Lost For Words!

Neoliberalism and its Malcontents

Keanu Reeves is one of my favourite actors. He has done quite a lot of interesting roles, starting with playing the stoner boyfriend of Martha Plimpton in the 1989 film Parenthood, where he says ‘Let’s record our love’ whilst brandishing a polaroid camera.

Since that role, he has belied typecasting as a stoner, despite his first lead role being Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan in the Bill and Ted trilogy. Aside from Ted, he has earned great acclamation as John Wick in the surreal ultra-noir series about a hitman at war with the underworld, and in the Matrix franchise as the hero Neo.

Neo is not usually used as a noun, either Proper or Common. Neo is usually used as a prefix, based on the Latin, denoting something new or revived, usually in a political context, and usually in a pejorative way.

For example, we have ‘neo-conservatives’, or neo-cons for short.

Since 9/11 or thereabouts, neo-cons have mostly been regarded as that faction of foreign interventionist Americans who supported the second Gulf War and other military misadventures engaged in during the presidency of Bush fils.

However, if you go back a little further, to the early 1980s, people would describe neo-conservatives as former socialists who had abandoned the socialist cause to support the free world in its struggle against communist tyranny. In 1984, for instance, I remember reading an article on the legacy of Eric Blair which argued ‘Orwell would be a neo-conservative if he were alive today’.

Similarly, we have the term ‘neo-liberal’.

Back in the late 1980s, when I did a course on US Politics – ‘America: Decay of the Liberal Dream’ taught by the late Professor Ray Nicholls if you are curious – neo-liberalism was a new American development in American liberalism.

[Let’s do a quick pause here to differentiate in the use of the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’. In the USA, a liberal is usually someone to the left of centre and a conservative is someone to the right of centre. In the rest of the Anglosphere, a liberal is an adherent to a particular individualist political philosophy which values individual liberty, whilst a conservative is someone who adheres to a somewhat more cryptic political philosophy which shares a lot of the same values, but which also values traditional social and cultural values. Both are considered right of centre.]

1980s neo-liberalism was some form of progressive social democratic political thinking, but which had an American accent to it (Professor Nicholls did emphasise to us that no one had successfully explained why exactly socialism had never developed in America unlike in other Western countries).

Neo-liberalism today is very different from what it was defined as back then. Neo-liberalism is what is now used to describe, usually in a very pejorative way, what in the late 1980s was usually termed ‘neo-classical liberalism’, or more simply, classical liberalism.

Classical Liberalism can probably be contained best in the works of such products of the Scottish Enlightenment as John Locke, Adam Smith, James Mill, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill.

With economists such as Von Hayek and Milton Friedman (as distinct from his son David, who termed himself an anarcho-capitalist and therefore perhaps a ‘post-neo-classical liberal’ – a term I have coined myself) classical liberalism underwent a post war intellectual revival. This is what led to the common use of the term ‘neo-classical liberal’.

Which leads me to a recently published pamphlet which I read yesterday during the 40 degree heatwave, The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life).

I call it a pamphlet in the old fashioned polemical sense, as when Thomas Paine published his essays on his political views over 200 years ago. It’s only about 160 pages in length, and is there to, with a few selective quotes and some expositions of recent political, social and economic developments, blame this amorphous philosophy of neoliberalism for all the ills currently facing the world.

One of its problems is that it hardly quotes any Liberal philosophers at all, except in passing, and when it does, it gets it out of context. On quoting Adam Smith on page 4, in order to introduce his famed concept of the ‘the invisible hand’, the authors state:

‘The rich, he claimed:

…are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.’

The first four words in the quotation marks above are the words of the authors, and the following words in italics are from Adam Smith himself.

A more fuller version of this mention (From Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments ) to put it in proper context is as follows:

The proud and unfeeling landlord views his extensive fields, and without a thought for the wants of his brethren, in imagination consumes himself the whole harvest … [Yet] the capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires… the rest he will be obliged to distribute among those, who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of, among those who fit up the palace in which this little is to be consumed, among those who provide and keep in order all the different baubles and trinkets which are employed in the economy of greatness; all of whom thus derive from his luxury and caprice, that share of the necessaries of life, which they would in vain have expected from his humanity or his justice…The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own convenience, though the sole end which they propose from the labors of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements… They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition.

To fill out our understanding of Smith’s Invisible Hand for proper context, let’s look at the only other time he mentioned it, in The Wealth of Nations:

[…] every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.

Whilst the authors open their pamphlet with an introduction to the Invisible Hand, so as to justify naming their book The Invisible Doctrine, they immediately abandon any further discussion of Adam Smith or any of the related philosophy. John Locke is only mentioned very briefly in the opening, and the utilitarians Mill, Hume, and Mill fils are not mentioned anywhere at all.

