Unknown's avatar

About Green Economy Action

Part-time independent journalist, Australian regenerative & organic farming pioneer 1988 until a total family & Labor Party/ CPSU fraud, lived in virtual exile 13 1/2 years, now part time commercial organic b/ d veg gardener central Adelaide Hills

WHY the Wokie-pokie Hokey-cokies Oh RMJ Hated Fay Weldon

kIND-oF – WHAT’S THAT WERRD – analogous or perhaps more aptly and sharply BARKING-MAD EMBLEMATICALLY IDEOLOGICALLY NEOLIBERAL re The Rape of Lucrece 1594 — 1994 – falling within the Age of Romance 1509 Cortes to the Sub-prime Places of Residence-Geckoe-Greenpan-Soros Ripoff Mortgage Documents Crisis 2008

Oh John, we all knew you would spill the cosmic geopolitical beans eventually.

◐ It’s been a great ride, Curramulka Kid, and it is not of course only Australia that stands, sits, lies down and suppurates in your debt.. ◑ – سلام; AND Hello to this guy ⋰

“Couldn’t we go upstairs? Do we have to do it on the sofa?”

“Oh for God’s sake, Annette!”

“Sorry, Spicer,” said Annette. “We’ll stay here.”

“You are so inhibited,” said Spicer. “But perhaps that’s why I love you. I as Zeus the seducer-lover-divine you as Danaë.”

“Just call me sweet-as-pie,” said Annette, “and I’ll answer to it.”

“Those bracelets are practically sinking into your arm. You can’t have got fatter since yesterday.”

“Water retention,” said Annette.

“Don’t be so unglamorous,” said Spicer. “Don’t they hurt?”

“Yes,” said Annette.

“I quite like the thought of that,” said Spicer. Turn over.”

“Dr Rhea told me you were leaving me,” said Annette.

“I’m beginning to think Dr Rhea’s nuts,” said Spicer.

“But did you tell her that?”

“I tell her all kinds of things she wants to hear,” said Spicer. “From dreams I invent to scenarios of the future.”

“But why?”

“Because I’m easily bored,” said Spicer. “And she drones on and I like to get her to change the subject, or at least the archetype.”

“But why do you go to her?”

“Because I’m in a transitional crisis, because I need to liberate my Perseus from my Polydectes, and slay Medusa, the poisonous feminine, or look at it another way, cast off Medusa and escape Lilith; or simply be the tree, the trunk, the pillar, the stake, the anti-natural which penetrates the cleft hill. Does that hurt?”

“Yes.”

“It’s meant to. Just a bit. Isn’t this good?”

“Yes,” said Annette. “Just call me Tweetie-pie4. Each in their own myth. Personally, I choose Disney.”

Ahmm.. Young People we’re lookin’ after you – now we are

HIGHLY men-tally1 disciplined, non undergraduate though I recall from her entertaining biography i discovered say 30yrs ago2 not unaffected when younger as the rich kid abroad on her gap et-set-era year hankering after the upper middle class resplendency not to say opulence – although the magnanimous Scotsman Adam Smith said it was – or would be – Northern England robust slavery economy as well as the City of London’s architecture AND its marvellous deep drainage works3 post Sir Christopher Wren, respectively – socio-cultural, spiritual and ecological Mistress-deconstructor of mawkish masculinist and phoney feminist disintelligence Fay Double-you, babe..

JOHN BLUNDELL

Economy, Education-reform, Neurocognitive Health 2-5 Set Series Quantum Relations Logic Neurolinguistics Neuroscience (the radical overhaul of 20th century..) plus the Fifth & Final stage of Human-society namely the Human Project – raison d’etat (who the fuck was Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli 3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527 Florentine diplomat author philosopher historian?) rushes head-long to a new micro raison d’etre for every man woman young person & child on Earth

• irritated near to death by the Globalist and Screw-thy-neighbour and Mince-those-pesky-babies Christian nutters’ End of Times Antonio Gramsci’s “theory” (theorem or phenomenological law) of cultural hegemony written primarily during his imprisonment, between 1929 and 1935, in the Prison Notebooks) not published as a single treatise but rather emerging from his reflections on the nature of power and social control within capitalist societies since he had been a kid in High School ?

• N-n-n-o RU some Active-yeast, jesus-fork ?

Australia 10072025

Memorial Tribute

Patricia Elizabeth Thomson born 7 September 1940 in London, England – 18 April 1992 in Sydney, Australia was an English-born Australian television and film actress.

Rosanne’s La Boite T in Education
confrère Pat visited us at Lobethal Rd just weeks before her death

1 rare in a chick, right

2 “I Think, ∴ I was,” figuratively not literally, students (puto igitur me fuisse)(some early Age of Romance Idiot-savant who delighted in Colorado USA I-am-i-said IM-wott-IM Wott IM Popeye the Sailorman rambunctiousness, and was of course mutatis mutandis and ipso facto Enlightened, man)

3 and those who later – dates, dates, Young-people, you find them up in palm trees, on clothing ownership tags, notated on Grade III children’s lunchboxes, painted on or carved into Five-thousand year old rock art and at the bottom of some slowly rotting-out deep sea benthic zone – what next, young people, timetines, datelines, bylines and songlines3a following upon and indeed from the multifarious works of the Semitic chap who made pulchritudinous and sexually-active Queen Victoria Empress of India The Right Honourable The Earl of Beaconsfield KG PC DL JP FRS ?

3A Alice Springs Stuart3b Arms Hotel lounge bar say late November 1970: I’m off to Dublin in the Morning to Join the I – R – A

3B ⋯ all you hyper busy-asked/ buzzy-arsed but dead-set not manic neoclassical neuorolinguistics Socratic Logic Once-upon-a-Silly-jism (yuck) students note “Stupid” Arms in USIS CIA Pentagon & ADF Canberra Private-schoolkids’ or John Howard’s destested Chaser-boys English usage

4 Yipp-yipp whooh-boop-dih-bomb- dee-eh all students note the resignation of @Xcomms Chief-exective-officer 9th July 2025 over the company owner’s insistence upon favourable reports on the career or at least belief-system and personal philosophy of the WWII leader who effectively (indirectly) dstroyed the German nation and ‘handed it’ on a ‘silver platter’ to George C Marshall US Army chief of staff during WWII (1939–45), later US secretary of state (1947–49), later of defense (1950–51) and to United States of America investors

Quantent Crocess Merry-can Curds & Whey of Life + Cntng Sht

Featured

As the regular Blundell crew of mega-influencers – which reminds me of a kid joke The budgie went missing but hey grandfather (the writer’s own grandpa, a 1920s-on South Australian public educator steeped in Alfred Marshall, Wm McDougall & Albert Venn Dicey was an Oxford University Press pre-publication appraiser) opened the door and influenza, you’ll all be passionate about the fundamental Content : Process dial-out and consequent upon your studies of the last five years champing-at-the-bit to demand that it be mainstreamed in every educational institution on Earth on pain of cessation of public funding (in the breach) AND to the challenges of document titling, ever socially conscious that the mere announcement, presentation and display of a brand or category of study ensures Foucaultian artificial or socially-constructed ex fact compartmentalisation and ‘siloing’ of your written works – as the million so-called posts on X Comms that are 95%, say, lost to reflective deliberation, assessment and decision1 by the public in 30 minutes flat.. to 99.9 recurring beyond 35mins.. So yes it’s shaped up as Content-Enumeration-Process, ahmm.

Beavers

Castoroides (from Latin castor (beaver) and –oides (like)[2]), or the giant beaver, is an extinct genus of enormous, bear-sized beavers that lived in North America during the Pleistocene. Two species are currently recognized, C. dilophidus in the Southeastern United States and C. ohioensis in most of North America. C. leiseyorum was previously described from the Irvingtonian age but is now regarded as an invalid name. All specimens previously described as C. leiseyorum are considered to belong to C. dilophidus.

Yes Everyone it’s a Photo of Sarah Cooper from, Well/ Cromwell, Say Seven Years Ago

GEA 1/6

I see the way ahead to the light, but I could hardly leave my family in the state it is: I love you, Annette, in spite of everything. What kind of man would I be if i just abandoned you? Not much cop on the wheel of life. I’d fall right off, right through to the cockroaches. Laughing?

‘Trying to,’ said Annette.

‘Take another slug of Easy Night. Gilda rang me. She was really worried about you. Go back to sleep, sweetheart. See you later. We’ll bring back fish and chips.

‘And Dr Rhea Marks? Will she come too for fish and chips?’

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Spicer. ‘You’ve terrified her out of her wits, Annette. I’m not exactly lkng frwrd 2 Rainbow Puppeteers. Don’t make matters even worse than you’ve made them already.’

‘Sorry, Spicer. Is this call being broadcast through the office?’

‘Yes,’ said Spicer, ‘come 2 think of it. But you’re a media personallty. It shouldnt worry you.’

GWA 2/6

‘Mrs Horrocks?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘This is the Oprah Winfrey Show. Amelia speaking.’

‘Oh, hi.’ ‘We mean to record tomorrow and hold over and screen for our New Year show. We like to do things

GEA 3/6

live but even Oprah has to have a holiday sometimes. Can I just say how much I loved Lucifette Fallen? Of course the timing is good for you – Ernie Gromback tells me he’s scheduled publication to fit in with our transmission. isn’t he a charmer?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Annette.

