Poor old Lord Keynes. The world’s press has spent the past week blackening his name. Not intentionally: most of the dunderheads reporting the G20 summit that took place over the weekend really do believe that he proposed and founded the International Monetary Fund. It’s one of those stories that passes unchecked from one journalist to another.
The truth is more interesting …
Author Archive for Christiaan
Keynes is innocent: the toxic spawn of Bretton Woods was no plan of his:
Just a quick word of thanks to all those National and ACT voters out there in NZ, especially those who were in a “mood for change,” because now you’ve got it. A government of radical right-wingers, many proven untrustworthy in the 80s and 90s, ready to turn New Zealand upside down and shake.
Almost everything I said New Zealand can expect is right there in National and ACT’s supply and confidence agreement:
A huge increase in prisons and prison population, under “three strikes” law, where somebody convicted three times goes to jail for life. You only need compare the U.S. or even New Zealand to somewhere like Norway or Finland, where crime and incarceration rates are well below ours, to know that this is about appeasing the sadists and the hang ‘em high brigade rather than actually reducing crime and making NZ a better place.
You get Rodney Hide as Minister of Local Government, which means local councils are going to have Hide’s discredited ideology—that all is better if it’s privately owned—shoved down their throats (think privatised water and roads).
You get Heather Roy as Minister of Consumer Affairs, which means in practice that you’ll have a minister looking after the affairs of business at the expense of consumers.
There’s ACT’s “Taxpayer Bill of Rights Bill,” a radical Libertarian policy that would cap government spending to what it is now and tie it to inflation plus population growth. This is designed to make anything funded collectively by the taxpayer inadequate, so that people lose faith in democratic publicly funded services and turn to the private sector. The ultimate aim being to transfer wealth from the hands of the many to the hands of the few, by way of profits.
The private sector will now get to review government policy with a mind, no doubt, to privatisation, lucrative contracts for cronies and the cutting of social programmes (education, health, etc.). Again, all ultimately aimed at transferring wealth from the public realm into private hands, by way of profits. You won’t see the public being able to review the way the private sector spend profits of course.
And, potentially the most devastating, going with ACT’s anti-science position: the killing off the Emissions Trading Scheme. As No Right Turn writes:
Looking at the terms of reference, they’re going right back to the start, including “hear[ing] competing views on the scientific aspects of climate change” and looking at whether we should do anything about it anyway (and of course float the idea of a carbon tax to further delay things). In other words, repeat the entire policy process of the past fifteen years (which has included several select committee investigations, as well as a national interest analysis [PDF]), only in a more politicised context, with a politically-dictated outcome on the science. After fifteen years, we’re right back to square one.
Meanwhile, energy and industrial emissions - which were going to be covered by the ETS from January 1 2010 - will be free to rise, and polluters will continue to be allowed to externalise the cost of their pollution. And we will be picking up the tab for all of it.
The only thing left for them to do is to declare that they’d like to send more of our soldiers off to Afghanistan to be killed in another futile immoral war led by the only nation in the world to have attacked another country with nuclear bombs.
Think again (think Tony Blair):
I shut my eyes when I listen to [Obama] and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.
Here we have a handsome, dashing and intelligent man, a man with generous instincts and a silver tongue; but a man with no distinctive plan for government that he has seen fit to share with us; a daring opportunist; somebody we may one day judge as a sort of Tony Blair with brains. And here we go again, all over again, hook, line and sinker.
Even after so many months of speech-making it’s still not clear what are the concrete changes that may now ensue and in particular, there are some big foreign policy areas where Obama is not promising a hugely different tack from Bush …
As for what the policies are going to be, the situation is pretty depressing. I mean, Obama, during his campaign, didn’t promise very much, basically talked in cliches and synthetic slogans like “change we can believe in.” No one knows what that change is. In foreign policy terms, during the debates, his—what he said was basically a continuation of the Bush-Cheney policies. And in relation to Afghanistan, what he said was worse than McCain …
He doesn’t like to take on power … I think his record in the state senate in Illinois and in the US Senate is that he doesn’t like to take on power. And if you don’t take on power, you know, the corporate power that dominates every department in our government, you’re going nowhere, because they control the budget, they control the priorities, they have heavy control on the media.
… his position contains massive inconsistencies … he has not repudiated the war on terror. Rather, he insists that by focusing excessively on Iraq, the Bush administration “took its eye off the ball”. The real target must be Afghanistan and if Osama bin Laden is spotted in Pakistan, bombing must be used there too.
John Pilger (who was right about Blair back in 1997):
Like all serious presidential candidates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expansionist. He comes from an unbroken Democratic tradition, as the war-making of presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton demonstrates. Obama’s difference may be that he feels an even greater need to show how tough he is.
My guess is, sadly, that within one week, literally one week, Obama’s staff and cabinet choices will make decisively evident that without mass activism forcing new outcomes, change will stop at the surface. I fervently hope I am wrong.
Vice President-elect, Joe Biden, is a pro-war Zionist. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, helped push through NAFTA and favoured the war on Iraq.
Alexander Cockburn on Rahm Emanuel:
He’s a former Israeli citizen, who volunteered to serve in Israel in 1991 and who made brisk millions in Wall Street. He is a super-Likudnik hawk, whose father was in the fascist Irgun in the late Forties, responsible for cold-blooded massacres of Palestinians.
Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys… Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?
Obama: bought and paid for.
(thanks to Media Lens for this post)
This is the first in a new series tracking people who find the whole democracy thing inconvenient1 and would rather those pesky citizens just shut the $%!@ up so they can get on with transferring the world’s wealth from the hands of the many into the hands of those who are actually entitled to it, the few.2
Jenni McManus is editor for the The Independent, a New Zealand-based business weekly, and here she is expounding her idea of democracy and how the incoming Prime Minister of New Zealand should interpret his mandate:
If forced to choose between breaking election promises and the country’s economic survival, voters’ intentions are clear. Key wasn’t elected simply to implement his manifesto but to manage and lead the economy out of the crisis.
Translation:
We have our Pearl Harbour Mr Prime Minister so the choice between a small attack on New Zealand’s wealth and a full out assault to transfer every ounce we can into the hands of few is clear. Don’t worry about those pesky voters and their silly ideas about democracy, my psychic abilities tell me that their “mood for change” is that they actually want to be fucked up the ass.
She fills out her credentials by offering this piece of advice to the incoming Prime Minister from one of the ultimate despisers of democracy, Roger Douglas, writing in his 1993 book ominously titled Unfinished Business:
Notes:Do not try to advance a step at a time. Define your objectives clearly and move towards them in quantum leaps. Otherwise the interest groups will have time to mobilise and drag you down.
- Well, in actual fact, these people love democracy, at least by their definition of the word. They see democracy as James Madison wanted it to be, speaking at the secret debates of U.S. constitutional convention in 1787, as a means to produce governments that will “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” i.e. to protect those with property from those without. For the purposes of this series I am using a more popular definition: that the central institutions of society have to be under popular control. [↩]
- They don’t actually say this is their objective but even those of them with good intentions are so blinded by their ideology that they just don’t care if this is the outcome. [↩]
Green politics has come along way in the past ten years.
Barack Obama on revamping America’s energy use:
I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
For us to say we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy, that’s going to be my number one priority when I get into office …
(via Frogblog)
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