Nor is there any genuine effort to try and define what Liberalism is, as a political philosophy which has developed over the past 340 years, or even to outline its values, beyond a few selectively chosen phrases used as cliches. Discussing the merits of promoting individual rights and liberty, as opposed to the appalling alternatives, is beyond the authors.

The remainder of the philosophical exposition of the pamphlet, if you can indeed describe it as a philosophical exposition, is dedicated to misquoting from Hayek and Friedman, whom, whilst valuable for reviving interest in Classical Liberal philosophy amongst economists and politicians, are not themselves particularly original political philosophers – unlike Locke and Smith.

More energy, of course, is devoted to exposing the funding sources and supporters of organisations and think tanks which advocate for policies based on what the authors describe as neoliberal ideas.

The authors argue that the entire purpose of Neoliberalism is to use corporations and the state to enrich an overclass of oligarchs at the expense of the rest of the world.

I am left thinking that the authors have as much understanding of modern finance and capitalism as Karl Marx did (his straw men capitalists with their monopoly of the means of production showed a profound ignorance of the limited liability corporation and its role in economic development).

This impression is exacerbated throughout the book of the phrase ‘Neoliberal International’, as if, like with the revolutionaries and subversive Marxists of the 20th Century with the infamous Communist International, there is some sort of overarching organisation of Neoliberals who plot and scheme for the accumulation of all the wealth in the world. How different is this from the conspiracy theorists who argue about the trilateral commission, the Bilderburg group, or the Illuminati?

Liberalism, particularly in its Classical form, exists, and as a political philosophy, it is beautiful. Neoliberalism, as expressed by disgruntled and discredited former Marxists looking for a straw man to hurl political rocks at, does not.

The Factory Of Sadness Remains Open

Why the Cleveland Browns? Why not the Dallas Cowboys (who have a famous team of cheerleaders) or the Green Bay Packers or the New England Patriots? If one is going to root for (to use that quaint American word they use instead of ‘barrack’) an NFL team, something which is not exactly normal for an Australian born and raised in the western suburbs of Melbourne, then why not choose a team which actually has a history of winning.

After all, I do not have any links to Cleveland or to Ohio, aside from watching the occasional episode of the Drew Carey Show sometime in the 1990s. I did not even actually know where Ohio was in the USA until I read The Pioneers, David McCullough’s engrossing account of the start of the westward migration of Americans in the early 1800s. (It also, sadly, was the last of McCullough’s books – all of which are worth reading.). But I think I had already chosen the Browns as my team before that.

To be honest, I support the Browns out of sheer perversity. As a supporter of the Footscray Football Club (aka the Western Bulldogs), I am used to feeling the love for an underachieving sporting team. Indeed, the 2016 premiership miracle has so sated my appetite for success that I will feel the warm inner glow from that year even if we do not ever win another flag for the rest of my life.

The Cleveland Browns have not won any championship since 1964 – before the Super Bowl era. Nor have they ever played in the Super Bowl. You can tell, as a Bulldogs supporter, that this resonates with me.

Their old stadium was described as a ‘factory of sadness’. The suffering of Browns fans is alluded to in countless TV shows and movies. Memes abound, such as the one with a despairing Browns fan and the caption ‘I once left my 3 Browns tickets on my windshield. I came back and there were 9.’ or the one with two hot women Browns fans ‘Why are females Browns fans cool to date? Cause they’re not expecting a ring in the future!’

I keep the Browns app on my phone so that I can check their progress each NFL season.

Given that it is coming up to Super Bowl soon, I opened the app this evening to read about the Browns’ 2024-25 season, and it was truly bad! They went 3-18 – which even for the Browns is a pretty poor year.

The Browns last made the playoffs (American term for finals) in 2023. They lost in the first week.

Of interest to me at the time was that I received an email from the Melbourne Browns supporter group (I did register for this several years ago) inviting me to attend a pub (Bell’s Family Hotel in South Melbourne) which was playing the playoff game and watch the game with other local Browns supporters.

I did not go, mostly because it was early on a Sunday morning, and I prefer not to start drinking alcohol until after 12pm, but I regret it now, particularly as it was the only invitation to a gathering of local Browns supporters I have received to this point in time. I suppose they only convene when the Browns make the playoffs, as I assume the pubs around Melbourne who show gridiron games live don’t bother to show Browns games unless they are in the playoffs.

So I will not be going to watch a Browns game at a pub anytime real soon. This is a bit of a pity, as I have accumulated heaps of fan gear – t-shirt, hoodie, and jersey (with the name of a player who left them around the same time I bought the jersey at a deep discount from Rebel Sport) – and would love an excuse to wear the gear.