‘We’re building the programme around the domestic row,’ said Amelia. We reckon

GEA 4/6

God and Lucifer had the first one: brilliant of you to have seen that Lucifer was female. After that it was Jupiter and Juno. What can the rest of us poor mortals do in the face of the archetype? We have our pet psychotherapist to help us see through the dark to the light.

GEA 5/6

That’s the bit we’d like you to read from Lucifette Fallen : on page eight of the proof copy. I must say your publisher whizzed ir round to us. The para beginning “Where darkness becomes light” – down to “What can a child do but repeat the experience?” And then sit next to Oprah and chat a bit about your own experiences and what drove you to write the novel,’

GEA 6/6

‘I’m sorry – I’ve lost you. I’m still a bit sleepy – ‘

‘You are very central to the show, Mrs Horrocks, said Amelia. Have you had experience of TV before?’

‘No,’ said Annette.

‘Welcome to the real world,’ said Amelia.

John Blundell 🦘🇦🇺 🌏

In celebration of Fay Weldon 22 Sept 1931 to 4 Jan 2023 with detail from Affliction 1994. Oh that year in John Foster Dulles’s Christendom. Australia? No, too hard.

FW

1 Australia’s ABC Radio National this evening 8th July ran its weekly program The Law Report with four academics in startling explication on certain issues that the institution’s sub-editors figured should be billed ‘AI and Automated Decision-making,’ oh Whoop, oh Lord Jesus, we have been very good and tried our hearts out and stuff

A Government of National Unity is Required for Australia

Folk foregather in a geo-community, a suburban, rural or regional residential, industrial, services and recreational projects zone

There’s this lady in AMERICA, we guess, who boasts One-hundred and 74 thousand bored loney cyber-sucks – whom she gaily INFLUENCES..

Who is Kellie-Jay Keen? Why is Kelly-Jay Keen power-driving Australia electoral political decision?

“I have always believed — as most mothers do — that the first three years of a child’s life are absolutely crucial. And now or rather, and again, neuroscience and child psychology confirm what our instincts already told us: young children need consistent, loving care from their mothers in those early years to develop emotionally and neurologically. This isn’t sentiment — it’s science.

“So why do we have a system that forces mothers to walk away from their babies before they’re ready?

2023 or not long after the tall lady from the University of Queensland delivered the 2023 Boyer Lectures

“Everywhere you turn, politicians and pundits talk about the “childcare crisis.” But what they really mean is a labour crisis — not enough adults in the workforce. Their solution? Push more mothers into full-time employment and expand state-funded daycare. It doesn’t matter whether the mother wants to return to work, or whether the child is ready. It doesn’t matter whether the job is fulfilling or soul-destroying. What matters, to them, is productivity.”

open.substack.com/pub/kelliejay/…

The FRAUDULENT REBRANDING of Deskilling neatly politically marginalised and COMPLETELY nonsensised & neutralised by
卍 backing-WWII authoritarian Catholic Church patriarchic scribes as ‘Liberation-theology’

John Blundell

•The dude dumb enough to believe on Satirday 20th May 1992 that western liberal democratic society was actually not a monstrous ‘glow-ball’ investment & Accountancy-house fraud guaranteeing ecological meltdown, preposterous educational, technical, philosophic and moral (ex Austrian priest Ivan Illich-read & predicted deskilling (dumbdown) of 1971 and permanent real-estate investment development warfare was me.

•A philosophic & ideologic Maimonidean

•Neurocognitive health & birth through death educational reform

•I do the formatting

•You all STFU & get busy

Bernays’ Wires & PJ Keating (Australia’s) Levers

Well we just make shit up.. and the money.

“The Economic Ideas that Guide the Hands (paraphrase, Young-people)”

MICHAEL STUTCHBURY

Nov 29, 1990 – 11.00am

JOHN Maynard Keynes wrote that the world was ruled by little else than the ideas of economists and political philosophers, be they right or wrong.

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,” he suggested in his General Theory more than half a century ago.

[In Australia, the levers of economic power are still pulled by practical men (yes, men).] But these days, their hands are heavily guided by the powerful orthodoxy of contemporary economics and economists.

Many of the divisive political economy debates of the 1970s have been resolved in favour of the so-called rationalists: the ACTU agrees that wage blow-outs are bad for jobs; no-one today dares call for higher tariff protection; and no-one is now calling for Budget pump-priming to avoid recession.

The influence of economic rationalism has been extended further by the broad agenda of “microeconomic reform”, and Australia’s historic change of course during the 1980s to expose its protected industries to the discipline of world producer and finance markets.

It is symbolised by the rise of the econocrats, the economics-trained bureaucrats who have made major territorial gains through the Canberra Public Service in the past decade. Their world view is reinforced by the financial markets, the intellectual dominance of rationalist think-tanks and the opinion-makers in the up-market media, who subscribe to a similar orthodoxy.

[Although business pulls the levers and presses the buttons] which set the production lines going and the cash registers ticking, Canberra’s policy decisions influence the key prices and markets faced by the corporate sector: the price of money, the exchange rate, the degree of import competition, its debt-servicing costs, the buoyancy of the domestic market and so on.

And, in a relatively small economy dominated by oligopolies, Canberra’s regulatory framework literally guides the flow of billions of dollars in industries such as telecommunication, aviation, banking, superannuation, motor vehicles and broadcasting.

The rise of the econocrats affects all these areas and has paralleled the spread of rationalist economic criteria from the power centres of Treasury, Finance, Prime Minister & Cabinet and the offices of the key economic ministers, to departments primarily responsible for public policies ranging from education, training and transport to social welfare, immigration and telecommunications – just about every portfolio except defence.

According to one survey of Canberra’s senior executive service, more than half of the top bureaucrats can boast qualifications in economics, business or accounting.

Even the trade bureaucracy has had its protectionist elements of McEwenism cleaned out.

After the heated disputes of the 1970s, the Tariff Board of Alf Rattigan (an early honorary econocrat) and the Industries Assistance Commission has now intellectually defeated the protectionist policies which have greatly shaped Australia’s economic development.

And even the director of the National Institute for Economic and Industry Research, Peter Brain, has accepted Labor’s tariff cuts after providing the most vigorous academic pro-protection arguments in the 1970s.

And, although the Minister Industry, John Button – an IAC sceptic – was the politician who pulled the levers to dismantle protectionism, the IAC won the intellectual debate by using essentially the same simple theoretical framework devised two centuries ago by Adam Smith: that is, that economies should concentrate on what they do best and not attempt to prop up uncompetitive industries.

Protectionist business leaders of the 1970s such as Repco’s Neil Walford would look antique amid the dominant rationalism of the 1990s.

The Tariff Board’s current manifestation, the Industry Commission, has been given a wider brief – to search out and expose regulatory inefficiencies throughout the economy – and a powerful econocrat to lead it in the form of ex-Keating adviser Tony Cole.

The rationalist econocrat advice going to politicians can be boiled down to more market deregulation, more reliance on competitive price-setting to allocate resources, less government regulation, more user-pays funding for public services, and greater exposure of the economy to the discipline of competition on world markets.

The balance-of-payments and foreign-debt crises have added to the push for micro-economic reform, itself a buzz-word for applying textbook economic principles to market regulation and public policy.

The orthodox response to the balance-of-payments crisis of markedly tightening fiscal policy and reducing the Federal Budget surplus has dovetailed into this by seeking to get better value for public spending – a classic example of the economists’

focus on maximising the use of limited resources.

Yet it is not entirely laissez faire. The Reserve Bank, for instance, has little regard for the intelligence of the financial markets or the infallibility of the banks.

It continues to intervene in the foreign exchange market to “dirty” the float. The Reserve Bank’s head of research, Ian Macfarlane, provided the earliest critique of the 1980s debt boom in terms of an “overshooting” of asset prices, particularly in the equity and property markets.

The Piaget 4 stages of human mental deveopment going to another 4 and notionally 5 – to WHOLE OF healthy well-norished life educational reform and the “revolutionary” removal of idiot Social-universe dialectitians & Marxian praxis nutters from Twenty-five Thousand universities

And Treasury has never suggested that the Australian economy, described by Paul Keating as a “bucking bronco” because of its exposure to commodity price shocks, should be “unguided”.

Under Chris Higgins, the Treasury is still prepared to go along with the deal-making of Labour’s wage Accord.

The ex-Treasury head and current Reserve Bank Governor, Bernie Fraser, has stressed the need to gain political acceptance for policy change and also qualifies as an econocrat “Accordian”.

The econocrats remain “can do” policy advisers – and in Fraser’s case, a puller of levers. Unlike the hard-line Treasury in the days of John Stone, they are prepared to tailor economic reform to political “realities” while, at the same time, musing over how to maintain the pace of economic reform outside a period of crisis.

The Department of Finance head, Michael Keating, has approvingly described the Hawke Government’s approach as “bargained consenus” or “a unique blend of deregulation, aimed at improving the operation of markets, and a ‘new’corporatism, aimed at more closely embracing business and unions in the policy formation process”.

This, in essence, is the Australian response to the 1970s collapse of Keynesian-influenced aggregate demand management under the twin evils of high inflation and high unemployment.

