Neo Con Train Wreck

This morning, Malcolm Frazer, former Prime Minister of Australia, delivered a withering appraisal of the Bush administration in an opinion piece he wrote for "The Age". Malcolm Frazer, although he has been accused of harbouring and at times even expressing "leftish" views, remains a committed conservative. When I say conservative, I don't mean the phony, card-board cut-out, paper-mache and grease-paint conservative so common in America today! I mean the genuine Aussie hardwood variety of conservative.

And it seems that Colin Powell, who might resemble a solid American ash conservative, were it not for his association with the Bush Turkeys, has also endorsed Mr. Obama's candidacy.

Although, I thought Malcolm Frazer's Australian critique fundamentally cruel, but fair, I am still inclined to say to him. "Why go easy on them, Big Mal? ... Why prevaricate and pull your punches? ... Why not call it like is!". Because frankly mate, the Bush Turkeys and their neo-conservative, neo-capitalist, or neo-whatever collaborators were the most worthless bunch of ratbags, crooks and scumbags in the history of politics in the USA! In a few weeks time, thankfully, they will depart. But they will leave that unfortunate nation morally, politically and actually bankrupt! Ok, I guess he couldn't say that because he was writing for one of Australia's leading broadsheets. But I can say it. And I just did.

Earlier on last week, everyone had breathed a sigh of relief when it seemed that the skittish markets had been placated. All that was required to calm them down was huge amounts of cash. Or so it seemed! We all marveled at how smoothly and efficiently those neo-capitalist global money markets function once obliging governments had shoveled in trillions of dollars. This seemed to soothe the markets wonderfully and restore confidence. But, alas, it was only for a half a day or so ... Oh well easy come! Easy Go! As they say ... And they do say that quite often, these days.

The long term outlook for the "real economy" was not so bright either. In Australia, we were warned that there may be "tough times ahead". And as the week wore on it seemed that Wall Street and share markets around the world would continue to deliver a wild roller coaster ride (the most often used metaphor). Perhaps those temperamental markets required a little more "soothing"? Should we inject a few trillion more?

On Friday morning, President Bush addressed the US Chamber of commerce and reassured everyone that it was all under control and that taxpayers money was being used responsibly to avert a much more serious crisis.

The words had hardly left his crooked, lying lips when the stock market crashed again. Wall street investors now live in dread of seeing the chief Bush Turkey's head on their television screens. A single glimpse of his face triggers general hysteria in their ranks and drives market values, all around the world, down in another stomach churning steep dive.

It is quite amazing that there are still some politicians, such as Nicolas Sarkozy, who are happy to have their photograph taken with George Bush. One would have thought that prospect would have been about as appealing as standing next to a known carrier of "Bubonic Plague".

Curiously enough, this has not deterred the Bush Turkeys from attempting to synchronise the Dow Jones index in lock-step with the president's approval rating. And to this extent it seems to be the only project that those incompetent bunch of criminal shysters have accomplished since Bush took office. Whether this was done in order to mete out some retribution to the Wall street crowd for deserting them or as a last-ditch desperate measure to prevent Bush's popularity from actually dwindling to zero is difficult to say.

In any case, one would have to question the wisdom of spending so much money on propping up stock markets (and property markets). Central authorities have recently injected astronomical units of currency (that in the USA, at least, they didn't even have) into the finance system in order to make it function. It would have to be the most extreme money printing event in the history of economics. On previous occasions when governments printed money on an extraordinary scale, workers ended up carrying their weekly wages home in a wheel-barrow. And I should add that in such hyper-inflated basket case economies, there was lots of spending. Mainly because there was no point hanging onto the money! By the time you got the wheel-barrow back to your front porch, the money was worth only half what it was when you knocked off work. Provided of course that you were fortunate enough to actually have a job!

These days, we are being re-assured that such problems have been solved in the "modern" economy. Apparently our US-style global neo-capitalism is not susceptible to hyper-inflation! This must be because we no longer use "printing presses" to print money? And it's a good thing that we don't! If you tried to print a trillion dollars in coin of the realm, it would take an awesome amount of resources. It's been a long time since I actually saw a (US) hundred dollar note, and it may be even longer before I get to see another, but if I estimate the size at roughly 120 millimetre by 60 millimetre and one millimetre thick, I can do a quick calculation with "bc" in a Kubuntu terminal and if I did my sums right, I can guess that if you stacked a trillion dollars (in $100 notes) into tightly packed bundles of $10,000, The pile would stand about ten metres high and occupy an area of roughly 72 hectares. Not to mention the number of trees that you'd have to cut down, and the amount of ink that it would take to print all ten billion of those $100 notes.

So are we to believe that because it's all just virtual money, the hyper-inflation will be virtual also? Are we to be reassured that everything is under control, dear reader? After all, we have been assured by experts that everything is ok. The same experts that got us into this mess and are about to abscond with those hectare sized virtual suitcases full of virtual money.

As grim as all this might seem. It really is just a stroll in the park compared the threat posed by the Global Warming Elephant, also in our lounge-rooms. As I speculated in my first (satirical) blog about global warming, the pachyderm in question is more like a bloody great raging and trumpeting, woolly bull mammoth than your common garden variety teensy-weensy economic baby elephant. If you think the (developing) depression is a crisis, the environmental crisis on the horizon will seem like the mother of all crises.