Why Teams Need Their Rivalries

The AFL does not do ‘Rivalry Round’ anymore, or at least not at the moment. When they did do them, typically we would see the interstate clubs would each play their local rival, Carlton Vs Collingwood (obviously), Essendon Vs Richmond (mostly because of the Kevin Sheedy link, but possibly because of that infamous melee in 1974), Hawthorn Vs North Melbourne (because of the three grand finals in the 1970s they played against each other in), Melbourne Vs Geelong (just because…) and Western Bulldogs Vs St Kilda (because we both were bottom of the ladder teams with a distinct lack of success).

The supposed rivalry between my team, the Bulldogs, and St Kilda, does not really have too much bite to it. Failing to win a plurality of premierships (pre 2016 at least) does not really make for a satisfying rivalry. True, St Kilda did beat us in a couple of preliminary finals circa 2010 (or thereabouts), but their failure to then go onto glory erases any real sting.

At best, a rivalry with St Kilda is like drinking zero-alcohol wine – what is the point?

We do have a few teams where the Bulldogs have a better claim to a rivalry. We are now 1-1 in VFL/AFL Grand Finals with Melbourne, as well as being socio-economically different supporter bases. We are 1-0 in Grand Finals with Sydney, and have tended to beat them most times we meet them in recent years. We are 0-1 in Grand Finals with Hawthorn, as well as having been defeated by them in countless lesser finals in my lifetime (such as the 1985 Prelim).

Looking at other teams which I consider hoo-doo teams for us come September, Adelaide seems to have the wood on us every time we play them in a final – not just in the 1997-8 Prelims where they robbed us of Grand Final appearances, but more recently in the 2015 finals series, where a disgruntled second string player allegedly leaked the game plan to his brother in the Adelaide squad. Geelong has also beaten us in more finals than I care to remember, starting with the 1976 elimination final, and most emphatically in the 1992 Prelim (I left that game at three quarter time feeling quite depressed).

And then we have Greater Western Sydney, the newest of our rivals.

In the year of our Premiership Miracle, 2016, the Western Bulldogs slogan was BE MORE BULLDOG. That features on my membership scarf from that year (the one time I opted for a scarf rather than a membership cap).

In a gesture which could be described as either mischievous or mean spirited (I tend to think the latter), GWS choose to create a website that year entitled BE LESS BULLDOG, where they listed all the members of their coaching staff and playing list who had formerly been connected to the Bulldogs.

Obviously, with former local boy Callum Ward and former captain Ryan Griffin both playing for GWS then, it was a very sore spot for me and other Bulldogs supporters.

Possibly that also has to do with the realisation that the AFL probably gave serious consideration to the viability of giving the Western Bulldogs incentives to relocate to Western Sydney at the time that the two expansion clubs were being considered, similar to what was offered to North Melbourne if they were to base themselves permanently in the Gold Coast.

Happily we got the last laugh. Our team went to their obscurely located home ground somewhere in darkest Western Sydney, beat them in that closely fought Preliminary Final to rob them of a place in the Grand Final, and then the following week won the AFL Premiership in what concluded a month long fairy tale.

Even sweeter, former GWS player Tom Boyd kicked three goals for the Bulldogs in that Grand Final, all in the final quarter at a time when we needed to pull away and win the game.

Three years later, when GWS did make a grand final, memes reminded AFL fans that both GWS and Tom Boyd had kicked three goals in a Grand Final. Ha!

Since that time, we have had a rather intense rivalry with GWS. We win some, they win some. We do not give quarter.

It is safe to say that GWS can be considered the New Enemy of the Western Bulldogs.

Of all the other teams that I have listed above, I think that Hawthorn has the most claim to being our Ancient Enemy. This goes back to when they beat us in the 1961 Grand Final, a defeat which has not been avenged yet. Since then, aside from the 1985 Preliminary Final, they have beaten us in a long list of finals in my lifetime.

And yet there is one game which sticks out in my mind – the 2016 Semi Final. That was when we, against all expectations, defeated Hawthorn when they were the reigning premiers. I fondly remember at the 11 minute mark of the final quarter, when we goaled and went 42 points up, all the Hawthorn supporters started leaving. We started singing ‘Good night Hawthorn good night!’ at them as they walked out, the game now beyond doubt.

Hawthorn have bounced back from that – they beat us in that elimination final last September, reminding us that our Ancient Enemy remains a potent one, a truly existential threat for our success and survival.

These rivalries add some flavour to every sporting competition. There is greater satisfaction when a much hated rival club is defeated, and greater angst when they win. This is what truly makes people passionate rather than apathetic about supporting their teams.

I for one would love to see the Bulldogs triumph in an AFL finals series where they eliminate (in the following order) Adelaide, GWS, Geelong, and then Hawthorn.

