Living The Dream with the National Disability Insurance Scheme

In this episode Dave (@withsobersenses) chats with Vanamali Hermans (@VChristabel) about the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Whilst billed as ‘the most significant economic and social reform since the introduction of Medicare in the 1970s’ Vanamali shows how the NDIS often means the reduction in services for those with disabilities and bureaucratic hellishness. We discuss why this is so, the compounding issue of inequality in regional health delivery and the struggles and strategies both developing and possible. This is the first of possibly a few episodes on the NDIS.

Due to incurable idiocy Dave’s levels are still too low. (Sorry)

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Articles mentioned incomed:

Vanamali Hermans

• Behind Closed Doors
• Our Healthcare System is Failing Us
• Market-Models Like the NDIS Are Failing People With Disabilities

Tim Lyons:

• Organising Ourselves: rebuilding Australian unions

 

Precarias a la Deriva

• A Very Careful Strike – Four hypotheses.

Living The Dream in the Trade Union Movement

May Day in Wollongong circa 2000 photo by Sharon Pusell

In this episode of Living the Dream Dave (@withsobersenses) chats with Godfrey Moase (@gemoase) the General Branch Assistant Secretary of the National Union of Workers. Godfrey had a number of criticisms of our last show . We talk about these and Godfrey also addresses the broader strategic and tactical possibilities for anticapitalist struggle and how they relate to trade unions.

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You can find some of Godfrey’s writings here:

• Maintain the wage rage (with Carina Garland)
• Defending Australian Labor
• The case for a 30-hour working week
• Absorbing Corbyn

Other things we mention include:

• The Young Workers Centre
• The Wollongong Out-of-Workers Union
• Unions Australia

Music by The Sweatshop Union

(This podcast was recorded as ex-Tropical Cyclone Debbie drenched Queensland)

Living the Dream: Welfare, Social Reproduction and Social Impact Bonds

 

In this episode Dave (@withsobersenses) and Rob talk about how the provision of welfare and social services are changing. We chat about the concept of social reproduction, the welfare state and its evolution and critically investigate new developments. As the mining boom ends, the world teeters on a the edge of another economic meltdown and states struggle with increasing amounts of debt we ask what’s going on with welfare and how can we struggle on this terrain in ways that point to a better life and a better society.

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Material referred to includes:

Multi-million dollar ‘green bonds’ could fund Qld’s climate change strategy

 

Competition Policy Review

 

Global Social Impact Investment Steering Group

 

Delivering On Impact: The Australian Advisory Board Breakthrough Strategy To Catalyse Impact Investment

 

Back ground on Debt and Social Reproduction can be found at Australia you’re standing in it part 2: Debt & Social Reproduction

An earlier show on the struggle of No Shelter! A Collective Against Gendered Violence can be found here

Everyone should read this issue of Viewpoint on Social Reproduction.

 

For an inspiring historical of the unemployed struggling over the conditions of welfare see The WOW factor: Wollongong’s unemployed and the dispossession of class and history

 

And listen to this killer track by Mutant Death (which features an on air argument between the scumbag Bob Hawke and dear comrade and friend Nick)

 

6 thoughts on facing the (possible) eve of another economic meltdown

 

Predicting the future is often a mug’s game but we can be fairly confident that 2016 we see the conditions for capitalism, both in Australia and globally, worsen. At the very least the mining boom is grinding to an end and perhaps there will be another global meltdown. What will this mean? Depending on the size of the malfunction it will (probably) mean rising poverty, homelessness, unemployment (though currently employment in Australia is surprisingly high) and general misery and declining wages, government spending (as revenues drop), wealth levels and good vibes. This will (probably) all manifest in impacts on life expectancy, mental health, identity based-conflicts, state repression, social cohesion… all this in a world already marked by war, violence, inequality, alienation and ecological disaster. A grim prospect unless we can collectively change our destiny.

