News That's Fit To Punt - 13/Mar/2017

Mining Bust Out West

Jeez, that election in Western Australia looked like a real rout. It's funny how the state votes in the conservatives during the years of the boom and somehow trusts them to do the right thing with it, and then when the boom turns into a bust they discover the conservatives have squandered it. It seems to be like a collective insanity that takes hold of the state. During the mining boom years, the rest of Australia had to listen to utter idiocy coming out of the WA Government thanks to the fact the recent mining boom turned  WA into a net contributor to the GST regime rather than a net recipient. Then they cried poor about it , and got very little sympathy - as they should - and now that the state finances are in ruin, the people finally vote in the ALP. When you consider that at one point the WA LNP were mouthing off about seceding from the rest of Australia, it's certainly laughable that they will be a net recipient to the GST regime once more.

I guess one shouldn't laugh at the misfortune of others, but this one was pretty predictable.

Mining booms often turn to busts. Most Australians know this, except it seems, the outgoing administration of the nation's resource-rich west. 

Western Australia's now former premier Colin Barnett bungled the bonanza, splurging windfall cash during the good times only to find the cupboard bare in the bad ones. The upshot is the state's budget deficit and debt have spiralled, the AAA rating is gone and people are fleeing, the latter at least has the advantage of containing an unemployment rate that's already the nation's highest. 

"There's an element of Dutch disease there, and the government certainly mismanaged the boom, but it also reflects the sheer size of the mining sector in WA so when it collapses it drags everything down," said Shane Oliver, head of investment strategy at AMP Capital Investors in Sydney. 

"WA didn't seem to learn any of the lessons from Australia's past mistakes during commodity cycles and now the state is effectively in recession." 

(edit)
Western Australia's Treasury was projecting the revenue windfall from mining would still be continuing in 2018-19, despite commodity prices peaking in the third quarter of 2011 and mining investment not too long after. 

As a result, the government has been trying to cut outlays in a weakening economy and there's even been talk of tax increases as gross debt is on course to surpass 20 per cent of gross state product in coming years.

It's pretty laughable when you have a long memory. So much for the notion that WA somehow had organised things differently to all the other mining boom and bust cycles in the past. Tire's a lesson in there for the fossil fuels industries too.
There's a lot more to be said bout all this, so I'll come back to this below.

100 Days Of Tesla

We live in times such that a tech billionaire tweets something and it turns into a head-to-head discussion with the Premier of SA and PM of Australia. It's weird but all of a sudden people want this project to happen - which would be nice of South Australia but also, - which would be the proper part of the renewables tech business getting a crack at the Australian electrical grid.

Tesla's Elon Musk may have put large scale battery storage on the national agenda with his offer last week to solve South Australia's power crisis for free if he did not deliver a large system with 100 days of signing a contract, but both the Prime Minister and South Australia's Premier are looking for more detail before taking him up on the offer. 

Mr Turnbull and Mr Musk spoke for an hour early Sunday afternoon, with the Prime Minister yet to form a view on the merits of power storage systems in solving South Australia's power supply woes. 

"They had an in-depth discussion on the value of storage and the future of the electricity system," a spokesman for the Prime Minister's Office said. 

Their discussion was not political in tone, but rather a discussion between two people "picking each other's brains" over the options for energy storage in Australia, one source familiar with the discussion said.

Elon Musk for his part has resumed campaigning for a shot on Twitter. You'd look an idiot if you turned him down now, wouldn't you? Of course these are people in government in Australia are people who don't mind looking like an idiot, so you have to subtract your optimism. Or is that curb your enthusiasm. In any case, the offer is there. Now begins the process of looking the gift horse in the mouth.

Time To Start Collecting Canned Food?

This link is from Pleiades.

While economists love trade, it has extremely political ramifications. And it is politics that in Every’s view is driving the world back to a 19th century style trade world. A world where after a period of free trade, high tariffs were set up and where trade became a conflict involving domination of one country over another.

And the problem is that economic conflict can quickly become real conflict.

It was a scary prospect – not only would raising trade barriers reduce our standard of living – but if the path of the next 10 years follows the path of the late 1800s and early 1900s then the world gets very dangerous very quickly.

