As a child, I used to watch a lot of old Warner Brothers cartoons on the TV. Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies etc. Mostly they were organised into either The Bugs Bunny Show or The Porky Pig Show. And some were The Road Runner Show.

Wile E Coyote, the hapless protagonist of the Road Runner Show, is a very American character: endlessly ingenious, inventive, resourceful, optimistic, persistent. And totally incapable of realising when to cut his losses or to learn lessons from history. [I am not sure that the creators of this character intended viewers to read so much into him as that, or what it says about their mid 20th century take on American society.]

When I look at what is happening in the stock market at the moment, where there is a a significant upward bounce from the lows we experienced in March, with the pandemic still raging out of control across most of the world, ravaging communities and the global economy, governments and reserve banks printing money at an unprecedented rate, geopolitical turmoil, all of that, things do not really seem to make much sense. Markets should be much much lower than they are. Things are much worse than they were in March.

What helps me to make sense of it are the Road Runner cartoons, and what frequently happens to Wile E Coyote. Oft times, we see him speeding off in pursuit of the Road Runner. He is so intent on his prey that he fails to see that he has run all the way off a cliff, and keeps on running. Eventually, he realises that he no longer has any ground under him, and looks down. Only then do the laws of gravity take effect, and he falls into the canyon, hard.

Share markets are like our friend the Coyote right now. They have run off the cliff, but have not realised this yet. When they do, Boom!, we get the second wave of the bear market.

Since the age of seventeen, when Suzanne Vega was on the charts with her debut single Marlene on the wall and then the Pretty In Pink soundtrack song Left of Centre, I have been a fan of her music. When I acquired her debut album and played it constantly during swot-vac before my HSC exams, she became my favourite singer, and she still is.

I remember, when her first greatest hits collection, Tried and True, came out in 1999, that it was a sign that I was getting old when one of my long time favourite singers was putting out a greatest hits album.

But at that time, when she included, aside from her soundtrack contributions Left of Centre and Woman on a Tier, two songs which had not previously appeared on any of her studio albums (Rosemary and Book and a Cover), feeling a little bit disappointed, as I knew that there was at least one early song which had not made it onto any studio album.

I knew that because at some point, either in 1986 or 1987, I was browsing Brashs Highpoint (Brashs is a long defunct record chain), and saw an early live album of her music, which had some song whose name I did not quite recall, but which had the word ‘station’ in it.

So for years, I wondered about where I could find that song. Close Up, the four volume re-recording of her back catalogue, did not include it.

Last night, I rediscovered it. When browsing Apple Music, I found recently digitally reissued two early live albums by Suzanne Vega, both of which featured Black Widow Station. That must be it. That niggling question buried deep in the back of my mind since my teenage years is finally answered.

As an added bonus, there is another long forgotten early song, The Rent Song, on one of those live albums. I can see why, perhaps, these songs never made the cut on her early studio albums – there were a lot of great songs to choose from. And later on, I suppose her song writing gradually changed so that they would not be a great fit on her five later albums (particularly not the Carson McCullers inspired concept album she put out as album number 9 in 2016).

Playing those songs now, along with the other classics that appear on those live albums, reminds me a bit of the good times of being in one’s late teens. [Not that I would ever want to be seventeen again.]

“Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all boil down to one sentence, ‘it is right to rebel!’ For thousands of years, it has been said that it was right to oppress, it was right to exploit, and it was wrong to rebel. This old verdict was only reversed with the appearance of Marxism…. And from this truth there follows resistance, struggle, the fight for socialism.”

This quote is from self-styled Marxist and successful warlord and dictator Mao Tse Tung. I am taking it from page one of my copy of the 1972 book, It Is Right To Rebel, which was a contemporaneous account of the student radical protests at Monash University of that era of the late 1960s and 1970s.

It was a very different time. I was a toddler, we still had military conscription and were committed to a questionable war in Vietnam, and the McMahon government was in the last months of a 23 year Coalition reign over Australia.

And at my future university, Monash, there were regular student protests.

