'Sicario'

Government By Assassination

Some of these films to do with the war on drugs across the US Mexico border are becoming more and more extreme in their moral relativism. While I'm not one of these people with moral absolutes, I tend to think that if the premise of the film is to do with law enforcement, a film should provide some kind of position on moral reasoning that involves the state. We relinquish capacity for a personal or private war in exchange for justice law and order. Ultimately films to do with law enforcement have to take a position about the operation of laws to ensure order or peace or whatever is the social consensus might be.

Then there is this film.
So here is the obligatory spoiler alert!


What's Good About It

This is tough. I'm not entirely sure I saw a lot that I liked in this film. There are some nice shots showing the Arizona landscape, horizon and sense of the land. The writings isn't witty or sharp (and you really notice this after watching a Woody Allen film), and the directing is pretty ordinary. The sound track is interesting. It's reminiscent of 'Jaws', what with its pounding bass notes.

The story boils down to a CIA black ops unit trying to insert an assassin into a difficult spot, but in order to operate in the USA they need n FBI agent to be there and rubber stamp the operation. The main character is chosen because she's effectively too junior to buck the system. It's good that a female character is doing this kind of role. God knows the film would have been 10 times more boring if it was another young guy again.

Emma Blunt delivers a scowling concerned performance that gives it a joyless reality. Josh Brolin turns in a performance you would expect from him. He is sort of cast-to-type.

What's Bad About It

The film meanders a lot. The action is meant to be driving the story but there's something perfunctory and ridiculous about the movements. Because Emma Blunt's character is kept in the dark for half the film, we as the audience are kept in the dark as well. Much of the time you're wondering what the hell is going on and if it is ever going to reveal something profound. It doesn't. It simply never gets there. The crucial central action of the film does not belong to Emma Blunt's character. It belongs to Benicio del Toro's character, who is as nihilistic as they come.

The nihilism is entirely self-defeating in this film. There is no existential crisis - it's just crisis of faith in the government, but it's not even well explained. You're left with the sense that maybe the film makers don't really care about the underlying social issues in Mexico. After seeing the first season of 'Narcos' and then coming to this movie, you really feel let down with its absence social insight. Lots of people are shown dying, getting shot. You get to glimpse one Mexican cop and his family, but it's probably the wrong story to have focused upon.

What's Interesting About It

That's the thing; it's really not all that interesting, in of itself. It's another film that depicts the war on drugs on the US Mexico border. Yes, it's endless, draining, with terrible human cost. The film simply posits that the state will move into a phase where it will make and act upon amoral judgments, simply to bypass due process.

You rarely see a film where the moral purpose of the action on the screen are not underpinned by something bigger than the individual. If it is a film about the law, then it usually revolves around the moral ramification of how justice is carried out, or the unintended consequences laws, or the practice of law. If it is about law enforcement, they usually mount an argument that lawfulness is goodness. This film says we shouldn't care, we should just do what it takes to get bad guys wherever they are, by any means necessary. The crazy thing about it is that it's not entirely clear how assassinations of drug lords actually helps in a war on drugs. Yet, it is asserted this is the future.

An Ugly Future Of Fighting Non-States

Yes, we're already underway in this horrible little process. Because states fail, like Rwanda and Somalia, they give rise to international players that do not adhere to protocols of a state but exert the kind power that a state might exercise. These independent players are complicating factors for diplomacy. An earlier example might have been the financial power f cocaine cartels in the 80s and 90s, or the Somali pirates in the early 2000s. Al Qaeda certainly fit that bill in as much as it was very interested in international terror, while the current ISIL is a similar entity with roots in terrorism but with aspirations to being an actual state.

When such players enter the international politics, they can be difficult to engage, especially when their intent is hostile and their rhetoric inflammatory. The American track record in recent years i.e. under Barack Obama, has been to hunt down the leadership and then use drone-strikes to kill them. Many people object to this modus operandi because - amongst other notable reasons like collateral damage - it leaves no space for negotiation for the enemy leadership and so the drone-strike program ensures there will be no dialogue.

The assassination plot carried out by Benicio del Toro's character is a direct extension of this program whereby the US Government is willing to kill the leadership of a Mexican drug cartel instead of bringing the man to justice. And this may very well be the protocol that will be used on coming years whereby if one is a Mexican drug lord, there will be no due process and basic rights under the law. The US Government is interested in eliminating such people, not arresting and trying them.
If the film is right, then we've entered a zone where conventional moral reasoning will be useless, and whatever moral reasoning we cobble together will either be inadequate, truncated, or ineffective. If that, is the future as stated in this film, then this film is a bleak film indeed.

Clearly America struggles greatly with this problem. There are no easy answers, although the legalisation and proper regulation of drugs would actually change the economic dynamics of this situation greatly. Just saying...