#oxi2015 5 hypotheses arising from the struggle in Greece

OXI! Fantastic! But what now? As always we must start from the position that it is impossible to really know from afar what is going on – especially on the ground where it really matters. It is ridonculous to give advice [edit: sectarian comment removed] . Kevin Ovenden’s journalism both at Left Flank and on Facebook has been invaluable. He is our John Reed. Still we are compelled to try to think on the run and to try to work out what this moment is teaching us about our world so we can improve our efforts to transform it. So here are some hypotheses arising from my observations at a distance of the struggle in Greece. They are for discussion and debate.

#oxi2015 – Greek Lessons

At this moment it certainly appears, it certainly feels, that everything hangs on what happens in Greece. But it is almost impossible to tell from this distance what is actually going on. Those of us who have never been to Greece, who can’t speak Greek don’t have a clue. Even those of us who are reading obsessively are seeing some things but we are missing most things. The fractured nature of the Left (for a lack of a better term) means that there is a tendency to try to seek out those in Greece who fit with our already existing ideological proclivities and amplify what they say. There is also the constant problem, one I don’t think I can escape, that our already existing biases means that we see what we want to see and learn lessons that we already know. And nothing is more foolish or full of hubris than those non-Greek Left organisations issuing statements, judgements and handing down the correct line from a distance – especially because these groups often have no to marginal influence in the places they actually exist.

But that all said something is happening and it behoves us to look at the struggle as it unfolds in all its complexity and see if there are lessons to be learnt.

Is the G20 the Austerity Summit? No actually…..

Is the G20 the Austerity Summit? No actually…..

Recently the following press release was put out by the BrisCAN (BrisCAN being one of the spaces organising against the G20). This press release framed the problems of the G20 as follows:

“G20 is austerity summit” claims protest organiser

BrisCAN spokesperson, Adrian Skerritt said: “The G20 meeting will disrupt the lives of Brisbane residents from November 8 to November 16. But it won’t end there. G20 policies will continue to disrupt our lives long after the meeting is over.”

The G20 forum is committed to shifting wealth from the majority of citizens to the incredibly rich. They will do globally what Newman and Abbott are doing locally – sell public assets, outsource and cuts to social services.”

“The G20 is the Austerity Summit” claimed Mr Skerritt.

“What they can’t achieve through their budgets and trade deals they will attempt to resolve through war. Look at Obama and Abbott’s new war in Iraq and Putin’s use of military force in the Ukraine.”

The rally and march on November 15 will condemn G20 policies that create poverty and inequality. The march will also champion the values that should drive economic and political decisions – justice, sustainability, indigenous sovereignty and democracy.

“BrisCAN is demanding a world with an economy that works for people and the planet, a world safe from the ravages of climate change and war, a world with good jobs, clean air and water and healthy communities” said Mr Skerritt.

The rally will assemble at 11am November 15 2014 at Emma Miller Place (Roma St) and subsequently march past the G20 summit to Musgrave Park.

What’s wrong with this? Two problems:

1. Austerity is no longer the central plank of the strategy of multilateral organisations like the G20.
2. It is wrong to conceive of the G20 as some nefarious exterior force set to fuck up our lives. Rather the G20 attempts to coordinate capital accumulation on a global level; the social relations of capitalist society already constitute our lives.[i]

#BUSTTHEBUDGET? Conjuncture, strategy and a wager on new possibilities

 

Two facts:

1)   The Coalition’s first budget is an intensified assault on the living conditions of the vast majority of people in Australia

2)   This assault has generated more opposition and anger than any element of the political class expected or feels comfortable about.

