Greed And Dissonance

I'll start with a conundrum:

What connects these dots? 

⦿ https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2023/08/22/grocery-items-expensive-inflation

⦿ https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2023/08/23/woolworths-swage-theft-profit

Hmmmm... I wonder...

The Dissonance

Listening to the news the other day, discussing how the price of groceries has been affecting Australians. There was some financial commentator speaking to the journalist about the prices of food. 

This is our Labor government. A government that supposedly stands for the working person, for living standards, against corporate exploitation. 

The cognitive dissonance in the radio interview was almost tangible. What was the reason people couldn't afford food? The economy seems to be doing well - supermarkets are showing strong profits, banks are showing good profits. Surely in such a strong economy, people should be able to afford food?

And why were the prices of food so high? The supermarkets, as noted, were making profits so why was food still so expensive? You know when people are looking right at an elephant and pretending that it's just an elephant-shaped hole in the space-time continuum? 

Unsurprisingly, shoplifting is on the rise. But what do they say? "...total stock loss was up 20 per cent compared to last year due to a rise in “organised retail theft” and crime driven by cost-of-living pressures..." Where the merry effing hell do they think those "cost-of-living pressures" come from? When a half kilo block of cheese costs $10? Not from the dairy farmers - Coles is still bending them over and giving them a good shafting, adding to the farmers' "cost-of-living pressures." Not from the factories like Bega. They too are getting a big dairy milking from Coles. 

Seems the "cost-of-living pressures" are all stemming from - Coles. And they have the chutzpah to blame "organised retail theft." Oh wait - that phrase can be read in two different ways... I get it now...

There was some discussion about what government body was in charge of fixing the prices of food to be affordable. Turns out there isn't one, the government believes that "the market will fix itself." Now where have I heard that particular bullshit before? 

But I realised that the government is also staring hard at an elephant-shaped void. 

I heard a similar thing about the housing cost crisis, too. How could prices have skyrocketed like that? Why were rents so high? Were there market forces at work here that couldn't be identified? 

And the price of energy was going up, too. Here, I commented on it in this article a few months back. I posted a while back that the same story was covered by two different newspapers thus: "Billion dollar shock for the electric grid" and "Energy providers enjoy a billion dollar windfall from renewables." Yep, the same event, in one case made to look terrifying and a justification for shocking price hikes. The other, a regrettable glitch in the media that gave away information that might erode profits. 

Honestly - people will literally turn themselves inside-out before they say that corporate heads and landlords are base greedy pigs and they don't give a flying f*** at the moon for anyone else. 

And Actually

This is a state of affairs that can't continue, and I think the government is aware of that. Regarding the energy prices skyrocketing, they pulled the rather limp move of fixing gas prices for a few months, as if that was going to stop any of the price gouging that's still ongoing to this moment. At this moment, renewables and batteries are coming online at a tremedous pace. Each battery, each wind turbine, each solar plant, is reducing the fuel costs of generating energy. And yet the price keeps going up. It's not to cover capital costs, because while solar panel and turbine manufacturers are also capitalists, they still haven't quite developed the brass bollocks that the energy companies have. 

So it's all just totally greed, so that when - inevitably - the energy companies have to concede that they can't justify those rates any more, they can drop them back a little, amid much fanfare, and most people won't remember that this "new low price" is higher than it was while fossil fuels still had to be paid for on top of maintenance.

Landlords wasted no time raising rates, banks kept their rates high on the basis of the Reserve. The Reserve kept doing the same thing over and over because their boss liked his cosy lunches with his bank chief mates and the government wasn't having a quiet nice word in his ear to back the eff down because he was killing the less wealthy of the Australian population. 

And the government knows that we now know that they're quite okay with everyday Australian people dying for the sake of corporate wellbeing. If this was a war, there'd be outrage and activism. Because it's being so soft-pedalled in the media and they are - as observed - spinning the news so much that bits are flying off, we need to change the public's focus so they can see those bits sticking to the news screen.

Capitalism is dying. The concept of 'post-capitalism' is no longer an abstract concept. What kind of a post-capitalist world we get, we need to start agitating for now. We need to make better decisions than the handfull of CEOs and shadow chiefs have done, because look where that's led us to - a world where governments can decide on an 'acceptable' number of their constituents who'll be killed by the decisions made. 

Capitalism has been ruled by numbers. Numbers of people the product will kill either in the acquiring of the raw materials, or in the process of making he product in the factory, or in the number of people who are killed by the waste products directly or later, indirectly, by the damage to the planet, or finally, the number os people the product will directly kill by misadventure, poisoning, unsafe application. 

Numbers are great at understanding the planet and the Universe but they're pretty shyte when you start using them to define how many people you knowingly plan to kill so you can make another number in a thing called a 'bank account' increase. 

What we want for post-capitalism isn't that. 

Stewardship, Morals

That's the thing we want. I don't want to make another single dollar out of paper or polymer, nor strike another coin out of metal, in order for people to compare the hypothetical size of their external genitalia in terms of dollars and cents. 

I'd much rather settle for a change to how we learn to know our own value in terms of how we can live a lifestyle we feel comfortable with while simultaneously making sure that lifestyle doesn't cause more irreparable harm to the one and only planet we're able to live on, as it turns out. 

Do I bang on about killing capitalism too much? I rather think not. I wish you'd help me get the message our farther and wider. I definitely know I bang on about that too much, but - come to think of it - no. No I bloody well don't. Your support means the difference to me of being able to keep blog stuff paid. To pay for the odd advertisement to get wider exposure and wider dissemination. 

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