Introduction to Foci

I'm interested in the following disciplines:

1. Economics, Privatisation, The ALP's Identity Crisis,  The Fable of the Pensioners TV
2. Nutrition, The Ketogenic Diet, Anti-Aging, Sick People, Sick Planet, Monocropping is War
3. Climate Change
4. Cosmology
5. Anti-Realism versus Realism
6. Psychology
7. Ford Australia Ceases Production

A collection of theories, some useful, most problematic, theories motivated mainly by vested interests, unable to explain the evidence, assuming that the world conforms to the theorist's model of it, asserting that the world is how they claim it to be, not how it really is, as though asserting a theory to be true, makes it true. Our mainstream theories don't seem to contribute very much to human welfare - whether they be concerned with understanding the world, organising the world or feeding the world.

Economics

In economics, the mainstream neoliberal view is that unregulated capitalism is self-optimising. However, the unfettered application of the neoliberal Holy Trinity - deregulation, privatisation and globalisation - over the last three decades has all but brought the world to its knees. Deregulation – by removing all constraints on finance capital and speculation - has created a string of speculative booms and busts each more serious than its predecessor, an on-going series of stock market swings, panics and crashes - including the global financial crisis itself. Privatisation has cannibalised huge swathes of the world’s social and economic infrastructure. And - under the banner of comparative advantage - globalisation has impoverished both the developed and the underdeveloped world in a global race to the bottom.

The driving force behind all these developments is the capitalist corporation. Corporations don’t need or want regulations and controls; they don’t care about industrial safety or the environment. Corporations exist simply to maximise profits, dumping their wastes off onto the rest of society or the environment wherever they can, like cost externalising machines. Today, more than ever, corporations are highly mechanised, automated and mobile. They don’t need skilled workers anymore, instead just cheap, docile workers, easily acquired by relocating to parts of the world with plentiful supplies of cheap labour, to countries with no regulations or controls, to places that don’t care about decent living standards, industrial safety or the environment.

For three decades, neoliberal governments have encouraged globalisation, breaking down all barriers to the free flow of international capital, elevating so called free trade over fair trade, impoverishing workers everywhere, deskilling, casualising and relocating jobs, undermining trade union power, eroding progressive social and economic reforms which took many decades of struggle and sacrifice to achieve, delivering nothing more than a global race to the bottom. Workers in the third world haven’t fared any better either, with one low wage area being played off against another. And now, with the global financial crisis, the world is going through the worst market failure since the Great Depression, millions of workers around the world losing their jobs, their homes and their pensions – their very futures.

It seems fairly clear that the only thing that unregulated capitalism optimises is the corporate bottom line, albeit through ever increasing economic catastrophes, destroying wealth like some form of dog-eat-dog social Darwinism, whilst at the same time achieving an ever increasing concentration and accumulation of capital. The surviving Wall Street banks are bigger and stronger than ever, and in four years the Obama administration hasn't succeeded with a single prosecution.  

Nutrition

The mainstream view on nutrition is that obesity is caused by too much fatty food and too little exercise. Fatty foods elevate cholesterol and cholesterol causes heart disease. Individuals must achieve a balance between calories in and calories out. This is the mainstream view and there’s not a shred of evidence to support it. Western societies have been lowering their fatty food and cholesterol levels for decades but heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity continue to increase – in some cases reaching epidemic levels. The truth is that calories don’t count – but the type of foods they come from do. Carbohydrates make you fat and being fat is a major risk factor for all the above diseases. Consequently carbohydrates also make you ill.      

Climate Change

Again without a shred of evidence, the mainstream view rests on an incoherent concept of global temperature. But temperature is just not the sort of thing that can be averaged. Hence, global temperature doesn't exist except as a meaningless statistic. Nevertheless the mainstream asserts that carbon dioxide is causing runaway global warming - whatever that may be. The real problem is that the global warming faction has hijacked the environmental movement which has traditionally been concerned with improving public amenity including clean air, clean water and open, public spaces; saving natural habitat, ecosystems and forests, and making corporations accountable for their waste. All this has now been rendered subservient to global warming.

But reduced to essentials, global warming boils down to the commodification of carbon - carbon credits turned into commodities and traded in capitalist markets like oil or iron. But all the evidence from Europe shows that carbon trading schemes don't reduce emissions one jot. They do however allow big polluters to carry on as if nothing had happened. The commodification of carbon was invented by Enron. It was successfully marketed by Enron to environmentalists at Kyoto. Enron was destroyed shortly thereafter by its corrupt and incompetent management   

Cosmology

The mainstream Big Bang Theory (BBT) unites science and the Bible. According to BBT, the universe began as a single point particle which instantaneously expanded very much faster than the speed of light about thirteen billion years ago. It has been expanding ever since - just as the first millennium theologians theorised.  BBT is comparable to the Ptolemaic theory of planetary orbits. The theory can explain the orbits, but only if some very weird planetary movements are allowed, speeding up, slowing down, reversing etc. To 'save the appearances' the Ptolemaic system was rendered ever more complex with the introduction of increasingly intricate epicycles - cycles within cycles. Of course the weirdness came from the fact that the Earth is not at the centre of things. Once Copernicus dared to point this out, and Newton developed his theory of gravity, planetary orbits became really simple, elegant ellipses.