The Garnaut Report was released a couple of weeks after I composed the first "Elephant Blog". I had intended to mention it, but events quickly ran ahead of me. As in the Stern Report (2006), The Garnaut Report had made it clear that the eventual cost of doing nothing would greatly outweigh any short term costs. Also as more results come in from the monitoring of global warming, the need for action seems to be becoming more urgent. Nevertheless, various parties and interest groups used the report as a political football, which sadly, has now been almost "kicked to death", with occasional citations of the Laws Of Economics. The general consensus seems to be that we cannot implement even the watered down recommendations in the Garnaut Report. It seems we just can't afford it!

I've already said often enough that I'm not an economist. I did complete a first year economics unit during my tertiary education. It was a "dumbed down" version for scientists.

And just why would you dumb it down for scientists?

Well, just as there are lots of experts on football in late September (AFL Grand Final Week) and an even greater number of equestrian experts around the second Tuesday in November (Melbourne Cup Day), so there seems to be a plethora of experts on economics during the current sub-prime crisis. This is because economics, like punting, is not a science. Despite, the pretension of many practitioners, the graphs of supply demands curves (the only thing any 1st year economic student recalls), the occasional reference to differential calculus and the statistics, there is not a single working mathematical model of a real life market.

In the real world, markets and economics that drive them are messy things. They could be influenced by politics, religion, mass media, national pessimism and/or national optimism, astrology and bio-rhythms rather than mathematical principals of crystalline and pristine purity we might use to describe predictable natural phenomena like the majestic dance of celestial bodies. And the interactions between those messy social/economic influences are complex and unpredictable. Even if there were equations to describe the behaviour of these systems, those equations would contain multiple variables and would be insoluble. And in the unlikely event that we found any simple equations, they would resemble the mathematics of chaos rather than the linear functions written on the white-boards of so many economics classes.

Nevertheless the myth that economics is a science and that there are Laws of Economics is one of the persistent fantasies preached by politicians today. Every politician who utters the phrase deserves to be pilloried and punished in the opinion polls. And since September 2008, they probably will be.

Our economic systems and the transactions of goods and services are agreements that since our neolithic past has become (or used to be) loosely governed by rules. Of course, it was recently decided to ditch many of those rules. Nevertheless the remaining rules are really just agreements which we made amongst ourselves in the interest of social cohesion, and rely largely on "trust". Those rules are nowhere near as binding as the Laws we might find in the physical sciences.

These (physical science) Laws have names like Boyle's Law, the Laws of Thermodynamics or the Laws of Gravity, etc. And they really are laws, mandatory, irrefutable and irrevocable! As far as we can tell most of them have applied without exemption throughout the entire Universe for as long as it has existed and will apply for the remaining time that The Universe continues to exist and may in fact be built into the very fabric of the Universe. And we won't be able to sooth them or buy a dispensation by shoveling lots of money in their general direction after the penalty provisions have been enforced.

The Global Warming Elephant will be governed by these type of Laws, And it won't just alarm the markets and make them nervous and cause them to be skittish. It will annihilate the markets.

And so there will be some great challenges for President Obama, should he be elected, and there seems little doubt that he will be elected. Even though I shouldn't make predictions about the outcome of the election, because I could be forced to eat large slabs of humble pie if I'm wrong, I'm still going to go out on a limb here and predict that unless the Republicans can show that George Bush was really an evil extra-terrestrial alien doppelganger in a human skin and further present us with documentary evidence that he is not, has never been and will never be associated with the Republican party in any manner, then Senator Obama can start measuring the drapes and fittings in the Whitehouse now.

And speaking of confidence, I'm going to go out on another limb and predict further that it is more than likely that there will be a surge in market confidence once George Bush's unwelcome visage is no longer visible on screens in or anywhere in the vicinity of the Wall street stock exchange. If the Bush Turkey has a place in history, it will be as the rat-cunning sleazebag who, with the help of his scumbag cronies emptied out the Fed, bankrupted the entire nation and demonstrated to the incredulous world how the USA could still lose the very same cold war that the USSR lost so spectacularly and untidily last century. And even though it has turned out to be rather sad for us all, I have to say that it couldn't have happened to a nicer political party!

Nevertheless, even though the US infrastructure is rotting and decrepit and the US political system is corrupted and ruined, the USA remains the mightiest nation-state on earth, as measured by the yardstick of economics or military power. And even though President Obama might enjoy an electoral "honeymoon". It will be one of the briefest ever. Because he will have to roll up his sleeves and get to work quickly, if he is to have a chance of putting the neo-conservative decade behind him and creating some form of green-glasnost and possibly even resurrect America, phoenix-like, from the ashes left by the neo-con disaster. as they did last century after the devastation of the Great Depression. And it is interesting to note that even though Keynes has been given credit for crafting the economic philosophy that helped America recover from that event, it was really the grand project of defeating global fascism which got America back on its feet.

In this century there is an even greater challenge, that of global warming. We can only hope that if the new president does rise to the challenge, and show some leadership as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to do last century, that he will have more success, and more co-operation from the military than Gorbachev did. Because the awful realisation is rapidly dawning on us all that if the badly listing American ship of state goes all the way down to Davey Jones' locker, she just might take many of us along with her.