While maintaining elements of “consensus” reform, it has been heavily influenced by the international emphasis on supply-side efficiency as the key to improved economic performance – a shift climaxed by the Eastern Bloc rejection of central planning.

The vague push by the Employment, Education, and Training Minister John Dawkins for some sort of government assistance for exporters is unlikely to have much support from his econocrat advisers, who are led by the rationalist Greg Taylor, a former IAC chairman.

The Australian embrace of rationalism has not been as zealous as”Rogernomics” in New Zealand, where the Treasury was heavily influenced by the extreme free marketeers of the University of Chicago to spark an unedifying brawl with the economists at Wellington’s Victoria University.

Even in NSW, where economic rationalism has made its greatest inroads at a State Government level under Premier Nick Greiner, to establish a moral high ground over the discredited interventionism of the Cain, Burke and Bjelke-Petersen governments, the reform program is tempered by “dry and warm”political considerations.

In Australia, the main rationalist impetus has not come from the academic economists who, during the 1980s, lost the sort of prominence gained during the Whitlam days.

Yet the university economists are making a quiet comeback to policy influence, most notably through such commissioned government reports as by the Australian National University’s Helen Hughes (which questioned the effectiveness of export assistance) and Ross Garnaut (which praised the virtues of free trade).

Professor Hughes also was a member of the FitzGerald committee which recommended giving a “greater economic focus” to Australia’s immigration programme.

As well, the role of university economists is being revived because they speak much the same language as the ascendant econocrats – at least at the ANU which runs the closest thing in Australia to a US-style graduate school. Increasingly, ANU economists are involved in the Canberra policy chat sessions with econonocrats organised by the Economic Planning Advisory Council secretariat.

And the ANU’s Bob Gregory holds the academic economist spot on the Reserve Bank board.

Whereas Treasury economists in the 1960s were most likely to have been educated at the University of Melbourne, today they and the econocrats elsewhere in the bureaucracy tend to have received their post-graduate training, if not their first degree, from the ANU. The other main econocrat-academic link is between the Industry Commission and the University of Melbourne, where both the ORANI econometric model project and the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research are based.

The ANU’s economics department is noted for its high technical and mathematical rigour and perhaps best represents what Peter Groenewegen and Bruce McFarlane complain in their new book (A History of Australian Economic Thought) to be the Americanisation of university economics teaching in Australia.

This, they suggest, is based on the methodological assumption of individual choice; with perfectly informed consumers maximising their utility; businesses maximising their profits; where economic agents operate in competitive markets and so are typically price-takers; and where government intervention is tainted by definition.

“Hence deregulation, competition and anti-monopoly policy become essential prescriptions to turn the textbook vision into real life,” bemoan Groenewegen and McFarlane.

“Much of this North American market economics is now fully absorbed into Australian teaching of economics. The older traditions of a positive role for government in ensuring those social goals the market was seen as unable to achieve have been relegated to the background”.

True, the emphasis of American university economists on highly abstruse mathematical techniques to model sometimes dubious assumptions about human behaviour has spread to the younger generation of Australian academics.

But, in the Australian context, “rationalist” economics does not necessarily conflict with a more mainstream or even social democrat perspective.

Parts of the microeconomic agenda, such as waterfront reform and more user-pays road pricing, are unexceptional reforms which have been given impetus by the rationalist programme. Even a left-wing Labor politician such as Brian Howe has been prepared to introduce more “stick” into the social welfare system – a hobby horse of the rugged pro-marketeers.

Level-playing-field arguments support the taxing of non-wage income such as capital gains and fringe benefits – and possibly even wealth and bequests. And as the University of Sydney’s Judith Yates pointed out in work for the Campbell Report more than a decade ago, financial deregulation did not benefit the poor.

Thanks to Paul Keating’s deregulation, the big demand for economists has been in the financial markets.

Most of the leading finance sector economists have been poached from the training grounds of Treasury or the Reserve Bank and lured by the basic economic enticement of money. Top-level examples include Westpac’s David Morgan from Treasury and Bain’s Don Stammer from the Reserve Bank. Examples at the chief economist level include the Macquarie Bank’s Bill Shields from the Reserve Bank and the National Bank’s Julian Pearce and BT’s Andre Morony from Treasury.

These ex-econocrat market economists have an influence on macroeconomic policy mainly as articulators of the financial market’s conventional economic wisdoms.

But, increasingly, they have been relegated to short-term economy watchers required to give the money market dealers split second “buy” or “sell”responses to the latest Bureau of Statistics release. Paul Keating is no longer obsessed with “trumping” market expectations over the Budget bottom line as in the mid-1980s, when he was trying to hold the $A up. They have lost their role as the chief anti-inflation “hawks” because of the high interest rate pain reflected in their banks’ mounting bad debt provisions. And they shift between alarmist doomsaying and libertarian indifference to Australia’s foreign debt build-up.

Few have much of substance to say about wider economic policy issues: it’s not what they are paid to do. The exceptions include the Chase AMP’s Garry White, whose background in the old Industries Assistance Commission gives him an expertise in trade and industry matters, and the HongKong Bank’s Jeff Schubert, an ex-Prime Minister & Cabinet econocrat who has enthusiastically pushed his idea of a variable rate consumption tax as a way to reactivate fiscal fine tuning.

Similarly, the business economists have relatively little impact in public policy debates, although one of their most prominent members – CRA’s John Macleod – is the current president of the Economic Society. While economists appear to have a surprisingly small influence within Australia’s major industrial companies, the increasing role of business leaders in public policy debates perhaps is reflected by the appointment of a former Australian Industry Development Corporation economist, Carol Austin, to BHP.

However, the Business Council, these days headed by former senior Treasury official Peter McLaughlin and employing ex-Canberra econocrat Mathew Butlin, continues to shoulder much of the burden of trying to educate corporate leaders in economics.

The Business Council has taken the lead in labour market reform, but has left the Confederation of Australian Industry to make the running in the industrial relations theatre of the Industrial Relations Commission.

It has also concentrated on policies to reform transport bottlenecks, but has found it difficult to take the policy lead on issues which conflict with its constituencies’ self-interest, such as telecommunications reform, lower tariffs and tax reform.

Until its recent decline, Michael Porter’s Centre of Policy Studies at Monash University represented the cutting edge of the ruggedly pro-market think tanks which continue to push the spread of rationalist criteria. These include Porter’s new Tasman Institute, John Hyde’s Australian Institute for Public Policy in Perth, Greg Lindsay’s Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney and, getting well into polemics, Melbourne’s Institute of Public Affairs.

So far, there has been no strong counter from the social democrat Left, apart from the revival of the labour movement-oriented Evatt Research Centre in Sydney led by Peter Botsman.

A newer source of economic analysis has come from consultants such as Access Economics, headed by ex-Treasury officials Geoff Carmody, David Chessell and Ed Shann, who have sought to compete with Melbourne’s Syntec on macroeconomic policy and business-cycle advice to the corporate sector. Carmody and Chessell, in particular, are closer to the “Stone-age” Treasury than today’s “can do” Keating econocrats, and have advised the Liberal Party on tax issues.

Also prominent is the Canberra-based Centre for International Economics set up by a former Bureau of Agricultural Economics director, Andrew Stoeckel, and staffed with like-minded ex-IAC officials. Stoeckel has carried out major international studies on the costs of agricultural protectionism and, in another sign of the rationalist times, is now heading the analytical attack on the rural socialism of the reserve price scheme for wool.

For the rationalists, however, some of their early policy wins have produced some sobering realities in practice. The first big win was Paul Keating’s decision to push through a startled Labour Party the financial deregulation recommendations of the Campbell Committee.

But the pro-market economists behind financial liberalisation clearly did not pay enough attention to prudential supervision of a liberalised banking sector, nor to the securities regulation of a corporate sector which was suddenly much freer to borrow. They overestimated the strength of the challenge from foreign bank entry to the established domestic oligopoly – an empirically depressing result for the theory of “contestability” which does not bode well for domestic airline deregulation.

And they were not prepared for the speculative volatility of financial asset markets. The famous US economist, Milton Friedman, thought that speculation would not be destabilising as this would require people to irrationally buy high and sell low. This is exactly what the corporate entrepreneurs did in the mid-to-late 1980s, by both initiating and then being swept along and finally under by the psychology of the herd and the boom-bust of asset prices.

In contrast, the labour market provides an example where the rationalists continue to drive the intellectual debate but where practical men still have their hands on the levers of reform. Rationalist academics such as the sometime utopian founder of Flinders University’s National Institute of Labour Studies, Richard Blandy, and the author of the Greiner Government’s industrial relations reforms, John Niland, have been pushing for a less centralised labour market policy since the 1970s.

But, it has only been since the shock of the mid-1980s balance of payments crisis and the “New Right” challenge of disputes such as Mudginberri and Robe River, that the Government and the ACTU have been forced to try to squeeze supply-side labour market improvements from their centralised wage Accord.

And it is reform on the terms of the power brokers in the labour movement -chiefly ACTU secretary Bill Kelty – who retain the close support of Paul Keating. The mainstream rationalist economists continue to give grudging support for the Accord’s ability to dampen the inflationary bias which stems from Australia’s labour market rigidities.

But they are reserving their judgement on the Western European style “award restructuring” reforms designed to increase the job market’s “functional flexibility”. To survive, the Kelty plan eventually will have to deliver the economic goods.

