Quick Shots - 07/Feb/2017

More On the Liberal Party Split Thing

As it turns out, there's more about Cory Bernardi that's worth knowing. We could have guessed it, but it bears pointing out:

Bernardi first sensed a problem in 2009, when during a heated and divisive partyroom debate on whether the Coalition should support Kevin Rudd's emissions trading scheme, one of his colleagues, the now deceased West Australian MP Don Randall, rose to his feet and said: "I don't give a stuff about the national interest, I want to get re-elected and this needs to go away." 

Bernardi went back to his Senate office and wrote down the quote. He never forgot it. It was the beginning of the end.

I don't know how else to put it but that right there is the mocking gun that these Liberal Party politicians are nothing but hacks sucking on the pubic teat. As if Bronwyn Bishop and Sussan Ley weren't enough proof, here in the segment above is the distilled essence of how these bastards think. 

The late WA MP Don Randall said he doesn't give a stuff about the national interest, he just wants to get re-elected. It begs the question why the hell we need to re-elect such a person; as it turned out, he died shortly before the recent election and truth be told, judging from the quote, it was probably a good thing too, because he certainly had no intention of serving the national interest. It's easily arguable that the most he served the national interest was when he died, thus depriving himself of more opportunities to suck at the public teat. 

That Cory Bernardi thought the quip was worth writing down as quote to which he is going to make his political credo, tells us well enough that he too doesn't think much about the national interest - he too is all about getting re-elected. It's strange that he thinks he has a better chance not as the Liberal Party's No. 2 on the SouthAustralian Senate ticket but as an independent. Maybe there's more money in being a leader of a party of one. It's hard to figure how the dollars an cents work out, but it would be remiss of the media if it didn't investigate this strictly pecuniary angle. After all, the man's motto amounts to, stuff the national interest, he's only in it for himself.

If I may offer a bit of gratuitous advice to Corgi BurntNazi, it is that the ALP have found "Disunity Is Death". Leaving a major party that would put you in as a senator is likely the dumbest move he's made in politics. 

Grexit Again?

If there's one thing that really puts the fear in the markets the world all over, it's the notion that Greece will default on its debts. That being said, the narrative to date has been, the Euro Zone won't let that happen, and the Greeks have to eat a lot of humiliation not to be allowed to default or leave the Euro. This has resulted in the ECB cycling through a lot of money that pays off the debt for Greece in exchange for Greece making immense cuts to its expenditure - some of which might have been reasonable but others that have resulted in terrible cuts to services. There doesn't even seem to be any coherent link between the cuts demanded by the Euro Troika and how the money is spent seeing that most of the money goes to paying off the bonds. And as the Greek economy shrinks and shrivels, it loses any chance paying off the debt.

With that in mind, here's something from Yanis Varoufakis, the ex-finance minister of Greece.

“This two-pronged preparation is the only way to prevent another excruciating retreat by the prime minister in the short term and [German Finance Minister Wolfgang] Schaeuble’s plan in the long term,” Varoufakis wrote. 

In his article, Varoufakis suggested that Schaeuble’s strategy is to lead Greeks to the point of exhaustion so they ask to leave the euro themselves. 

Noting that the “parallel payment system was already designed in 2014”, Varoufakis stresses that Tsipras had “two delusions” that led the government to the current impasse:

• a. that on the night of the referendum, the dilemma was between Schaeuble’s Grexit Plan and the 3. bailout
• b. that the obedience to the 3.bailout could be political manageable through a parallel, society-friendly program.

Both of these “working assumptions” were based only on autosuggestion, the ex finance minister stresses adding that he tried to explained this to the Prime Minister on the night of the referendum 

“In reality there was never a basis for hope that the toxic 3 bailout would be gradually rationalized, in terms that the European Commission would support Athens so that the austerity and anti-social IMF measures would relax, the IMF would force Berlin to accept debt restructuring and lower primary surpluses, the ECB would include Greece in the bond purchase program (QE),” Varoufakis wrote 

He accused leading European negotiators of lying. 

“That Moscovici [EU Monetary Affairs Commissioner], Coerer [ECB] and Sapen [French finance minister] might have given such promises was not an excuse.
Since May 2015 we were fully aware that these gentlemen know how to lie and fail to deliver on their promises when they do not lie.”

Greece remains the thin end of the wedge. If Greece goes, then, the dominoes are in play for the rest of the PIIGS, and will lead to the destruction of the Euro. While it stays in the Euro Zone, the world can live with the fiction that everything is okay, except there is the glaring issue of Brexit, whereby cozy assumptions about the health of the Euro Zone can't be ignored. If the UK can leave, then it offers a practical blueprint for Greece to leave.

The weird thing is that the UK need not ought to have voted to leave, while Greece needs to leave if it wants any semblance of control over its finances. The horror show of bluff and intimidation made by the Troika to keep Greece in the fold and to keep taking the austerity medicine in a sense informed the UK public as to the failings of not having control. Even more ironic may be the case that the UK already had kept its pound sterling as opposed to adopting the Euro, so in a sense it was the state with the least problems of losing control to the Euro Zone. thus if the UK still seems it fit to leave the Euro Zone, then it follows that perhaps Greece needs to reconsider its desire to stay.

