Darkness at Noon

(via another blog I’ve been enjoying lately, Solidariti)

There’s an article in the New Scientist confirming what I’ve always known, that activism is dominated by the middle class.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it would be better if those ‘on the coal face’ were more active.

For me, the stark example of the problems with this has always been the forestry movement. Conflict can be expected when you put young middle class student-type up a tree to stop it being cut down. Then you add a 3rd generation forestry worker whose father logged the same forest and who has lived in the area all his life, is a life long CFMEU member and frankly likes the forestry work because he a solitary sort of bloke.

I’m always in favour of direct action and certainly the tackticks of many forestry activists have been effective (not to mention that it is a worthwhile issue). But I have always been uneasy with putting an environmentalist up against a unionist on the front line. The environment vs jobs argument is a false one, the biggest threat to forestry jobs is off shoring which is made possible through neo-liberal trade agreements which, through no coincidence, is a major issue for the environment movement.

So as young, middle-class environmental activists, let’s be a little bit more mindful of our position in all of this.

The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice is excited to announce the launch of our latest campaign: Your Voice in House.Check out the website today:

www.yourvoiceinhouse.org.au

The “your voice” website enables you to contact your representatives in government. When you search on your Postcode or Locality you get a list of everyone that represents you at both the State and Federal level in all houses of parliament. You can then select the representatives you want to email and send an email through the site.

The site is still a “beta site”. This means that, as far as we can tell, the site is working fantastically and it is now available for large scale usage. There might be a few minor hic-ups along the way, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on things and will tighten it up where we need to.

We think you’ll agree this is a pretty exciting initiative. What is more exciting is that it is only stage one – we’ve big plans for this site. However, a site like this can only continue with your support. If you aren’t a member of the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice, please consider becoming one today. With your support we will be able to further develop this site and promote it further so that it can be put to its full potential.

Become a member today at: http://democracyandjustice.org.au/merchandise-memberships-and-donations-mainmenu-55.html

(We’ve also got a new look website, and an ‘.au’ on the end of our domain name. Let us know what you think: www.democracyandjustice.org.au)

So, as I say I’m a little obsessed with a few people’s writing at the moment that are able to see the bigger picture when it comes to the Global Financial Crisis and I’m quite concerned about the ‘business as usual’ approach that the Australian government is taking to it.

One on the people I’m enjoying reading is John Michael Greer who wrote this post yesterday where he notes:

Consider the way that nobody in American political life has anything to offer in the face of economic crisis but more attempts to reinflate a bubble like the ones that popped in 1987, 2002, and 2008. All sides are declaiming about economic growth, at a time when further economic growth in the current sense of that phrase is the last thing America needs. A sane strategy would seek economic contraction instead – a massive downsizing of the banking and finance sector until our annual production of debt has some relationship to our annual production of goods and nonfinancial services; a steady decrease in energy use across the board until US energy use per capita equals that of Europe, about a third of the present US level; the systematic rebuilding of American manufacturing and agriculture protected by trade barriers, which would require Americans to pay prices reflecting American wages for their consumer goods; and so forth.

So imagine how my heart sunk when I read this in the paper this morning:

THE G20 must not allow the fire that is burning in their economies to spread through a new wave of protectionism, Kevin Rudd has warned.

In the Netherlands Freedom of Information Laws require that “any person can demand information related to an administrative matter if it is contained in documents held by public authorities or companies carrying out work for a public authority. The request can either be written or oral. The authority has two weeks to respond.”

Doesn’t that just make you want to say ‘Yes!’ really loudly and inappropriately?

In Australia “agencies can refuse access to information [for] reasons … such as ‘embarrassment to the government’ or ‘causing confusion or unnecessary debate’.”

Is it just me, or is every FoI request made with the intention causing embarrassment to the government, or god forbid, creating ‘unnecessary debate’. And when did debate become unnecessary?

This is a long winded way of saying that myself and the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice are pretty happy that Freedom of Information is next on the list of reviews (after Electoral Reform) for Senator Falkner.

The recent response to an increase in violence related to motorcycle gangs worries me. Yes, I am a biker, but more importantly, I thought organised crime was illegal and that freedom of association was a human right (not that any Australian has that many rights).

I don’t like these biker gangs at all, but it’s like the ASIO laws that were introduced after September 11, these activities were illegal beforehand, we just need to get better at enforcing them.

I was pleased to see that Victoria seems to have the most sensible aproch to the situation:

The Victorian Government and Victoria Police are opposed to moves to ban the gangs.

Premier John Brumby defended Victoria’s decision not to participate in an Australia-wide “dob-in-a-bikie” campaign, saying the state had the toughest organised crime laws in the country.

“Whether it’s an Asian triad gang or … a bikie gang, that legislation is all-embracing, it’s umbrella legislation and it gives police and the special examiner extraordinary powers,” he said.

Further to this post, I’ve been paying attention to a few voices talking about the Global Financial Crisis in a much larger context. It is obvious to me that the the sub prime mortgage issues and ‘credit crunch’ and just symptoms of a much larger problem which is being overlooked and is why we need an Emissions Trading Scheme that will actually do something.

In previous economic collapses we have still had the resources to recover from it. I just don’t think we do this time. Primarily, we’re probably now past peak production of oil. Until now we’ve had pretty easy access to what amounts to an almost free energy source. Yes there is still a heap of oil left in the world but it’s a lot harder to get to. Our Energy Return on Investment is much worse.