That would be extremely satisfying.

Not Everyone Likes Rock N Roll….

I just finished reading Land Of The Long Weekend, the late Ronald Conway’s 1978 critique of 1970s Australian society, culture and consumerism.

It was heavy going. Whilst I am quite well read, Conway was even more read, in the way of an autodidact, and fond of quoting his interpretations of many famed authors and philosophers throughout his text, which made it necessary to go slowly and concentrate on comprehending every word. I suspect he needed to do this because, despite becoming a lecturer in Psychology at RMIT, he was self taught and wanted to prove to his readers that his intellect was just as good, or better, than that of people who went to university rather than having to drop out of school at age 15.

Conway, as one can tell from the titles of his books – The Great Australian Stupor was that of his previous opus – had a very jaundiced view of Australian society. He was more or less contemporary with the much more famous Manning Clark and Donald Horne, with whom one could say that he shared the outsider’s desire to mock his surroundings, although his own critiques were from a more conservative viewpoint.

I do not think I got much value out of reading Conway, and it is telling that whilst Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country is still in print after 61 years, Conway’s own book is only indirectly now remembered for the title, which occasionally gets used out of context for the economic inertia of our society which supposedly results from our proliferation of public holidays, rostered days off, and tendency to ‘chuck a sickie’. [Indeed, the reason I ordered an out of print copy through Amazon was because I wondered whether this book addressed these latter issues – it doesn’t, not really.]

But on page 296 came a passage on Conway’s dislike for Rock N Roll. I will quote the best bit of it below:

‘The recent death of the ‘daddy’ of rock, Elvis Presley, at the age of 40, bloated, exploited as well as exploiting, taught no moral to his ageing followers. They mourned his hermaphroditic crooning and jelly-postures of sentimental lewdness as if he had been the dead god Adonis instead of an instrument of the most culturally degrading mass profit industry since the African slave trade.’

I wonder whether Conway preferred classical music over rock, but I am not too inclined to worry about it. Personally, I am rediscovering the 1950s big band Italian lounge music my parents used to play on the weekends in my childhood.

In Which I Deeply Regret Installing Solar Panels

I have just finished emailing a preliminary enquiry to Consumer Affairs Victoria about my recently installed white elephant solar panels.

I deeply regret getting solar panels now, two months on, as they have still not been attached to my electricity account due to the failure of the solar installation company to provide Jemena (ie the actual electricity supplier) with the appropriate information to reconfigure my meter.

As some detail in this sorry saga, I provide the following points:

On 23 October 2024 I paid $4700 for the installation of solar panels (I declined the interest free loan from the state government because I do not like owing money).
At that time I was told that the company was going to arrange everything with my electricity retailer to ensure that the panels were counted in relation to my electricity bill. (This did not happen.)
On 13 December after some enquiries with my retailer (AGL), the solar panel installers sent me documentation which was required to reconfigure my smart meter. I forwarded this to AGL. They raised a request with Jemena on 16 December 2024 for the reconfiguration.
On 6 January 2024, when I decided to check progress, I was advised by AGL that the request for reconfiguration could not proceed because Jemena required additional information in relation to the solar inverter. In particular, a ‘commission CSIP inverter application’ needed to be raised. This was a new requirement.
I immediately contacted the installer, on 6 or 7 January about this. They were apologetic and said they would take care of it.
I contacted Jemena on 14 January and asked them if the required request had been raised and they advised that it had not. I asked them to provide me with written advice so I could provide to the installer. I emailed it to them and asked them to action this matter as a priority.
The installers contacted one of their tradesmen that day to ask them to action this by email.
I checked with Jemena again on 21 January and this matter has still not been attended to by my solar panel installer.

Right now, I have started keeping screenshots of texts and a record of all emails. I am not sure what (if anything) I can do, or how long a complaint to Consumer Affairs will take, nor what they can do.

What I will advise you if you are thinking of getting solar panels is:

Tell any company who cold calls you to go to hell. Stick to some large well known company whom you otherwise deal with for routine things and which you already trust.
Keep in mind that the money you can earn from your solar panels sending power to the grid has just been slashed by 99%.
Solar panels are probably environmentally harmful and create emissions during their construction which will not be easily offset by the power they generate.
You can probably spend the money on something far more worthwhile, like a holiday in Queensland. I sure wish I had!

Stupid me for agreeing to buy from cold callers – but I was in a good mood as I was getting my split cycle aircon system installed and thought that getting panels would be a cost effective way of running my aircon all summer long.

Trump On Greenland: The Return Of Manifest Destiny (or is it Manifest Insanity?)

In the first half of the 19th Century, many Americans were gripped with a sense of Manifest Destiny, an idea that they were destined to control the entire North American continent.

