Newspeak on the asset stripping of Australia

When you take a public asset without permission and give it to private individuals, that is not 'reform' it is theft. Taking something without the owners' permission is stealing. In Chile in 1973, in Argentina in 1976, people were jailed and military coups were required, for state-owned industries, services and land to be sold off to private enterprise without permission. It was called 'reform' then and it is called 'reform' today. It is still carried out by governments at the behest of shonky economists who have trained in the Milton Friedman or similar schools of economics, which Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, has shown up to be, at their worst, torturers and apologists for torturers. Today in Australia, in every state, we have elected dictatorships, with government conceived as 'elected delegates' rather than representatives of the people. How did this happen? Our press was corporatised, which means that the mainstream press now consists of a few global networks of intersecting industries of which only the public face is the media. Our mainstream media have so many vested interests that it is hard to imagine a subject they could report on which could not enhance their earnings somewhere. This problem can be analysed on many levels, but one is the creation and marketing of political and economic viewpoints via the creation and marketing of public figures. The mainstream media picks up on various elected public figures and makes or breaks them in images useful to its corporate interests. In the mean-time our government processes are attacked by the vested interests at another level, making it virtually impossible for people to organise effectively to have their voices heard. Our education, particularly in history, has been watered down into small modules to prepare us to be little cogs in giant conglomerations and teachers no longer educate children in the art of clear-thinking or in critical history. History has become, more than ever, an ideological view for widely marketed perceptions. Local governments are now ruled by State employed CEOs whose job it is to reinterpret local opinion until it satisfies the objectives of the state governments, which are involved in facilitating land and asset speculation, in the guise of 'reform'. Any of us who have tried to protest against massive, undemocratic and unwise projects, like the Channel Deepening, the injection of over a million more people into cities already straining at the seams, and short of water, will have run into some of the myriad of tricks now used to occupy public time and resources so as to deflect real public opinion and objections. See, for instance: Jack-boot planning coming to Victoria - Time to Protest is NOW I object to the application of the term 'energy reform' to a process whereby the public are being deprived of assets and control over energy and services without which most of us will die in this complex society. Even economists are admitting now that we have hit a petroleum wall. That is, that we are unable to increase petroleum production and that we must accustom ourselves to a continuous decline in the oil energy upon which the planes and cars, upon which we all rely on so much, run. As energy supply in all its forms, including coal, becomes increasingly straightened, you cannot tell me that the rich men and their stooges who currently run the NSW caucus, or any other Australian government body, are going to stand up to their mates in the corporations and tell them to give Australians their due. No, what will happen is that this already divided society, will increasingly define the poor as unworthy of basic services. Already they are justifying the deprivation of the NSW public their ownership of NSW electricity by defining the public servants who currently deliver electricity as some kind of bad guys who cannot be trusted to do a solid day's work and deliver a service. I mean, really! We are talking about rich people who pursue their interests in power-broking in between professional manicures, massages, ski-jaunts and hobnobbing with the idle rich. It is a good thing for the public to have substantial representation at every level in the public service in the delivery of fuels and the running of essential services. Without this pressure governments can use our dependence on these services against us. They can allow the services to run down. They can allow their rich mates to price the services out of reach of all but the elites. It is not just a good thing; it is an essential thing, when energy-supplies are on a downward curve, to keep public control of them. Why would I or any other Australian with their head screwed on trust Iemma and his peers to safeguard Australians' access to vital fuels and services if we cannot trust him and his peers to base their decisions on democratic consultation? The arcane Milton Friedman pseudo-science of privatising for efficiency, whilst blinding young students, credulous journalistic hacks, and naive foreign-aid personnel, has been discredited everywhere it has been tried. The current situation of reasonable comfort and complacency is set to change very quickly and our country is on the verge of descending into severe and worsening poverty. What will happen then? The upper middle classes, which had their silence bought by being involved in the profits at the shareholder level, won't be silent when their shares fall through the floor. Large industries, like nursing and the police, are kept in line through judicious application of carrots and sticks, but they won't be silent when the banks close down and try to call in their mortgages. Then will those who encouraged Iemma to sell off NSW Electricity encourage him to privatise the police and Rudd to privatise the army?