There were still occupations of the admin building when I was an undergrad, by anti-fees demonstrators. Much as I am a very conservative person, I am also a romantic, and I do like the idea of students questioning the status quo and protesting. It is one of the things which is very healthy about our democracy and civil society, even if I do not always (or often) agree with the protestors.

By the mid 1990s, the last sad echo of the dissent of the early 1970s on campus was when Dr Jim Cairns, former Deputy Labor Leader and acting Prime Minister, would set up a card table outside the union building on an occasional afternoon and try to sell some of his old books. Passing by en route to a meeting with some fellow postgrads (in the one semester I took my part time MA seriously enough in comparison to full time work to actually still visit the campus), I would stop and engage in polite small talk with Dr Cairns. After all, just over two decades earlier, he would have spoken not too many steps from where he sat chatting with me, enthralling the better part of ten thousand students with his words.

That time would so quickly sweep away the memory of his place in the history of that era was something I found profoundly tragic.

What is going on at the University of Queensland at the moment is far more tragic. They are seeking to expel a student radical, who has done nothing more than express dissent with the University of Queensland’s Finlandizing policies towards Communist China.

I only became aware of the case of Drew Pavlou in the past week, and I think that the below article from the Guardian serves as a good narrative of what is going on:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/24/how-a-20-year-old-student-put-the-spotlight-on-australian-universities-cosy-relationship-with-china

Protests on university campuses are part of what makes them interesting places, and particularly what make them a healthy contributor to our democracy. Student occupations of admin buildings, which happened, in my time, on many campus around Australia, were a healthy, albeit rather Quixotic, sign of dissent.

University administrations tolerated them. And perhaps they saw them the way that I do, as a healthy thing. But that is a different time again, when universities were less interested in the bottom line, and more interested in intellectual freedom and academic enquiry.

Nowadays, the mutterings about the decay in the academic standards and moral position of universities in Australia has started to go from a whisper to a scream. A blind eye is frequently turned to plagiarism, and every attempt is made to pass the paying customers, including through group rather than individual assessments.

Is it any wonder that a university which is firmly committed to encouraging as many customers from Communist China to attend would wish to ingratiate itself to its paymasters by seeking to suppress dissent where it can.

Last year, during his participation in a Hong Kong pro-democracy protest on campus, Mr Pavlou was assaulted. The Chinese Consul General in Queensland, Xu Jie, who is an adjunct professor of the University of Queensland, praised the spontaneous patriotic behaviour of the people who participated in this violent counter protest. Having read Silent Invasion, I strongly suspect that Professor Xu may have ordered the counter protest.

Of course, Professor Xu and the violent anti-democracy protesters are not subject to sanction from the University of Queensland. A 20 year old undergraduate and assault victim is the one accused of bringing the University into disrepute.

I think that the University of Queensland’s administration has brought itself into disrepute. And their heavy handed attack on one of their students will have ongoing consequences for their reputation. The Free World is watching.

Every few years my CD player stops working properly and I need to go buy another one. After all, I have a library of about 300 CDs that I have paid good money for and should listen to more often.

However, this is 2020, not 1990. I bought myself this iMac almost 18 months ago and it is mostly all I now need, supposedly – a replacement for my TV and CD player combined, and all the world’s music is at my finger tips.

And when I go looking at JB HiFi, just about the only place where I can find a CD player to buy these days, the range is, well, a little more limited than I remember. I am not into stereos etc – I just want something which will play the music I like, in a modestly enjoyable way.

Hence, I have not bothered yet to replace my CD player and the CD case in the lounge will just continue to gather dust.

Because, of course, I have a music streaming service, and that means that I should be able to get everything that I owned on CD.

Not only that, but I have two now. I resubscribed to Apple Music at some point last year, and recently I added Amazon Prime (not for the music or the home delivery, but for the video).

Today, it occurred to me that as I am working from home, perhaps I should listen to some music. So I felt that I might, in between my frequent Skype meetings, play as much of the Suzanne Vega back catalogue as I can fit into a day filled with constant interruptions.