The Economics Of Narcotics

I might have mentioned this in some other random entry, but it comes down to the fact that narcotics are derived from plant growth. They're farmed. Of all the things that are farmed and collected and sold, the price for narcotics in fact far outstrips anything else. The only reason it gets so expensive is because there is significant demand that is made to struggle for a small supply. The small supply derives out of law enforcement agencies trying to confiscate the contraband. The high prices encourages farmers in impoverished places like Afghanistan or Central America to opt for growing narcotic agents instead of proper crops. As with the bootlegging during Prohibition, the harder the state tries to squeeze the supply, the more lucrative the trade becomes for more parties to enter into the narcotics business.

That's the operational truth of the drug trade. In reality, drug syndicates would be charging what the market will bear, so the pricing of narcotics is presumably at the high end of whatever that can be charged. In that context, every drug bust announced by the police effectively drives up the price per unit weight and this all goes into the drug lords' pockets as profits. Given the above, any film that argues assassinating the drug lords as we do Terror cell leaders is clearly ignoring the economics of the whole enterprise.

When you look at this film in context with other films and TV shows dealing with the influx of drugs over the border into the US, it is clear that the current legal paradigm of prohibition is not working. A lot more money is going to have to be spent on education and rehab programmes and medical processes to deal with addiction than simply rounding up users and dealers and incarcerating them.

Of course, the United States is probably not the likeliest of places for such a radical re-think. That being the case we're probably going to be subjected to ever more nihilistic pointless movies about busting drug lords whatever meaning there waist the enterprise has evaporated out of the topic. There's just a fascist will to prosecute the war on drugs regardless of casualties or meaning.

Torture Is Condoned In American Films

One last thing I want to point out about this miserable film is how the drug lord's brother is tortured for information. The torture is done on US soil, but by Benicio del Toro's character who is amped for vengeance. Taken together with the torture scene at the start of 'Zero Dark Thirty', it appears that while we vocally denounce torture in the West, we're quite okay for it in our fiction. And this hypocrisy is reflected by the state.

It's actually the same old hypocritical split that was pointed out in 'A Few Good Men' whereby the state is happy to appoint a figure to do its dirty work, while claiming the highest of ethical standards for itself. Once again, the split manifests itself with the CIA black ops willing to do the dirty work on the one hand, and the FBI agents wanting to follow the book of the law, finding it hard to condone the CIA tactics. It's the reflected image of 'Homeland', where the FBI are made to look like chumps.

This hypocritical split is not new. When Allende fell in 1973 in Chile, CIA operatives were in there torturing people for information. We might put this down to statecraft, but we've become too accepting that this stuff happens. When it is in our fiction as a readily accepted given, we really ought to be thinking a bit harder about what our politicians are doing on our behalf. The most gruesome part of this film might be its hideous implied politics.

News That's Fit To Punt - 03/Jun/2015

There Is A Housing Bubble Going On, Yo'

Sometime this year, the top end of the economics bureaucracy has started to admit there is a housing bubble going on. It's guarded as admissions go, and they limit the scope to high end properties in Sydney and Melbourne, but they're talking about it fairly openly. The funny thing is that the figures that tell us there's a property bubble going haven't changed all that much since the middle of last decade when Steve Keen was telling us there was a property bubble going on; and we know he lost that bet and had to walk to a mountain and back like some Hobbit.

What seems to have happened to change the view of the economic bureaucrats is that there isn't any consumer spending even with the drastically cut interest rates which sit at historic lows. That's right, TwIRP isn't cutting it. So far the RBA has run TwIRP for a couple of months  but it is making all the noises to say it won't go lower.

the RBA's expressed concern that at this stage of the game, cutting rates is boosting asset prices but not investment. It's investment that the country needs, not higher asset prices per se. 

As usual, much of the commentary on monetary policy, being Sydney based, is seen only through the prism of Sydney real estate. National monetary policy can't be set to suit Sydneysiders. 

The Sydney housing bubble is real enough, everyone except the Prime Minister and Treasurer seem to agree, but that can't be the RBA's prime consideration. Funny though that the bias has been dropped when business investment continues to refuse to come to the party.

So yes, it would go back to that problem where people don't seem to be spending their money. If TwIRP won't set you running out thereto buyer new fridge from Harvey Norman on one of those dealswhefre you pay nothing for 12months, then there might be something more profound going on. Steve Keen's theory is that there's simply too much household debt to take on more for the sake of consumption.