The biggest difficulty for those selling the idea of free trade is that a soon as you start talking about things such as “comparative advantage” people quickly switch off. It’s much easier to understand trade in what is known as a mercantilist sense – the “domination” point of view, where the aim is to export more than you import.

That is certainly the view of Donald Trump and his trade advisor, Peter Navarro, who has recently argued that because GDP is made up of consumption, government spending, investment and net exports (exports minus imports) reducing the US trade deficit is a good way to grow the US economy.

The problem with that view is that in the US – as in Australia – the size of net exports pales in comparison to consumption, investment and government spending.

Clearly, if the benefits of trade are not doled out to the public but instead, accrues to a small percentage, as has happened in the last 30years, the public becomes less enamoured of free trade; and so we must wonder if we've hit that point where the public has decided it won't back free trade any more. It would explain the shift toward  parochial kind of anti-tradepolitics as seen in the Brexit debate/debacle as well as the rise of Trump-ism (devoid of any coherent ideological framework, it does seem to to be a cry against free trade).

A Scary Passage From Crikey

Also from Pleiades was Crikey's entry about the WA election, which I think deserves a long quote.

They have to do something. They should have done something before. When the red dust settles and the tallying’s done, the verdict on the mining boom in WA will be a harsh one. No Norwegian-style social fund was established — Norway now has a trillion dollars under management from North Sea oil and gas, and the whole country could retire — and much of the money that did come in served principally to inflate prices to, well, Norwegian levels. FIFO was imposed on people who wanted settled jobs, and no government stepped in to oblige the companies to give their workers more options. Men and women of modest skills and earning capacities were suddenly pulling in huge wages, with little advice as to how to invest it. Many bought houses in regional FIFO towns at prices approaching capital city levels — and then saw them halve in value as the boom died away. Meanwhile, the towns that became FIFO bases — from Singleton in NSW’s Hunter Valley to Kalgoorlie to Bunbury — were drained of the communal stability that makes life possible. “How can you organise a footy team? How can you even get a picnic going,” a woman had said to me in Singleton, two years ago, “when you never know who’s going to be here? The shops are empty, the town’s bled dry.” Two days ago, someone said the same thing, near word for word, in Kalgoorlie. In both towns, and many others, the miner’s mansions have “for sale” signs in front of them, directed at a market that isn’t there. 

Some didn’t even make it to the bad-investment stage. A lot of people were drawn to FIFO by the idea that it would allow them to make big bank, on the simple principle that once you’re in camp, there’s nothing to spend your money on. But that scheme misses the effect of 14-day, 21-day, 28-day stints of 12-hour shifts on the human psyche. Beyond a certain point of such punishing, inhuman labour, it is all but impossible for most people not to blow their money in the first days off, especially if they’re young. Everyone who’s done night shifts, continuous shifts, back-to-backs knows this. The money spends itself, burns its way out of your pocket. Potlatch, the old tribal custom of wanton destruction, takes over. You stride into a bar and fuck it, you’re not going to drink beer, or Red Label, you’re going to drink Chivas! A double! Chivas for everyone! For some people who just came to do a couple of years in the mines and party up, that’s probably no great tragedy. Others have worked years at grinding, dirty, dangerous work and have nothing to show, a fact that must be part-cause of the suicides, depression, domestic violence and addiction that has broken through FIFO communities like a long wave. 

Given a free kick by 4 billion years of geology, and a chance to reinvest, Western Australia appears to have created a situation in which Wake in Fright and The Unknown Industrial Prisoner serve not as dystopian warnings, but as HR manuals. Now a state that has spent a decade chipping bits of itself off and floating it northward for silly-money prices cannot pay for its most basic services, pay down its debt, and is proposing taxes that should have been being levied since the 1990s and scrambling to fill the gap with infrastructure projects it can’t afford to start. Services cut include those to Aboriginal people, which in turn has produced unwilling population movements, pressure on centralised and reduced services, and a resultant and distinct fraying of white-black community relations in a range of towns, a fall away from such detente and mutual understanding as has been achieved in recent years. What looks like a racial political issue, is, in reality, a product of the state’s fiscal crisis, and its panicked efforts to plug the gap.

