with the xenophobic impulses as claimed by the campaigners to remain. It had a lot more to do with the fact that Westminster had been relegated to rubber-stamping laws created in Brussels, and that those laws were not working at all in the British context. Europe will rightly be smarting from this result. The ramifications are multiple and here are a few that I can think of just off the top of my head:

• Scotland will want to have a do-over of their secession referendum. Scotland wants to remain in the EU. 
• Presumably Norther Ireland wants to stay in the EU. Otherwise it has to organise borders with Ireland. If Scotland and Northern Ireland split, the Brexit would have brought about the end of the Unite Kingdom. Not sure how the Queen deals with this as she's still Queen unto the Scots but it brings those old hoary questions back into the limelight. 
• Can the City of London stay the financial hub of Europe when it no longer is in Europe and will presumably have trade barriers with Europe? Will the British economy recede from its current model of being built around finance, insurance and real estate banking? 
• Grexit is firmly back on the agenda. If the UK can exit the EU, then Greece will see that they can force the issue to get out. This would be sensible except... here come another round of Grexit-Fear market gyrations
• What trade deals now and how? When the UK is out, what kind of barriers to trade will there be with Europe? One imagines these will be high, just to punish the UK for leaving. In fact Brexit means the UK has opted to go with less leverage when it needs to negotiate more.
• David Cameron must be done as Prime Minister. I can't imagine he survives the week now that he's spent his political capital and it all went up in flames. Could the next PM be *gasp* Boris Johnson? What kind of world are we living in when ugly populists like the Johnsons and Farages of the world win and ... heck why not mention it, Donald Trump is a nominee to be a presidential candidate for the Republicans?

Apart from the bit where David Cameron loses his job, a lot of that is actually quite difficult to digest. In any case, it's an historic day indeed.

It's kind of funny to reflect back on the moment the UK joined the EEC way back in 1972. France made it conditional that the UK ditch its favourable trade arrangements with her former colonies, and so Australia and New Zealand were - for a better word - 'dumped' by the Mother Country. Australia's modern identity really emerges from that historic moment when the Mother Country jumped into a bed with the French and the Germans and abandoned her children to make their own way in the world. The massive shift towards Australia's engagement with Asia which started in the mid-70s directly follows on from that rather uneasy historic moment. For the most part Australia has done okay out of that change. It forced the country to grow up quite a bit, become more cosmopolitan and less parochial, and maybe even a little more sophisticated in its dealings with the old dart.

That being said, should the UK start renegotiating all its trade deals and come knocking in Australia, and should there be an ALP government around, the UK would best be reminded of this history, and perhaps even be asked whether they would like to revisit 'Terra Nullius' in their Parliament - perhaps even offer an apology to the indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand. There's a lot of unfinished business to be discussed.

UPDATE: "And he's gone! David Cameron, gone for a duck...as he trudges away from the crease. Took a big swiping shot and skied the ball. Not a very good captain's knock..."

Quick Shots - 21/Jun/2016

Trying To Read The Electorate From Headlines

This election certainly is tight. It's probably as tight as the 2010 contest which saw the Hung Parliament. There's a swing calculator on this SMH article which is worth playing around.

Stirton notes further, on the state data, that Labor could pick up 16 seats, getting it to 73 - just three short of a majority and ensuring a hung Parliament. 

Seat-by-seat, Turnbull may be ahead. But when Labor won the unwinnable in Queensland, some pointed back to polls asking why they'd been ignored. Good question.

The uniform swing needed to put the ALP back into government is 4.5%. At 4%, which is where the polls are now sitting, it gives rise to a result of 73 seats each for the ALP and Coalition respectively with 4 seats in the cross bench, just like in 2010. Both parties have disavowed forming a minority Government, and in the case of the ALP, you can fully understand why bad on their experience. As for the Coalition's disavowal, one is struck by the oddness of the luxury provided to them through being the incumbent, and how they will likely retain the role of caretaker government.