I wanted to play it in publication order, from the self-titled debut album in 1985 which I have been listening to since 1986, right up til time to log out from the laptop and start thinking about dinner.

I got through the first three albums – Suzanne Vega, Solitude Standing, and Days Of Open Hand. Then, as the day prepared to draw to a close and I had a few minutes before my next Skype with two of my staff members, I thought it was time for album number 4 – 99.9 Fahrenheit Degrees (which, by the way, is the last of her albums which I really like – after 1993, she seemed to lose her way a bit and aside from a couple of songs on her greatest hits album, there’s nothing more recent that matches her early glories).

Except… 99.9 Fahrenheit Degrees is the one album of hers not listed on Apple Music. Rather than go onto her fifth album, Nine Objects Of Desire, it occurred to me that I am an Amazon Prime member now, and perhaps the $20 I pay per month might get me access to the album there.

What I found was rather displeasing. Amazon Prime’s music section is not just very user unfriendly, and mostly directed at trying to channel you into signing up for yet another more premium subscription to give you more music for a further fee (talk about bait and switch), but it does not seem to allow you to even play an album (not that one, but another one which was represented to me as available via Prime) continuously.

I have had a gradually building resentment towards and distrust of Amazon for several years. So today that ratcheted up several notches in the one go.

Two paid music streaming services, and neither has what I wanted to listen to – and one was making it impossible for me to just set it to the singer I wanted to hear and leave it alone.

That, my friends, is a first world problem. Let’s be grateful for that.

In one of the early seasons of The Simpsons, there is an episode ‘Lisa The Beauty Queen’ where Lisa is runner up for the Little Miss Springfield pageant and then becomes Little Miss Springfield after the winner gets struck by lightning. Lisa being Lisa, she is not content to be a figurehead for the powerful interests behind the pageant and quickly becomes outspoken on issues she feels strongly about, to the point where those vested interests come to see her as a major liability they need to depose.

Krusty the Clown, Big Tobacco, and the corrupt town fathers anxiously look for a way to remove their problem. The solution comes when they realise that Homer wrote something on the application form in a spot which he was not mean to write in. On that minor hitherto overlooked technicality, Lisa is stripped of the Little Miss Springfield title.

When I read some of the details as to why Communist China has just slapped an 80% tariff on Australian barley imports, I am reminded somewhat of Krusty the Clown and his corrupt henchmen in Springfield.

Apparently there has been issues in relation to our barley exports for about 18 months. That they now come to the boil just as Australia is leading calls for an enquiry into the origins of the Pandemic, an enquiry which Communist China was most hostile towards until the last possible moment, does not appear merely coincidental.

The allegation is that Australian barley is subsidised and that this makes the imposition of a high tariff justified. The main purported subsidy is some sort of social security payment to farmers. This is risable, and not even the barest of fig leaves to cover the naked intentions of the Communist regime’s desire to punish Australia for leading the calls for an International enquiry.

This of course, not the only threat to our trade. A couple of years ago, when Huawei was unsurprisingly bundled out of contention for our 5G network on national security grounds (you would need to be very naive to consider that a company based in a totalitarian regime was a safe bet to run a nationwide communications network), there were bans on coal imports from Australia (however, there are a lot of Australians, myself not exactly one of them, who would welcome an end to all Australian coal exports). And Canada, after it honoured an international arrest warrant on a Huawei executive, was also subject to retaliatory bans on their exports to Communist China.

Communist China is a rogue state, which is treated as a mainstream nation mainly for the sheer size of its economy, which countries and companies worldwide wish to trade with. The human rights abuses (think of the Uighurs for example), the thefts of intellectual property, the menacing behaviour in the South China Seas, these are all matters which are conveniently ignored.

However now, with the global economy under serious threat from a Pandemic which probably originated in a biowarfare lab in Wuhan (not, mind you, created there, simply a naturally occurring virus which was being studied under conditions of criminally negligent biosecurity), and people forced to bury their loved ones in conditions which are less than ideal, the degree of tolerance for a country which has so many inherent flaws in its political system is dropping fast.