Finally, the fascinating and controversial new challenge to the orthodoxy of economic policy-making has come not from the Left but from two rationalist ANU economists.

Professor John Pitchford has argued that the balance-of-payments blow-out of the 1980s is not necessarily a “problem” and, in particular, nothing that justifies driving the economy into recession with high interest rates to try to cut off import growth. A current account deficit is just as likely to represent foreign capital inflow in search of investment opportunities in Australia as any decline in the economy’s trade performance.

And Peter Forsyth has argued that micro-economic reform may increase economic efficiency and national income, but also will not solve any balance-of-payments “problem” because it will not change the gap between national investment and saving which, by definition, equals the current account deficit.

Yet, while these two closely allied ideas have swept through the universities to gain acceptance from probably the majority of university econo mists, they have yet to influence the political debate substantially.

Nor is it clear how they will, given that both Pitchford and Forsyth support the pro-market thrust of the rationalist economic reform agenda, but not for the reasons claimed by the econocrats and politicians.”

After such an edifying report we have the, uh, pesky hippie environment thàng

Jonno, Adelaide Hills 🦘🌏

• Restoration of NON military-industrial-scientistic Complex Objet-sujet¹ scientific enquiry not least in honour of DD Eisenhower 1951

• Neurocognitive Health

• IMMEDIATE ADOPTION of 2-5 set series quantum relations self-consciously deliberatively macro metally conceived ordered sequentia logic by some 250 governments de jurê & de facto around the collapsing world

• The conscientised, fully explicated.. pre pubescent kids “go” Yeh 🙂 .. planned, implemented “9 ⭕️” micro through meso through macro economy after Community Economist independent journalist’s newsletter Australia 1995

• Futures at least hypothetic

Sunday 23062025 Mt Barker South Australia

¹Object-subject

How About ..what-about?! East Prussia & Generals Samsonov & Rennenkampf

May all students of what actually happens in history at the ‘SHARP’ (THOUGH HIDDEN) decision-making end find the following useful

John

The Quartermaster-General of General Headquarters, Danilov, was third in rank in the Russian army, but foremost in initiative. He had spent the last few days diligently working out matters of prime importance: he had drawn up one plan for the speedy transformation of conquered East Prussia into a separate governor-generalship, and another for the immediate cessation of warlike operations there; the task of Rennenkampf’s army thus being completed, it would be moved forward across the Vistula for operations aimed at Berlin. As part of this plan he had asked North-Western Army Group to have one army transferred from Rennenkampf to Warsaw..

Since the Chief of Staff of North-Western Army Group, General Oranovsky, was in no position to protest at this directive (any objection made by a junior against an order from above always undermines hid status and prospects), he had already issued instructions for the corps in question to be pulled back to the railhead. (Rennenkampf.. ) Nor did Oranovsky dare, in reporting to his superiors, tolaymuch stress on the anxiety which was beginning to make itself felt among the staff of the North-West Army Group. He merely reported that X Corps had been force d to withdraw near Soldau in ‘a certain amount of disorder’, and that the two corps of von Francois and von Mackensen, ‘which have disappeared from the enemy forces facing Rennekampf’, had suddenly shown up in front of Second Army. But General headquarters was unperturbed by any of this, and in a long telephone conversation on the night of the 15th’/16th Danilov, in pursuit of his latest plan, induced Oranovsy to effect the immediate transfer of the Guards Corps from Warsaw to the Austrian front, remarking with complete unconcern that Samsonov would have to do without the Guards – he had nearly five corps anyway.

Zhilinsky and Oranovsky might have passed on some of the anxiety they felt that day by harrying Samsonov, but to their annoyance (and partly to their relief, because he would then be entirely to blame for anything that went wrong) Samsonov cut off communications. This absolved them of any responsibility for intervening directly to make Blagoveshchensky’s VI Corps and Artomonov’s former corps (I Corps) move inward to the aid of the centre corps of Second Army. To have done this would have been too much trouble to Army Group Headquarters; it would also have been beneath their dignity, [SINCE ACCORDING TO SERVICE PRACTICE THEY WERE NOT OBLIGED TO DO SO]..

Begin of Ch 41 August 15th pp 407-8 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn trnsltd by Michael Glenny Penguin Books 1974

Now I greatly hope the foregoing excerpt from August 1914 serves all students of the contemporary “Romanov” – Misha Glenny – Russian situation with respect to western Europe well !

John Blundell

Australia

There follow student-purposed annotations – cognate ideational excursions concerning the year 1974

(i) 1974 was the year the USA Federal Bureau of Investigation murdered KAREN SILKWOOD, a nuclear power industry technician on behalf of the Robert Oppenheimer and the post WWII Science-boosterism cult¹ (and @WestinghouseNEC in a Billion-dollar promotional campaign at this present fraught time in human history)

(ii) as though there were an Intelligent Electronic Ambience² bringing all purposive and intellectually ‘powerful’ men and woman around the world to common and cognate experiences (even on the other side of the world) it was only weeks before Silkwood’s killing on a freeway outside Cleveland Ohio USA³ that having been selected by the SA government (when working for the Commonwealth Dept. of the Interior NTA Welfare Division in Alice Springs) to take up a District Officer position in what had been said to have been “the most racist town in Australia” on the front page of a city morning newspaper in 1973 I did that. – Followed by five virtually revolutionary years of service in that town by Australian or indeed ANY ex British colonial frontier zone standards.

¹”Oppenheimer and the Gita”
The phrase “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” from the Bhagavad Gita is a powerful statement by Lord Krishna, where he reveals his cosmic form to Arjuna. In this context, “Death” (Kala) represents not just physical death, but the ultimate power of time and change, encompassing creation, preservation, and destruction. It signifies Krishna’s role as the force that brings about the end of all things, ultimately leading to their recreation. This quote is famously associated with J. Robert Oppenheimer, who reflected on it after witnessing the first atomic bomb test at Los Alamos Nevada USA. ..this author’s supplied and far from gratuitous note appended at this point >> destroyer of THE world per the ecocidal and extreme unseasonal repetitive weather-systems failure onslaught of which nuclear radiation plays a signal part

²certainly an unproven social relations construct but equally certainly noted and briefly written up in my 1997 (post sting) Community Economist Publications Worldwide newsletter – JB

³”..killed in a car accident near Crescent, Oklahoma, north of Oklahoma City,” the spooks who want us all depersonalised as literal objects-of-trade for the profit of entrepreneurs and foreign investors particularly, if they can’t actually swing our dehumanisation for fertiliser NOW write..

Colonial Writing in Downing Street and Birmingham Prison

Using public library Wi-fi for a week REFUSING TO PAY AN EXTRA PENNY to any grandly titled Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Data-salesman that/ who thinks it fair, sane or ethical to charge a simple writer who actually never watches videos running > 1 minute for 25 G of data in 3 wks flat for ‘oceans’ of coded stinking crap letters, conjunctors & numbers of no use to man, woman or beast.

I am fighting you people AND winning and you bloody well know it.

John (Kangaroo & Eastern global longitudinal hemisphere dude)

Let not the marriage of true mines admit, impediment, you Seppo CFI’s

Convict testimony and memoirs certainly influenced the chaplain Thomas Beagley Naylor’s writing about Norfolk Island during and after Maconochie’s administration.

Naylor arrived in 1841 soon after Maconochie’s appointment and became a keen supporter of the reformist regime: he declared the mark system and its reform principles to be ‘above all other means the best, if not the only means of uniting the conflicting interests of the criminal and justice.’¹

Ward considered him an able and kind teacher.² Carey suggests Naylor and Maconochie together ‘achieved a kind of spiritual liberation’ for some convicts, although her study does not take much account of the convicts’ writing³

Rob Wills suggests that the musician and surgeon James Aqinas Reid, whom Maconochie employed on Norfolk Island, was also highly involved in convict memoirs.

It was most likely Naylor who strongly influenced the religious tone of many of the Norfolk Island narratives. Both he and the commandant were adept at using print culture to influence public debate, although their interests were sometimes adjacent, rather than perfectly aligned, especially after Maconochie’s 1844 recall.

Naylor used his personal experiences and connections with prisoners to mount an influential print campaign on penal matters in official (and explosive) correspondence, such as his 1845 -1846 letter to Lord Stanley.

Naylor’s letter was titled ‘Norfolk Island, the Botany Bay of Botany Bay,’ evoking a long-standing image of Antipodean moral degradation that is traced in this book through the Revd Richard Johnson and many subsequent writers.

In his polemic, Naylor relocated the locus of moral concern to Norfolk Island in the aftermath of Maconochie’s recall [and especially the inversion of social order that accompanied the subsequent breakdown of authority] under Commandant Major Joseph Childs.

Reports of the proliferation of homosexual activity accompanied this and other accounts, with corrupt colonial officials both profiting from the disorder [and implicated in punitive repression of convict violence and resistance].

..met Mrs Naylor and intercepted her husband’s manuscript, suggesting the ‘extreme impropriety’ of publishing it before bringing it to the attention of the government.