BBT again puts the Earth at the centre of an alleged expanding universe. But, as with Ptolemy, every new anomaly forces BBT to introduce ever increasingly complex explanations to again 'save the appearances'. According to the BBT 98% of the universe is missing. With gravity as the driver, there is just not enough matter in the universe to account for its configuration. BBT therefore invents dark matter and the corresponding dark energy to save the day. Neither of these substances have ever been detected, and it is doubtful whether they even exist. They certainly cannot have any of the properties of ordinary matter. So BBT turned to the physicists for help. Particle physics is now searching for what it calls the God particle - the Higgs Boson. And Stephen Hawking is busily trying to understand the mind of God. The Large Hadron Collider has so far found nothing.              

Realism versus Anti-Realism

And, to top it off, anti-realism denies the existence of a mind-independent real world altogether. Social constructivism is one major form of anti-realism which claims that facts, justifications and explanations are all socially constructed. It must be acknowledged that some facts are socially constructed - money is one of them. Clearly money wouldn't exist without society. But fact constructivists claim that all facts are created by society - including facts like rivers and mountains. These facts seemed to exist long before humans. But, according to fact constructivists, they didn't. Human consciousness and language carved these facts from the primeval substance which had no form or structure until human contingent needs and interests intervened and created facts about the world.  This strange philosophy is examined in detail in the Realism versus Anti-Realism post.

What Happened at Ford?

The Ford Motor Company announced yesterday that in 2016 it will cease motor vehicle production in Australia. Thousands of jobs will be lost, not just the ones at the Ford plants but also jobs in the supplier and retail industries that depend directly and indirectly on the Ford plants. What happened?

Well, the standard answer is that Ford simply lost in the race against its competitors: consumers simply don’t want to buy Ford vehicles in commercial quantities anymore; they prefer the alternatives on offer from the competition. Why? Standard economic theory will say that Ford prices were too high and/or their quality was too low, and their prices were too high because their costs were too high: costs consisting of wages, parts and components, low production volumes, lower government subsidies; staged reductions in tariffs and quotas since the 1980s, and a host of other factors such as exchange rates, interest rates and availability of credit.

These same factors affect Ford’s competitors of course but somehow their competitors must have been better at managing them. If so, then the quality of Ford management is another factor to be taken into account.

So, economic theory has an explanation for the Ford closure. Should we worry? Not according to the theory. What happened at Ford, however unfortunate, is just the market mechanism at work. And while it may be sad to see so much hardship among workers, their families and their communities, the result will be better cars at lower prices and that has to be a good thing – doesn’t it? This is what the market does, this is its job: weeding out the weak and rewarding the strong, and the result is lower prices and better quality for everyone. As for the workers and their families, well the government if need be can step in to assist them through the hard times.

Government assistance usually consists of retraining and relocation programs, but for many it means early and forced retirement as well as accepting lower paid jobs with poorer working conditions, while often being forced to leave one’s trade and one’s trade union. But isn’t this just stick-in-the-mud whingeing because they are being forced to move with the times? Overall, the theory paints a rosy picture: everybody wins and there are no real losers.

Coherent, but is it true?

It’s a coherent story. The parts of it fit together nicely and it persuades a lot of people: people who should know better. So what’s wrong with it? The primary problem is that it ignores the bigger historical picture. What happened at Ford happened in the context of institutional, organisational and economic structures. Had these structures been different, then the outcomes at Ford (and a thousand other companies) might have also been very different. How so? To answer this we need a bit of recent Australian economic history.

All economies have a sector structure – primary, secondary and tertiary, which is just shorthand for

• primary: agriculture, minerals and energy
• secondary: manufacturing
• tertiary: government, information          

Australia, until the end of WWII, traditionally depended on agriculture mostly wheat and wool which they exported to the rest of the world – especially Britain. But these commodities were in long-term decline in world trade – both by value (relative prices) and by volume. At the end of the war, Australian policymakers recognized the urgent need to shift Australia away from dependence on these traditional unstable and declining agricultural commodities and focus instead on the development of manufacturing – cars, textiles, steel, and chemicals and so on. To achieve this, a wide range of immigration, industry and regional assistance programs were implemented – investment subsidies, tariffs and quotas on imports, depreciation allowances, relocation assistance, import offsets and training programs.

