The Australian Labor Party is Dead

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[This was published by On Line Opinion, 12 May.]

Isn’t it time we declared the Labor Party officially dead?

The party has become a façade, an empty shell, a Faux-Labor Party.  It lost its vision long since.  It has forgotten why it exists.  It has no purpose, other than to gain power for the egos that inhabit it.

Lacking a vision, Faux-Labor is purely reactive.  Lacking a vision, it cannot frame issues to its advantage.  It cannot seize the initiative.  Caught awkwardly in its opponents’ framing, it is forever on the back foot, only ever able to be less bad, never able to proclaim a noble goal and pursue it.  Its collapse in the polls is surprising only for its speed.

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Visionless Rudd Doesn’t Want to Reduce Greenhouse Emissions

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The most telling part of the Rudd Government’s “deferral” of efforts to reduce Australia’s greenhouse emissions is that it won’t even look at the issue again until 2012.  In other words, it is unlikely Labor will actually do anything in its next term, even though it leaves open the suggestion it might do something in 2013.

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East Anglia Climate Science Exonerated

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[21 April: a version of this has been posted at On Line Opinion.]

The committee charged with examining the quality of the climate science conducted at the University of East Anglia has found “absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever”, according to its Chairperson, Lord Oxburgh.

Accusations of fraud or scientific misconduct have been widespread since emails were illegally hacked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit last year.  Oxburgh continued  “whatever was said in the emails, the basic science seems to have been done fairly and properly”.  The committee considered that if there had been misconducted they would very likely have found it.

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The Underlying Crisis in Economics – Mistaking the Beast

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Extracts from Economia.

The writing of Economia was essentially completed in 2003.  It was obvious then that the global financial system must come to crisis within a few years.

The Global Financial Crisis, serious as it is, is only part of a deeper crisis reaching to the core of how modern economies are conceived and managed.  The problem is not just that financial markets have acquired excessive power and are greedy, corrupt, unstable and destructive.  It is not even that the GFC has not yet shown us its worst, as Steven Keen argues (Declaring victory at half time).  It is that mainstream economists have fundamentally mis-identified the nature of the beast they are dealing with.

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The Peaking of Climate Denialism and the Resurgence of the Sensible

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Despite the ascent of Tony Abbott to the Liberal Party leadership and some recent unhelpful comments by the Chair of the ABC, Maurice Newman, there are some glimmerings that the irrational backlash against global warming science may be peaking.

The backlash can be seen as part of a broader attack on evidence-based, sensible debate that has been systematically promoted in Australia over the past several decades.  The attack has ranged over many social and political topics, including asylum seekers and the “history wars”, which concern our forebears’ treatment of indigenous people.  It has also taken on an explicitly anti-science tone in recent years.

It is revealing to examine the nature of the climate controversy, and to spell out exactly what the approach of climate “sceptics” implies about how we should determine policy.  There are also lessons on how our political process can be distorted by disinformation and by superficial interpretations of “balance” in reporting.

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How Banks Create Money Out of Nothing (Dated version)

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Update Dec 2015. This version does not reflect the way modern banks work. A new version is posted here.

[Update 18 March 2010: this is the text-book explanation, but Steve Keen argues persuasively that this is only a minor part of the modern money creation process, most of which is beyond the control of central banks. See Kevin Cox’s comment below, including his proposed remedy.]

A little-known or poorly understood fact about our banking system is that banks create money. Out of nothing.

That in itself need not be a bad thing. We need a medium of exchange, which is the basic function of money, and the money has to come from somewhere. However the creation of new money is buried within our fractional-reserve system of banking. This makes it invisible to most people. Also, banks create the money in the course of making loans, which means they can charge interest on money they create at essentially no cost to themselves. That is a guarantee of unearned profits, even apart from the myriad fees banks charge for other services.

Because the fact and the process are obscure, I post here an explanation of how it comes about.

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Where is the Bold Leadership?

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This was published by New Matilda, 22 Jan 2010.

The Republican victory in Ted Kennedy’s former senate seat in Massachusetts may seem a long way from Australia, but there are similar forces at work in both countries.  So far, no major political party in the Anglophone world has been willing to directly challenge the right-wing ascendancy of the past three decades, and we continue to pay a heavy price for their timidity and lack of vision.

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No Fraud or Misconduct in Hacked Climate Emails

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Published by On Line Opinion 18 January.

A report by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change finds no evidence for fraud or scientific misconduct in the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.  To quote the Pew report:

“Although a small percentage of the emails are impolite and some express animosity toward opponents, when placed into proper context they do not appear to reveal fraud or other scientific misconduct by Dr. Jones or his correspondents.”

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Tony Abbott and East Anglia have not cancelled Global Warming

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Published by On Line Opinion, 8 Dec.

The triumph of climate delialists in the Liberal Party and the recent unauthorised release of allegedly damaging emails from a British climate research group are being portrayed by some as the end of the global warming “conspiracy”.

However the so-called scandal of the emails is a manufactured storm in a teacup.  Anyway the evidence for human-caused global warming is far more diverse and robust than denialists make out.  In fact the latest evidence is even clearer, and more ominous.  Denialist politicians are on the wrong side of history.

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