Mrs. Pleiades told me a story about the newly built suburb near where she lives, which is chock-full of McMansions that sell for amazing prices. The families move in and deck them out with modern furniture straight out of catalogues. Three years go by, and suddenly money is tight as they have to start repaying for all the stuff they bought when they moved in and deferred the payments. Money gets tight, they fight, they divorce, and pretty soon the block is up for sale again. The point is, a lot of people out there with mortgages buying into the property boom, are up to their eyeballs in debt. They're not going to be spending. The rate cuts are nice if you're a debtor, but we're really seeing the limits of this kind of economic control.

What Happened When the Bubble Popped In Tokyo? (Part 2)

Leading up to the Japanese property bubble popping in 1989 was this period in the media where everybody was talking about how unaffordable property had become. Young couples were deferring starting a family because of this, just at the same time Japan's working population peaked. In the aftermath, property prices plummeted back to historic norms - but on the authorised of the slide down were crippled banks who would then not issue any new loans. So the best educated generation in Japan basically got priced out of property, and then got given short shrift in the aftermath when employment prospects and wages both went down the drain.

All this mess put yet another dent in the population of Japan because that generation simply couldn't reproduce at the same rate as the historic norm, which today has translated into an even smaller pool of workers. What's weird is that wages haven't risen correspondingly because productivity increases ate up the jobs that might haven there in industrial times. Since then, Japan has had a "lost decade" followed by another one just like it, ran into the GFC and all the while had a zero interest rate policy going which sustained a lot of banks and zombie businesses.

Without population growth and with the increase productivity brought about computers, it's not surprising demand stagnated and with it the whole economy, and that's before we look at the mounting debt by both government and private sector. The decision to hold on to as much of the status quo through out this time essentially fixed the economy like a bug in amber. In all that mess, housing prices went back down to historic norms. In Australian terms, we're talking about 1990 prices.

Should the housing bubble burst here and all the debt payments start rolling in and there is massive pressure for the sleazed to sell, the RBA no longer has much of a way to go from TwIRP to ZIRP. Any attempt at quantitative easing will be an attempt to shore up asset prices, but that will inevitably lead to the slow growth future exactly because it will preserve the indebted, uncompetitive zombie firms. Whatever happens next, the property bubble bursting is going to have profound effects for decades to come.

Of course, Tony Abbott seems to think, no, the property bubble is a good thing because he's invested in it (he didn't exactly offer any other reason, and there likely isn't).
Amusingly, the idiot cheerleader-in-chief Daren Goodsir thinks the bubble is a problem and Tony Abbott's comment is part of the problem.

You Ain't Worth What You Used To Be

You know Australia's is in some kind of consumption decline when the GDP grows, company revenues grow and real wages stagnate and go backwards:

Wednesday's gross domestic product numbers revealed a growing and already significant gap between rising company profits and declining employee pay. 

Australia's GDP grew faster than expected over the first three months of the year, by 0.9 per cent on the previous quarter instead of the consensus estimate of 0.7 per cent, driven by greater mining output and increased inventories.

But nominal GDP, which is a better indicator of wages and personal income growth, expanded by only 0.4 per cent over the March quarter, and was up only 1.2 year-on-year. 

"We're working harder, producing more but we're earning less," Macquarie Group chief economist James McIntyre said. 

Mr McIntyre described the gap between company growth and employee wages as "the income challenge" and the key economic challenge of 2015.
Real gross domestic income, which adjusts for the terms of trade, rose 0.2 per cent quarter-on-quarter and was 0.2 per cent lower over the year. 

Australian workers earned an average of 0.5 per cent less over the three months.
Mr McIntyre said waning commodity prices and the dwindling mining boom were pushing incomes and employment growth down.
"It's a slow moving, continual drain," he said.

If major companies don't pass on their profits to workers presumably they are being passed on to investors as dividends. In any case they aren't investing that money as we know from the shrinking CapEx in this country. Beyond the mining sector, growth is feeble and meagre.

But what can I say, restaurants and events are growing. Bread and circuses, people, bread and circuses.

FIFA, Septic Sepp, Corruption And All That

Possibly the most welcome news this past month was that American agencies were investigating 6 top level FIFA officials for corruption, racketeering, and a host of other charges.  If there was an international sporting lobby that truly deserved this incursion, it was FIFA, followed closely by the IOC. FIFA has done more questionable things in therapist decade than the IOC has, such as awarding the World Cup to Russia, then Qatar over much better bids. With staggering amounts of money flying around chasing these bids, it's no surprise that somebody decided to give it a bit more scrutiny.

For a span of a couple of weeks Blatter insisted that he was not involved with any corruption and then promptly went on to wind his fifth term as president of FIFA. Naturally this drew a resounding negative reaction from around the globe, to the point that the Americas and Europe might secede from FIFA. Sepp Blatter is now resigning in the wake of this massive backlash. now it turns out the FBI are investigating Blatter as well.

Frankly, it couldn't have happened soon enough.