This led them in the 1840s to provoke a war with Mexico as a pretense to conquer large and valuable tracts of land, including everything from the newly independent Texas til California. Then, after the American Civil War, several decades were spent dispossessing, pacifying, and eradicating tribes of native Americans in the interior of the nation.

Not everyone was enamoured of this doctrine. This is probably just as well – it does not sit comfortably in the mostly rules based system which has evolved in the 20th Century after several of the most ruinous wars in history. Ulysses S Grant commented in an interview, many years after the war between the United States and Mexico:

“I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. … The wickedness was not in the way our soldiers conducted it, but in the conduct of our government in declaring war. We had no claim on Mexico. Texas had no claim beyond the Nueces River, and yet we pushed on to the Rio Grande and crossed it. I am always ashamed of my country when I think of that invasion .”

Early on in his Personal Memoirs, when reflecting on his ante-bellum career, Grant sombrely observed:

“The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”

Greenland’s Army Prepares For Trump’s Inauguration

From Sea To Shining Sea indeed!

Once and Future President Trump has made some belligerent comments in recent days which are reminiscent of the ideas of Manifest Destiny, talking about taking control of Greenland, making Canada the 51st state, and regaining ownership of the Panama Canal.

Many of the comments which Trump has made over the years since he embarked upon his political career have seemed to express views which best belong in the 1840s or 1850s.

Much of his isolationism and anti-immigrant rhetoric, which first propelled him into the White House with his promise of a border wall, seem reminiscent of 1850s Nativism (commonly described as the ‘Know Nothings’), which had been directed at the fresh waves of Irish and continental European migrants who were flocking in growing numbers to the USA in newly developed steam ships.

Manifest Destiny was an earlier idea, and one of more lasting impact to shaping the USA. Whilst it found its most cynical and wicked expression in the Mexican War in 1846, Manifest Destiny originally grew from the religious ideas of the puritan ‘pilgrims’ who arrived on the Mayflower, with their attachment to the ‘city on a hill’ from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14).

The pilgrims felt that they were on a Mission from God, and that idea came to permeate American political thinking for centuries to come.

Much as the attempts to force the American Colonies to pay taxes and incur expenses for the maintenance of the military establishment needed to protect the colonies in the Seven Years War are cited as the main reason for declaring independence from Great Britain, British rule also impeded the expansion of the colonies beyond the Appalachian Mountains. This was something which the American colonial leaders deeply resented.

It is not really mentioned, except in passing in the Declaration of Independence, where it is obscurely touched upon:

“He [ie George III] has endeavoured to prevent of the population of these states, for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.“

Nine simple words at the end of a short paragraph. A truth which is more sinister than self evident, but probably one which the leaders of the American Revolution placed greater weight on than many of the other paragraphs justifying their rebellion.

With independence, the fetters came off. They bought, conquered, or annexed everything which is now the United States by the end of the 19th Century, including the formerly independent Kingdom of Hawaii deep in the Pacific Ocean, with little regard for former occupants or sovereignty.

Manifest Destiny made this all OK, as Andrew Jackson might have said (one of his election campaigns is believed to have originated the term ‘OK’, incidentally).

When Trump makes his broad statements about Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal, he is harking back to a time, 180 years ago, when such thinking among Westerners was seen as more or less normal.

Such thinking is not normal anymore. Several ruinous wars (and I am not simply talking about the First and Second World Wars) have caused geopolitical thinking to move away from the idea of warfare as a rational means of dispute resolution, or that conquest of territory is a legitimate expression of foreign policy.

The reversion in 1999 of the Panama Canal Zone to Panamanian sovereignty was a result of a treaty signed by the late Jimmy Carter with the president of Panama in 1977. Many on the American Right deplored this greatly during the 1980s, and demanded that the treaty be disavowed.

The treaty has been in effect for 26 years. What should Trump do now? Disavow it and occupy the canal by force? Such disregard of the sovereignty of other nations in the Americas would not be new – there are plenty of examples of this in my lifetime, including the invasion of Panama to depose General Noriega 36 years ago, and the invasion of Grenada. To say nothing of the CIA coup in Chile in 1972.

But such an action reeks more directly of Manifest Destiny than the superficial excuse of national security given for those invasions and coups. It would be done the same way that treaties were broken with the Iroquois, Shawnee, Cherokee, Sioux, and numerous other Indian nations. Manifest Destiny justified the breaking of those 400 treaties, and it could be similarly used to justify breaking the 1977 treaty on the Panama Canal.

The problem is that if the contemporary USA cannot be trusted to honour some of its treaties, it cannot be trusted to honour any of them.

