"The best lack all conviction
and the worst are full of passionate intensity"

W.B Yeats - The Second Coming

Monday, December 28, 2009

Debt and Destruction

Figures released in the silly season reveal that Australians are up to their ears and beyond in hock.

Figures released by the Reserve bank show that debt held by the household sector is somewhere north of a trillion dollars (That's $1,200,000,000,000.00), equaling our (very) Gross Domestic Product.

I predicted back in January 2008, incorrectly as it turns out, that the Global Financial Crisis would deliver a credit squeeze. The bailout of the banking sector didn't allow this, and the short term stimulus activity meant people could keep on racking up debt. This has continued to fuel an asset bubble. People are *over* the GFC, and, despite sluggish seasonal sales figures, appear to be tucking into business as usual with "no interest and nothing to pay until 2011", as Gerry Harvey puts it.

How long they expect this to go on before it begins to cause serious pain in the household sector is beyond me. We have created a population bonded in servitude to credit providers. The household sector is now owned by (largely) the big four banks - and, Australians being Australians, they will do what they are told.

We are two nations. A corporate nation and a household nation. The corporate nation drives the political and economic agenda and the household nation is left sucking on the social agenda.

When Rudd beams his message into wide screen TVs bought on easy credit into the loungerooms of the country he talks in the language of the social agenda. He says things that households want to hear. It's all very fluffy and aimed at Mr and Mrs McMansion and their 2.2 kids.

When he acts, he acts on behalf of the corporate nation, and delivers on an economic agenda that addresses the needs of the corporate nation. Bank guarantees, award stripping (or "streamlining" as the neo-liberal Gillard calls it), uranium mining and handouts for polluters in the name of carbon reduction are all par for the course. Add to this a looming assault on the nation's underclass through a tightening of welfare and runaway grocery prices and you start to see a picture where Rudd is no friend to the working stiffs, and possibly the best successor Howard's supporters from the big end of town could have hoped for.

Unfortunately their partisan blindness paints Rudd as a dangerous Marxist, so they are left with the debilitating Tony Abbott as their champion. But even Turnbull could see Rudd was open to some very accommodating, corporate friendly politics.

So households end up with three fifths of sweet truck all while much largesse is divested to our friends in the ASX 200, and any number of overseas multinationals.

And because Rudd is brand ALP there are many traitorous swine on the left that will suck it up while every month it becomes harder and harder to keep the good people at Visa happy.

Oh, for a champion of the household nation.

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Play Abandoned #24 - It Couldn’t Happen To A Nicer Bloke

Crystal Gayle was right; the Australian First XI can dish it out but they can’t take it.

That clown Watson’s carry on over in Perth was pathetic. These flat track bullies are synonymous with the zeitgeist that sees cricketers pulling down six figure sums while nurses are expected to get by on less than 50K a year.

I don’t like cricket; I love it. And it is possible to love a sport and hate a team. And I intensely dislike the type of degraded human that is thrust into sport by a media machine that feeds of a nation’s need for vicarious success

How would pay TV survive if we were all out there actually having a go – instead of feeding off a few spoilt and gifted brats having a go in our stead.

Peter Roebuck, who says a lot of wise things between the occasional foray into excruciating hubris, warned us before the start of the 2009 Melbourne Boxing Day Test against Pakistan that the visitors had the potential to field like the ‘a fourth grade team after a night on turps’.

I play in a fourth grade cricket team and have, on occasion, been known to foray into the universe of spirituous liquors and fermented ales. Roebuck appeared to have correctly measured Pakistan’s frailties in the field. We drop sitters at first slip in fourth grade too.

Both Katich and Watson were dropped as they piled it on for two sessions of cricket. It made them look better than they are. But, to their credit, they made the most of the other fellow’s misfortune. Which is how Australia comes to dominate the long form of the game. Ruthless efficiency.

Both eventually fell in the nineties.

Watson’s downfall, via a rather bizarre mix up run out, seemed particularly judicious. While Katich’s dismissal simply seemed like a punchline to a very droll joke.

No doubt the vast majority two-dimensional thoughtless scoundrel patriots that pass themselves off as cricket fans were dismayed. They don’t understand that it is only through adversity that true champions are made. Not through a private school education and having every door opened for you as you pass through lif.

Steve Waugh always seemed genuinely affected by the very real poverty in the subcontinent. Michael Clarke seems genuinely affected by Bec Cartwright’s silicone injected persona. It’s all rather sad. How did it come to this?

When sport becomes business, both suffer. For the sportsmen this is more serious as it usually affects them personally as well as financially. Players like Watson and Clarke – who appear to be genuinely emotionally underdeveloped – are to be pitied rather than condemned.

Given the circus that surrounds elite sport in this country the chances of them ever being normal people appear non-existent. Is this a bad thing? Probably it is; certainly for the players concerned. Will anything be done about it? Unlikely, and less so if, as expected media revenues fall as carbon constraints begin to increasingly hobble western economies.

The players should be able to seek financial refuge behind the Indian megabucks in the IPL for the short term. But the money will never help them understand why so many people think they are jerks.

And no, it’s not envy. It’s a desire to see grown men be brave and honest, and not hide behind a roaring buffoon persona that doesn’t fool anyone with a bit of a grip on life, or knowledge of what makes up this wide and strange planet.

In the meantime Pakistan lurches towards failed state status under an unrelenting terror campaign by a fanatical minority. This can only escalate as irregulars fight a proxy war in Pakistan to counter the Pashtun baiting across the border in Afghanistan. More death and less time for civil society, let alone sport seems the order of the day.

In the face of that, the Pakistan First XI is a minor miracle to be celebrated and, certainly, respected (not just because I backed them at 5-1 to win this match).

More power to their arm. They will need it. Half the side, like my fourth grade team, can’t throw straight.

Methuselah – spilling a sharp chance at mid-off


Tuesday, December 22, 2009

And so this is Christmas…

Eighteen months is a long time in politics.

The blog that never sleeps would like to thank the following for contributing to these, as the Chinese phrase goes, interesting times;
This enforced furlough comes at some price. Luckily, looming homelessness has forced your humble scribe to return to going over the world’s entrails to discern what small truths can be gained there from.

Normal transmission will resume shortly.