All of this goes to show the rearguard action of fighting the 2013 election with a a restored Kevin Rudd was in fact, the correct move if only to "save the furniture" as they said at the time. The furniture saved in 2013 is roaring back after only 1 term of the Coalition Government which was a truly shambolic, pathetic, idiotic  government if there ever was one. 

The bigger question mark is if the demographic has changed somewhat since 2010. It's been 6 years of lots of people dying and presumably those deaths would have - excuse the word - 'favoured' the older voters siding with the Coalition. It is eminently possible that the polls are under-reporting the sea change in the demographics and that maybe the ALP has more support than shows up in polling. 

The Never-Ending Campaign In The USA

Goodness, if you thought this current election unleashed by Malcolm Turnbull was seemingly without end, then the 18month epic preselection and then election process of the US Presidential elections is just interminable. At this point in time, Hillary Clinton is claiming she has enough votes to win the Democratic nomination, although this point is contested by Bernie Sanders' camp because those 'Super Delegates' don't get to vote until the 25th of July - which is a whole month and a bit more away from this writing. 

I'll be honest, I think Bernie's been licked, but I refuse to piss my pants; and thus I say to anybody who listens, let's see how this plays out. As they say, a week is a long time in politics. There are four and a half of those "long times" between now and when the Super Delegates decide who will be their nominee. There are already disturbing revelations being thrown out to the media about Hillary Clinton, thanks to Wikileaks. 

Yeah. That right there is Hillary Clinton recommending Regime change in Syria. What's coming out of this is the notion that Trump might be scary because he's a bigoted xenophobe with little tolerance for anything that requires nuanced thinking; Hillary Clinton is just as scary being a hawk of unrivalled dedication to toppling Middle Eastern regimes just to 'protect' Israel. You'd think that maybe the Super Delegates might want to ponder if they want to line up behind a President who is going to go to more wars to 'protect' Israel. 

In other news, Trump's campaign might be running out of money. 

Quick Shots - 19/Jun/2016

Are We There Yet?

I guess if I don't read a little about the election I'd be amiss in keeping breast of what the pundits think. The call seems to be a narrow Coalition win, which is like a kiss of death. Mark Kenny is also a little down on Bill Shorten and the ALP in spite of what he thinks has been good campaigning. I wouldn't know whether Bill Shorten has been all that great but e seems to be turning around the loss of smarter people to the Greens, which was a serious issue as late as 1 year go, which I covered in the last post.

Peter Hartcher thinks that Shorten has a credibility problem every time he promises policies that will involve spending billions. In a vacuum, yes, but he is running against the Coalition who are infested with climate change denialists. It's not like the Coalition have any degree of credibility at all. Compared to that, Bill Shorten sounds like a measured, controlled, proper leader. Of course, we don't know if this turns into votes in country that is persuaded mightily to treat asylum seekers in the shabbiest of manners possible.

I'm not holding my breath - but if this electorate votes this Coalition back in, I think I'll go on a bender.

The Unpredictability Of Climate Change

Some time in the last decade, NSW was in the middle of a drought so bad it saw the Warragamba dam water level down in the 30% level. It was so bad, there were water restrictions and people were killing each other in suburban streets over the use of water. It led to NSW Premier of the late 2000s, Morris Iemma green lighting a desalination plant which now looks to be a white elephant of sorts - but you can't rule anything out in the future. I say that because this week it is at 98% and with more rain falling, it may well spill over.

Both the drought and this excessive rain came about because of climate change. This is what it means to live in volatile weather conditions.

This kind of leads me to the Pleiades mailbag today.

From The Pleiades Mailbag

Here's a scary article about the runway melting of the polar caps.

