Painting Fakes

I wrote some articles about degrowth ( here , here , here and here ).  I always meant to write more but I also have another project called Climate/Housing  and instead I wrote a series of articles there about extreme weather events .  Then I got distracted by other things, like getting repairs done on my house.  Now I'm back and here's what may or may not be the final post in my degrowth series.   Back when I started writing about degrowth I observed that the idea makes perfect sense, but that its advocates don't seem able to outline a political pathway towards it.  This is not to say that they are naive or disengaged - far from it. It is just such a fringe political idea at the moment that most people in politics and business (heavily intertwined in most societies including ours) simply ignore it.   I don't want to be a hypocrite and write a pithy series of posts that are similarly impractical.  I mean, at least Jason Hickel and Kohei ...

Catholics around the world, and many who are not Catholic, are mourning the death of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis, following his death on Easter Sunday. Pope Francis was responsible for many firsts.  He was the first Pope from the Americas, and from the Southern Hemisphere.  He was also the first Pope to take the name Francis, after Francis of Assisi, famous for his devotion to the poor and his teaching that God's love encompasses the whole of Creation.  During his 12-year reign as Pope he tried to live out this example - living simply in the Vatican guest-house rather than the Papal Palace, washing the feet of prisoners on Palm Sunday, visiting and shining a light on what he called 'marginal places' where people struggled with poverty and oppression.  Much of his teaching reflected this priority. No one person can rule an institution with a billion members, not even one as hierarchical as the Catholic Church.  The church of which Francis took over l...

A couple of times in this series on degrowth I've talked about billionaires - about how economic growth is actually fueling increases in rich people's yacht money , not the basic needs of ordinary people, and about how our social fragmentation and the control of our media by similarly rich people means we are largely unaware of this fact and frightened to challenge the status quo for fear of losing our precarious security.  In this post I'd like to talk in a bit more detail about our billionaire problem. I consider myself wealthy.  After over four decades of professional careers and now in our 60s, Lois and I are debt free, own the house we live in and have a healthy superannuation balance.  We can look forward to a secure, comfortable retirement.  We are better off than 80% of the world's population. Now, we have simple tastes, we don't need a vast amount of money to live on.  I understand that some people have more expensive hobbies than we do - they want to ...

Back when I worked in Brisbane City Council I worked with a very clever man called Frank.  Frank was the Manager of City Assets, responsible for overseeing management of Council's  vast portfolio of land, buildings, infrastructure, equipment and so forth.  I was responsible for housing and homelessness initiatives and Frank organised for Council to donate some fabulous parcels of land for the Brisbane Housing Company , a new affordable housing company we were kicking off alongside the State Government.  He also handed over a small stock of spare houses to homelessness organisations to use for short-term housing until they were needed for their original purpose. I really appreciated his support, but the thing he did that impressed me most had nothing to do with me.  It was about cars.  For most of my time in Council, cars were a source of frustration.  Each of Council's hundreds of small teams had its own allocated vehicles, with their numbers vary...