When threats are not even thinly veiled, and followed by punitive measures whose stated and technical justification is highly unconvincing, it is time to wonder. The Communist Chinese ambassador recently said that perhaps Communist China might not now want to let its students come to Australia, or to buy our beef or wine.

I say OK. Let’s trade with the rest of the world instead. Whilst the opening up of trade with the PRC 30 years ago was done in the hope of both liberalising their economy and their political system, only one happened. For such a large part of the world’s people to still live under such capricious tyrants is a tragedy.

Our universities are turning into degree mills, rather than focusing on providing quality education to the Australian community. Wines popular in the export market are priced out of the reach of Australian drinkers. Houses in our major cities are being priced out of the reach of our community due to the flight of money from Communist China from those who get rich on that regime, but wisely do not trust it to allow them to keep their wealth or their lives. We should be finding a way to either trade our coal and iron ore to other nations, or to use them in our own neglected industries. We should be eating the best of our red meat here, not sending it there.

Who really needs to be Little Miss Springfield, or to trade with Communist China? Our leaders, both political and business, need to reflect on that.

www.youtube.com/watch

As a twelve year old I liked this song. As an awake (not ‘woke’) fifty one year old I love it!

Postscript- not sure that the link works but the song is Pell Mell ‘No Word From China’ . YouTube, you are unfit for purpose.

I recently read Jarrod Diamond’s latest book, Catastrophe, in which he discusses how various countries he knows well have dealt with an existentialist crisis facing them. One of those is Australia.

The first country he writes about in his book is far flung Finland, somewhere on the far side of the world close to the frozen northern wastes, sandwiched between Russia and the Scandinavian countries (of which Finland insists it is part).

Finland’s existentialist crisis arose from the war of aggression which the Soviet Union launched against it at the start of the Second World War, at the same time that the Soviet Union sought to reclaim the other recently independent nations which had been part of the Russian Empire. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia all ceased to be independent.

Finland, although it had the misfortune to find itself a co-belligerent of the Axis Powers, managed to retain its independence. This came at a great price – 100,000 dead out of a population of less than four million (that is approximately eight times the losses per capita that Australia suffered) and the loss of its second largest city and a slice of its territory.

After the war, faced with the menace of a very large and aggressive neighbour, the USSR, Finland sought a modus vivendi which many in the West (including a young Dr Diamond) found appalling. They compromised on their foreign policy, their internal politics, and on their freedom of press and speech, in order to prevent the USSR from feeling a need to invade and remove their remaining independence.

They also maintained a very high ratio of reserve forces, so as to remind the Soviets that whilst military victory over Finland was inevitable, it would again be extremely costly.

The USSR hence came to accept the independence of Finland, the politically neutral neighbour which would not criticise them or give them any cause to invade and establish it as a buffer state, the way that it had in several instances in Eastern Europe.

Finlandize became a verb, meaning:

to induce a country to favour, or refrain from opposing, the interests of a more powerful country despite not being politically allied to it.

Which brings us to the current state of relations between Australia and the tyrannical state that is Communist China.

Two years ago, Clive Hamilton, a respected academic, wrote a book called Silent Invasion, in which he sought to warn Australians about the subversion of our democracy and the compromise of our political process by Communist China. His usual publisher, Allen and Unwin, declined to publish this book. Accusations have been made that this is the book that Communist China tried to stop.

I bought three copies, and made sure that each was widely circulated and read. It is the least that I can do as a responsible and patriotic citizen.

I do not recall Dr Hamilton using the term ‘Finlandize’ in his book, but I do recall that he voiced concerns that Communist China’s goals included reducing Australia to a client state, where our alliance with the USA was abandoned, where criticism of China’s interests was suppressed, and where we might even be prepared to compromise on our legal and political freedoms.

Dr Hamilton did mention various ‘soft power’ techniques being used, such as the mobilisation of the Chinese student population in Australia to oppose Free Tibet demonstrations, and the donations strategically being made to our major political parties, so as to mute any scrutiny.