For several decades (until the mid-1970s) all went well with this program. Australia experienced unprecedented growth in population, employment and GDP. A significant shift toward manufacturing occurred, and the economy was protected from continuing agricultural declines. But there were problems.

The rise of the so-called Asian-Tigers (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as Japan) meant the growing availability on world markets of cheap goods kept out of Australia by high import tariffs which raised prices for Australian consumers. But, at the same time, these rapidly growing economies bought increasing quantities of Australian minerals and energy products (coal, iron ore, natural gas) to underpin their rapid economic growth. Australia ran major trade surpluses with most of these economies throughout the 1950-60s, but the exchange rate was managed by the government which kept the rate of currency appreciation under control.

However, throughout the 1960s, Australian consumers became increasingly aware of how cheap things would be with access to imports at low Asian prices; consequently tariffs became increasingly unpopular. At the same time, Australian minerals and energy producers who had been rapidly increasing their exports had begun to claim that minerals and energy products – not manufacturing - should be the basis of the Australian economic development strategy.

By the mid-1970s, this alternative position had gained some traction in the Canberra bureaucracy and senior levels of the Australian Labor Party – especially the Whitlam faction. As a result of Australia’s post-war manufacturing policies, employment had achieved unprecedented highs, the trade balance was positive and a reduction in tariffs would lower Australian consumer prices thereby helping Australian workers. To Whitlam, the signs were good and in 1973, he instituted a 24% across the board tariff cut.

At the time, Bob Hawke, the then ACTU President was outraged, claiming he had not been consulted by Whitlam and that the cuts would cost jobs. But Whitlam’s timing had been carefully chosen and the then overfull labour market readily absorbed the cuts.

An Alternative Left Economic Strategy

Of course, all was not well with Australia’s post-war manufacturing development strategy. Domestic growth had been fostered in large measure by subsidiaries of foreign multinationals operating in Australia and enjoying monopoly profits while sitting comfortably behind high tariff walls. This was not an optimal growth strategy. The multinational inter-industry linkages to the rest of Australia were weak with demand for industrial supplies and capital equipment largely flowing overseas via pre-existing multinational supply networks. Australia lost income and taxes via multinational transfer pricing (inflating the prices of imported supplies in order to transfer profits to the overseas parent). And the Australian multinational subsidiaries were denied access to the global export markets of their parent companies. Consequently the post-war manufacturing development strategy introduced a very one-sided import replacement strategy (the imported goods the subsidiaries were themselves now producing were replaced and protected, but not the industrial supplies and capital equipment needed by the subsidiaries), and failed completely on the export front.

What the incoming 1983 Labor Government needed to do, then, was to renegotiate the arrangements with the Australian-based multinational subsidiaries to a) ensure that Australia industry got a larger share of the multinational industrial supplies and capital goods markets, b) that the subsidiaries abandoned their transfer pricing behaviour and paid their fair share of taxes, and c) that the overseas parents gave increasing export access to their Australian subsidiaries, and last but not least, d) a significant proportion of the monopoly profits earned behind high tariff walls be progressively turned into price and tariff reductions so that Australian consumers could enjoy prices more nearly the same as those that prevailed in international trade. This was a lot to swallow in one go, but, because of the high tariff walls, multinational profits were virtually guaranteed in Australia and it could easily have been achieved over the medium term.

The Right Alternative

But despite some lukewarm hand waving in this direction at the 1983 election, a different strategy prevailed. Paul Keating, having spent several years as Shadow Minerals and Energy Minister, was persuaded by the mining lobby that any future development strategy lay with minerals and energy. So, in the 1980-90s, Bob Hawke (PM) and Paul Keating (Treasurer) aided very effectively by Bill Kelty, then ACTU Secretary, finished what Whitlam had started.

For more than a decade, this trio instituted a wholesale winding back of Australia’s post-war manufacturing development. Investment subsidies and allowances were abolished, and regional and locational incentives abandoned. Government abolished control over exchange rates, over interest rates and over foreign banking. Tariffs and quotas were abolished or progressively but rapidly reduced. The underlying economic philosophy was neoliberal – according to the then US President Reagan – governments can’t solve the problem, governments are the problem. So government must be wound back; government enterprises must be privatised and governments must balance their budgets even while income taxes are being cut. The then Australian Labor Government agreed, as did subsequent Coalition governments.  

The result was an immediate cessation of public sector and manufacturing growth and development in Australia with the clothing and textile industries virtually wiped out within a decade. Steel and chemicals were soon to follow. Cars, because of their locational sensitivities have taken a bit longer, but the car component industry went long ago. This then is the real story of Ford and it should be seen in the context of Australia’s development strategy over the last thirty years. It’s not over yet.