 

 

The budget aims to establish the infrastructure state which via encouraging the sale of state assets hopes to generate sufficient funds to create enough effective demand to offset the end of the mining boom; the budget is an attempt to address the rising sovereign debt (caused be the rise in expenditure and drop in revenue due to the global, secular not cyclical, crisis of capitalism) by pushing more of the costs (in both money and labour) of reproduction onto the wage and into the home; and despite (still slowly) rising unemployment the budget attempts to increase the supply of labour through restricting welfare payments, increasing conditions for the disability pension and raising the age to access aged pension ( it could be also argued that the increases in debt and costs for workers increases the pressure to work). All this in part works by using and intensifying the internal hierarchies that exist within the incredibly heterogeneous working class in Australia.

 

The response from the broader population has been generally hostile and angry. There have been a number of relatively sizable rallies. Students opposed to the deregulation of university fees have also carried out a number of brave and defiant acts of disobedience. The media is both reporting a constant stream of stories that represent people’s criticisms of the budget and a large section of the media and the political class have responded with tatty front pages and snide columns attacking the Australian population on a whole for their reaction.

 

Amongst the opposition to the budget there are a number of divergent threads. There is a great deal of hope that the ALP, PUP and the Greens will block the budget forcing a double dissolution election. Sections of the socialist and anticapitalist Left hope that putting pressure on the trade unions will lead to industrial action (or that making the demand for unions to act, and then having unions ignore these demands, will lead to recruiting new members….) and social media is circulating a call for a general strike.

 

The budget and the opposition to it are the peaks, the top of the ice-berg but not the totality, of the current conjuncture of capitalist society in Australia (which I try to examine in more detail here). A particular organisation of capitalism has come into crisis and the deal that was offered to the population has started to fall apart. Equally the political disorientation of so many of us is also part of the conjuncture: the long term changes in class compositions, the massive atrophy of social democracy, the rise of anti-politics and the historical experiences of the defeat of all the major struggles of the last decade(s).

 

We could say that the ‘disjunctive synthesis’ of this conjuncture is on one hand the crumbling popular authority of the state and the absence of any genuinely active and popular alternative.

‘Addressing these challenges requires ambition’: The G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting

…money only has one face, that of the boss.

                                                                        (Negri, 1991, p. 23)

Over the last few days a number of important meetings of the G20 have been held in Sydney. The main meetings have been the Finance and Central Bank Deputies meeting #2 (20th to 22nd February) and the Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting (22nd to 23 Feb) but there has also been a joint round table between the B20( the Business 20) and G20 on Infrastructure and the launch of an OECD report Going for Growth as well as we can assume countless photo-ops, corridor conversations and long lunches – noticeably Christine Lagarde from the IMF is in town. All this should emphasize to us how the Leaders Forum is only one element in what seems to be a now year round series of events, meetings and discussion that work to constitute the G20 as the permanent and preeminent executive body of global capitalism.

Debt and the Limited Imagination of the Left

Debt. Debt is constantly looming at us. It is now a key element of the political-ideological constellation of our time. Debt expresses both the current crisis of capitalism in its economic guise and also the ‘representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’(Althusser, 2008, p. 36). Debt is pervasive, all encompassing and seemingly inescapable.  The debt of Australian households is steady at 150% of income(Reserve Bank of Australia, 2013). If Australians only spent at the levels of their income it is more than probably that great sections of capital – especially retail – would no longer be viable. The majority of debt is tied up in mortgages: the major asset of most households is not only purchased by going into serious debt but only can maintain its value because the society as a whole is steeped in debt.

  Graph: (Bird, 2013)

It was the US Sub-Prime Mortgage crisis that triggered this current, seemingly permanent, economic malaise – and it is now sovereign debt, that is the debt of states, that is the part of its current manifestation. (Neither are the source of the crisis itself – for that you need to look deeper into the structure and history of capitalism.) The sharpest expression of this is the looming possibility that the US will not raise its debt ceiling and thus be compelled to either drastically cut state expenditure or default on its debt. Since US debt, in the form of Treasury Bills, make up a core component of the global economy, such a default would, in the words of IMF Christine Lagarde ‘…cause serious damage to the US economy, but also to the global economy as a result of the spillover effects.’