Soon after that, the then Senator Sam Dastayari proved the effectiveness of this when he was found to be parroting support for Communist China’s aggressive foreign policy in contravention of his own party’s policies. Thankfully, in his indiscretions, Mr Dastayari has done the Australian people a great service, in that he has provided a very stark illustration of the peril under which our democracy now can be compromised.

He is not Robinson Crusoe, sadly. Politicians of either colour, usually on their retirement from politics, have taken Beijing’s shilling (or yuan) through lucrative lobbying fees, or company directorships. Paul Keating, sadly, seems to be the most vocal of those in defending the interests of the PRC and criticising those Australians who are concerned about that influence, proof, as I have always suspected, that a nationalist is not a patriot.

Twiggy Forrest, for all the the good that he has done and continues to do, featured heavily in Silent Invasion, given that he has such extensive business interests dependent on trade with the PRC. His recent behaviour and utterances would probably cause him, if this book was to be revised for a second edition, to feature more prominently again.

His recent comments about the origins of coronavirus reek of Finlandization:

“Because it just might be Australia, it just might be Britain, it just might be China.”

This is nowhere near the standard of the Communist Chinese official who speculated that the US Army had brought coronavirus to China, but it is the sort of supposedly offhand comment which will reassure PRC officials about the wisdom of continuing to do business with Mr Forrest and his companies.

Of course, Communist China would like to be reassured about the wisdom of continuing to trade with Australia more generally. They do not like it when our political leaders call for an international enquiry into the origins of the pandemic. As a direct result, our beef and barley trade with Communist China is currently under threat.

Finlandizing is a drastic step, and not one that Australia should ever take in relation to Communist China.

Firstly, the consequences of Finlandizing are terrible.

Do we really want to abandon our long held military alliances with other anglophonic democracies such as the US, which give us protection from the risk of foreign invasion, and which would leave us at danger of aggression from regional powers such as Communist China?

Do we want to abandon our ethical and decent voice in foreign affairs, where we do call out tyrannical and appalling behaviour?

Do we want to institute practices where we silence internal critics of our government and its policies, particularly where those criticism may offend our economic interests offshore?

Do we abandon the strong guarantees of political and legal liberty that have developed since the time of Magna Carta in 1215?

Ask yourself as to whether the trade and economic benefits which we gradually have obtained over the past 30 years are really worth selling our legal and political liberties for, the birthright of the Australian people? It really would be similar to Esau selling his birthright for some red pottage.

Secondly, is there any real need for us to Finlandize?

Finland is a small nation, which shares a very long land border with Russia (ie the former Soviet Union). It was very far from any potential help, and even further from any help whom one would want to call upon in 1939.

Australia, on the other hand, lies about 5000 miles south of Communist China. To reach and threaten Australia militarily, Communist China requires a much more reliable army than that it now has, and a blue water navy. It first needs to threaten a large number of its neighbours to the north. They will need to neutralise our alliance with the US, who do have the largest blue water navy on Earth, as well as other superior forces. They cannot menace us militarily.

Through the use of soft power, various politicians and business leaders have become sympathetic to Communist China. This is now on the public record and in the public eye. Such views cannot now be held and expressed without being closely scrutinised as for motive and for loyalty. Thank you, Mr Dastayari.

Communist China is currently a major trading partner of Australia. However, this is a problem we share with much of the rest of the world, where many have been burying their dead without ceremony during the pandemic. There will be a reckoning, and a trade reorientation out of the recession which has been caused by the Wuhan pandemic.

The costs of trading with Communist China now threaten to seriously outweigh the benefits for the rights and liberties, not merely the prosperity, of all Australians, and indeed of the nation.

Let us not Finlandize, or even make the diplomatic noises associated with complicity with the tyranny that is Communist China. This is the time where we need to call them out for the threat that they pose to their own people and to world peace.

Rodney Dangerfield was, in my view, rather intellectually underrated. His movie characters tended to be crass and nouveau rich, but rather than showing that money can’t buy you class, they showed up the posh snobs with inherited money, who might have more refined accents and manners, but who were far more ruthless and grasping.