Nothing of course ever goes completely to plan. Almost as soon as the Keating reforms were implemented, the Asian-Tigers lost their bite. Japan has been economically comatose for practically two decades. Nevertheless, the Keating plan appeared to succeed. So what has taken the Tigers place? As the Tigers declined, China grew. It was the People’s Republic of China that stepped up to the plate and ‘rescued’ Keating’s plan, thereby putting a completely different political twist on Australia’s development strategy. Politically, our international alliances are with the USA and Europe; economically on the other hand we are now almost entirely in the pocket of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce (aka the Chinese Communist Party), a few home-grown and very greedy resource billionaires, and the major US investment banks (Goldman-Sachs et. al.) that gave us the ongoing 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

Mr Keating is happy to take credit for the specious ‘success’ of his strategy, but he persistently fails to explain how we are going to get out of the present hole - or should that be quarry - that his policies have got us into.

This, then, in very simplified form, is the story of what happened at Ford. And it is not at all like the rosy picture that orthodox economic theory would have us believe. Neoliberalism lies at the heart of what happened at Ford and as noted it's not over yet, not even close to being over. Ford is a victim of the anti-manufacturing, counter revolution in Australia's economic development strategy which kicked-off in 1980s. The Australian economy and all successive governments since the early 1980s have abandoned manufacturing and the mixed economy, opting instead for a deregulated, privatized, resource based growth strategy. The result? Australia is now structurally weaker than it has ever been.

The Fable of the Pensioner's TV

Consider the following tale:

The manager, a Basil Fawlty-like character, resolutely refuses to even consider buying a new TV for the residents of the old-folks home. But they won't be bullied by this upstart, so they agree to raise the funds themselves. The TV might be old, but every night they enjoy a good squabble about what to watch after dinner. After much argument, Basil reluctantly agrees to hold the money for safekeeping. Eventually, he is even persuaded to purchase the new TV. And for a few weeks the residents enjoy the benefits - taking squabbling to a whole new level. One day, however, the TV suddenly disappears. Worried about its whereabouts, the residents ask the manager where it has gone. Looking a bit embarrassed  he reluctantly admits to selling the TV at a low price to one of the residents – Mrs Rich - who has moved the set into her rooms for private viewing. Mrs Rich is happy to allow residents to view the TV, but in future they will have to pay a small fee to help cover her costs.   

The pensioners are confused and angry, how could he do that, he had no right, the TV was bought and paid for with their money. But Basil dismisses their complaints; they had given him the money for safekeeping; and the TV was purchased in the name of the home not its residents. And anyway, why are they worrying when the money from Mrs Rich will be used to lower the fees of some of the wealthier residents who've been complaining that they pay too much for the extra resources they use. And in future only those who actually watch TV will have to pay – what could possibly be fairer than that?

But, apart from a few of the wealthier ones, the residents are not happy, they demand that the manager immediately recover the TV from Mrs Rich. After a long, awkward silence, he admits he can't do it. The truth is that he's entered into a long-term contract with her and if he breaches the contract he will have to pay her compensation, with money he doesn't have - although the residents can raise the funds if they like. The residents are even more outraged - they remind him that they already raised the funds once to buy the TV in the first place. Then old Mrs Jeffries comes up with a good idea: recover the old TV from the cellar where it has been gathering dust over the last few weeks. But Basil says he can't do that either. The contract with Mrs Rich contains 'non-competition guarantees' which allow her to claim compensation in the event that, for whatever reason, her revenues are reduced by any alternative entertainment. The contract prevents him from introducing any changes - even the introduction of a new radio, or a card table or in fact any form of change that might detract from contractually agreed TV viewing levels.            

Now make the following parallel connections 

Manager	Government
Residents	Citizens
Mrs Rich	Corporations
TV	Public assets
Resident’s fees	Income Tax

And you have a good analogy for privatisation.

Governments sell public assets – the assets of the commoners - to private corporations at knockdown prices. Assets once owned in common are now owned in private by corporations. Citizens must now pay for access. The revenue from the sales is used to lower income taxes on the wealthy because, according to the standard argument, the poor spend all of their income, but the rich invest almost all of theirs and this creates economic growth and higher incomes, some of which will eventually 'trickle down' to the poor. So in the end everybody wins. This 'neoliberal' story is, of course, a complete fairy tale. The surplus funds of the wealthy are rarely invested in productive assets; instead they are withdrawn from circulation leading to a collapse in effective demand and higher unemployment; or alternatively they are used to feed speculative asset bubbles such as the sub-prime mortgage catastrophe; or they are invested offshore which reduces our capacity to compete overseas. The truth is that we can have very little confidence that the wealthy will use their assets for productive investment.           

