Since you haven't been asking about Amerca's Cup racing, here's another change of tack. Apart from my pal at WelTec in Petone, I don't suppose anybody read this laughable attempt at political analysis by Vaclav Klaus while on a visit to his mates at the Cato Institute in America. Vasek appears to be mired in the past fighting political ghosts long past or perhaps that never even existed during his cosseted life as a banking apparatchik under the old regime. Seventeen years after the revolution led by his rivals and that he himself pusillanimously warned against, Vasek apparently believes that the enemies of 'freedom' are still alive and well, and he's not talking about the Bin Laden family or his illegal wire-tapping mate in the White House either. No, real evil lurks in the creation of fashionable 'isms' that "put various issues, visions, plans, and projects ahead of individual freedom and liberty." Take "social-democratism", for example, which is allegedly nothing more than a milder and softer version of communism. Other insidious 'isms' include internationalism, multiculturalism, Europeanism, feminism, and environmentalism. "Communism is over, but attempts to rule from above are still here, or perhaps they have merely returned."
Nice one, Vasku. Although he "understands" concerns about eventual environmental degradation (duh? this degradation hasn't taken place yet?), environmentalism as an ideology is a huge threat to individual freedom. Yes indeed, environmentalism only pretends to deal with environmental protection. Behind their people- and nature-friendly terminology, the adherents of environmentalism make ambitious attempts to radically reorganize and change the world, human society, our behavior, and our values, harrumphs Vasek! Order in the 300 underpanted Spartans and eviscerate them with deft jabs to the belly with those phallicy javelins now. It's a quasi -scientific conspiracy to deprive that freedom-loving 0.0001% of mankind with all the loot of their gleaming Sports Utility Vehicles and their Louis Vuitton handbags. If we want to load up with the atmosphere with carbon from our weekend Manchester to Budapest short-haul flights 10 times per year and fill our houses with pointless trinkets delivered on pallets made from tropical rain forest wood, then who the fuck are those tree-hugging cunts to tell us what to do?! How dare they encroach on our God-given right to over-consume and leave the rest of humanity to eke out a living from the crumbs we leave after gorging ourselves at their table!
Erm, only thing is, Vasek, you forgot to make mention of the most fundamentally dangerous 'ism' of them all and the one that seriously inhibits all of mankind's ability to pursue the greatest freedom of all, i.e. life. That is, neoliberalism. The danger of this ideology is that because neoliberalism is predicated on open-ended expansion and grow over equity (equal distribution of the world's resources), it is inherently unable to confront the very real limits that nature imposes on economic growth (and I'm sorry Vasku, but technology may help at the input end but not at the output end). It should go without saying that neoliberalism and the irrevocable economic growth that Vasek advocates is in fact inimical to planetary sustainability.
Neoliberalism in the form currently practiced via structural adjustment policies of austerity and deregulation in the Third World in particular, and via the expansion of free trade regimes such NAFTA and WTO, fundamentally deepens socioeconomic inequality, both globally and within countries. Socioeconomic polarisation has been a feature of neoliberal reform in virtually all the contexts in which it has appeared. Neoliberalism also poses the fundamental ecological-economic problem of negative externalities. In uncorrected market exchanges, the selling prices of goods do not incorporate the full social and ecological costs of their production. In the absence of rules for internalising true costs, the benefits of globalised production accrue disproportionately to those players most effective at externalising negative costs. Finally, neoliberalism is predicated on the continued loosening of state restrictions on capital. Because most environmental policy is regulatory and because governments are pitted against one another in competition to attract and hold footloose capital investment, one fears a deregulatory 'race to the bottom'. The globalisation of Vasek's neoliberalism will continue to force producers to move the most humanly exploitive and ecologically dstructive portions of the production process to desperate Third World locales.