That's pretty bleak reading. It turned out they needed a mining tax but realised it after they campaigned hard to get rid of it. Oops. What do you do with this kind of collective hubris and stupidity? It doesn't end well:

The gap has been plugged, instead, with meth, a drug that has boomed out of control in WA, simply because it has become so cheap, easily made from base chemicals, in suburban labs springing up in every city and town. Those looking to explain its reach in WA by its occult power to turn people into speedfreak zombies are ironbarking up the wrong tree — meth hit the big time when it became cheaper than dope. Its popularity is a product not of addled obliviousness, but of the judicious application of rational choice theory by substance abusers, looking to maximise their investment. It’d make the Institute of Public Affairs proud.

All that, in overlapping bits and pieces is the conversations you get into across the state — with everyone. Miners, ex-miners, civic boosters, NGO officers, emergency services, journos, snappers. In WA, everyone’s become an amateur political sociologist, hot on the trail of where it all went wrong, and what the solution might be.
Whatever happens on Saturday, the state’s dilemma concentrates the mind wonderfully. Kalgoorlie stands as a metonym for Western Australia; Western Australia for Australia itself. We are all aware that we have not stored away for the lean years, and the fat years come to an end. The prospect, delicious for pundits, less for the public, is that either major party will fall short of a majority, and have to cobble together government in both houses of Parliament. Looked at clear-eyed, this often delivers good government, but the public rarely thinks so, and the golden west exemplifies the decay of political legitimacy and effectiveness in Australia, and if that occurs here, it may not be too long before the state is back at the polls once more. 

What WA needs is the Unflux, the many nations in one — a party with a realistic and integrated program to deal with the reality of resources-led states, not the fantasies they offer. As goes the state, so goes the nation.

Everybody's got 20-20 hindsight it appears. Right now, it's hard not to think of all those mortgages underwater in Western Australia and what that's doing to the banks' bottom line.  It all went crazy out there with the low interest rates and the seemingly low inflation as 'measured'y the RBA. If the reality was in fact significant inflation, then clearly Western Australia was not served well at all by the RBA's policies in the last decade. You can start to see the whole thing start to unravel. You have to wonder just how long will it be before it hits the East Coast?

View From The Couch - 31/Dec/2016

Just Guessing But...

I've been pondering this problem of global warming. First of all, we've run past 400ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. We're not even counting the CH4 Methane, and Methane is of course 4 times worse than CO2 when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Our democratic processes in the first world are simply not getting anywhere near the results we need to curb the runaway emissions growth. If you look just at Australia for instance, the mining interests for fossil fuels have spent so much money to cripple the proper discussion of this threat that it has become nigh impossible to make any sensible progress on the issue. While nations around the world are moving over to renewables in a hurry, it appears that the USA and Australia are going to be the stupid holdouts sticking to fossil fuels.

The thing is, the massive problem of emissions isn't just a problem isolated to the climate, but something that will have a chain reaction in food production. Agriculture is going to take hit as a result of the effects of climate change, and the most vulnerable nations are places with big populations with very little food security - like China and India. If it ever gets to the point where not enough food can be produced to supply these countries, they are going to have riots on their streets, and in the case of China, the suppression of those riots will probably lead to a revolution - exactly the kind of outcome the current regime will want to avoid.

So if you work backwards from the pointy end of the problem, it's far more likely that an authoritarian regime will try and invest in technologies that will actively suck out carbon from the atmosphere in order to bring the problem back under control. I imagine that the Chinese government will spend whatever is necessary to create massive renewable power plants with the specific purpose of converting atmospheric carbon into liquid or solids.

Here are some examples of technologies out there already:

• Synthetic Photosynthesis.
• Nano Spike Catalyst lowers energy threshold to reverse combustion and harvest ethanol.
• Large scale carbon capture projects
• Capturing carbon and turning them into building materials

The thing is, Green groups would have you believe that this is futile and what needs to happen is zero economic growth or some such nonsense. Geo-engineering is a dirty word in the Green paradigm, but when you look at just how much runaway emissions are going on, and how capping emissions is still going to get us into a world where the sea level rises by meters and the weather patterns are going to be shot, then it's easily arguable that what needs to be done is to shove the carbon genie back into the bottle.

If you're running China - an authoritarian state that's not scared to crack a few eggs - one of the advantages is that you can send a directive out and it gets done on a massive scale. It is the most likely candidate to simply order massive solar and wind generators to power these projects en masse with the specific purpose of capturing as much carbon s possible, and lowering the parts-per-million figure back below 400ppm. And they may well do this while we in the first world are still stupid enough to be arguing whether Global warming is actually happening and whether we should do something a bit more serious than Direct Action in Australia as we keep digging up fossil fuels.