That is never more so than in his 1986 film, Back To School, about a self-made tycoon who decides to enrol at University so as to encourage his son not to drop out. He was able to attract some pretty smart screenwriters, as well as persuading Kurt Vonnegut to make a cameo as himself (that is always a plus with me).

It was my first exposure to the writings of James Joyce, some four or five years before I read Ulysses (assuming that anyone can claim to have read the unreadable), and about three years before Kate Bush covered some of the same prose from that passage in her song The Sensual World.

It also was my first exposure to the poetry of Dylan Thomas, where the final act of the film starts with Dangerfield reciting Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night to inspire himself to pass the rigorous oral exam.

I did not get around around to actually reading Dylan Thomas until a few years later, when I was about 25 and first opened his unique and lyrical voice play, Under Milk Wood, left completed but unperformed amongst his papers when he died in 1953, at age 39.

Dylan Thomas could perhaps be described as so typically Welsh as to be untypical, hard living, hard drinking, and melodically lyrical. He drank himself to an untimely death, and perhaps the daemons that drove his writing drove much more than that.

A few years later, a young American, Robert Zimmerman, was to adopt the surname Dylan after reading some of his poems, and to become, many years later, Nobel Literature Prize Laureate, despite writing songs, which are best to listen to, not read.

Perhaps that is not grounds for objection, given that the foundation of our Western literary tradition lies with the mythical Homer, the blind poet, and the centuries of oral recitation of complex poetry by illiterate Illyrian bards, between the dark ages after the fall of Troy and when the Greeks learned to read and write again.

Nor, when I write here about Dylan Thomas, and I dive back into my copy of Under Milk Wood, can I ignore the fact that he did primarily intend for much of his work to be recited out loud, rather than to be read in silence.

Dylan Thomas displaced T.S. Eliot as my favourite poet about nine years ago, and when I dive back into his rich lush lyricism, I remember exactly why I made that choice, and why I feel that for all that modern Western culture owes Bob Dylan, the wrong man bearing that name holds a Nobel Prize for Literature.

Dylan Thomas’ prose and poetry are beautifully interwoven, like an ornate spider’s web, such that to quote an extract from one of his works is like holding up to the light one piece of a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, far insufficient to do him justice.

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless

and bible-black, the cobble streets silent and the

hunched, courters’-and rabbits’ wood limping

invisible down to the sloeblack, slow black,

crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are

blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the

snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there

in the muffled middle by the pump and the town

clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in

widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and

dumbfound town are sleeping now.

So opens Under Milk Wood, with the First Voice so ably performed originally by his fellow hard living Welshman, Richard Burton.

Come closer now.

I am so enraptured by the poetry of Dylan Thomas that, a bit like those eager evangelical gentlemen of the Gideon Society who hand out free Gospels to passerbys and ensure your motel room has a Bible in it (Hunter S Thompson owes them a lot), I was so keen for others to come to appreciate Dylan Thomas that I lent my copy of his collected poems to a friend about five years ago. I am still waiting for it to be returned.

So this week, being starved of his work for so long, I ordered another copy of his poems from the local bookshop. It arrived on Friday, and it is open in front of me as I write.

Do not go gentle into that good night is one of his greatest and most accessible poems. Aside from Rodney Dangerfield’s recitation of it in a movie, Michelle Pfeiffer a few short years later (and yet already a quarter century before today), in Dangerous Minds, introduces it to her English class, alongside the lyrics of the other Dylan. Nineteen lines, in six short bittersweet stanzas, grieving the decline into old age of his father:

And you, my father, there on the sad height

Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The controversial prize winning novelist briefly known twenty five years ago as Helen Demidenko named her novel after Dylan Thomas’ short poem The hand that signed the paper, and quoted the first and third stanzas at the front of the book (I have more than one first edition of this novel):

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,

Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;

These five kings did a king to death.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,

And famine grew, and locusts came;

Great is the hand that holds dominion over

Men by a scribbled name.

I thought after re-reading these prescient words that perhaps he had written it after Munich, but no, it was published in 1935, when he was barely 21.