Wadhams: “A whole series of consequences, which are all unfortunately rather serious. Firstly, the retreat of the sea ice or the loss of the ice will mean that global warming will increase because you are changing a large area of white to dark, reducing the average albedo [reflection] of the planet… Secondly, there will be an acceleration of sea level rise because warm air that lies over the open water in the Arctic Ocean moves over to Greenland and gives you surface melt at the Greenland ice sheet [equals 23’ of sea level rise] to an extent that didn’t used to happen. We found in 2012, for instance, the entire surface of the Greenland ice sheet was starting to melt for a period in the summer, and this is completely new, and this means that sea level rise will be accelerated because that melt water runs off into the ocean… Possibly one of the most severe threats is the that the shallow waters off the Arctic coast, especially the Siberian coast, are very wide continental shelves, only about 50 to 100 meters of water. That water could warm up during the summer months because the area is ice-free now already, and this will give you positive temperatures on the seabed which will start to thaw out the seabed permafrost which has been sitting there frozen since the last Ice Age. This has never happened before because the sea ice never retreated very much in the summer and the water temperature could not rise above zero because of the ice cover… The permafrost is acting as a cap for a very large amount of methane (CH4), which is sitting in the sediments underneath in the form of methane hydrates. You release the pressure by removing that permafrost and methane comes out as huge bubble plumes. It’s already happening; it’s been detected by scientists all over the Russian Arctic and most recently by a Swedish expedition and by various U.S./Russian expeditions. Each time they go there’s more and more bubbles coming out, and the fear is that there’ll be a general release of methane trapped under those sediments, which could cause a very rapid rise in the rate of sea level. We calculated it could give you 0.6 C warming of the planet in five years. That’s a big boost because methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas.”

As for rapidity of climate change, Dr. Wadhams says that the situation is already getting very serious, and brand new feedback processes are coming into play. Accordingly, that’s what is most worrying, extra feedbacks from what global warming itself produces. It’s like AI with a “will of its own.”

If that doesn't sound apocalyptic enough, you should check out Peter. Wadhams' lectures on Youtube:


...and here's a scary article about what Hillary Clinton would like to do as President. The funny thing is the US policy think tanks seems be making up scenarios for 2050 when in fact climate change might make the world totally uninhabitable. There might not be a world worth dominating in 2050.

View From The Couch - 18/Jun/2016

This Damned Election - This week's Edition

Sometime last year I reported that a bunch of academic types wanted to vote Green and they abandoned the ALP. I decided to see if that were still the case, and it turns out that it is not still the case. A lot of them have headed back to the ALP. I asked why they switched back and they said it was because Bill Shorten was making a better case for himself with the policies he's put up, and back then the ALP were being very coy about their policies that it drove them to despair. Now, they do not despair so much - which goes to show political support is indeed ephemeral.

I'm certain that the Coalition are terrible managers of the economy. So it goes without saying that the ALP should get the nod over the Coalition. If anything the purgatory for the ALP seems to have been too short to be in such a good position so soon after the defeating 2013. After all, they did make a big hash government. What's troubling is that people like Tony Burke who were instrumental in making a hash of it, are still around and bound to become a minister should the ALP win. That into say, even if the ALP win, this is going to be tough-to-stomach in the new government. Should the Coalition win, then well, we know it's going to be three more years of this unimaginable, unmitigated disaster that is government by stupidity ("of the, for the...stupid").

If there's one thing that's becoming clearer in this election, it is that we really aren't given a greatest setoff choices - and this lack of a good choice is necessarily so because we've made so many people who are undeserving of office into politicians. These professional politicians exist because politics has been seized upon as a career to have. This careerism in turn is precluding the depth and breadth of thinking required to really build this nation. Instead, we have the kind of people who think it's pretty damn cool to cash in long held government assets through privatisation, trying to find ever more silver to sell off. To what purpose? - we're told it is to cut the deficit.
You know, at a certain point incredulity kicks in. Which is sort of where we find ourselves.

Shintaro Ishihara Writes About Kakuei Tanaka

Shintaro Ishihara is the rightwing conservative everybody thinks Shinzo Abe is. Let's clear about this: there are people in China and South Korea who carry on like Shinzo Abe is going to re-militarise Japan into the war machine it once was, and start invading the peninsula and continent. It' a crock of shit because in the years Abe has been Prime Minister this time around, he's barely increased the JSDF budget. When you consider the oldImperial Army and Navy combined took 70% of the budget, 1% seems like not much an attempt to re-militarise.