Take the North Atlantic Treaty. Denmark is a signatory and therefore an ally of the USA. Greenland is an autonomous region of Denmark. Occupying Greenland would be an act of invasion against an ally. The impact on the national security of the USA in causing upheaval in NATO would be enormous, far greater than the gain in gaining Greenland.

Canada? Since the UK effectively defeated the USA in the War of 1812, the only people who have publicly suggested the invasion of Canada are the creators of Southpark, when they produced the first Southpark movie in 1999, and the highly toxic and hypocritical Michael Moore, who made an actual movie (Canadian Bacon) on this premise once. So, there have been two unsuccessful movie comedies on this subject.

One is left to wonder whether Trump is getting his foreign policy ideas from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who are satirists, and who do not want their stated ideas taken seriously. Their other movie creation, Team America: World Police, could also be, worryingly, be taken literally by Trump as a blueprint for foreign relations, given his utterances. None of it seems so funny now, does it?

But when you look at what Trump says on foreign relations, one cannot help but wish for the return of circumspect and mature leaders like General Grant, who saw Manifest Destiny for what it really was – a pseudo theological justification for military conquest.

Vale Charlie of Charlie’s Pizza

There is very little left of the Footscray that I remember as a child. Growing up on Gordon Street, we were forced to move north when the hospital expanded when I was seven. That side of the street got bulldozed. Years later, the Baptist Church over the street closed down and then got redeveloped as units (my brother and I went to the kindergarten which had been located at the back of the church). The part of Gordon Street north of Ballarat Road, adjacent to our next family home, has changed radically in the past 50 years too. The ammunition factory is now Edgewater, and the Modern Maid stove factory got developed into housing in the mid 1990s. Individual houses have been redeveloped at an accelerating rate as well.

A lot of the businesses are gone too – long established ones. Ted The Toyman (est 1930s) became Ted’s Cycles and closed within the past five years, a victim of land taxes. The shop front is still vacant. Only one of the many longstanding shoe shops (Harry’s Shoes) remains (Kifts and Hicks are now just memories). The shop fronts which were Jim Wong’s Chinese restaurant (a Footscray institution) and Poon’s (an even older Chinese restaurant which recently relocated to Sunshine) remain empty. Il Paesano Pizza closed about 10 years ago when the new owners ran it into the ground, and Domenico’s Pizza changed owners about 6 years ago.

Nor should you get me started on listing all the pubs which have been redeveloped or demolished outright – although the Barkly is the one I most lament, due to time spent there with my dad on our walks to Footscray shopping centre.

It looks like another Footscray institution is likely to be gone now. Charlie’s Pizza has been at the Ballarat Road end of Droop Street since 1974. News dropped on Facebook yesterday that its owner, Charlie Morabito, died a couple of days ago.

I have not eaten in Charlie’s for quite some years, as I have not lived within home delivery range since 1996, and I never felt it quite the sort of place where I would want to dine in. My brother, however, is a regular there, and loves doing a late night steak there, and would chat regularly with Charlie about local community gossip.

Charlie also originates from my mother’s home village, Ferruzano, in Reggio Calabria. This makes him what we would call a Paesano, a fellow villager. Most of the people from Ferruzano (commonly known as Ruzani, much the way people from Melbourne are Melburnians and people from Footscray are Footscrayites) moved to Melbourne after the Second World War, so there are more of us here than there are in Italy.

He was quite a character, with his 1970s disco wog hairstyle, sideburns and moustache, all carefully dyed black, even though he was well into his 80s. He also liked to pretend that he was a decade younger than he was. You can probably surmise why – he still had an eye for the ladies.

He stubbornly stayed there on that corner of Droop Street for half a century, making his pizzas and watching Footscray shape shift into what it is now. He was one of those constants, at a time that everything around him was changing, something which we locals could rely on.

And now he too is gone, and with him, we probably see the end of his popular pizzeria too. Footscray and its community is much the poorer for this.

Adding Wesfarmers To My Share Portfolio

A few years ago, during the years of Plague and the isolation that ensued, a close friend of mine emailed me with the suggestion that I don’t need to bother with shares. Unlike most people, he pointed out, I belong to a defined benefit superannuation fund with a generous pension on offer, and in which I have huge equity.

He did have a good point – the actuarial value of my current pension is almost double that of my house, and I am getting a large payroll each fortnight than I did whilst working for the Man (lower tax and no 10% gross voluntary contribution to my super fund will do that) .

But I am so used to having a share portfolio over the past 28 1/2 years that I do not ever see myself divesting myself of shares.

However, I think I have made it fairly clear over the five or so years I have had this blog that whilst I enjoy owning a share portfolio, I am not that enamoured of individual stocks.