Of course, corporations don't deprive the commoners of the asset altogether, their aim is to derive a permanent income stream by charging consumers for its use. So, instead, they introduce ‘user pays’ tolling systems that give citizens restricted access which, at the same time, yield a perpetual revenue stream to the corporation. These privatization deals, shrouded in secrecy, contain extraordinary 'no-competition' clauses which guarantee the corporation's earnings either by restricting anything that potentially threatens their revenues or by financially compensating them if it actually costs them money. This sleight of hand completely masks the fact that the people have already bought and paid for the asset with their taxes.

And this entire system of misdirection, this clever pea and thimble trick is contradicted by fatalities on the privatised London transport system stemming from reduced maintenance standards, the debacle on the privatised Sydney Cross-City Tunnel, and by expert report after report showing deteriorating service standards and safety performance on privatised projects. When like is compared with like, when proper cost-benefit analyses are undertaken, when the full range of social costs and externalities are taken into account, government is far more efficient and far less costly than the capitalist corporation. We should give the TV back to the pensioners, after all they bought it and they own it. Capitalist corporations cannot and should not manage the public interest.

Monocropping is like the Vietnam War

 

The analogy is not perfect but it’s close; and while we know how the Vietnam War turned out, it remains to be seen how monocropping will turn out.

 

Monocropping	Is like the Vietnam War
Global Corporations   Big Agriculture ·         Cargill ·         Archer Daniels Midland ·         Monsanto	Global Corporations   Military-Industrial ·         Lockheed-Martin ·         BAE Systems ·         Boeing
Big promises   Feed the world	Big promises   Save the world from communism
Problem of obdurate local opposition   Entrenched local ecologies	Problem of obdurate local opposition   Entrenched guerrillas: Viet Cong
Adopt policy of high-tech destruction   Deforestation, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides	Adopt policy of high-tech destruction   Bombing, defoliation, Agent-Orange
High-tech support for cash crops   extensive irrigation, energy intensive fertilizers	High-tech support for corrupt Diem   Materiel, logistics, ordnance, personnel
War of attrition   Drawn-out battle against resilient local ecology, nature never defeated, always growing back, always regaining lost ground	War of attrition   Drawn-out battle against guerrillas, never defeated, always coming back, always regaining lost ground
Casualties   Civilians (see effects of diet), the environment from chemical run-off, the land from rising water tables and salination, flora and fauna from destruction of local ecologies	Casualties   Military personnel (both sides), civilians, flora and fauna from destruction of local ecologies
Ultimate defeat?	Ultimate defeat   Ever escalating costs and unsustainable methods eventually defeated the US government and military corporations in Vietnam

 

    

Psychology

Introduction

We all like to think that we are in control of our lives, not the big things like government policies of course or earthquakes or tsunamis or even thunderstorms, but the little things like what’s for dinner, what shall I wear, what shall I watch on TV, understanding the family situation, continuously scanning the immediate micro environment, predicting the way things will turn out, interacting with friends and neighbours, having an overall perspective on the things around us. But to what extent are we in control? If someone asks us how we came to make this or that decision, we’ll always have an answer; and if someone asks us to explain this or that piece of our behaviour we’ll never be short of a convincing story, a story listing the reasons for our actions in our perfectly rational and ordered lives. But what if it’s really not like that, what if our free will is mostly an illusion, what if most of our actions are not the perfectly rational responses we think they are, instead being completely automatic responses to information unconsciously absorbed from our environment, information that predisposes us to behave in certain ways, behaviour primed, set and acted out within milliseconds, behaviour which our ancient unconscious behavioural guidance systems believe will best protect us and keep us safe?

Unconscious Behavioural Guidance System

Consciousness is self-awareness which develops in humans aged between eighteen months and two years old. Of all the animals, only humans, chimpanzees and orang-utans possess self-awareness, a faculty which formed very late in our evolutionary development, and one depending critically on the cerebral cortex – the highest level of brain development. Throughout most of our evolutionary history, the species that ultimately evolved into modern humans were not conscious of themselves. But they did survive and prosper in their natural environments - we're the proof. To do this, they needed a mechanism to keep them safe, a capacity that could continuously scan their environment, quickly identify threats and opportunities, formulate goals and plans and then take appropriate action, all within milliseconds. In this pre-self-aware state the link between environmental input and behavioural output was automatic. Consequently, much of the human brain evolved and functioned as an unconscious behavioural guidance system. The same is true today. Consciousness is really an overlay that creates the semblance of rationality in human decision making. The pre-conscious brain is doing what it has always done – continuously and automatically scanning the immediate environment.  

