Painting Fakes

 In my last post I reviewed Mark Considine's assessment of the results of neoliberal policy reform in Australia's social services.  In each case, the results have been bad for service users and governments, who get poorer quality, more expensive services.  However, they have been very good for the entrepreneurs who get into this market, who have been able to get rich on government money. This is pretty much the story of the whole neoliberal project.  Ordinary punters are promised that if we reduce workers rights, the rights of indigenous people and pesky environmental regulations and provide government 'incentives' to business, this will turbo-charge economic growth and everyone will benefit.  Turns out that this isn't true.  Rich people keep on getting richer, while the rest of us stay about the same or even get poorer.  Meanwhile, we are crossing various ecological boundaries, threatening our futures in the name of 'economic growth' now. One answer ...

Over the past four decades the world's wealthy nations, including Australia, have been undertaking a vast social and economic experiment.  Whether you think this experiment has been a success, or a colossal failure, depends on how rich you are. This experiment is generally called 'neoliberalism' by progressive people like me.  More conservative people are more likely to call it 'free market economics' or the more fuzzy 'economic reform'.  The core idea that drives this experiment is that markets are the most potent and efficient way of organising production and consumption of both good and services. This has several implications for the way governments should act. They shouldn't compete with private sector entities, and should sell any government entities that do so.  Hence the wave of privatisations around the globe. They should keep their regulation of market activity to a minimum, as this interferes with the 'free' operation of markets. They s...

Following reading and writing for my series of posts on the long-running war on Palestine, I followed up on a recommendation from a friend* to have a look at Israeli historian Ilan Pappe and read his book, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, published in 2017. Ilan Pappe was born in Haifa, Israel in 1954, and studied and taught history at the University of Haifa.  However, his writings led to personal attacks in the media and threats to him and his family, so he left Israel and now teaches at the University of Exeter in the UK.  To say he's not a fan of Zionism is an understatement.  He is on record as supporting a unitary state in Palestine in which Jews and Palestinians have equal citizenship, and the right of return for the descendants of Palestinian refugees of the Nakba. The Biggest Prison on Earth  examines the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.  But first of all he provides a quic...

In the home group I'm part of we're currently reading and discussing Palmer J Palmer's Let Your Life Speak, a connected series of essays on the subject of vocation.  Palmer's central idea is that discovering our vocation is not a matter of receiving a message from God, nor about becoming somebody or something, but about recovering our true selves.  He says that we are born as unique, intact selves, but that as we grow the forces of our families, our schools, our churches and our societies lead us to lose sight of our true selves and take on identities which we perceive that others value.  Discovering our true vocation is the process of digging through those adopted selves to rediscover and own the true self we are born to be.   Reading and discussing this book led me back, once again, to my favourite Ursula LeGuin novel, City of Illusions.  This book has featured in this blog before, but like all favourite books it continues to speak, and there is more...

While I was reading Bob Woodward's accounts of the Trump presidency , I came across a reference to Jeff Sharlet's wonderful and terrible book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.   I just had to read it, although it took me a while to get to the top of the holds list at my local library. Published in 2023, The Undertow  is a series of essays which explore the nether regions of the American Right, Trump's base. They were written over a number of years as Sharlet travels around the country talking not to politicians but to ordinary punters who are sold, not just on Trump as a person, but on the whole package - the conspiracies, the misogyny, the guns, the end of abortion, the stolen election, you name it, they believe it. He goes to various events - Trump rallies in which journalists are kept in a cage for Trump to humiliate at the appropriate time; the International Conference on Men's Issues, relocated at short notice from the swanky Detroit Hilton to the decide...