July 06, 2016

Certainty

When the economy necessarily determines policy, why waste time with conferences and branch meetings and the other rituals of old fashioned political engagement democracy? You don’t lobby the seasons to change, you don’t protest at the ebb and flow of the tides. Once the market’s entirely naturalised, what’s the point, other than nostalgia, of a trade union or a pressure group?

...

[F]or the new mandarins, the shrinkage of such bodies doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it was all to the good, since it allowed the duly qualified experts to do their thing undistracted – and they had the business of governance entirely under control.

Until, suddenly, they didn’t.
- Mr Sparrow
Since when did the primary role of government become providing “certainty” to the business community? In fact, it’s hard to read a newspaper or turn on the TV these days without some rent-seeking plutocrat whining about the democratic process getting in the way of the grubby business of making money.

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In short, “certainty” must be denied everyone but the wealthiest and most powerful members of the community. The rest of us, through three decades of neoliberalism, have gradually been stripped of our life protectors and told to sink or swim.

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Now, with another indecisive election outcome, the business cassandras are out in force again, blitzing the media with doom-laden press releases – each of them faithfully recycled by a media that has come to accept uncritically the message that business interest and the public interest are one and the same.
- Mr Denmore.

Amusing also to see the media cheerfully doing the (ex-)government's work for them in spreading the Mediscare lie. While serving the Coalition's agenda to delegitimise their (near) loss, for our commentariat it, like the "Howard fatigue" nonsense of 2007, serves their neverending efforts to delegitimise democracy itself, and bury any suggestion that voters might be motivated by rational views on substantive issues, rather than being gulled by the scams of the campaign, sheep that we are.