Priming

The pre-conscious brain has several components i) an evaluative mechanism, ii) a perceptual mechanism, and iii) a motivational mechanism. Psychological research over the last thirty years shows that each of these mechanisms exists and is automatically and continuously active in the human brain. Moreover each of the components interacts with all of the others. What this means, for example, is that environmental stimuli will be perceived by the brain, unconsciously, and within milliseconds it will be automatically evaluated as good or bad, and a set of goals and behaviours designed to achieve those goals will be automatically initiated – all within milliseconds and all below the threshold of consciousness. Priming is simply the continuous stream of sensory data picked up automatically by the unconscious scanning brain, data which predisposes us to act in certain ways in subsequent moments.   

John A. Bargh

As consciousness evolved, it built on the ancient pre-conscious apparatus. This means that humans can experience, evaluate, plan and take action automatically – all below the threshold of consciousness. For example, John Bargh’s experiments show that young students unconsciously primed with the idea of ‘old age’ were observed to walk more slowly away from the experiment than they did on arrival. Moreover their memories were significantly degraded – slowness and memory loss being integral elements of the old age stereotype. A second experiment unconsciously primed students with either ‘rudeness’ or ‘politeness’ and the subsequent set-up kept them waiting to hand in the results of their tests. The students primed with ‘politeness’ waited patiently for up to ten minutes until the end of the experiment. The students primed with ‘rudeness’ interrupted almost immediately.

Unconscious Behavioural Guidance Systems

Derren Brown

Even more striking instances of priming occurred in programs featuring Derren Brown the well-known British magician and psychological entertainer. In one program, Derren invited two senior advertising executives to develop a publicity campaign for a (fictitious) business he was about to set up. He gave them half an hour to come up with a rough sketch, leaving a sealed envelope on the table in the room were the executives were working. At the end of the period, they showed Derren the results of their activity and gave their reasons for the approach they had taken. Derren then opened the envelope which, to everyone’s surprise, showed a sketch virtually identical to the one the executives had come up with themselves. Derren explained that the executives had been unconsciously primed by the sights and sounds they had taken in during a very carefully orchestrated taxi ride to the studio. It was interesting to note that the reasons the executives gave, ever so seriously, for their design decisions had absolutely nothing to do with the real reasons.

Priming the Primers

In a more sinister application of priming, Derren Brown within the space of a few days unconsciously primed several ordinary people with good jobs in settled careers to become petty thieves robbing the local store, to become participants in a re-run of the infamous Milgram experiment which showed how participants would electrocute to death fellow participants if instructed to do so by white-coated officials, and finally to become armed bank robbers – literally forcing security guards at gun point to give up the 100,000 pounds in cash. That program was really spooky – had the situation been real it would have almost certainly ended in a bloodbath.

The Heist

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, shows many instances of the unconscious behavioural guidance system at work. Stereotyping is a feature of the system, and sometimes it can go badly wrong as when New York police officers mistakenly shot to death a young black man. Three instantaneous mistakes were made i) they were suspicious and thought the youth was behaving suspiciously, ii) they were terrified and thought the youth was terrifying and iii) the youth was reaching for his wallet to identify himself and they thought he was reaching for a gun. He was shot more than forty two times. The entire incident was over in seven seconds.

Less lethally, in an experiment involving teacher evaluations, the evaluations didn’t change significantly whether the evaluation period was ten seconds or ten months; and in a speed-dating experiment, people’s actual choices bore no relationship at all to the preferences they had stated beforehand. Gladwell’s point is that the unconscious system is much larger than its conscious counterpart, it is permanently active and constantly scanning and it operates in parallel via a spreading activation model. Compared to the conscious brain which must work in series, it really is a super computer. It is often more accurate; but, unfortunately, it can be easily tricked and manipulated which is why magic tricks, advertising, and political spin are so effective.

Blink

Pernicious Advertising

Everyone is influenced by advertising but everyone massively underestimates by how much. The reason is simple. Advertising doesn’t much impact our conscious brain; but it significantly influences our unconscious behavioural guidance system. For example, in one of John Bargh’s experiments three groups were exposed to one TV program containing food advertising and one without – the groups were toddlers, teenagers and middle aged adults. The experimenters made available crackers and drinks for the duration of the program but the participants were not instructed to eat or drink. In the case where the participants were primed by the food advertising, the participants consumed 45% more crackers than in the case of no food advertising. The increase in consumption occurred irrespective of whether healthy or junk food was being advertised.

Bargh concludes that the function of the advertising is not brand familiarity which advertisers often claim, rather it is ‘consume more now, and buy more tomorrow’. This is the real function of advertising, the real reason for the multi-billion dollar annual advertising budgets. And whilst we might worry about the fact that some sections of the population are more vulnerable than others – e.g. kids, the truth is we are all equally susceptible via our unconscious guidance systems.