The point is, Shintaro Ishihara, was the politician who would love to go back to a strong Japan. He certainly was right up until the moment he retired. After all, he wrote the book "The Japan That Can Say No". Anyway... Shintaro Ishihara came to political prominence back in the late 70s as being anti-corruption and therefore anti-Kakuei Tanaka within the LDP of Japan. Now he has a bestseller that is a novel about Tanaka, but written in the fist person. A sort of imaginary auto-biography. The title is 'Genius'. In it, he goes into loving detail of Kakuei and his convictions.

It's a slight volume and covers the terrain we all know very well. If anything we don't learn much from it except for the fact that Ishihara seems to have turned the corner on his appreciation for, and appraisal of his old political foe. He really means it without irony when he calls Kakuei Tanaka, a  kind of political genius and visionary. Which is pretty strange.

Kakuei was a card, and did have a big-picture view of Japan. I don't know if that qualifies him as a genius - but the book certainly is interesting. As an attempt at polishing a turd goes, it showed Ishihara has quite the intellectual stamina for such a task.

In case you might have forgotten the kind of character Kakuei Tanaka was, here's my entry on how he advised his runners to deliver bribes.

Quick Shots - 15/Jun/2016

Screw You Malcolm Turnbull Part 1

I've been off-air here because my landline is down, which means my ADSL2 is out. I'm relying on my mobile phone to get me on here right now. It's a bit precarious and potentially really expensive doing it this way, but here's the thing. Telstra's really not interested in looking after its copper because the NBN is going to supplant it. That's all well and good except Malcolm Turnbull as Tony Abbott's communications minister hobbled the NBN and slowed down. Which means, I don't have the option of going to NBN while my sad copper connection languishes.

It really is a wormhole of suck when Telstra can't send techs to fix this immediately. It's going to take until the end of the month. It really shouldn't be like this. I blame Turnbull for needlessly making the NBN roll out far more politically fraught than it needed have been. It's such a stupid thing but today, it's impacting me so I get to scream and tell him what a partisan boofhead he was in hobbling the NBN.

Screw You Malcolm Turnbull Part 2

It's that stupid election going on. Unlike previous Federal election, I really I don't have a whole lot to say. I'm not convinced of the collective wisdom of crowds that produced a Abbott government in 2013, so pardon me if I'm a bit jaundiced about the potential for either government winning. On the one hand is the clearly regressive incumbents facing off against a deeply regressive left of Bill Shorten's ALP. I guess it's not as bad as Trump vs. Clinton, but it' not far behind on the anti-inspiration stakes. This isn't a "Justin Trudeau offering generational change and hope" kind of election. It's more a "who gets to be the arbiter for vested interests, fuck you world" sort of election.

Worst of all might be the coloured brochures proclaiming 'policies' that get sent to us. These must cost a motza to print and post, and yet they're devoid of any information that you could really hang a hat upon. I got one from my local member for Reid, Craig 'the Gerbil' Laundy, which promises a "strong new economy". I want to know what happened to the last one and where they're hiding it. As far as I can tell, they went out to the back shed and shot it. Twice.

The Gerbil seems like a wet Liberal and probably not a very hardened Thatcherite/Reaganomic trickledown-economics exponent, but he can't go around promising to fix local congestion by spending money on WestConnex. I can't believe that our candidates have been reduced to this kind of idiotic positioning just so that Malcolm can run an election campaign on the 'Jobs & Growth' slogan.

It's 2016. For the love of God, won't somebody just tell these idiots that the myth of Trickledown Economics is dead?

Screw You Malcolm Turnbull Part 3

Look, I know it's sort of obvious, but nobody is calling out the coalition for essentially running with people like Corgi Bernardi and Sophie Miserabella. If your party includes people as hateful as these muthers, you should be putting out some kind of disclaimer, like, "voting for this party will help these intellectually deficient people into positions of power in this country".

Otherwise, this election is leaving me cold. After all, the electorate has proven itself collectively asinine as of 2013. The incumbents know this and are trying to exploit them once more ("unto the breach, oh stupid people!"). The only question is how much stupidity can you load onto reality before it collapses. After all our nation is built on such fragile foundations when it comes to things like facts and reality.

