This song is political...

The Failed Doctrine

It is customary for leftist solutions to concrete problems to be dismissed as little more than the dew-eyed ramblings of cloistered academics. In particular, unions are dismissed as 'irrelevant', the by-product of a long-dead industrial reality, and socialism is dismissed as self-evidently absurd. Faith in the 'market' as an all-purpose 'solution' is one of the few dogmas that brings a whole range of anti-leftists together.



With this in mind, I was struck by two recent articles illustrating the costs of the supposedly 'free' market.



China is in the process of 'freeing' up its markets for the exploitative labour of migrant workers. We have seen recent reports of slave labour literally occurring at the hands of indifferent, budding capitalists. In addition, last week a strike-busting squad, armed with shovels and other weapons, lead a vicious attack on workers. The workers were protesting the fact that they had not been paid in four months.



One of the victims of the assault is currently brain-dead, but is being kept artificially alive, lest his assailants face murder charges:




Of course, the employers had their reasons for withholding workers' wages:

Mr Xiang says most of the six seriously injured were, like him, singled out
by the Fuyuan thugs because they were team leaders. His dead colleague, Mr Lei,
was a safety monitor for Qiutian Construction, the subcontractor that brought in
the workers.
Qiutian says it has been unable to pay workers because Fuyuan
has refused to compensate it for losses suffered last summer when the site
flooded. Qiutian says that legally the developer is responsible for losses
caused by acts of nature.

This is, apparently, 'capitalism with Chinese characteristics'. Such things were not uncommon in Western capitalist countries not so long ago. Today, union-busting in Australia takes place via legislation, and is held by the Government to be in everybody's best interests, other than self-serving 'union bosses'.

Courtesy of our American friends at Crooks and Liars, I noticed this article (also being featured at Larvatus Prodeo). In contrast to the allegedly destructive Bolivarian socialism of Venezuela, free-market utopia Colombia has made the news once again for its treatment of union members:

The bus had just left Drummond Co. Inc.'s coal mine carrying about 50
workers when gunmen halted it and forced two union leaders off. They shot one on
the spot, pumping four bullets into his head, and dragged the other one off to
be tortured and killed.
In a civil trial set to begin Monday before a
federal jury in Birmingham, Ala., union lawyers have presented affidavits from
two people who allege that Drummond ordered those killings, a charge the company
denies.
Multinationals operating in Colombia have admitted paying right-wing
militias known as paramilitaries to protect their operations. But human rights
activists claim the companies went further, using the fighters to violently keep
their labor costs down.

Colombia is being treated as a mere colony for US Corporations, as are some of its northern neighbours. Yet pointing out the fact that corporations do not always act in humanity's best interests is virtually anathema in the mainstream press, and likely to result in accusations of 'anti-Americanism', or, still better, 'socialism'.

The existence of Stalin and Mao appears to be enough for some to dismiss any leftist doctrine - critics simply cite a figure of those killed under the relevant dictators, and consider the matter finished. When will the same critics turn their attention to the failed doctrine of capitalism, starving millions for the profits of a few, and crushing the resistance of those who stand in the way?

It is not that capitalism is inherently 'evil', (even if moralising had anything to do with it). The raison d'etre of capitalism is simply to generate capital. The inevitable by-product of this generation is that more or less people will be exploited, starved, and, in the cases we see above, killed.

But at least our plasma screens are relatively cheap.

Nausea, ad nauseum

I probably shouldn't bother with digging up NewsCorpse material: there are a number of blogs in my sidebar who do quite a good job of debunking the latest nonsense emanating from Murdoch's stable.

But who could resist today's offerings, where pro-Howard leftist bashing is in full swing:

Thinking man's chickenhawk, Greg Sheridan, opines about the 'defence of our realm', and takes a swipe at Rudd's plan for staged withdrawal of troops in Iraq, should Labor win Government at the election:

This all speaks well of Rudd's essential centrism and conservatism in
security policy, but it demolishes his argument about the increased terrorist
threat to Australia. Can you just imagine Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri
in their cave at al-Qa'ida central, just inside or just outside Afghanistan,
saying to each other: well, we did have those infidel kangaroos high on our
terror target list when they were in Iraq but now that they're only fighting us
in Afghanistan, where we are, and supporting our enemies throughout the Persian
Gulf, we'll give them a free pass and not send any more terrorists after them.