Worse still, the countries that don't move out of fossil fuel will end up paying for the fact that they keep emitting because China will send them a bill for all the carbon it is capturing, through an international emissions trading scheme.

Of course, China might not do any of this, in which case we're really going to be stuffed. But if you go through the ay in which the cards are stacked, you can see China would see the advantage in going hard in this direction. And if they do, the countries most committed to fossil fuels are going to end up paying up big time.

RIP Debbie Reynolds (1932-2016)

Away after Carrie Fisher passed away, her mother also passed away.

Starring in the legendary musical Singin' In The Rain and singing the hit song Tammy. Shining on Broadway and being nominated for an Oscar for The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Her own TV comedy show and an Emmy-nominated role in the sitcom Will & Grace. 

Debbie Reynolds' showbiz career exemplified an old-style versatility – singin', dancin' and actin' – that continued well into her veteran years. 

Her death at 84 a day after daughter Carrie Fisher added sadness to sadness. Son Todd's comments that "she's with Carrie" and that the stress of his sister's death was "too much" for his mother showed the paralysing impact of grief. 

Reynolds, who had a suspected stroke, will be best remembered as a luminous talent on stage, film and television - Hollywood royalty. Wholesome and charming in her early roles, she was later known as a brassy personality who was portrayed as an overbearing showbiz mother in Fisher's semi-autobiographical novel Postcards From The Edge.

It's just been a terrible year for celebrity deaths.

RIP Alphonse Mouzon (1948-2016)

This happened in the jam session of duelling deaths.

Alphonse Mouzon, a powerful jazz drummer who made his greatest contributions with a funk backbeat, forging a standard for 1970s fusion, died on Sunday at his home in the Granada Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 68. 

The cause was cardiac arrest, his son Jean-Pierre Mouzon said. Alphonse Mouzon learned this fall that he had neuroendocrine cancer and used a crowdfunding platform to help pay for treatment. 

Few other drummers were as integral to the development of fusion as Mr. Mouzon, who combined volcanic intensity with a brisk attunement to dynamic flow. He played in the first edition of Weather Report, and was a charter member of another defining jazz-rock band, the Eleventh House, led by the guitarist Larry Coryell. 

Mr. Mouzon had a productive association with the pianist McCoy Tyner, playing in a volatile acoustic setting on albums like “Sahara” (1972) and “Song for My Lady” (1973). He also served as the propulsive engine on notable fusion albums by the keyboardist Herbie Hancock, the flutist Bobbi Humphrey and the guitarist Al Di Meola, among others. 

Outside of jazz, Mr. Mouzon worked with major touring acts including Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder. The drummer John Bonham of Led Zeppelin acknowledged him as an influence.

I want to write more about Alphonse Mouzon, but I'm really bummed about all of these deaths.

RIP George Michael

As everybody with a heartbeat knows, this also happened on Christmas Day.

I kind of refrained from writing about George Michael because his cause wasn't exactly mine and his music never really did much for me. But seeing that all these other people are dropping like flies, I figured I may as well acknowledge it here.

Ugh, what a year

News That's Fit To Punt - 04/Aug/2015

"You've Never Had It So Good" Revisited

There are a lot of these old paedophiles getting their names dragged through the press these days. Whether it be Jimmy Saville or Rolf Harris, there seems to have been a regular trope of dirty old old men abusing children in their care and then having it covered up. Maybe once upon a time those cover ups were good enough to protect the names of the guilty, but times have changed. The abusers of old are being brought out into the daylight.

And so this bring sis to a former prime Minister of the UK no less, the late Edward Heath is now being investigated for paedophilia allegations that were covered up.

The British police watchdog is investigating claims of an old cover-up over allegations that former prime minister Edward Heath abused children.
Police on Monday called for any victims of abuse by Sir Ted Heath, or witnesses to any abuse, to come forward. 

London's Mirror newspaper spoke to one alleged victim, now 64, who said he was assaulted at age 12 in an exclusive Mayfair flat in 1961 when Sir Edward was an MP. And the Guardian reported that detectives have spoken to a middle-aged man who says he was abused as a child by Heath several times.