Most of my portfolio is held in ETFs, Listed Investment Companies, Real Estate Trusts, and Conglomerates. This way, I diversify my holdings and minimise my risk. After all, I have made some fairly poor decisions in stock picking in the past.

The main exception to that is Treasury Wine Estates, for obvious reasons.

This investment position continues with my latest purchase, 100 shares in Wesfarmers (formerly known as the Westralian Farmers Cooperative).

Wesfarmers owns a very diversified portfolio of businesses, most famously Officeworks, Kmart, Target (which I pronounce in the French way because I am facetious), and Bunnings. But it also stays true to its farmer coop roots with a fertiliser business, and various other assorted ventures.

It even currently is the owner of the Soul Pattison chemist chain, which used to be owned by (and the original core business of) Washington Soul H Pattison, which now, incidentally, is my largest shareholding.

Just like the latter, Wesfarmers has very right to call itself a conglomerate.

At $71.50 per share, it looked a little expensive according to the current broker consensus. But, as the Chinese say about the best time for planting a tree (either today or 20 years ago), the best time to buy shares is either right now or 20 years ago. I’m planning to gradually build up my Wesfarmers share holding, just like I have my Soul Pattison (sans pharmacy) shareholding.

Sadly, the AGM is in Perth each year, so I fear that I will not be checking out their corporate catering as I do when I attend company meetings in Melbourne.

Bernie Finn Returns – Yet Again!

I have written about former local state upper house MP Bernie Finn on various occasions in the past, particularly when I suggested he get given a knighthood (I was being facetious, if you don’t quite know how to read my tone!).

I will be honest and concede that his first coming as an MP in 1992 was of some value. He won the lower house seat of Tullamarine in the state election where the Kirner government got deservedly flushed down the toilet. That was a habitually Labor held seat, and he was not expected to retain it in 1996, but somehow he did. My impression was, that as a relatively youthful MP, he did a good job in holding a place on the Coalition backbench.

By 2006, when proportional representation had been introduced for the state upper house (a mistake I say – the upper house vote should be restricted to homeowners and other ratepayers rather than allowed to the plebs), Our Bernie got a second chance. He topped the Liberal ticket for Western Metropolitan, which guaranteed him election.

As the Liberals decided not to permit sitting state MPs to be challenged for their preselections for many years, he was able to retain his seat for four consecutive terms.

During that time, he increasingly showed a maverick and rather feral nature, leading some to ponder whether it would have been better to open up preselections for challenge earlier.

In the end, he was expelled from the party room over some tone deaf social media comments on abortion – an issue which, whilst supposedly near to his heart, he had never bothered actually taking a stand on in parliament.

As I have written before – his expulsion was way overdue. He really should have been expelled when he secretly reneged on a pairing arrangement and voted in a division when he had begged for an exemption as he did not want to be present in the parliament at Easter. That the opposition leader and the parliamentary party tolerated his underhand behaviour at that time did not do them any credit.

After his expulsion, Our Bernie returned to his first political love, the DLP, and brought a disgruntled Labor MP Adem Somyurek (famed for branch stacking) with him, in time for the 2022 state election. Our Bernie was not successful in his bid for reelection under the auspices of the DLP, but his boon companion was.

At the time, I described the DLP decision to run Our Bernie and Mr Somyurek Esq as a Hail Mary Pass.

My thoughts at the time were the following:

Hospital or Hail Mary Pass? The DLP Gamble Their Principles on the Prospect of Electoral Success

In that post, I observed my views on the DLP’s gamble thus:

This does not strike me as without significant risk. Neither has the integrity or idealism which normally represent a DLP candidate , but represent a blatant lack of principles and a proven disregard for ethical behaviour in their public life (Finn in his Good Friday ‘pairing’ stunt and Somyurek in his branch stacking).

If either was to be elected, who is to say that they would not then desert the DLP for another opportunity later down the track? Or even worse, were to remain as DLP MPs whilst repeating their history of reprehensible behaviour.

I more or less warned that:

The more likely outcome is that the DLP do not win any seats, but appear discredited and cynical through the cold and calculated decision to gamble their principles and ideals on two tired old renegades. This could end up costing them support amongst their existing members.

Interestingly, neither of these gentlemen remain in the DLP today – and whilst the DLP actually did help one of these chaps get elected, Mr Somyurek is now listed on the Victorian Parliament website as an independent and Our Bernie has jumped ship, again, for the resurrected Family First party as their lead Senate candidate for the next election.

So I think that the decision by the DLP in 2022 to back the Finn-Somyurek ticket has only served to discredit the DLP, and they don’t even have a current seat in any parliament to show for it – something that they will need, if they don’t have 1000 paid up members, to contest the increasingly imminent federal election.

Perhaps Our Bernie realised that, prompting his decision to join Family First.