There’s a great article over at The Oil Drum on this:

The current financial meltdown is the result of under-regulated markets built on an ideology of free market capitalism and unlimited economic growth. The fundamental problem is that the underlying assumptions of this ideology are not consistent with what we now know about the real state of the world. The financial world is, in essence, a set of markers for goods, services, and risks in the real world and when those markers are allowed to deviate too far from reality, “adjustments” must ultimately follow and crisis and panic can ensue. To solve this and future financial crisis requires that we reconnect the markers with reality. What are our real assets and how valuable are they? To do this requires both a new vision of what the economy is and what it is for, proper and comprehensive accounting of real assets, and new institutions that use the market in its proper role of servant rather than master.

The mainstream vision of the economy is based on a number of assumptions that were created during a period when the world was still relatively empty of humans and their built infrastructure. In this “empty world” context, built capital was the limiting factor, while natural capital and social capital were abundant. It made sense, in that context, not to worry too much about environmental and social “externalities” since they could be assumed to be relatively small and ultimately solvable. It made sense to focus on the growth of the market economy, as measured by GDP, as a primary means to improve human welfare. It made sense, in that context, to think of the economy as only marketed goods and services and to think of the goal as increasing the amount of these goods and services produced and consumed.

But the world has changed dramatically. We now live in a world relatively full of humans and their built capital infrastructure. In this new context, we have to first remember that the goal of the economy is to sustainably improve human well-being and quality of life. We have to remember that material consumption and GDP are merely means to that end, not ends in themselves. We have to recognize, as both ancient wisdom and new psychological research tell us, that material consumption beyond real need can actually reduce well-being. We have to better understand what really does contribute to sustainable human well-being, and recognize the substantial contributions of natural and social capital, which are now the limiting factors in many countries. We have to be able to distinguish between real poverty in terms of low quality of life, and merely low monetary income. Ultimately we have to create a new model of the economy and development that acknowledges this new full world context and vision.

Just a quite note to say that Fielding has voted down the electoral reform bill which means it can’t be reintroduced into parliament for at least two months.

It just doesn’t make sense.

Conroy’s great firewall is now officially silencing dissent:

The Great Australian Firewall has claimed another victim – some pages of Wikileaks have been added to the blacklist of websites which Australians are not allowed to look at.

The reason for the block is that Wikileaks published a list of websites banned by the Danish government. Australian websites which link to the pages face the threat of a A$11,000 fine.

The activist website wikileaks (I would now get an $11,000 fine for linking to it but a google search will show it up). Has been added to an internet black list of it’s own after it published a list of sites banned by the Danish government.

The EFA had this to say:

Electronic Frontiers Australia today hailed the leaking of the government’s secret internet blacklist as a “wake-up call for Australians concerned about secret censorship”. The blacklist, which appeared on the whistle-blower site Wikileaks, is compiled by the Australian Communications and Media Authority and distributed to the vendors of approved internet filters, but is otherwise secret.

“The leaking of the list has confirmed some of our worst fears,” said EFA Vice-Chair Colin Jacobs. “This was bound to happen, especially as mandatory filtering would require the list to be distributed to ISPs all around the country. The Government is now in the unenviable business of compiling and distributing a list which includes salacious and illegal material and publicising those very sites to the world.”

Panic stations friends, it’s no longer loony fringe groups being banned for showing pictures of mutilated babies, it’s now more mainstream activists devoted to accountability.

A little more here:

But about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.

…well that’s probably a bit of a stretch. What do you call it when you become aware of something and then you see it everywhere all of a sudden?

One of the more interesting voices in the blogsphere is Jeff Vail who grabbed my attention because his blog was called Rhizome (and still is in my RSS feeds). Anyway, he had this post recently which pointed to this interview between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer:

It’s in 3 parts – watch them all, you won’t regret it.

Then Jeff is good enough to point to this blog post by John Michael Greer which is fascinating reading:

A society founded on the unquestioned belief that economic expansion and technological development will continue forever may have a very, very hard time dealing with a future in which economic contraction and the abandonment of technologies too complex to be sustainable will likely be dominant trends. It’s not too far of a reach, it seems to me, to suggest that massive revitalization movements will follow.
…
Thus I’d encourage my readers to be at least a little wary of any movement in the years to come, however reasonable and hopeful it may seem, that claims to have a solution to the rising spiral of crises that is building around today’s industrial civilization. I have argued here and elsewhere that those crises define a predicament rather than a problem – a situation that cannot be solved, only lived with – but that definition flies in the face of some of the most deeply rooted assumptions of our culture. I suspect that unless we cultivate an unusual degree of common sense, a great many of us in the years to come may end up doing some equivalent of standing in suburban backyards, waiting for the saucers to arrive.

The other person that has caught my eye lately is Paul Gilding who blogs here. In a recent Crikey article he made the following point:

The global economy is a system, a complex interconnected, real time set of processes and relationships that thrives when it’s growing. The problem is this: we are now operating that system right up against, I would argue beyond, the limits of its capacity to function. These limits are set by two broad challenges: Ecological Limits and System Complexity. When you hit the limits of any system, the system either stops growing, increases in complexity or breaks down to a simpler form.

So, in other words, we are on the verge of complete societal collapse. We’ve run out of resources, we physically cannot continue to grow and seeming have a complete inability to comprehend it – understandably. The world as we know it is moving far outside the frame we understand it in. That’s scary and really exciting. What will the regeneration look like? It’s an opportunity more than a threat.

One of the greatest books I’ve ever read would have to be the Upside of Down – if you haven’t already, read it now… before it’s to late.

… and all of this leaves me wondering, what should I be doing personally? I have no idea but I’m pretty sure getting out of debt is a good idea.

And that’s me done sounding like a conspiracy theory nut.