Muhammad Ali (1942-2016)

"Float Like A Butterfly, Sting Like A Bee"

A long time ago, I first learned of 'Mohammed Ali'. I must have been nine. Muhammad Ali was going to fight Antonio Inoki, a wrestler in Japan. it was a bit of a farce. What I understood of the farcical 'fight' was that Ali was the greatest boxer on the planet and Inoki was the greatest wrestler and so it was going be a fight to sort out who was 'the Greatest'. What it was, was the greatest farce, but for us Gen-Xers, the greatest moments of Ali-as-fighter were already in the past by the time we were conscious of Muhammad Ali. He was like Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle, a figure whose record I had to piece together in the library. And I was a young sport nut enough to put the pieces together in the school library in NYC. Sometimes it takes stupidity to open the door to knowledge.

There also was this one fight they keep playing over and over in replays of past glory:



That right there is the famous fight with Sonny Liston where he knocked him out and demanded Liston say his name. Liston leads with his left and Ali gets a cross-counter over it, into the head and Liston drops. It looks nothing like a Rocky movie, but it's considered one of the great moments in boxing.

Ali loomed large in my imagination the more I read about him. His record prior to his suspension seemed immaculate. Although he had lost to Joe Frazier in '71, he had gone comeback to beat him in '74 and '75. He certainly fit the bill of the Greatest as far as I could tell.



There was also the 'Rumble in the Jungle' fight with George Foreman in '74 that kept coming up in conversation to do with Ali.



Ali lost some important years during the middle of his career when he conscientiously objected to being drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam. He famously quipped "No Vietnamese ever called me n-gger". How could he not be a cultural hero to the world after that?

The defiance and race consciousness were of its time, yet Ali transcended the kind of ordinary discourses on race. He was beautiful - "how can I be humble when I'm so pretty?" he asked rhetorically. He was fast and graceful, and possessed that marvellous wit. Above all, he demanded to be recognised as "the Greatest". When he met the Beatles he still insisted he was the Greatest, but that they were beautiful too, just like him. And so the banter went with Ali.

I did catch the broadcast of a few his fights towards the end of his career. I remember distinctly the two fights with Leon Spinks, one where he lost surprisingly on a split decision, and then the one where he came back and beat Spinks on an unanimous decision. Just as he had done with Frasier, Ali had gone back and beaten the guy who beat him. Then he fought Larry Holmes and lost and then Trevor Berwick and lost, which were his last fights. If anything the Holmes fight showed he had stayed the ring too long. Even as a kid, I could see that he wasn't the guy that he once was when he thumped Sonny Liston with the cross counter.

I think about it now and I'm a little surprised my parents let me watch this stuff but the truth is, Ali was such a showman, it was must-see television. And as good as Holmes and Spinks were, they were never the kinds of campions Ali was in his heyday. Truly, we would not see that kind of dominance until Iron Mike Tyson came along, and Tyson was a completely different kind of boxer and champion as well as a showman. Just as Ali - myth, record and all - belonged to the Baby Boomers, Iron Mike - his myth, record and all - was very much of Generation X. Ali was such a presence in the world, he was like a one man mission statement.

Then, there was this carton show:



The years after he left the ring were more fraught. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in his early 40s, and by the time he was carrying the torch at the Atlanta Olympics in '96 he was shuffling like an old man. It was sad, watching him with his arm shaking and his stiff facial expression without a smile. He wasn't tense, he was fighting his twitches all the way as he raised the torch. It was meant to be triumphant but looking back on it now, it's painful and pathetic.

Perhaps Ali is better to be remembered for his greatest win, the one against George Foreman, immortalised in the documentary 'When We Were Kings'.



Rest in peace Muhammad Ali; we will certainly never see the likes of him ever again, for he truly was The Greatest.