An excerpt from the recently published [The Antipodean Laboratory: making colonial knowledge 1770 – 1870, Anna Johnson Cambridge University Press 2023] brought to all you largely excellent grown-up and ‘blessedly’ as the numpties & plodders of this hideously & spectacularly failing world of ours are wont to c’est\ say – the beneficiaries of a western liberal education in the himantities, arts and social sciences particularly New Millennium #Economics at senior secondary school level.. it is s-o-o good to know you.

Did the mind boggle for you too – or those funny-looking clouds go whooshing across the sky with the eastward rotation of the only terrestrial (or perhaps gallivanting oceanic pirate’s struggling audio-visually represented culture with cast and crews of thousands and mentally/ imaginitively humanly overwhelming Production Values⁴ with reference to two standout contemporary themes in Australian national (not Domestic, m’dears – that as you would all have known for THIRTY ONE years now but for the neoliberal corporate neoclassical crap propaganda mind-boggle censorship regime now become the supercharged “AI” + Dalle 3, 4, 5 et Set Era deskilling or Dumbdown & mass mental health crisis macabre global pantomime Billionaire Mental 11 Year-old Boys Global Command & Control Centre.. means household ⁵.

The second one? Do I really have to reference that “mesanathematic” Mara Dusseldorp pre-modern misanthropic mindfuddle? Well no. It’s my global educational blockdbuster journal and I’ll try if I want to\ 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2.

What next jolly old woozy & affluent Addled & Laid? Australian Local Government councils?? New Zealand???

DEDICATION OF DOCUMENT

Hugh Stretton, briefly my friend after the Rann-Olsen sting because he was at least prepared to discuss his much-lauded though in the terms of the concentric circles economy theorem 1995’s erroneous construction of community as merely a sector that was distinguished from the macro and the microeconomic sectors of what was faddishly called ‘glo-cal’ economy in the same historical period (of Geckoeism), the early 1990s. Also referrred to by the idiot brother of the then federal Treasurer – to me, ‘in black & white, in a letter signed by himself of which by some freak-occurrence of usually fully-predictable Australian Packer-era gangsterism i still possess the original – as the Spiritual Sector.

That was ‘Baptists,’ students.

One wonders what the newly elected Pope Nickelodeon would have to say about that particular piece of whacko reductionist-objectivist-Monist-Animist-primitive Earth-centred solar system Carl Sagan pseudoscience. In fact I recommend very strongly that he urgently speak on the matter because no reasonably well (not by TV) educated young person under the age of 30 is listenening to a word the man has to say presently.

John Blundell

The humanisation century – micro resorce & information goes macro decision-making & human adult relationships ..originally off the ACOSS conference, Sydney, September 1978

¹ cited in Barry, Alexander Maconochie, page 168

² Ward, ‘Diary,’ p 128

³ Carey, Empire of Hell, p169

⁴ the construct Production-values emerged in the deadly Rand Samuelson⁴ᵃ Greenspan Friedman Porter 1990s

⁴ᵃ derided amongst all non performing sealed, delivered and virtually microchip-implanted economists around the world when I first studied #Economics at @Flinders in South Australia – though the school gave us a microeconomics supply & demand monster text which was fit – as North americans say – like a glove to complement Samuelson & Bourlag’s (pesticides headbanger) World-trade Ecocide and Permanent-warfare.. Richard Lipsey.

⁵ VG Childe, Australian, suicide at Katoomba NSW, oekòmenè, 1941 What Happened in History

Daily writing prompt Kiddiepress USA\ Fourteen Million Bees Escape Google\ Wiki-boo’s Fun Articles for Young ‘n Old\ FU taken ur Meds¹?

How the conceptual framing of this essay began when I got out of bed – Vote early & Vote often Australian Labor Party trope, meme and slogan still very much alive in public discourse clean through the near-completely loopy Hawke years and into the Twenty O’s – was a “stentorian’ blast or at least report to the effect that conversationalists and speechifiers should get out of world politics immediately. Their processual has bastardised and largely destroyed socially intelligent content EVERYWHERE.

There are now no refuges and there can be no more vanity projects.

Screenshot

Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?

answered-users
answered-users
answered-users

View all responses

In what the Shrunken-heads museum of the United States of America cretinously – hey now we can play with our poo i’ve got a good stick – announces to the sentient and passably literate world as Nature fighting back a bobcat .. not a small truck-scoop, children

Ahmm readers will joyfully accept whatever they may get or score from greeneconomyact.com and immediately forgive typographical errors in the following essay THERE’S NO TIME for corrections conni[ptions or curlicues – and spare us the fuck the gargoyles – WE HAVE IN POINT OF FACT, RECORD AND HISTORY RUN OUT.

Ayn Rand’s, Nathaniel Branden’s and Alan Greenspan’s “Objectivism” – psycho-culturally and “spiritually” rooted not in quantum mechanics but in Belle Epoch Newtonian mechanics & the Rutherford* (my God he was a New Zillndr too) particle physics of that nether day – cultural objectivism – Jimmy Carter period ethical relativism and Sex-is-mental on anabolic steroids – IS the early 20th century Christian Fundamentalist psycho-spiritual ‘Luddism’ – expressly, overtly, and with doctrinaire ideological passion and intensity – afeared of and even preposterously angered by evolutionary biology, relativity and quantum relations which all three are high-falutin, new-fangled, cockamamie Gyro Gearloose ideas.

And as the ideational or frankly ideological product, or patently ♂卍ψ-cultural outcome, STUDENTS NOTE, this contemporary world of the Billiionaire AI Gangsters’ Cabal catastrophically remains literally smitten by intellectual “numbskulls” in positions of great wealth and political responsibility who profess not to understand quantum relations (the Physics of the Manhattan Island post Hawking popular culture aberration)..

This rather puts me in mind of an Australian self-styled public intellectual who did radio broadcasting 5 days a week and would listen to ‘audio-books’ on his way home to his lavishly Australian Taxation Office leveraged farm setting up an annual conference for the bored-idle-rich-irascible class of person – conversationalist speechifiers – in a provincial city called the something-or-other of High Dears, but I digress.

Well no I do not.

Students ALL senior secondary

Students ALL University Intake – that’s before admission to any degree course or program

In a breezy easy 2,000 words and in my email “inbox” – divine, ⦿/ ۞/ ⍟, huh, boyz – by Fridayⱽ midday your time zone

So there you are and there you go you dear gentle genital adult and young adult reader, it is indeed a drunken apothecary-run-amok-in-his-own-dispensary’s random discovery and illumination of New Millennium neurolinguistic truth in reason that’s set you all on your merry – Spelling-bees educational, social, economic, cultural, ψ spiritual and in fact every other childish (pre-operational mental and concrete-ops mental) thing behind you.

Your Servant, Team

John Blundell = 35.0732° S, 138.8576° E Saturday 07062025

^yes, the Friedmanite banker ghoul.. social studies kids will note that these people had oarsome sexual relations with each other back in the day

¹ “Meds” were vaginal tampons in what might be called Dame Edna Everage’s working and middle class Australia – the publicists and copywriters of the Lutheran Church ‘AOG’ Barrier Industrial Council Arthur Calwell immigration Oi-oi Land medicalised chicks themselves, young people, but you’d all know that only too well..

!ᴬ just a note to all of the female readers now – a socio-cultural take that every single one of you will find powerfully useful in actually negotiating (not for the love of Christ, the Prophet, the Buddha and Arnold ‘Dead-brain’ Schwartzenegger navigating) YOUR OWN LIFE ➸ overdone1 make-up

1ᴮ World’s saddest ‘fun-facts:’ do any of you older people remember the fashion statement in protest and mockery against being ‘medicalised, diagnosed, mauled, molested’ or SIMPLY OBJECTIFIED in society, on-the-advice-of-post WWII psychiatrists, teenaged girl’s all white face paint which appeared in my city when I was a 20 something social worker?

1ᶜ you reckon I’ve had enough of this @Wordpress essay you’d be right – i have as ever an enormous amount of other work to do this Wednesday morning in southern Australia but one last point in this neoclassical four-point (quadratic, Socratic, syllogistic – code for simple minded/ micro-fixated no meso- no macro no cosmic or Fake-universal meaning, value or common sense) textual explication/ explanation, viz ALL men and boys in busted Dr Who & Na-di-nahnah ex-human society figure they’ve some crazy-arsed and crazy-headed right to mouth off, expostulate, pass hostile moronic judgment on, AND ASSAULT anyone who doesn’t look like themselves or speak the same language with the same accents and intonation as themselves and this pre-apocalypic Chretien/ cretins’ Book of Revelation “mindfuck” comes not just to you but to your children and to your present or future grandchildren as the manly gift of Socratic rebellion some 23 hundred freaking years ago in sthrn Europe

^ Wednesday next will be OK if you have a Young Adulthood ψ spiritual need to keep ‘running’ with 1890s neoclassical Socratic disciplines for now – yes GEA & Monkeys do l-a-u-g-h-s ⥈ i guess you can all laugh about the Silicon Valley Mom’s Basement collegeboy 1890s Ivy League mannnerisms of deadline, timeline, byline and (the definitionally psychotic) Dateline now – or you’re starting-to, as my girlfriend once said to me

Was that the Leaving of Liverpool – Ronfusion Ceigns

Major international spokes-genitals early 2025

Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain
Sam Wetherell
Apollo, £25.00 (cloth)

In 1945 a ship lay in wait on the Mersey River by Liverpool, then Britain’s foremost imperial port. Stripped of its cargo and packed with bunk beds, the ship contained a hundred dazed Chinese dockworkers, who had been hauled from their beds at night and rounded up in police cars to be deported back to Shanghai, their wives and children never to be told what became of them. The seamen had made their way to Liverpool decades ago, on lumbering, lonely cargo ships. During the war years, they had crewed vital shipments of food and weaponry, even as German bombs razed the docks that received their vessels. But for those ordering the deportations, their contributions mattered little.