But what really cements Dylan Thomas as my favourite poet, and as truly great, are the one hundred and eleven lines in the two verses which make up In Country Sleep. This is truly a work of genius, which runs and rolls and rhymes in uncounted ways.

Here are just the last few stanzas of it, to give you an idea of just how beautiful and ingenious it is, and how his death was such a true loss to the world of letters:

Illumination of music! the lulled black-backed
Gull, on the wave with sand in its eyes! And the foal moves
Through the shaken greensward lake, silent, on moonshod hooves,
In the winds’ wakes.
Music of elements, that a miracle makes!
Earth, air, water, fire, singing into the white act,

The haygold haired, my love asleep, and the rift blue
Eyed, in the haloed house, in her rareness and hilly
High riding, held and blessed and true, and so stilly
Lying the sky
Might cross its planets, the bell weep, night gather her eyes,
The Thief fall on the dead like the willy nilly dew,

Only for the turning of the earth in her holy
Heart! Slyly, slowly, hearing the wound in her side go
Round the sun, he comes to my love like the designed snow,
And truly he
Flows to the strand of flowers like the dew’s ruly sea,
And surely he sails like the ship shape clouds. Oh he

Comes designed to my love to steal not her tide raking
Wound, nor her riding high, nor her eyes, nor kindled hair,
But her faith that each vast night and the saga of prayer
He comes to take
Her faith that this last night for his unsacred sake
He comes to leave her in the lawless sun awaking

Naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come.
Ever and ever by all your vows believe and fear
My dear this night he comes and night without end my dear
Since you were born:
And you shall wake, from country sleep, this dawn and each first dawn,
Your faith as deathless as the outcry of the ruled sun. 

Let me start by saying that despite the suggestiveness of the heading of this posting, I am not announcing a Road To Damascus style conversion to Marxism, socialism, or even social democracy. I remain a cultural conservative with a commitment to politically and economically libertarian values (much as I dislike the word ‘libertarian’).

But I have always had a degree of sympathy for protesters. Aside from the fact that they are needed for the continuance of a healthy democracy (as is the tolerance of protesters – by tolerating them so heartily as I do, I am actively contributing to the health of our pluralistic society, no?), I admire the Quixotic idealism of protesters, even when I think they are way wrong or being just plain silly.

At the time the Occupy Movement were active several years ago, after the Global Financial Crisis, I thought that they were either way wrong, or almost crazy. But whilst I am still a believer in free market capitalism and the idea known as ‘democratic capitalism’, I cannot sit around unquestioningly accepting the current practices of reserve banks without thinking that there are a few things which are very wrong, and which require me to at least ponder whether the people in the Occupy Movement had a point (rather than feel inclined to call out at them something witty like “Hey you, get off the drugs and get a job!”).

Skepticism is not a bad thing, and it does not mean that you abandon the beliefs or values that you try to adhere to. I have been skeptical, to varying degrees, about religion and the existence of God since I was 15, yet I still tick the Roman Catholic box on the census form and self-describe as Catholic in the profile for this blog.

Similarly, I can and should be skeptical about some of the tenets of capitalism, in theory or in practice. Especially at the moment, when not only are we facing the most serious economic crisis since the Second World War but I have significantly more in savings than I did at the time of GFC or any of the other financial downturns since 1987.

‘Economic rationalism’ is a good starting point. This is the assumption that individuals are going to behave in a rational and self interested way, and that cumulatively, the synergy of enlightened, rational, self-interested individuals is going to result in the best economic outcomes for the whole.

On the whole, this still remains better (both from a moral and a utilitarian perspective) than what the main alternative is – central planning. After all, if you cannot trust individuals to make decisions which are the best for themselves, can you trust one person, or (even worse) a committee of people, to make better decisions for everyone else? What makes the central planner cleverer or more rational than each other individual?

But that is the fallacy both of Capitalism and Communism. Both doctrines place great weight on human rationalism. Capitalism, in that individuals through rational decision making, are going to make separate decisions which cumulatively are going to result in greater riches for all. Communism, in that all individuals will form some sort of collective consciousness that will result in a paradise.