Sir Edward died in 2005, aged 89. He was prime minister in the early 1970s and lost the leadership of the Conservative party to Margaret Thatcher in 1975.
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Wiltshire Police were said to have heard allegations about Sir Ted Heath in the 1990s, but they were not followed up. 

Superintendent Sean Memory told the BBC: "We had a senior retired police officer come forward (in late 2014) to inform us that they believed a trial may have been vacated [abandoned] as a result of information received in relation to Sir Ted Heath. We've looked extensively at that and we've decided to make a referral to the IPCC [Independent Police Complaints Commission]." 

The IPCC inquiry will look at how the case was handled by Wiltshire Police and if the trial was stopped, why it was stopped, Superintendent Memory said. "More important for me today is, are there victims of sexual abuse from Sir Ted Heath or witnesses, and if so I would ask them to come forward today."

When you think about the Lord John Sewell who was in the papers the other day, who was snorting drugs and cavorting with prostitutes, you get the feeling that these revelations coming in a cluster aren't for nothing; that perhaps somebody somewhere is trying to set right the wrongs that got buried along the way. It really is interesting how these things are coming to light, one after the other lately.

The "It's What You Wanted Isn't It?" Moment

Turns out the Coalition's choice of tackling climate change known as Direct Action does sweet fuck all. That is to say, under this Coalition government, carbon emissions have increased, thanks to burning more black coal. Like, who would've guessed that would happen, right? Who could have guessed it? Repeal the Carbon pricing mechanism and just let these old school carbon-pollutin' Low-Falutin' (if such term could be coined)  energy companies on the loose with their antiquated, filthy, low-efficiency power fossil fuel power generators. The mind boggles. But of course this is exactly what Tony Abbott promised to deliver, and so I guess we should chalk up this mess to him.

Pressure for Australia to set an ambitious goal ahead of the Paris climate summit at the end of the year has also increased with the release overnight of Mr Obama's Clean Power Plan aimed at cutting carbon emissions by 32 per cent on 2005 levels.  

"It's obvious we're going in the other direction," Dr Saddler said. 

Environment Minister Greg Hunt said the post-2020 targets will be released soon.
"We welcome the action by the United States – and note that they are tackling climate change without a painful carbon tax," Mr Hunt said. 

However Mark Butler, the opposition spokesman on climate change, said the Abbott government's policies were to blame for the jump in power-sector emissions, particularly "stalled investment in renewable energy, the removal of the carbon price – and the perpetrator of all this is because of [Prime Minister] Tony Abbott". 

"For as long as Tony Abbott is Prime Minister, carbon pollution will rise," he said.
Greens deputy leader Larissa Waters linked the emissions jump to party donations: "Coal companies' donations to the government are now paying off in a big way with the biggest surge of pollution in living memory. 

"This surge in pollution can be added to the mountain of evidence that the carbon price worked beautifully," Senator Waters said. "Pollution dropped as the economy expanded and unemployment was smaller then than it is now."

Which I guess comes back to the abject lack of leadership in tackling one of the greatest challenges of our times; a challenge that this Federal Government is totally incapable of addressing with any credibility, authority or intellectual honesty. 

Which brings me to the next bit...

The Business Leaders Disagree With Tony Abbott

Just because Tony Abbott installs Maurice Newman to oversea a review of climate policy - a bit like putting an ostrich in charge of airport policy - doesn't mean the business sector as a whole does not believe in climate change and global warming. If anything Maurice Newman appears to be out on his own, out on a limb and mostly out to lunch with his denialist position.

In that light it's probably worth noting this opinion piece by Cameron Clyne, former head of the NAB:

These risks are what the economists call "stranded asset" risks. It's an evocative term for when an asset – a coal mine, a power station, a smelter – still has years of life in it, but just can't compete because the economic or regulatory tide has turned. 

We know from history what happens when a business or a government sets its face against a change that is coming anyway. It's usually not the politicians or the chief executives who end up at the unemployment office. Leadership mistakes are worn by people who are least at fault for the bad decisions: the workers, their families and the communities that depend on them. 

It's everyday Australians who bear the brunt, cop the hit and pay for the wilful ignorance and blindness of political leaders – and some in the business community – to the very real and very rapid changes that are all around us. 