If all things are equal, the next time the Grexit show hits the road and world markets panic over the possibility of Greece leaving the Euro Zone, it might be better to put your money on the likelihood that it does leave, and that it's a good thing.

News That's Fit To Punt - 06/feb/2017

Australian Kakistocrats

A long time ago, Don Chipp defected from the Liberals to form the Australian Democrats, a party that was eventually brought to ruin by its own careerist apparatchik Natasha Stott-Despoja. Anyway, we are finding out today that careerist, right-wing-nutter, Senator Cory Bernardi is splitting from the Liberal Party to form his own right wing party.

Cory Bernardi is set to upend centre-right politics in Australia and announce on Tuesday that he is resigning from the Liberal Party to head his own conservative movement in a stunning move that will rock the Turnbull government as Parliament returns for the new political year. 

Fairfax Media has learnt that in recent days Senator Bernardi informed his staff of his decision to defect from the party he has represented in the Senate for a decade. He will join the crossbench as an independent conservative senator for South Australia, fearing that populist parties will continue to rise if right-wing voters aren't given a viable alternative.

That's all very interesting as a rationale. He's indicating that there is a crowd of deplorable people out there that need a Fuhrer, so to speak, and he's nominating himself. Its interesting how fascists always think alike that way.

It would be interesting to see if Fatuous George goes with him from the Queensland LNP. It would be a party of pretty awful kinds of reactionary fascists wanting to attract the worst elements of society. I think the term to describe that is 'Kakistocracy'. So it would be appropriate to call themselves the Australian Kakistocrats.

What Aussies Want (But Won't Get)

Pleiades alerted me to this one today. This one is an interesting bit of polling.

In a survey covering dozens of hot-button issues put to a representative sample of Australian voters, a desire to rely less on imports and to manufacture more at home stood out as the number one thing most people agreed on.

In the aftermath of Mr Trump's US election victory, where he strongly advocated reviving that nation's manufacturing industry, nearly 83 per cent of surveyed Australian said they strongly agreed (42 per cent) or agreed (40.5 per cent) with the notion we are too reliant on foreign imports. Only 6 per cent disagreed.

Support for an expansion of Australia's manufacturing sector was robust regardless of age, gender, income or locality.

This striking finding comes from the Political Persona Project, one of the most comprehensive attempts ever made to profile different types of Australians based on their lifestyles, social values and politics. Conducted by Fairfax Media in collaboration with the Australian National University and Netherlands-based political research enterprise Kieskompas, the project revealed seven types of Australians, representative of the seven most dominant patterns of thinking in Australian society.

I hate to break it to people, but this is not what the future holds. Manufacturing jobs are disappearing, even in China. Even Foxconn, the famed manufacturer that produces stuff for Apple sacked their workers and replaced them with robots. Even over in America, Elon Musk's Gigafactory opened and it is entirely 'staffed' by robots. The assembly line jobs are not coming back to Australia or America if they're being lost even in China. In fact the trend has prompted Elon Musk to declare that Universal Basic Income will become the future because he sees no other way giving enough people, enough jobs.

Thus our politicians can posture all they like, but those manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. In fact, even the service sector jobs will also be under threat, and basically humans are going to be superfluous to the economy with the vast majority not being beneficiaries of the said economy.  In the past, the work ethic was used to compel people to work the boring jobs, but if those jobs won't exist, it's going to be harder to sustain a culture on work and valued labour. The near future will be the government flogging people for not getting work that doesn't exist... which of course is what Centrelink is doing already.

More importantly, China is trying to re-gear its economy so that domestic consumption can sustain its own manufacturing behemoth as the combination of automation and rising wages eats into the long standing competitiveness of the Chinese exports. China is going to be hard pressed to keep its manufacturing as time goes on, and then they will have the same question of just what kind of industries are meant to emerge to keep people employed. Against that context, it's hard to imagine manufacturing making a big come back in Australia. If it ever comes back, it will come back as robots.

It's amazing that neither political party is spelling it out, because not being honest with the public is what is going to give rise to the Deplorables who vote for Brexit, Trump and ... well, Abbott.

The Crazy Is Everywhere (Please Don't Go Encouraging It)

I have to say, Paulin Hanson is the herpes infection of Australian politics, a despised, socially embarrassing irritation that keeps coming back.

Senator Hanson told Sunrise on Channel 7 on Monday she was thrilled with the strong performance of One Nation and even speculated that one day she could be Prime Minister.

"To be PM, what an honour that would be. It is a privilege to be the leader of the nation. But it is a tough position and I can understand that you can't please everyone all the time," she said. 

"My job now is to represent the people of Queensland and to build the party. Maybe one day, let down the track, in 15 or 20 years time, who knows what will happen."

It's cloud-cuckoo-land, that conversation where Pauline Hanson is casting herself as a Prime Minister. I guess our society is dumbing down and the more and more of the worst elements are getting their way, but if it ever turns out that One Nation is producing a Prime Minister for this country, it is the end.

