As our communication system speeds up, driven by the power of cable television and the Internet, news cycles take on characteristics of a tropical storm: swirling centripetal winds, sudden shifts of intensity and direction, a tendency to darken the horizon and blot out memory, or awareness of anything else that might be happening. Participants-news purveyors and consumers-are always in the eye of the storm. So there was rough justice in the arrival of Gustav, a real hurricane, to rain on a Republican National Convention taking place under sunny skies 1,300 or so miles up the Mississippi. Real as it was, for news junkies, Gustav was only the fourth media storm in a week.
First came Media Storms Hillary and Invesco Field, packing plenty of wind and questions momentous-seeming enough to build suspense. (A media storm requires an open-ended question to keep anchors talking and bloggers blogging.) Would Mrs. Clinton's speech for Barack Obama at the Democratic convention be sufficiently tinged with insincerity to alienate her supporters from the candidate? Would his acceptance speech before a crowd of 84,000 on a football field, in front of a set that might have been borrowed from the TV show The West Wing, make him seem less presidential?
"Not really" was the answer in each case but before it could register the questions had been shoved aside as a new one loomed: Could a caribou-hunting mother of five, with creationist leanings and membership in a church that preaches that these are "the last days" and that God has chosen as a "refuge" the state of which she's a first-term governor-and maybe also chosen her to play that role-put enough verve into John S. McCain's campaign to redeem, at a single stroke, his reputation for independence and his sorry standing with social conservatives? A perfect media question that had been daringly sent aloft by McCain himself, instantly eclipsing Obama's big night. The first episode of Media Storm Sarah lasted less then forty-eight hours, then Gustav came along.
The real storm passed without furnishing the images of private greed and public lassitude that made Katrina an enduring symbol of the Bush administration's aloofness and incompetence. George W. Bush's party, spared the embarrassment of having to welcome him and his vice president to its convention, made a solemn show of transforming itself for one evening into a social service organization, filling its party hats with contributions for the hurricane's victims. Gradually then, the Gulf was left to dry out and the political surge resumed, only now the story line John McCain and his advisers had scripted had suddenly changed on them. From a remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, with the Alaska governor as heroine-a feisty battler against corruption in her own party, in McCain's reformist image-it threatened to turn into Juno, last year's sentimental comedy about a pregnant high school student who cheerfully decides to have her baby.
Joseph Lelyveld
St. Paul, Minnesota
The chemical dissolved in his mouth. Spirals of thoughts, highways of information, truckloads of sentiment, we were carried away from the moment of our youth, transfixed, transported. He wasn't sure who he was anymore. Distant voices never made it into full blown personalities. A solipsistic universe, quiet, deadly. mushy in its intent, filled an otherwise tired brain. Nothing mattered anymore. All the profound observations of his youth had disappeared. Perhaps Churchill put it the best, if you're not a communist when you're young you have no heart, if you're a communist when you're old you have no brain. It's all, sadly, too true.
He had stopped believing in everything. Consumer sentiment. A blistering blizzard of disinformation. Nothing was real. Nothing was genuine. Old fashioned socialists paraded as friends of the Australian people, when all they did was serve themselves. None of them had ever done a normal days work in their lives. The government is now dishing out more than $10 billion in a so-called economic stimulus to everyone on benefits. The rest get nothing. So lots of people, millions, are getting thousands of dollars in their kit come Christmas; and a lot of people aren't.
It breeds resentment. It breeds scorn. Time and again people make the point. The bludgers get everything, they get nothing. Everything becomes crowded. Everything is dark. He was so totally unconvinced by anything he heard. They paraded their smug selves beneath their stale smelling undies; they were a pretense, crowded with their own self importance, lecturing all of us, sympathising with no one, bleating endlessly about the weak and the vulnerable. But the so-called weak and vulnerable were smug in their own certaintities that everyone else should pay for them. That there was no point in dying. That getting up and going to work was for the birds.
We joke between ourselves, did you get any money in the package? Did you? No, no, of course not, we're the suckers that get up and go to work. So you mean, said the 17-year-old son of a PR person, that everybody who doesn't do anything, all the lay abouts, get money? Yep. The emails pour in. Handouts for all. Except the so-called "working famlies", the ones who actually get up and go to work. Although even they will probably get a thousand dollars a child. A thousand dollars. Which as many people are now commenting will end up in wrapping and string on the floor, surrounding some piece of plastic with the label: "Made In China".
Everything's made in China these days; our own manufacturing base has been destroyed. We don't make anything. We don't do anything. Except dig things out of the ground and sell it to the highest bidder. Except pour scorn on our own people. Except persecute the people who fail to agree with the status quo. The masive deceptions. Mass Delusions and the Status Quo. Book titles. Peculiar deceptions. Astonishing what people will believe. He was caught in all these fractures of over information, disinformation. The flooded networks.