Sheridan doesn't really address the question of what the hell Australian troops are doing in the Middle East in the first place, fighting dubious (I'm being extremely charitable) wars on behalf of the US and Britain.

Next, we have Noel Pearson, about whom I had occasion to touch on recently. Pearson still wants bipartisan support for Howard's unilateral intervention into Central Australian communities. He concludes:

The principal psychological problem of indigenous leaders is they are
bitter about the Howard Government and its history over the past decade. Our
progressive non-indigenous supporters can afford to devote all of their energies
to willing the New Jerusalem - after all, even a conservative government looks
after them, notwithstanding their contempt - but our people cannot afford this
indulgence.

For a bipartisan guy, he seems to spend a lot of time kicking one side of politics, whilst issuing apologias for the other. I guess that, by now, the 'progressive non-indigenous supporters', and, basically, all Aboriginals who disagree with the Pearson-Howard authoritarian approach should have realised that their reasoned critiques and alternative proposals are tantamount to a mystical enterprise - 'willing the New Jerusalem'. And after all, who can seriously question Howard's exemplary tack record on helping Aboriginals, notwithstanding his contempt.

After Noel, we get Christopher, the more repulsive of the Pearsons, pontificating about how wonderfully the Church has dealt with modernity, 'unlike fundamentalist Islam'. It's possibly easier to deal with post-modernity when Western powers aren't bombing the shit out of you, but Pearson does not include this in his theological musings. One paragraph in particular caught my eye:

Both Benedict and his predecessor, John Paul II, have been formidable
philosophers. They shared the view that the trajectory of modernity, considered
as a project, was along the nihilist lines laid out by Nietzsche in Beyond Good
and Evil. In the communist bloc it culminated in the gulag. In the capitalist
world they see people commodified as units of production and consumers in a
largely amoral, global marketplace.

I don't care to speculate on the philosophical abilities of Popes past and present. Nonetheless, Pearson obviously hasn't actually read the Nietzsche book he cites, or he might have noted that Nietzsche explicitly rails against 'nihilism' (or at least, a particular version of it), and could be expected to have virulently opposed both communism and consumerism. The irony of the likes of Pearson eulogising the world, whose innocence has been lost at the market-place should not be lost on anyone, excluding loyal readers of The Australian. It is appropriate that he concludes his jeremiad with a parting shot at the 'moralising' of Robert Manne, again caught out suggesting that Aboriginals might have suffered injustice in Australia's past.

Economics editor, Alan Wood, kindly assures us that, contrary to all of the evidence that adult Australians would encounter on a daily basis, there actually isn't a housing crisis. Sure, housing is frightfully expensive, but, Wood tells us, that's why the Howard Government has cut back on income tax. Moreover, he avers, the real 'wealth distribution' answer to any housing 'crisis' that may exist is to get grandparents and parents to fund homes for their less wealthy offspring. A perfect solution, one feels, as long as one has wealthy parents.

Not content to leave it there, today's Pravda also features a column by ABC board member, and the Hungarian answer to Piers Akerman, Imre Salusinszky. But, small mercies, he is merely extolling the virtues of Dickens, rather than righteously crusading against the madness of the left.

It is ironic that possibly the most intelligent article among this gaggle comes from Melbourne's tabloid, the Herald Sun. It's more propaganda from Hitchens, of course, but he at least is one member of the Politburo who appears to be trying.

No wonder 'the West' is losing every struggle, what with that 'liberal' (or Liberal) media.

The Other Side of Economics...

We hear a lot about the Liberal Party's economic credentials - arguably, it is these, in addition to a perceived superiority in matters of 'national security' and the all-important (for the blue-rinse set) 'border protection' that constitute the Party's strengths. Matters such as IR, health, education, and the environment tend to be seen as the Labor Party's traditional strengths, relatively speaking.