Quick Shots - 02/Jun/2016

What Yanis Said About Australia

Walk-Off HBP sent in this one a little while ago. Former Greek Minister For Financial Crises Yanis Varoufakis recently was in Australia and was asked a few questions about our economy. This bit sort of popped out so I'm quoting it here:

“The first thing that has to happen in this country is to recognise two truths that are escaping this electorate, and especially the elites. 

“Firstly, Australia does not have a debt problem. The idea that Australia is on the verge of becoming a new Greece would be touchingly funny if it were not so catastrophic in its ineptitude. Australia does not have a public debt problem, it has a private debt problem. 

“Truth number two: the Australian social economy is not sustainable as it is. At the moment, if you look at the current account deficit, Australia lives beyond its means – and when I say Australia, I mean upper-middle-class people. The luxurious lifestyle is not supported by the Australian economy. It’s supported by a bubble, and it is never a good idea to rely on the proposition that a bubble will always be there to support you.

“So private debt is the problem. And secondly, because of this private debt, you have a bubble, which is constantly inflated through money coming into this country for speculative purposes.” 

Varoufakis is unequivocal in his conviction that current growth – which he likens to a Ponzi scheme – needs to be replaced with growth that comes from producing goods. 

“Australia is switching away from producing stuff. Even good companies like Cochlear, who have been very innovative in the past, have been financialised. They’re moving away from doing stuff to shuffling paper around. That would be my first priority [if I were Australian treasurer]: how to go back to actually doing things.”

I jokingly asked him who this read like and he answered yours truly so... just saying, it's not like the views expressed here are off the planet. At least the former Finance Minister of Greece is espousing them as well. 

Varoufakis is pretty unequivocal about the idiocy of allowing the auto manufacturing industry to leave Australia. It's worth noting that the flip-side of Varoufakis' concern for manufacturing is that the more FIRE - finance, insurance and real estate- sectors grow in proportion to the rest of the economy, the less the economy seems to be able to grow. That is to say, the more 'financialised' an economy becomes a great part of the economy is taken up with the activity of shuffling paper wealth around. This is typically soon the USA here Manufacturing went from 30% of GDP to about 11%, and the FIRE sector went from 13% to about 24%. If the economy is producing things at around 10% and yet the paper shuffling wealth is 25%, it's not surprising you get low growth as well as lo wages growth and gross inequality.

This Damned Election In Australia

The one forgivable aspect of elections in Australia is that under the Westminster system these campaigns tend to go for weeks and not 18months like over in the USA. Even so, Malcolm Turnbull has opted to go for one of the longest campaigns leading up to the polls and well, there's still a good month to go before we show up at the voting booths.

Even so, things are running so tepid and boring, people are conjecturing whether Bill Shorten is - how do you put this? - trying as hard as he can to win this election. That maybe he's secretly going for a two-election strategy instead of trying to seize the day.

Electorally, in the wake of the Rudd-Gillard years, Shorten's approach prioritises the reconnection of the ALP with its disillusioned base over attracting the extra middle-ground voters needed to win an election. And that in turn explains why insiders in both camps report Labor is doing better in its heartland - i.e. safe seats it already holds - than it is in the marginals where swinging voters will decide the election. 

The result could be a repeat of 1998 - a sizeable swing to Labor for only a modest return of new seats. Yet for Shorten personally, that would bring an upwelling of affection from the Labor faithful, casting him as a defeated leader who had fought the good fight for "Labor" values - very useful if your challenger is the darling of the rank-and-file, the Left's Anthony Albanese.

All of this suggests Shorten may well be already thinking about his own survival as leader beyond the horizon. Don't expect him to use the term or even to accept the logic, but the inescapable conclusion is that he has a two-election strategy having concluded months ago that gaining the 19 Coalition seats needed to win on July 2 is unachievable.

In other words, he's really not putting the hard yards into winning the middle. It's a bummer because of the thought of Turnbull getting a full term and then continuing with these Abbott-esque policy positions is going to be a real drag. You kind of wish Shorten would go hard for the Lodge this time around, if only to make up for the ridiculous loss in 2013.

The more interesting news to do with the elections coming from fringier areas. Like ABC friends who want to target Coalition seats.