The decision was the product of Britain’s new welfare state—a decidedly utilitarian, not utopian, project with an infrastructure forged in war (think conscription, nationalization, rationing) and a singular, at times ruthless, goal: full employment and economic modernization for the collective it served. Any population outside of that collective, imagined as the white national community, would be welcomed only so long as it was useful. Seen as obstructing progress, the Chinese dockworkers—who might have themselves unknowingly displaced returning British servicemen from their jobs—were cast aside.

The forces that rendered Liverpool obsolete in the twentieth century have become endemic in the twenty-first.

What happens when a whole city gets cast aside? Postwar Liverpool, whose maritime industries declined as imperial trade waned in the era of decolonization, would soon find out. Once a gateway to the Atlantic, the port city’s westerly position now divided it from growing trade with Europe. By the early 1980s, when the combined effects of stagflation and neoliberal economics were reconfiguring Britain’s other northern industrial cities, seven in every eight of Liverpool’s dock jobs had already been lost. Britain’s welfare state was a workers’ state, designed to fit the greatest possible number of the population for productive labor and have their needs met, in the main, by fairly waged employment. Now that work for all was a past horizon, that welfare state could not save Liverpool. As the “productive regimes that had summoned them” ceased to exist, writes Sam Wetherellthe people of Liverpool, like the Chinese seamen before them, became extraneous.

However, rather than a simple story of being “left behind,” the fate of Liverpool and its people can tell us something about the future. The major intervention made by Wetherell’s Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain, a pacy and compassionate ode to Merseyside, is to flip our chronology: Liverpool is not a relic, the book argues, but a prophecy. In the twenty-first century, the processes that rendered Liverpool obsolete in the twentieth—rising prices, falling wages, chronic labor insecurity, homelessness, and health care failure—have become endemic. As more and more are abandoned by the economy and the state, the decline that befell Liverpool threatens to become our collective destiny.


How did it feel to be at the vanguard of Britain’s obsolescence? Standing in the Liverpool Airport on a warm July day in 1964, one might barely have noticed. The Beatles were making their fêted return to their home city, suit-clad and stepping off a shimmering jet, about to be engulfed by fawning, fainting crowds. They would exit the airport, located in the new suburb of Speke. Here, cool water from Capel Celyn, a small Welsh village submerged to create a reservoir’s worth of fresh water for the just-built council estates, flowed from novel indoor taps. From Speke, they would move toward a city center poised on the brink of regeneration, down newly paved roads fit for an era of mass motoring in a city known, briefly, as “Britain’s Detroit”—a fitting moniker for a city that had celebrated the opening of a Ford factory in the suburb of Halewood just a year earlier. The Beatles, boys from Merseyside suburbs importing a version of American swing, encountered a city embracing industrial regeneration at a moment when it seemed to be working.

In 1934, a eugenicist sociologist warned that, because of the ongoing mixing between the white working class and foreign seafarers, the “quality of the people” of Liverpool would decline.

During the 1960s, the manufacture of cars created 30,000 new jobs in Liverpool, almost half of them at the Halewood Ford factory. Ford bosses were wary about employing former dockworkers, who tended to be highly unionized and used to a level of autonomy afforded by seasonal shift patterns, which placed their labor in high demand. To acculture them to the monotonous rhythms of the factory, with its half-kilometer-long production line, all but the most conservative unions were barred from official negotiations. This mattered little to workers, who simply imported more organic forms of collective action direct from the docks. Wildcat strikes, absenteeism, and a dockers’ practice known as “the welt”—where half the gang would work while the other rested—were used to push back against poor conditions. One group of recently hired workers, yearning for the autonomy of dock work as they kept up with the rapid tempo of the production line, put explosive powder under the peel of an orange that their foreman planned to eat for lunch. However, while the white working class had been temporarily rescued from obsolescence, others had been cast aside: by refusing to hire former seafarers, Ford had introduced a color bar by stealth. With the loss of maritime industry, it was Black men who struggled the most to find new, factory-based employment.

The problem of Liverpool’s surplus population had always been framed in racial terms. In 1934, eugenicist sociologist David Caradog Jones had warned that there were exactly 74,010 too many people living on the Merseyside and that, because of their idleness and the ongoing mixing between the white working class and foreign seafarers, the “quality of the people” of Liverpool would decline. Long before the deportation of Chinese sailors at the end of the World War II, Liverpool was being made whiter. The waterfront area of Sailortown, a strip of migrant dormitories hosting sailors from across the empire, had been eradicated through rounds of slum clearance and, eventually, German bombs. Liverpool’s Black population (mostly descendants of West African sailors) were pushed inland and out of sight to Toxteth, a neighborhood in Liverpool’s inner city. As white workers were given new work and new homes, discriminatory hiring practices locked minorities out of jobs while racist housing policies kept Black families away from the suburbs. The few who slipped through often returned to Toxteth after facing relentless (and unimaginative) hostility: bricks through windows; dog excrement through letter boxes. Discriminatory police violence, stop-and-search laws, and endemic racism meted out by an almost entirely white police force intensified the containment of Liverpool’s Black population in Toxteth’s crumbling, subdivided former Victorian mansions.

They would not silently endure their treatment forever. 1981 saw the Toxteth Uprising (Wetherell rejects the term “riot” as implicitly delegitimizing), one of a series of violent clashes between the police and minority communities in Liverpool, London, Bristol, and Manchester. During the febrile nights of July, police fired tear gas into crowds, a violent tactic that had only previously been used in overtly imperial contexts (Burma, Malaya, Belfast). Targets of the tear gas included a three-year-old girl, cowering behind her parents in the back seat of a car. For Toxteth’s minorities, the long nights of fighting were a rejection not only of relentless police violence, but the wider structures of governance that had pushed them into an overpoliced, under-resourced area of the city to begin with. For the police, though, they were simply outside the national community: not only surplus, but disposable.

Liverpool’s white community would not have defined themselves as such. In the suburbs, the factories, and the city center (where less than 1 percent of shop workers were Black), whiteness was ubiquitous. Unlike comparable deindustrializing cities in the United States, (we might think of St. Louis, which has had a similar, book-length treatment by historian Walter Johnson), Liverpool had no history of planned segregation and thus no overt white separatist movements. Nonetheless, when threatened, the white community closed ranks. In one of Britain’s most left-wing cities (with a City Council led by Trotskyites for much of the 1980s), a petition circulated by the Young Conservatives in support of police conduct in Toxteth was signed by over 5000 people. Police Chief Kenneth Oxford was never called to account for catalyzing (and then violently quelling) the uprising.

But the sympathies of Liverpool’s white citizens lay in the wrong place. Obsolescence was coming for them, too. A month after the riots, Chancellor of the Exchequer Geoffrey Howe wrote a memo to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, suggesting that “managed decline” might be the best strategy for Liverpool. The economic shocks of the 1970s had obliterated the optimism of the 1960s. Car factories had closed, and the inhabitants of the once-gleaming suburbs were now unemployed too. By the mid-1980s, just 7 percent of sixteen-year-old high-school leavers in Knowsley were finding employment. Wrote one resident, “If they send the career officer to schools, then they should send the dole officer, too.”

Liverpool’s white working class could have seen their own fate prophesied in Toxteth. In 1989, across the Pennines in Sheffield, police responded to chaos at the Hillsborough football stadium, created by their own incompetence, with murderous inaction. Having forced fans to enter the stadium through a few congested turnstiles, the police then failed to allow a heaving crowd out of a closed pen. Ninety-four people were crushed to death in the first minutes of the FA Cup Semi-Final (three more would die of their injuries in the years to come). Fans of Nottingham Forest, the opposing team, looked on in horror; police with contempt. For Wetherell, this defining moment in Liverpool’s history was a “catastrophe made possible by the cheapening of the lives of people deemed to be surplus in a city that was derelict and abandoned.” The tragedy not only happened to Liverpool but was about it. By the 1980s, the tracksuited “scouser” had become an emblem not of a lost Britain, but of its annoying afterlife. A surplus, threatening masculinity, prone to alcoholism, casual violence, and identification with region over nation, incarnated a new tabloid trope: the football hooligan.

It is not only that Liverpool’s communities have been abandoned wholesale; they’ve been recycled and repurposed.

Writing this a mere mile from Hillsborough, I wondered if Sheffield’s own obsolescence was also partly to blame for the tragedy that unfolded on a warm spring Saturday afternoon. Sheffield, a steel city, had like Liverpool entered its own terminal decline ahead of the national curve. The rapid growth of sites of steel production in the newly industrializing world meant that British steel ceased to be profitable before British coal did. Sheffield’s working class had been staring down their own obsolescence before Thatcher and Thatcherism, much like Liverpool’s dockworkers had after the decline of imperial trade. The utopianism of Sheffield’s iconic urban housing developments—most famous a Le Corbusier–style development named Park Hill—could not outlast the city’s economic boom. Conditions declined and crime rose from the beginning of the 1970s, and the South Yorkshire Police devoted increasing resources to the problem of white, working-class male “youths.”