View From The Couch - 01/Oct/2016

A Nation Of Cranks

I recently got back my copy of John Gardner's 'The Art of Fiction', and not having looked at it in a number of years I decided reread from the front. Interestingly enough the first big section covers why one must have a literary education in order to tackle being a writer and heroes through all the arguments in favour of having an education. If one had to distill it into a two sentence pitch, it boils down to this:

1. You need to have some kind of intellectual context and framework for doing your writing.
2. If you don't have any context you're very susceptible to being a crank. 

It's a little bit like how John Goodman's Walter thunders at Steve Buscemi's Donnie in 'The Big Lebowski', "you don't have the context Donnie!" The above two points would be John Gardner thundering at any novice writer attempting to write without a literary education of some description.

Which led me to ponder about pedagogy and why we insist - in general - on people getting any kind of education in anything, and it comes down to the fact that without it, your thinking could be that of a crank. When you look at the One Nation senators Hanson and Roberts, you take Gardner's point. If those people had an education worth spit, they wouldn't be saying the things they say. The fact that they don't possess the education to be Senators of this land, is betrayed by the very crank opinions they cast about.

That might sound like snobbery towards a woman whose main careers running a fish-and-chip shop and found her calling in politics relatively late. Back in 1996, she was the sort of talent the Queensland Liberal Party could find to run for them, and illustrates the low level education of that state. And while not everybody needs an education in order not to be a crank - as was the case with Paul Keating - most mortal minds cannot negotiate the path away from crank-dom without an education.

In fact, the path around crank-dom is so fraught, one can be susceptible to its gravitational pull, even with an education - as is the case with Malcolm Roberts. Roberts' case is more egregious because he had the opportunity of being educated as an engineer, which means he would have spent a minimum four years at a university, and for him to have formed the idiotic opinions he has formed and is trying to foist upon this very land, is nothing short of a tragedy; The 'reverse-miracle' whereby it is both unexpected, irrational, inexplicable, yet totally undesirable. The institution who conferred a degree upon Malcolm Roberts should be ashamed of itself for sending out into the world a mind so barren and misshapen.

As to the portion of the population to whom we apportion the blame of voting in this bunch, the same can be said. Back in the first incarnation of One Nation,the demographic support for the said party was always heavily distributed towards those with less or completely without an education, and least amongst those who could boast of an education. The fact that the nation could produce so many people who could be persuaded by such cranks, leads one to conclude that our education system has been subpar for quite a number of years. Funding Gonski isn't exactly going to fix this problem in a hurry. Worse still, if the conservatives of this land are a little taken aback by their brethren in rightwing politics, they only have themselves to blame for perpetuating the kind of class society that breeds such ignorance and cranks.

Cranks And Conservatism

On the Left, you used to have hard core Marxists. I don't know if they're still around rabbiting on about the eventual and imminent collapse of capitalism and citing page from 'Das Kapital'. They were cranks. Notably they went into hiding after the collapse the USSR. They're not coming back anytime soon, which is a kind of blessing. Of course, they've been replaced by the sort of Regressive Left social justice warrior types that make you cringe so maybe the Left is not freed from crank-dom either

Be that as it may, the Right had fewer cranks until relatively recent times. This was because they were cowed into hiding by the utter historic failure of Adolf Hitler who was chief amongst cranks to represent the right; it was Hitler who amassed a compendium of crank opinions and turned them into apolitical manifesto which resulted in catastrophic consequences. Citing right wing crank notions easily bought them comparisons to Hitler, which is about as favourable as being likened to shit on a stick.

The problem lately has been that the memory of Hitler is too far away and there are people with not-enough-education willing to try out some of these right-wing-crank opinions. Worse still, there are enough voters with not-enough-education to think these are somehow novel solutions to complicated problems with which they do not wish to entangle themselves, and this breeds the kind of crankiness we see in politics today. Any (pardon the pun) right thinking person would recoil at being compared to Hitler. Some of these people don't think it's such a bad thing.

Anyway. The point I want to make is that the Corgi Bernardis of this world might have an education, but are choosing to be wilfully ignorant when it comes to crucial issues such as climate change. it is then utterly unsurprising that he would like the Liberal Party to adopt some of One Nation's policies. He seems to have no idea how that reads on the headlines. The fact that he is oblivious to its impact tells you that his education, much like Malcolm Roberts' education was entirely faulty.

Similarly, the Prime Minister's desire to pin the event of the power outage in South Australia upon renewable energy illustrates the kind of wilful stupidity bolstered by crank opinions, shows just how far our nation has fallen in the intellectual stakes. It is hard to believe that at some point only half a decade ago, we viewed Malcolm Turnbull as a man of good sense and genuine advocate for having sensible climate policies. Now we can understand him as being no less a crank than Barnaby Joyce or Tony Abbott or worse still, Malcolm Roberts.

The take home message is this: a democracy is only as good as the education of its citizens, and judging from our politicians, we can see our education sector has failed us utterly.

On The Name Malcolm In Australian Politics

Just as an aside...
They say history repeats first as tragedy, then as comedy; thus, if Malcolm Fraser was the tragedy and Malcolm Turnbull the comedy, Malcolm Roberts must be the unwanted Hollywood sequel no one wants to see.