verging_on_random

Battling

Howard’s changes to WorkChoices cover people earning up to $75,000 a year. It’s been christened ‘the battlers’ clause’.

We live in puzzling times when a worker on $1,500 a week, or about 1.5 times average weekly earnings, can be regarded as a ‘battler’.

Life is for working

“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” –Theodore Roosevelt

Our current government would heartily agree. Well actually they’d leave out the ‘work worth doing’ bit … they just think life is about working. The more the better.

This fundamentalist belief in the absolute virtues of work is revealed again in this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald. The forthcoming federal budget is apparently going to contain ‘incentives to encourage older people into jobs.’

Why should the government be offering older people ‘incentives’ to get jobs? Well according to Tip Costello:

“Nobody has to feel unwanted or unused, and now my message is to people in their 40s and 50s, who were being put on the scrap heap a decade ago, ‘you’re wanted, you can be used, we want you in the workforce too’.

I suppose there might be people in their 40s and 50s who stopped looking for work because they felt they were ‘on the scrap heap’ but I can’t say I’ve met any. I know a few people of that age who don’t work full-time any more and they do it by choice. I’m not sure how they’ll respond to being told they can be ‘used’ but I don’t think they’ll react very positively. They’ll be quite angry I suspect at the suggestion that it’s any of the government’s business whether or not they choose to work. Just like many couples felt it was none of Smirking Pete’s bloody business how many children they might decide to have.

This kind of mentality reflects the maniacal obsession that the market fundies have with material outcomes. This obsession is the start and finish of their lives; the sole benchmark against which they evaluate anything and everything. According to their twisted values, the only meaningful purpose of a life is to work. Once you stop working, you’re ‘on the scrap heap’. And the purpose of having kids is to make sure there’ll be enough people working in a few years time to keep Teh Economy growing so we can all get richer and richer for ever and ever amen.

It’s a bit like the early settlers’ attitude to land: the Aborigines weren’t entitled to it because they weren’t exploiting it for productive purposes. They just let the land sit there … appalling irresponsibility, when it could have been turned into a saline wasteland in just a cnetury of overuse. Translated to modern life, that attitude says if you’re not using your life to do paid work, then you’re basically a wasted space. All human activity must be evaluated against this one single question: is it producing things to help Teh Economy?

If you think I’m exaggerating, try this other quote from the same story (my emphasis):

The budget will include $30 million to establish a neuroscience research centre at the Prince of Wales Hospital which will focus on preventing or treating diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. The aim is to keep health costs down and people working longer.

I remember a time when people would have looked for ways to prevent disease because it was worth doing for its own sake. It would ease suffereing, make human beings’ lives more enjoyable, allow their friends and families to enjoy more time with their loved ones before the inevitable end. Apparently these are no longer valid reasons to undertake medical research. No, these days we try to keep people healthy so we don’t have to spend money on them, and most important of all, so they can keep bloody well working and make Teh Economy grow.

Cos for the Howards and Costellos of this world, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of business owners and managers out there, that’s the Meaning of Life. Teh Economy. What sad people they are.

Walking the talk

It seems the pace of life is being reflected in average walking speeds. Somebody (who clearly has too much time on his hands) has measured the pace at which people walk in different cities around the world.

The study has found that people’s walking speeds have increased globally by 10 per cent over the last decade, with the biggest increases in the far east.

In Singapore, walking pace has risen by 30 per cent and in Guangzhou, China, the figure is 20 per cent.

No wonder we’re being overtaken by the damn Orientals. John Howard is (as usual) 100% right - we must all Walk Harder!

Cementing the clash of civilisations

What is it about the USA? Or at least the white Anglo-Saxon patricians who get to run the place most of the time. They seem to have a pathological need to see external threats and enemies looming out of the mist. I guess when you’re part of an elite at the peak of the global pyramid and you know deep down you did bugger-all to deserve it, you just naturally tend to be a bit paranoid.

Presidential hopeful John McCain seems determined to institutionalise a clash of civilisations. Maybe he misses the Cold War so much he’s yearning to replicate it with a new set of villains.

MaCain wants to open up the global peace market to competition. The silly old UN shouldn’t have a monopoly so he favours a new ‘League of Democracies‘.

According to McCain, ‘regional alliances such as NATO are not enough to cope with the many global challenges facing the free world.’ I think this is code for ‘The goddam French keep disagreeing with us.’ His ‘ proposed “League of Democracies” would be an organization with economic, military and humanitarian components’ that ‘could act where the UN fails to act’. I have a sneaking feeling this would mean ‘act where the UN doesn’t do what the USA demands’.

Needless to say it would only be a matter of time before the members of the League of Democracies would refuse to fund both it and the UN … leaving us with two competing global organisations. In the red corner, the League of Democracies … and in the blue corner, the United Evil Undemocratic Islamo-fascists, Socialists and Their Fellow Travellers.

The idea’s absurd of course and won’t get to first base but it demonstrates the sentiment amongst the US ruling class. They just can’t see why the rest of the world won’t acknowledge their pre-eminence. Don’t believe me? Well here’s one wingnut blogger’s take on the issue:

Do you want to get out of the United Nations or at least see it reduced to total insignificance? Well, this is how you do it.

We create a league of democracies and then, over time, the US starts doing everything through the league instead of the UN. As that happens, the league will grow in status and importance and the UN will become less and less important. Then eventually we’ll get to the point where the UN will be totally irrelevant because everything that matters goes through the league of democracies. Once we get to that point, whether we pull out of the UN or not won’t make much difference. That’s why this is a great idea and one that every conservative should support, even if McCain is the one who happens to be proposing it.

I would have thought any organisation that was run to do the bidding of one member nation would be anything but democratic, but then that’s the alternative reality inhabited by the wingnuts. Democracy = any country that agrees with George W Bush. Well at least it will make it easy to decide who gets admitted.