By 1984, when the northernmost outskirts of the city were losing mining jobs as Thatcher’s government tried to shed the financial burden of nationalized coal production, the most violent clash of Britain’s two-year standoff between the state miners fighting for their profession and the South Yorkshire Police, the “Battle of Orgreave,” erupted. Mounted officers charged their horses into an unarmed crowd, displaying a contempt for working-class life honed across a decade of economic decline in Sheffield. Just five years later, many of the same officers watched coolly as the bodies of the ninety-seven dead were laid out across the floor of an adjacent gym, even taking blood samples from the corpses of children in an attempt to establish that they had been drinking, that the dead had been culpable. 


The historiography of modern Britain lacks its own Ruth Wilson Gilmore, whose Golden Gulag showed how in California, rises in policing and incarceration were a response to both labor surplus and the privatization of state security. Neoliberal economics, she shows, entailed not simply the shrinkage of the state but the expansion of its penal functions. In Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain, increasingly violent policing, as it came for the Black community and then the white working class, figures merely as regrettable overreach on the part of the local and national government. Wetherell’s analysis, while it gestures toward the ways working-class obsolescence conditioned policing (and incarceration), stops short of drawing the conclusion it points toward: that the violence was not simply born of an excess of contempt on the part of the police but was legitimated and even encouraged by a state that had designated particular populations as surplus.

Obsolescence enables not only chronic neglect, but active harm: this is the vital connective tissue between the clinical dispassion of neoliberal cuts in the last century and the intentional damage wrought by austerity in this one. Thatcherite economics were never disavowed in British politics, despite thirteen years of Labor rule beginning in 1997. What arrived in 2010 was a new austerity conservatism, committed to reducing national debt by cutting public services. Austerity was an international economic phenomenon, a response to the 2008 financial crisis that gave rise to regimes of similar scenes across Europe and the Americas.

In Britain, it had a particular class and cultural politics. It unevenly targeted the post-industrial working class by cutting revenues sent by central governments to local councils, which otherwise relied on the rates paid by local people. Because local council income matched local population wealth, wealth gaps between white-collar and blue-collar towns, between the North and South of England, became chasms. Liverpool, the third-poorest city council in the country, lost 35 percent of its local council budget between 2010 and 2023, and in the process racked up almost £600 million in debt. As inequality widened, a cultural campaign against the unemployed intensified, epitomized by Benefits Street, a sneering, fly-on-the-wall style reality series about the lives of unemployed council estate dwellers in Northern former industrial towns. The condition of labor surpluses—of obsolescence—was once again regarded as a moral failing. David Caradog Jones—who had written of idleness as inherently degrading as he travelled Liverpool’s slums in the 1930s—found his acolytes in the twenty-first century tabloid press. The very brief social-democratic window, during which unemployment was a collective problem demanding state solutions, had closed.

Every April 15, Liverpool “Remembers the Ninety-Seven” who lost their lives at Hillsborough. But even before the fateful semifinal match, social murder—that is, facilitating and hastening the death of particular groups through chronic neglect—was taking place on a scale both grander and more quotidian. In Britain, the life expectancy of working-class people decreased from the mid-1980s, most quickly in Liverpool. Chronic poverty, unemployment, and the neglect of housing stock created “deaths of despair” through suicide, substance abuse, and, more perniciously, unusually high rates of heart disease and cancer. Merseyside doctors began to talk about “shit life syndrome,” a diagnosis that, in its mix of sympathy and pessimism, proved deadly: the large doses of opioids and benzodiazepines they prescribed paved the way for a heroin addiction crisis.

Merseyside doctors began to talk about “shit life syndrome,” a diagnosis that proved deadly.

In Wetherell’s formulation, Liverpool is “unmade,” tossed aside by the state and capital when no longer useful. But there’s a bit more to the story. It is not only that Liverpool’s communities have been abandoned wholesale; they’ve been recycled and repurposed. After ceasing to be producers of private wealth, a working class left with the physical legacies of their labor become consumers of health care. Gabriel Winant has shown how in Pittsburgh, as factories closed, hospitals grew, adding more beds and more caretaking jobs to mend the broken bodies left behind. The same has happened in Liverpool. Though the National Health Service remains publicly funded, many of its functions are now outsourced to private companies. Health and social care—mostly, that is, care for the disabled and the elderly subcontracted to private providers—now accounts for 70 percent of local council spending. The bodies of the longshoreman and factory workers cast aside by deindustrialization now generate revenue for these private equity firms, many of which are headquartered in tax havens beyond Britain’s shores. Liverpool, once a node through which wealth flowed into the United Kingdom, has become its exit point.

Wetherell is less interested in these dynamics, choosing instead to trace a more starkly visible history: how the workless working class became a product for consumption. In 1982, an editorial in the tabloid Daily Mirror had commented that—so fascinating was the speed of Liverpool’s decline—its council should “put a fence around and charge for admission.” Just over two decades later, in 2004, Liverpool became a UNESCO world heritage site (ironically, the designation was stripped in 2021 on the grounds that the waterfront’s historical character had been compromised), and its fastest growing economic sector was, and remains, tourism. At the heart of the redeveloped Albert Dock, once the arrival point of brandy, cotton, silk, and tobacco, stands the Museum of Liverpool, a slanting low-rise concrete structure designed to mimic trading ships. Opened in 2011, the Museum memorializes a lost working-class way of life. Cobbled terraces made of fiberglass, black-and-white films displaying the Blitz spirit of the 1940s, exhibitions dedicated to an aseptic “resistance” against an unspecified foe—all conjure an authentic but unthreatening lost way of life which, alongside the legacy of The Beatles, attracts 60 million visitors each year.

Tourism brought revenue, retail, and service work to Britain’s third-poorest city. It also brought white middle-class university graduates with cultural sector aspirations. Slightly north of the Museum of Liverpool, young professionals can visit an outdoor sauna or drink cocktails on the banks of the Mersey. Affluent urban life thrums beneath the shadow of Liverpool’s iconic Liver Building, once one of the tallest buildings in Europe and an icon of the city’s former maritime wealth. But, Wetherell writes, beyond a gleaming veneer of prosperity, there is no return to the past. The rising river will see the Albert Dock underwater within the lifetimes of Liverpool’s youngest citizens. But even before environmental catastrophe arrives, he warns: obsolescence “might be coming for us all.”

Hasn’t it already arrived? Liverpool’s white working class have been living with their own obsolescence since the 1970s; its Black community since the 1940s. Is the “us all” simply the middle classes—the white-collar cultural-sector and education professionals now facing the existential threat of zero-hours contracts, AI, and, in Britain, a “left” government with no plans to reverse the fifteen years of austerity that preceded it? Still, if a once-insulated middle class are the next to be rendered obsolete, what might they learn from those who went before? Can they outrun the complacency of Liverpool’s white working class, who themselves failed to see their own futures prophesied in the degradation of their Black neighbors? Could they—could we—resist?


If there is a resistance, Wetherell argues, it lies in mutual care. From the 1980s, Liverpool might have had the highest incidence of “deaths of despair” in England, but it did not become an epicenter for the AIDS pandemic, as public-health officials had expected for a city with a heroin problem. This was because the people of Liverpool refused to neglect all the city’s most precarious “surplus” citizens. Founding the first large-scale needle exchange in Britain, a quiet collective of activists ensured the safety of drug users and sex workers alike. Meanwhile, for the predominantly gay men already infected with the disease, the Merseyside AIDS Support Group refused to consign the dying to lonely, frightened deaths. They organized buddy systems, yoga classes, and a retreat on the west coast of Ireland, where daily swims with dolphins served as a kind of “natural therapist.” These forms of care were a radical refusal of obsolescence. Even the addicted, even the dying, deserved to live.

Activists practiced a radical refusal of obsolescence. Even the addicted, even the dying, deserved to live.

Before we refuse our mutual obsolescence, we must accept it. There is a freedom in this. Locating our value in work or, when that fails, the state, was always precarious. Even in, the imagined golden age after the war and before Thatcherism, welfare was only for the chosen. New houses, new jobs, new schools were unevenly distributed, and white workers were favored. When social democracy gave way to neoliberal economics, the white working class were abandoned first by their employers and then the state, too. People’s value cannot lie in the value they produce; if our value is vested in anything but our shared humanity, it is ultimately unstable. Read hopefully, Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain provides a deeply humanist, universalist prescription to collective obsolescence: if none of us matter, all of us do.

In Liverpool, this lesson has never been more urgent. Before a baby born on the Merseyside today has seen floodwaters lapping at the foundations of the Liverpool Museum, it will face more imminent threats. One third of children in Liverpool live in poverty. A senior pediatrician at Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital estimated that between 2015-2017, 500 children in England died from preventable, poverty-related conditions. There is no memorial quilt unfurled for these infants in Liverpool’s cathedrals as there was for the AIDS dead in 1992; no annual minute of silence for them as for the ninety-seven who died at Hillsborough. But all these deaths are produced by the same twin forces of contempt and neglect.