The static build up was overloading the system. Consumer sentiment. He couldn't care less. Mortgage stress. He couldn't care less. Somewhere there was an overwhelming story, a gripping narrative, a point to existence. But not here, in these fragile fractured days, amongst all the bleating and all the lies, in a place where people believed nothing but garbage, where their heads were full of noble sentiments packaged and sold to them by a political party, anti-racist, pro-global warming, everything we had been taught to believe simply wasn't true. He was caputred by the throat, yet none of it made sense, not at the core. There was no passion, no courage, no simple decency, there was deception and sleights of hand and politicians spending billions upon billions of dollars to make themselves look good. The nation had become a sad and dysfunctional crock. Trust no one. Believe nothing.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24507853-7583,00.html
KEVIN Rudd's Gordon Gekko speech shows clearly that despite his modern packaging his economic core is very much old Labor. Gekko, Oliver Stone's caricature of a financial speculator from his 1987 film Wall Street, is the archetypal financial capitalist for those on the Left. Stone, of course, is a great admirer of Fidel Castro and in more recent times an associate of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
The Prime Minister claims that somehow the present global financial problems are a hangover from the 1980s philosophy of "greed is good". He makes the extraordinary leap that the greed-is-good era brought the stockmarket crash of 1987, the savings and loans debacle in the US and the global recession that gripped many countries in the early '90s.
He claims today's problems are the fault of the 21st-century "children of Gordon Gekko" who have failed to understand the lessons of the greed-is-good era. If Rudd is to be believed, all the present problems arise as a consequence of the failure of values, "greed has triumphed over integrity", "speculation over value creation" and the "short term over the long term". In the Prime Minister's words, "this crisis bears the fingerprints of the extreme free-market ideologues who influenced much of the neo-liberal economic elite".
Rudd's comments remind me of the ideological nonsense I used to hear at ACTU meetings from left-wing trade union officials in the '90s. Bob Hawke and Paul Keating were repeatedly attacked by the political Left for their neo-liberal policies of global integration and deregulation. Doug Cameron, now a Labor senator, gave a speech to the Tasmanian Fabian Society in 2005 in which he attacked, among others, the Labor Right for being neo-liberal. It's an example of the ideological typecasting the political Left habitually uses. Anything that doesn't conform to their world view of greater government intervention is described as neo-liberal. This epithet is a favourite of the anti-globalisation crowd. Indeed, there is nothing more old Labor than protectionism and industry subsidies.
Much of Rudd's analysis is wrong.
Michael Costa.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/financial-crisis-will-pass-climate-change-wont-garnaut-20081016-52ee.html
THE "unprecedented" financial crisis — no matter how severe — will be short-lived and should not stand in the way of global action on climate change, Ross Garnaut says.
In his final salvo before winding up the Garnaut review office, the outgoing government climate adviser warned it would be bad policy if long-term structural change to cut greenhouse emissions was delayed by a short-term response to economic upheaval.
His comments came hours after Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi threatened to veto a world-leading European Union climate agreement on the grounds that businesses hit by the crisis should not be asked to carry extra costs.
Professor Garnaut urged governments to think about how the world got into the current financial mess — by placing too much emphasis on short-term economics.
He said the financial tumult was not likely to slow growth in emissions, and the available evidence suggested the long-term cost of climate change would be extraordinarily high.
The veteran economist predicted the current crisis would have run its course by December 2009, when a new global deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol is due to be reached at a United Nations meeting in Copenhagen.
http://news.smh.com.au/national/pm-to-meet-business-chiefs-over-crisis-20081016-51u0.html
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says he will be meeting with business leaders in Sydney on Friday to discuss the impact of the global financial crisis.
The meeting comes against the backdrop of further turmoil on global share markets which saw the Australian market drop around 5.5 per cent following the biggest slide on Wall Street since 1987 overnight.
"Fall on share markets and commodities markets reflect a general concern that the global economy is slowing rapidly," Mr Rudd told parliament.
He said the latest drop in US shares came after data showed US retail sales suffered their biggest decline in three years and comments by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.
"Ben Bernanke ... said by restricting flows of credit to households, businesses and state and local governments, the turmoil in financial markets and the funding pressures on financial firms has posed a significant threat to economic growth," Mr Rudd said.
Mr Rudd said the impact of financial market turbulence and stability in recent times has flowed through to equity markets and the real economy.
"That of course has implications for jobs," he said.
He said last Sunday's banking system support package and Tuesday's $10.4 billion economic support package are important and responsible responses.
"At a time when the global economy is going backwards at a pace of knots this level of stimulus is absolutely necessary and is responsible and it should obtain genuine bi-partisan support," he said.
He said business had welcomed the $10.4 billion package.
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