Sick People, Sick Planet

Agribusiness and Agrichemicals

The thesis of our upcoming book is simple; there are forces at work in the global economy making both the people and the planet sick. The forces consist of 1) capitalist agribusiness, including commodity trading, factory farming and monocrop agricultural corporations such as Cargill, Bunge, and Syngenta, 2) a second group of forces, equally powerful, consisting of capitalist agrichemical corporations such as Monsanto and Bayer which, together with the first group, include some of the world's largest multinational corporations, and 3) yet a third group of forces comprising the corporate-friendly governments of the US, Europe and elsewhere responsible for the global system of trade policies, tariffs and subsidies which underpin the global capitalist agribusiness and agrichemical corporations.

Sick Planet

Globally, these corporations are specialised in agribusinesses such as wheat, rice, and soya, with supporting agrichemical industries and corporations such as Monsanto and Bayer producing and marketing chemicals such as organophosphates, sodium fluoride and nerve gas, agribusiness corporations with operations covering huge land areas and producing nothing but single crops - monocrops. These corporations make the land sick, continually razing native flora and fauna, continually losing topsoil via erosion, continually polluting rivers, streams and estuaries with chemical run-off, repeatedly keeping the land bare by annual dosing with millions of tonnes of agrichemicals, hormone disrupting, xenoestrogen-based agrichemicals such as pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, subsequently fertilising with energy intensive, nitrogen-based chemicals because nothing will grow in the lifeless, bare soil they've created.

Sick People

And the substances grown by these corporations are making the people sick. The sugars and phytochemicals found in the main carbohydrate products of capitalist agribusiness and agrichemicals are implicated in a wide range of non-infectious diseases, major killers such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. For example, High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), a large component chemical (50%) of common table sugar and a central ingredient in many soft drinks is now widely implicated in the current obesity epidemic. Unfortunately, it is still not widely known that soya contains phytoestrogens, chemicals responsible for significant numbers of infant deaths from soya infant formula, early onset puberty in girls, sometimes with five-year old youngsters growing breasts, and gender bending genital malformations in young boys. Yet soya is still marketed as a wonder health food. While these substances are often referred to as ‘food’, they are in fact quite unnatural for humans whose physiology evolved over millions of years in a completely different direction.

Ecosystem Farming Hypothesis

The ALP's Identity Crisis

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) has an identity crisis. Historically, the Party represented disadvantaged workers and their trade unions, organisations continually involved in low-level conflict with capitalism – fighting for improved wages and conditions, job security, and defending worker’s rights.  Unions soon found that they needed to lock-in their hard won gains by legislation, so the Party’s historic task came to be seen as drafting and implementing worker and union-friendly legislation.

To understand how estranged the party has become from this historic role, we need to see the bigger picture. Around the world, after the Great Depression, a raft of stringent banking regulations was put in place. The aim of these reforms was to ensure that the kind of speculative greed that had caused the global collapse in 1929 couldn’t happen again. The reforms worked well for forty years producing unprecedented economic growth and improvements in living standards around the world. But in the mid-1970s the OPEC cartel, upset by the West’s defence of Israel, unilaterally increased oil prices and sent inflation through the roof. Economic growth faltered and inflation skyrocketed producing the infamous period of stagflation – inflation combined with unemployment, Keynesian theory said it couldn’t happen. For a time, in Britain, in the late 1970s something approximating a post Keynesian solution was tried – the Social Contract, a prices and incomes policy, trying to regulate the key variables by a kind of corporatist consensus. It failed, and in 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected. The Keynesian paradigm was unceremoniously replaced by the monetarist one.

In the 1980s, under Reagan, Thatcher and, in Australia, Hawke and Keating, a massive shift towards the so-called free market occurred. Fixed exchange rates were abolished, floating currencies introduced, and responsibility for interest rates was devolved to newly independent central banks. The three pillars of modern capitalism – deregulation, privatisation and globalisation - frequently referred to as the Washington Consensus were pursued vigorously. Historically the ‘free market’ might have been on tap, but now it was unquestionably on top.

By 1983, when the Hawke Labor Government was elected, monetarism was dominant in both Britain and the US. The Hawke government tried to square the circle, introducing the Prices and Incomes Accord which, on the face of it, was similar to the British Social Contract, a system of central corporatist economic planning, but with an economic agenda ‘free market’ to its core.   

Historically, the ALP had existed uneasily with ‘free markets’ preferring the so-called mixed economy – a balance of public as well as private enterprise. But now Keating vigorously supported the three capitalist pillars on the untested promise that this would produce higher economic growth and better living standards for all. The Labor Government’s planning system put all of its efforts into structural adjustment policies – palliatives such as industry assistance schemes and redundant worker retraining schemes designed to mask union complicity and to ease the pain of transition to the new deregulated, dynamic economy, until such time as the new system could deliver.