As I have observed in a previous posting, I am skeptical about rational economic man. Markets are mostly driven by fear and greed, as I am finding out from my daily observations, and the greed is mostly just ‘fear of missing out’. The markets should be lower than a Chinese coal mine right now, but they are bouncing around the 5000 mark (I am talking the ASX 200 here, not the Dow Jones).

Let’s take another fallacy of the capitalist system (or of human nature) – ‘ethics‘ – ie that people are going to almost always behave ethically in their economic dealings with others. I am a very trusting person on the whole, and I do not want to change that aspect of myself. But when you look at the financial edifices that fell apart in 1987 (why were some instruments called ‘junk’ bonds?) and in 2008 (‘subprime’), not so close inspection reveals that many people put avarice in front of ethics, and that whilst Bernie Madoff went to gaol, so many others who did not behave well seem to have gotten off Scott free.

And nothing has been done to fix those sorts of ethical issues – we just allow more complex financial instruments to develop, which few people understand.

Even P.J. O’Rourke, great defender of free markets, conceded on a visit to Australia after the GFC that there were ethical problems.

Then there is the assumption of ‘free‘ markets. To quote Team America, albeit in a totally twisted context, ‘Freedom isn’t free’. Not only do governments pursue policies which regulate or manipulate markets and currencies, but reserve banks do so on a major scale.

Which goes a long way to explaining what is going on at the moment financially.

Let me qualify this by saying that whilst I am very good at managing my personal finances and share investments, I do not have an economics degree, or any training in finance or accounting. I have self-taught myself quite a lot from remaindered textbooks and from reading economists like Galbraith, Von Mises, Von Hayek, Friedman, Stieglitz and Levitt. But in the past few weeks, whilst trying to make sense of bond markets, currency moves, interest rate cuts, and commodity prices, all whilst trying to work out whether or not to put my money back into the share market and if so, when, I have been made starkly aware as to exactly how ignorant I am about finance.

[As Socrates would put it, true wisdom means realising that you know nothing. This makes me wise.]

Reserve bankers are very clever people. They understand all these levers which they can pull to manipulate markets, and how each decision will play out. It is the rest of us who get befuddled and who end up scratching our heads and wondering what is going on and what should we be doing.

What is going on is that governments and reserve banks worldwide, but particularly the US Federal Reserve, are pursuing policies which effectively mean that money is being printed. This is not physical money, as in the Zimbabwean or Weimar German variety. It is conceptual money, like what you have in the bank rather than under your mattress.

There will be several effects of this money printing. One is inflationary. The money you have, whether in the bank or under your mattress, is going to lose some of its value faster due to higher inflation. Low interest rates will mean that you cannot offset this inflationary movement through earning interest in the bank.

Another effect is to prop up asset prices. As money is going to be worth less due to inflation, shares and other assets (such as investment properties) will not decline in value.

A third effect is to potentially spur people into riskier asset classes. If bank deposits are getting eaten by inflation and low interest rates, but the share and property markets are being stabilised by money printing, then those becomes a safer place to leave your money – even though shares are a higher risk proposition for most people and property itself is a very cumbersome and sometimes even more risky investment.

Which leads to the question:

Cui Bono?

Who is it that benefits from those interventions in the market that inflate prices? Is it the average mug punter in the street who is struggling to pay off their mortgage or save for a house deposit? Is it the over-educated bum hipster barista who disdains capitalism and thinks Che Guevera was a good guy (he wasn’t, by the way, he was a murdering butcher) and who wants to hop on their fixie and go to a protest rally? Or is it someone with a large share portfolio, large salary, and a mansion in Toorak (who has been able to exploit tax loopholes to pack away a large amount of money into the family trust and their superannuation fund)?

It is more likely to be the Toorak mansion owner, although I would hazard a guess that a mere multi-millionaire has less to gain than a billionaire does.

Is it any wonder that the Occupy Movement have something to get angry about? Inflationary government interventions are constantly occurring that transfer wealth from the poor to the mega rich. This is not free market capitalism. It is not really any form of capitalism. This is plutocracy, the state sponsorship of the rich.