Turning away from the problem will not make the problem go away. It seems some in Australia are willfully blind to these problems and the problems this poses for our nation and its economic and social fabric. 

The Abbott government is not leading Australia in the direction that's needed, but the forthcoming meetings in Paris to set new carbon reduction targets is a chance for them to do so. It will be a critical moment for our national economy and our people.

That's about as clearly put as you can have it.

News That's Fit To Punt - 12/Jul/2015

Are They Petty? Or Are They Just Bog Stupid?
It turns out all that weird attacking of wind farms calling them ugly, was covering fire to cut investment into wind power in this country.

Treasurer Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann​ have issued the so-called green bank with a directive to change its investment mandate, prohibiting new wind funding. It's understood the directive was issued without the approval or knowledge of Environment Minister Greg Hunt, angering the minister.  

The decision is another blow for the multibillion-dollar wind industry, which has just started to recover from the uncertainty created by the government's Renewable Energy Target review. Analysts say $8.7 billion is expected to be invested in wind power in the next five years, while the corporation has invested about $300 million in wind projects to date.

And international investors are warning the government's move sends a bad message about how safe it is to do business in Australia.
The directive is just the latest salvo in the government's attacks on the wind industry.

Good grief. So much for "Open for Business". We know they're fighting a rearguard action against the eventual move from fossil fuel to renewables that must inevitably take place so it's not that difficult to see that the top level of this government is deliberately mismanaging an issue to suit their crony-capitalist friends. But then there seems to be a belief in this government that Tony Abbott's own unpopularity gives him carte-blanche to just do what his cronies want because he's never going to be popular for ever doing the right things. If the electorate is not going to reward you for doing the right things, then it seems they're willing to damn the electorate and do their corporate masters' bidding and secure themselves a lucrative after-political-life. 

Which is to say, under Tony Abbott, Australia's polity has become no better than Indonesia. At this point in time, we're Indonesia-without-the executions. This place only looks respectable to people because it's white middle-aged men in suits running these crappy policies up the flagpole. You'd think this was the 1950s - which is exactly what Tony Abbott wants. Tony Abbott only needs look to his own faith to see how far off base he is on the issue, in this day and age when the Pope issues encyclicals about protecting the environment and curbing carbon emissions, slamming corporate greed as the Devil's own Droppings. You sort of wonder how he can sustain his opposition to things like Renewable Energy and kinder treatment of asylum seekers on the basis of his religion and not listen to his Pope. Evidently, it has nothing to do with his faith, it's all to to do with uncompromising cultural prejudices.

Using Federal Money To Tar The Opposition

This lousy circus that is the Royal Commission into union corruption keeps rolling like an unwanted circus caravan, waiting to find its miserable end. Earlier in the piece it was Julia Gillard who fronted the commission to explain her time at Slater and Gordon working as an IR lawyer, wherein she might have been a little irregular with some paperwork. Now it is Bill Shorten in the dock, being asked whether he short-changed his union members to cut a deal with the business sector. It's kind of weird that the Abbott government is asking these questions, seemingly-suddenly-amazingly interested in the welfare of the rank and file union members. We'll put that bizarre irony aside for a moment and ask the simple rhetorical question, what does this look like?

It looks like one of those show trials seen in military juntas and theocratic councils when they put the opposition on trial for being the Opposition. The Kim Dynasty did this a lot (now they just shoot them). Malaysia keeps doing it to Anwar. The Gang of Four in Communist China did this sort of thing to purge the enemies of Maoism and ended up in their own show trial. It goes on in Iran to this day and heck, even South Korea does this to presidents who leave office at the end of term. What all those countries have in common is that they don't have democratically functioning states. Even the ones that purport to be democratic and have elections can't be said to be functioning properly if they're doing show trials of the opposition. 

However, "a loyal opposition" is a difficult concept for a lot of countries that simply don't understand the adversarial system of law that developed in the English speaking world. Its underpinnings are culturally alien to them and so they concoct these kinds of show trials. It's a dead giveaway that they don't get democracy. 

Imagine my grievance and dismay then to see the Opposition Leader of this land, sitting in the dock over this stupid political show trial in Australia; Australia, the once most progressive nation in the English speaking world, reduced to the spectacle of a political show trial. You'd think we were Indonesia-without-the-executions; but no, we're even worse than that because they've stopped doing these for now in a sign that they've begun to get democracy. Clearly, our own political leadership has lost the plot. The exasperation in that photo says it all. 