Keating was responsible for two major privatisations – The Commonwealth Bank and Qantas – as well as financial deregulation, welcoming foreign investment banks to Australia with disastrous consequences, floating exchange rates, reductions in tariffs and quotas, and the shift from centralised wage bargaining to enterprise agreements. Keating foreshadowed the independence of the Reserve Bank (RBA), but it was left to Costello to formally confirm in a Statement on the Conduct of Monetary Policy issued in 1996. The independence of the RBA was reiterated and strengthened in a subsequent statement issued by Swan in 2010 on behalf of the Labor Government. The RBA is obliged primarily to adopt policies designed to stabilise the currency and secondarily to achieve full employment. Stabilising the currency has invariably been interpreted to mean controlling inflation, and this goal has without exception taken precedence over the employment objective.

Apparently unaware of the global mobility of multinational capital, Keating subscribed strongly to the idea of comparative advantage as a basis for international trade. He saw Australia as the quarry of Asia. In his Brave New World, there was no place for a manufacturing industry which had been the focus of much of Australia’s post-war growth strategy. Ironically, the Asian Tigers – Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, not to mention Japan – which were driving Australia’s minerals and energy export growth at the time, had all but collapsed by the early 1990s. Had China not stepped into the breach, Keating’s economic strategy would have been in tatters, as would Australia. Keating also suggested a consumption tax well before the Liberals, one of the rare occasions Keating was voted down by his cabinet colleagues.   

The global financial crisis has almost taken us back to the 1930s. The Washington Consensus is dead. Wall Street is again under fierce pressure to reform. Capitalism like the leopard really doesn’t change its spots. There is an almost universal acknowledgement that markets – especially financial ones – must be regulated.  Yet ‘regulation’ remains a dirty word in Australian political economy. The changing international mood finds no reflection in the forums of the Labor Party.

So, what does the Labor Party stand for? The promises given by Hawke and Keating in the 1980s have spectacularly failed to materialise, but in the intervening period we have lost control of interest rates and exchange rates, we have structurally weakened our economy – especially manufacturing, we have lost many of our skilled workers, we have casualised our workforce, and our unions are materially weaker, household debt has replaced real wages as the primary source of consumers expenditure, we have privatised whilst also enviting capitalist corporations into partnerships with government, forgetting that governments are accountable to the poeple, capitalist corporations aren't, members are deserting the Labor Party in droves, and Party thinking continually bounces from one weird proposal to the next.       

The Whitlam Dimension

One of the weirdest – a system of primaries designed to give ordinary people a say in party affairs – is interesting in light of Labor history. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Gough Whitlam fought and won a protracted battle against the unions and the left for control of the ALP. For years there had been tension between party officers and parliamentarians, especially in Victoria. Party officers and affiliated unions were concerned to ensure that party programs were implemented by the parliamentary wing irrespective of their popularity, the parliamentary wing instead concerned about their standing in the opinion polls.

The media were fond of describing party and union officials as faceless men, bolstering Whitlam’s campaign to break the power of the Party. Whitlam was successful. But the party officials were anything but faceless men, democratically elected by a then vigorously involved branch membership at various party conferences, controlling party resources, recruiting staff, conducting major research programs, organising pre-selections, and controlling renegade MPs who felt constrained by party discipline. After the Whitlam victory this system was completely dismantled. The job of the party officials, henceforth, was fund raising, public opinion polling and focus groups.

The party was set adrift, its anchor chain snapped. No longer would the party membership and executive exercise policy control and discipline over its parliamentarians. Now MPs were free to do whatever the parliamentary caucus and the cabinet decided. Whereas before the change, caucus factions hadn’t mattered very much since all were subject to external party discipline, now they came sharply to the fore. And ministers from the dominant factions were all powerful – almost warlords. Keating was just such a minister and he frequently road roughshod over party policy. It was more than ironic that just prior to the 1983 election, the party renewed its commitment to socialism.

Whitlam might have thought that he was fighting to free the party from rigid control by doctrinaire left wingers not interested in electoral success. In fact he paved the way for Hawke and Keating’s absolute control, and by a fairly linear progression, the woes of the current Gillard government. So now we have a party caught twice in its own trap 1) the major Keating ‘free market’ agenda of the 1980s has failed catastrophically and the parliamentary leadership can’t find a way out because 2) the party has no centre of gravity outside of parliament since the membership and party officials can’t, don’t, and won’t be allowed to do anything except raise funds and hand out how-to-vote cards on election day.