News Ltd economics hack Terry McCrann was busy extolling the virtues of the Australian economy the other day, in spite of a slump:

The economic numbers looked fantastic. The overall economy was zipping
along and the jobless rate was heading towards and potentially below 4 per
cent.
Yet the sharemarket trembled and then plunged $20 billion on Friday.
Does it makes sense? Short answer: Yes. Is the market telling us something -
challenging, if not unpleasant - about the future? Short answer: No.

McCrann explains that the economy is being kept in check by the fact of workers' wages generally not increasing. Why is this a problem?

The strong economy and especially the big jump in jobs raised fears of
further interest rate rises, something that is generally not a positive for
share prices. If there is one thing that is going to cause the Reserve Bank to
sit up and take notice, to move from being alert to alarmed, is if it sees any
sign of a worker-shortage starting to push up wages generally.

In short, interest rates will rise if working Australia, supposedly in conditions of nearly full employment, receives a pay rise. Ignoring the colossal piece of ideology that this implies, when we can reasonably expect that working Australia couldn't give a flying about the Dow Jones, I was struck by yesterday's article in the SMH, portraying the flipside of the 'economic boom':

Hundreds of families have been forced to sell their homes, or lenders have repossessed and auctioned them, in Sydney's west and south-west in the past year, property experts say.

Mr McNamara and Mr Dhillon estimate that hundreds of families in western
and south-western Sydney had been forced to sell their homes, or had had homes
repossessed and auctioned by lenders, over the past year.
Meanwhile, the
total debt burden on Australian households topped $1 trillion for the first time
last month, Reserve Bank figures published yesterday showed.
Debt on housing
accounts for about 86 per cent of household debt, with the remainder personal
debts like credit cards and personal loans. The ratio of household debt to
household income has reached 160 per cent, one of the highest in the world.
Interest payments now soak up a record 11.9 per cent of household income, nearly
three percentage points more than in 1989 when mortgage rates were 17 per
cent.

Obviously, one of the explicit aims of the Workchoices legislation was to keep wages low, one effect of this being that interest rates are supposedly kept under control. So on the one hand, we have an increased emphasis on individualism in industrial relations, a divide-and-conquer approach whereby corporate profit is relatively unaffected by workers getting pay increases. On the other hand, we have debt-driven consumerism, to the point that, rather cruelly, people are in hock to their eyeballs, and cannot withstand even minor increases in interest rates. Paradoxically, workers under the Howard/Costello doctrine need to keep their wages low (overall), or face repossession when interest rates rise, and mortgage payments can't be made. And this delightful situation is what we see when we are in the midst of a 'boom'.

Hopefully, some people out there in voterland assess the Liberal Party's economic credentials by the state of their own wallets, rather than just swallowing Costello's rhetoric wholesale. And it is unlikely that the above SMH article will figure prominently in the Liberal Party's thinking: after all, those who lose their homes have only themselves to blame for over-extending (to some extent); rampant consumerism is a good thing, (if not The Good Thing) in and of itself; and those whose homes were lost were mostly 'Westies', and were not likely to vote Liberal in any case.

With any luck, perhaps some readers will cite the above article when confronted with the typical free-market magical thinking of the neo-liberals and the libertarians. Clearly, the worst is yet to come for Australia's workers. The twin Right-Thinking virtues, of individualism and consumerism, may yet expose their ugly side. If the Federal Liberal Party is re-elected, we can expect yet more of this fundamentalism masquerading as economic theory, for as Costello himself recently said:

And I cannot stress enough, any movement away from Australian Workplace
Agreements; back to collectively bargained outcomes with unions moving wage
claims across the whole economy could undermine everything.

Work longer for less, Australia, and spend, spend, spend. Think of yourself, not your comrades. Sure, some poor folk will be found hanging in their outer-suburban McMansions. But what are a few lives worth, compared to the miracle of economic growth?

After all, Costello needs you.