What Yanis Varoufakis Has To Say About The Debt Deal For Greece

Pleiades sent in this nugget. Yanis Varoufakis has a piece in the Guardian. 

In 2010, the Greek state became insolvent. Two options consistent with continuing membership of the eurozone presented themselves: the sensible one, that any decent banker would recommend – restructuring the debt and reforming the economy; and the toxic option – extending new loans to a bankrupt entity while pretending that it remains solvent. 

Official Europe chose the second option, putting the bailing out of French and German banks exposed to Greek public debt above Greece’s socioeconomic viability. A debt restructure would have implied losses for the bankers on their Greek debt holdings.Keen to avoid confessing to parliaments that taxpayers would have to pay again for the banks by means of unsustainable new loans, EU officials presented the Greek state’s insolvency as a problem of illiquidity, and justified the “bailout” as a case of “solidarity” with the Greeks. 

To frame the cynical transfer of irretrievable private losses on to the shoulders of taxpayers as an exercise in “tough love”, record austerity was imposed on Greece, whose national income, in turn – from which new and old debts had to be repaid – diminished by more than a quarter. It takes the mathematical expertise of a smart eight-year-old to know that this process could not end well. 

Once the sordid operation was complete, Europe had automatically acquired another reason for refusing to discuss debt restructuring: it would now hit the pockets of European citizens! And so increasing doses of austerity were administered while the debt grew larger, forcing creditors to extend more loans in exchange for even more austerity.

And that's about as succinct as it can be put. In the 9 years since the GFC broke, I've had to think a fair bit about what the bail outs and Quantitative Easing meant. The best explanationI can give you is that it is an attempt to freeze the clock so that the participants in the world's greatest casinos have time to take their chips of the table and walk away without cashing in the losses, while the bill is sent to Joe Q Public. In the aftermath governments ran out of money do their normal government-y things, and so they committed to 'austerity' which further shrunk the economy and made things worse. Iceland, which refused to give the bankers a pass, has recovered nicely, which tells you something about all this glorious QE I II and 4Eva we've seen. 

David Cameron of course did have one standup moment where he declared he would not balance the books of the United Kingdom on the backs of the poor and needy. It's a great line, whether he actually followed through on it or not. It perfectly describes what Germany is doing- balancing its own books on the backs of the poor and needy in Greece. Whether 'Grexit' happens or not, the world's sympathies are with the Greeks on this fact alone. If Grexit should happen, the Greeks at least would have a fighting chance. As for Deutsche Bank that has trillions in derivatives tied to Greek bonds, I don't think we'll give them much sympathy when it all blows up, and Angela Merkel has to clean up that mess. 

Bio-Crude

CSIRO - Our Tax Payer's Money At Work!

Here's something interesting.

AUSTRALIAN scientists have made a biofuels breakthrough, turning waste products like paper and wood trimmings, crop residue and garden clippings into a stable "bio-crude".

If successfully commercialised, the process could massively reduce the amount of waste going into landfills and help the biofuels industry steer clear of the controversial food versus fuel debate. Most of the world's biofuel is made from food crops such as corn and sugar. Many oppose biofuels because they believe they will lead to higher food prices and hunger among the poor.

The great hope is second-generation technology that enables fuel to be made from waste material like the stalks and leaves of food crops.

Using the process developed by the CSIRO and Monash University, bio-crude could be made on-site at the likes of timber mills then trucked or piped to a refinery to be turned into a petrol substitute.

Steven Loffler from CSIRO Forest Biosciences said the new process had taken 18 months to develop and the key breakthrough was producing a bio-crude that was stable enough to be stored and transported.

Until now, bio-crude made from waste quickly broke down and became useless.

"By making changes to the chemical process, we've been able to create a concentrated bio-crude which is much more stable than that achieved elsewhere in the world," Dr Loffler said.

"This makes it practical and economical to produce bio-crude in local areas for transport to a central refinery, overcoming the high costs and greenhouse gas emissions otherwise involved in transporting bulky green wastes over long distances."

Biofuel production in Australia is still in its infancy. This might provide the impetus for volume production. The downside of all this is that it helps the continuation of the petrol-motor car regime.