As the journal I'm reading states: "The fruits of middle-class buying power are being subsidised by the externalised ecological damage of hazardous, unregulated production in the Third World, and by the misery of workers in the global assembly line...By rewarding production methods that externalise negative costs in distant places, the world's affluent consumers are shielded, delinked from the ecological and human consequences of their consumption." No wonder you can't get Vasek and his friends in Washington to agree to controls on carbon emissions. Sorry to be so disrespectful, but the planet is in serious trouble and as long as politicians like Klaus are burying their heads in the sand and insisting on business as normal then we're fucked. The guy's a cock.
No prizes for guessing what I'm studying this year.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Satan Klaus is a worn-out two-bit hack, a never-was wishing he could at least be considered a has-been. He will be remembered as the May King who presided over a satyricon of corporate looting, a criminal reallocation of the assets of the country he presumed to govern comparable to the communist nationalization pilferings of the post-WWII era. He is a Fool's Pope who railed against the threat of Czech culture dissolving in the EU like a sugar cube in a cup of coffee while at the very same instant the Czech economy he was managing so 'miraculously' was dissolving like a sloppy nut-studded turd in a hellbroth of bribe-fueled zero-sum globalization and mafia capitalism...
But I want to add one more 'ism' to Satan Klaus's ismania: authoritarianism. VK's blather about the conspiracy of extremists who want to control all from above is textbook authoritarian projection.
Let me take your accurate synopsis of Satan Klaus's position on environmentalism, Kivak: "the adherents of environmentalism make ambitious attempts to radically reorganize and change the world, human society, our behavior, and our values."
Now let me fuck with it a little bit: "the adherents of [neoconservatism] make ambitious attempts to radically reorganize and change the world, human society, our behavior, and our values."
Gettin ALL jiggy widdit now: "the adherents of [radical evangelical millenarian pseudo-christian religio/corporatist fascism] make ambitious attempts to radically reorganize and change the world, human society, our behavior, and our values."
Meanwhile, back at the ranch (literally), Klaus's butt-darts partner George W. Bush guts the Bill of Rights because the fiends who attacked us "hate our freedoms." Tricky Dick Cheney proclaims the "American way of life is not negotiable" while his bootlicker republican cronies pass lobbyist-authored legislation to dismantle the regulatory and taxation framework that has created the broadest and wealthiest middle class in the history of the world, the very foundation of the "American way of life."
Klaus, Cheney, George W. Buttfuck. They're all specimens of the same authoritarian psychopathology. As for Satan Klaus in particular, he's just pissed that he won't be the one orchestrating the "ambitious attempts to radically reorganize and change the world, human society, our behavior, and our values." Buttfuck and Cheney still have a year or so to totally ass-rape the world, but they're on the wane. Not necessarily good news; these two wounded jackles are unlikely to just lie down and die in the back of some shit-strewn cave...
And the little SS commandant that Elie Wiesel warned us lives in every human heart? Klaus is, as you noted, a cock. He may even be, perhaps, a pigfucker. But who consistently roosts near the top of Czech political opinion polls? Who was recently found to be the candidate most likely to be elected if Czechs were allowed to directly elect their president? (Hint: this last question could have been restated using the word 're-elected'.)
Dr. Thompson was not only morally astute but vaguely prophetic when he proposed as early as 1991 that the entire Bush clan be boiled alive in a giant vat of bubbling pus. But, what then? Ruminating on these issues often leads to the same old conclusion. As King George of Baghdad is learning to the anguish of thousands, burning down a stinking shithouse is easy, installing indoor plumbing can be rather difficult.
But fuck all that. Eccchh. My cup runneth over (with bile). For those of you who would like to learn more, this semester's recommended reading is "Conservatives Without Compassion" by John Dean.
ROTTEN OUT.
Andrew, you bloody Bolshie. Get over it, capitalism and globalization are good for you. God help us if you ever become an academic, with rants like that your students will want to lynch you for boring them, regardless of whether they agree with your main theses or not
Post a Comment