What has inspired me to write about Our Bernie today is that after much inactivity on Facebook, he has recently appeared in my Facebook feed, in full throated voice, unmitigated and unfiltered. I’m not quite sure when he started posting on Facebook, as I have only been able to doom scroll back about two weeks, but it is clear that he is posting many times per day, every day. I can only assume that he is sitting around with a glass of decent shiraz in one hand and his smartphone in the other, thinking of what next to say.

His utterances (I will not dignify them with the description ‘writings’) are mostly aimed at his dislike of most of his former colleagues in the Victorian Parliamentary Liberal Party (except for his replacement, Moira), his joy at Trump’s reelection, and his Moiraesque views on abortion and gender issues. Interspersed between those are some ad hominem jabs aimed at Dictator Dan and Albo.

In other words, they are quite self-serving and immature – particularly for someone whom I believe to be into their sixties by now.

We have this to look forward to between now and the federal election, and I dearly hope that Our Bernie does not block me on social media, as I find him quite entertaining.

Puneet Puneet Redux

When walking to the bus stop this morning, I saw the front page of the Herald Sun – a shrink wrapped copy lying on the driveway of a house somewhere around the corner.

‘Bring Him Back!’ was the headline.

Having grown up reading The Sun News Pictorial in the morning and The Herald in the evening (prior to their sad merger into the one entity in 1990), I knew exactly whom the headline writer was referring to: Puneet Puneet.

Puneet Puneet (what a name!), as everyone knows, is Melbourne’s answer to Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs. Except that Biggsy seems to have had a lot more panache and verve in his career as a fugitive from justice.

As a recap, Puneet Puneet was a 19 year old learner driver who had an unfortunate accident in Southbank in 2009 where he killed someone. It did not help that he was drink driving and speeding either. He pleaded guilty to the subsequent charges early on and was released on bail pending sentencing. He then ‘borrowed’ the passport of a friend and fled Australia.

Since then, attempts to have him extradited back to Australia have proven ultimately fruitless. He was arrested at his wedding in 2012 (one of his friends could not resist the reward money to inform on his whereabouts), and has been in and out of custody since then. The Herald Sun today observed that he has had 147 court appearances so far whilst fighting his extradition.

The sole ‘current’ road block to his extradition comprises domestic violence charges laid in 2022. Apparently extradition cannot occur until those charges are dealt with – which can take 4 to 6 years.

The article in today’s Herald Sun was another plea from Puneet Puneet’s victim’s father for the Federal Government to do something to expedite the extradition. I can sympathise with his desire for the delays in his son’s killer facing justice, but I also have long since formed the view (as in an earlier post on this case https://lostforwords.blog/2020/04/24/the-strange-and-highly-dickensian-case-of-puneet-puneet/) that the Indian legal system is sufficiently Dickensian as to make the Courts of Chancery in Dickens’ tedious novel Bleak House seem efficient.

So far, to the frustration of involved parties, the legal team behind Puneet Puneet have tried all sorts of absurd but highly effective tactics to delay extradition. At one point, a new judge was appointed to the case and wanted both sides to repeat their verbal arguments – making me wonder about the probity of the new judge’s motives.

Now there is the domestic violence accusation. I do not know what to believe. But I do not envy Mrs Puneet. I expect that her parents arranged her marriage to this highly successful chap because of his family’s relative wealth. To have her groom torn from her during their wedding celebration would have been humiliating (but possibly also a blessing). Since then, he at one point disappeared whilst on bail with his mistress (a woman who probably does not have her parents to blame for her connection to such a fine and honourable gentleman).

Does the domestic violence accusation have merit? I could easily expect someone with the demonstrated character of Puneet Puneet in the fifteen intervening years since he fled Australia to commit domestic violence. But it is very possible that this is just a cynical ploy by his legal team to buy even more time, and that Mrs Puneet has been bullied by the family and the legal sharks into making these allegations mainly to help him evade justice in Australia.

After all, the societal and cultural attitudes demonstrated in many parts of India towards women are not exactly convincing that domestic violence is abhorred and prosecuted. Don’t take my word for it – look at section 6 of the US State Department Report on Human Rights Practices for India:

https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/india/

I am very cynical about the likelihood of Puneet Puneet returning to Melbourne anytime this decade (if at all) to face justice. The only consolation to the family of his grieving victim is that the Puneet family has probably spent a large part of their family fortune on keeping him away from justice, and that he has, at least, spent considerable time in remand at various intervals over the past 12 years.

But what will happen if he does return? Will he be allowed to recant his original guilt plea and demand a trial? Will his legal team argue that the publicity and opprobrium he has incurred since his flight means that he cannot get a fair trial?

I do not expect any of this to end very soon.