A new universalism might propel us forward, but only so far. For to spend any time in Liverpool is to see that remembering has a politics, too. As the Albert Dock disappears, like the Welsh village of Capel Celyn before it, Liverpool both reveals the future and uncovers a past where all was not as it seemed. Even in Britain’s boom years, parts of the nation were already being unmade. Even as plans were being drawn to rebuild Liverpool from the rubble of German bombs, Chinese seamen were being deported silently by night.

Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.

Emily Baughan

Emily Baughan is senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield and author of Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire. Her writing has also appeared in Tribune, Jacobin, and the Times Literary Supplement. 

Boston Review is nonprofit and reader funded.

We rely on readers to keep our pages free and open to all. Help sustain a public space for collective reasoning and imagination: become a supporting reader today.

🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒

GEA & Baboons with armalites, kalashnikovs & AK47s readers these thirty-three yea..¹ thank @BostonReview profusely

Article appeared @adam_tooze @Chartbook for which GEA places on public record it’s enduring, persistent and Od’s bodikins alter-natively Od’s pittikins Featherstonehaugh INDEED resilient navigational landscape tramping triumphalist Year 2000 Capacity-building thàng (segué Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue – an authentic socio ψ culturally-spiritually contributory world’s document)

Here is a mid 20th C depiction of
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (English writer and philologist)’s Bilbs

John

Australia

1212hrs 🦘🇦🇺🌏 27052025

¹Baboons are primates comprising the genus Papio, one of the 23 genera of Old World monkeys, in the family Cercopithecidae. There are six species of baboon: the hamadryas baboon, the Guinea baboon, the olive baboon, the yellow baboon, the Kinda baboon and the chacma baboon. Each species is native to one of six areas of Africa and the hamadryas baboon is also native to part of the Arabian Peninsula.

Adam Tooze Historian Developing Blundell’s 1993 Dialectics of the Damned Proposition

Screenshot
“Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreThank you for reading Chartbook. To support the project, sign up for one of the subscription options.Upgrade to paidChartbook 350: Bullying as a mode of powerAdam ToozeFeb 7 READ IN APP The onslaught of the first weeks of the Trump Presidency has been intense. Even making a list of the points of attack is exhausting and demoralizing. At some point over the last few days I began to think a lot about bullying as a mode of power.Chartbook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Upgrade to paid What makes bullying distinctive as a form of government?Bullying power isn’t the same as authoritarianism, or tyranny, or dictatorship, or repression. Bullying involves the use of power to humiliate as well as to intimidate, hurt or coerce. Bullying is transgressive and excessive. It goes beyond conventional police, punishment or compellence and yet it is also less. It is less purposeful and instrumental than other forms of power. In the end, enacting repeated moments of humiliation may be an end in itself.In a world of warlordism, bullying may be the normal modus operandi.In a world of order, bullying can not persist unless it is tolerated, or it is authorized by other more stable and legitimate modes of power [Bullying is violent, but it is not the behavior of a master or a hero.In the classic formulation of the “master-slave” dialectic (paraphrasing Kojeve/ Hegel here) the struggle for recognition between the two protagonists is a struggle to the death. Both need something (recognition) and demand it from the other. The one who is willing to stake their existence emerges as master, whereas the one who chooses life, ends up as bondsman. This conclusion is unstable because the master wants recognition from a peer and the bondsman is no peer.] For their part the bondsman has given up their claim to recognition. The classic resolution is for the bondsmen through their labour to emerge as the true subjects of history, collectively usurping the role of the master. Bullying might be thought of as a degenerate form of this dialectic.Two options come to mind: Bullying could take the form of a frustrated bondsmen picking on their fellows without challenging the basic hierarchy. Or it might involve a bored and sadistic master choosing to reenact the moment of submission, even though the issue has long ago been decided.In either form, bullying is violent and dramatic, but it does not move the historical process forward. [Bullying does not create a new order, but lashes out, threatening and smashing existing things.As a transgressive form of power, bullying does not know its limits. Bullying doesn’t have a predetermined measure or plan. It starts with teasing and can end in hounding someone to death.And yet the intention of bullying is not murder. Bullying inflicts harm. Some victims may not survive. But the main purpose of bullying is not to kill. After all, the bully needs their victim.In this sense too, bullying is a secondary form of power. Not only does bullying need license, but bullying needs its victims.Bullying is a social activity.] The bully has victims and a successful bully has followers. The bully is amongst us.And yet despite being social, it is in the nature of bullying that it is unaccountable and irresponsible.Part of the stress of living with bullying is that one ends up devoting an inordinate amount of mental and emotional energy to anticipating the next capricious onslaught.In the conventional repertoire of power, the closest analogue to bullying is psychological warfare. It works by destabilizing and wearing down its victims. PSYOPs are mounted in the service of wider goals, such as counterinsurgency. Not for nothing they are the classic terrain of conspiracy theory.The question in the case of the Trump Presidency is how much is instrumental and how much of the bullying is nothing more than that, an end in itself.
Screenshot

Billionaire Monkeys wirh @MIT @Olivetti Typewriters thanks historian @adam_tooze for his essay

The moving finger writes and having writ moves on

None of your piety, wit or television-variety-chat & panel-show-piano-player-in-the-brothel savoir faire1 shall lure it back to cancel half a line

Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it 2

FORMATTING NOTE in cas you hadn’t picked this up long ago – perhaps you’re new here in which case Welcome – [ .. ] signifies emphasis only has been altered : text is faithfully verbatim reproduced.

As you move on with text and maths thematics, or the all-new neurolinguistics, it will gradually become clear that authenticity and respectful attribution are of paramount importance in #Science, literature, the arts and living human culture.

As people under peak neoliberal Raison D’etat ‘Christo-fascist’ Screw-thy-neighbour gangsterism now we teach ourselves to think, speak and write clearly in five parts or crash – if not burn.

John Blundell

Australia

1 the ability to act or speak appropriately in social situations.. “this is a gracious occasion, so try to behave with a bit of savoir faire”/ the ability to act or speak appropriately in social situations .. It is recommended students cross-reference Facility Facileness Importunity Fakeness Phoneyness Sophistry Tendentiousness Trivialisation Fatuousness Vapidity Nonsensisation Psychologising if not FULL-ON ARTIFICIAL BAD-METAPHOR PUMPING ELECTROMECHANICAL PSYCHOBABBLING,1A “Chattering,” ‘Baby-talk’/ Kiddie-talk and Polemics (Blundell, the famous essay on Polemic I never saw again, Blundell Orchards Ashton SA 5137 1995) .. 1A faxed letter to SA senator and then federal Attorney General AE Vanstone & future ‘Ambassador to the Holy See’ concerning ‘Timmy Psychobabble Fischer’ deputy PM of Australia, John Blundell, Blundell Orchards & Organically Grown fresh & dry retail food marketing store 1997

2 STUDENTS this name Omar Kayam (?) was given to a 1930s (?) Madison Ave Manhattan popular middle class market Information-product not any sort of Late-first or early Second Millennium Arabic scholar at all. My Mum had a copy of the pocket or purse book – too boring to research or even look up, right (darn right, you’ve all so much valuable & contributory work to be doing. ..unless of course you’re a McLuhanite GENUINE MEDIA STUDIES student and go well with that: WE NEED YOU REAL BAD RIGHT NOW)

Australia Was What Again ?

Well, you must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast

Two more excerpts from Alex Miller.. for dear gentle genital (ADULT or young adult) GEA & 🐒🐒🐒🥸 readers’ predilection (means cool)

“He is probably my age and even older and was a market gardening with his father when Artthur and I first came here, at a time when this was the country, or the edge of the country. In those days Stony and his father sold us the varieties of vegetables we were not clever enough to grow for ourselves. Their neat little fields and glashouses have gradually been squeezed into a tiny pocket surrounded by the new suburban mansions and their dogs and trampolines and tennis courts and swimming pools, the mansions all vaguely influenced by the holidays of their owners in Provence and Tuscany. [This country influences no-one any more.] The old Australian Australia has gone. That remnant sense of the pioneer. It is all mock European now.” (p 106 Allen & Unwin 2011)

Conversationalists ruled: a far better Socially-adapted life form than frankly any in public lfe in May 2025

“Looking at the picture he knew in himself a kinship of exile with it, a sense that each of them had been subjected to the same wilful coercion, the same peculiar cultural violence, of the men in command of things. Those who could command the pillaging. Displayed here in this silent foyer, Wyndham Lewis’s masterpiece had become a trophy merely of wealth and power, a rare and expensive object, like the Chinese celadon vase on the cover of Apollo, with which to augment the prestige of its owner, the great chairman of the board. Pat’s voice broke across the empty spaces of the foyer. ‘I’d go bloody starkers sitting here all day with that looking over my shoulder.’

‘I thought you liked it,’ Helen said gently. ‘[And there’s no need to swear, Pat. You’re upset.] Go on with what you were telli..” (p 152 A & U 2011)

The Tree of Man 1955 was what again?

A Nobel Prize in Literature was what again?

John Blundell

Journalist in Global Politics and the ‘Meltdown’ of weather systems and ecosystems

The expungement of European medieval metaphysics from 50k Science and Social Science faculties and schools around die welt

The authentic Post Socratic Logic

Economics

The new Neurocognitive learning, healing, growth and education