Business-managed democracy : the trade agenda

The architecture of global governance that has emerged in the past two decades has been strongly influenced by transnational policy actors. This article examines the role of transnational corporate agency in social policy by focusing in particular on the role of business coalitions, elite networking bodies and policy planning groups in fostering unity amongst corporate actors and enrolling political actors into managing democracies in the interests of business. The example of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) is used to examine how corporate agency is wielded through elite networking organizations and how this is eroding national social policy

State of NSW: Weighing the cost of the privatisation of power

Successive governments in NSW, of both political persuasions, have tried to privatise electricity despite strong and consistent citizen opposition. Citizen opposition is based on the desire to maintain public control of an essential service as well as awareness that around the world privatisation has led to higher electricity prices and lower reliability of electricity supply. Nonetheless governments have been pressured to privatise electricity by businesses and banks as well as the federal government. They have also been attracted to the lure of an influx of funds in the short-term to spend on other government priorities, such as urban infrastructure projects, even though government finances will suffer in the long-term from the loss of dividends. In 1999 the NSW Liberal Party campaigned on a platform of electricity privatisation, promising every ratepayer $1100 worth of shares or$1000 cash if they were elected and privatisation went ahead. Despite the bribe, the Liberal Party lost (with a 7 percent swing to Labor) because electricity privatisation was so unpopular. A subsequent NSW Liberal leader, Peter Debnam, referred to any efforts to privatise electricity as ‘political suicide’. The current NSW Labor Government seems to think that it is immune from such an electoral backlash, despite the union and ALP opposition that contributed to the downfall of Morris Iemma as Premier in 2008 when he tried to privatise the state’s electricity. That year a Sun-Herald/Taverner Research poll found that 79% of people surveyed were opposed to the government’s plans for electricity privatisation even though they were told that it would result in more spending on other infrastructure

Corporate discourse on climate change

Corporations seek to manage democracies to suit their own interests through the exercise of persuasion, propaganda, political influence and financial power. This is particularly evident when corporate interests conflict with the public interest, as is the case with environmental protection. Effective government measures to avoid global warming have been thwarted for three decades as a result of corporate efforts. Corporations have sought to undermine public pressure for government action by casting doubt on global warming predictions by funding and promoting dissident scientists, front groups and think tanks. They have diverted blame from themselves in industry-sponsored educational materials. They have ensured government policy responses favour market-based economic instruments through commissioned research, lobbying and the political weight of business coalitions. They have fostered faith in spurious alternative technological solutions such as clean coal. In all these ways corporations have ensured that they can continue business despite the environmental consequences that will ensue

Neoliberalism and the global financial crisis

The new right advocated policies that aided the accumulation of profits and wealth in fewer hands with the argument that it would promote investment, thereby creating more jobs and more prosperity for all. However financial markets provide opportunities for investment without creating jobs and, as the global financial crisis has revealed, speculative investment feeds an ephemeral prosperity that can be wiped out in a short time period. Inequities resulting from new right policies – including the deregulation of labour markets and the reduction of government spending – reduced consumer demand which had to be propped up with consumer credit and mortgage debt. Financial deregulation, also promoted by the new right, enabled financial institutions to dictate government policy and enabled wealth to be channelled into speculative investments exacerbating the volatility of share and housing markets. The combination of household debt and unregulated speculative investment led to the collapse of the subprime mortgage market followed by the bankruptcy of major financial institutions and the collapse of share markets around the world. Yet the Rudd government continues to place its faith in markets as a way out of the crisis

The Changing Face of Conservation: Commodification, Privatisation and the Free Market

Environmentalists in the late 1960s and 1970s argued that the exponential growth of populations and industrial activity could not be sustained without seriously depleting the planet’s resources and overloading the planet’s ability to deal with pollution and waste materials. They argued that new technologies and industrial products, such as pesticides and plastics, also threatened the environment. Following the protest mood of the times, they did not hesitate to blame industry, western culture, economic growth and technology for environmental problems. They questioned western paradigms of development and industrialisation, and criticising the inequitable distribution of wealth and resource use

Digging Your Own Grave

[Extract] The work ethic is one of the most neglected problems in society today, and at the root of many social ills and environmental problems. It’s at the heart of what I propose is a major environmental problem; there is too much production in affluent countries. All of the things we are producing day after day are not only creating a huge environmental impact - in terms of resource use, pollution, waste disposal and so on - but in order to get people to buy this huge amount of products, we are constantly bombarded with advertisements and marketing and turned into hyper-consumers. We are taught to be discontent with our lot. Subsequently, we have a situation in our society where the work ethic has become pathological. It was once very useful and important to the development of Western societies but no longer

Regulating the power shift: the state, capital and electricity privatisation in Australia

In 1990, British political economist Grahame Thompson observed: “One of the most remarkable features of the ‘conservative turn’ experienced in the UK since 1980 is the paradoxical emergence of extensive reregulation of economic activity in a period supposedly typified by drastic deregulation” (Thompson, 1990: 135). Thompson’s comments point to one of the central, but least understood, contradictions of neo-liberalism: that a system which is justified on the premise o f a withdrawal of state intervention in the economy has entailed an active role for the state in its implementation and maintenance. This article examines the realities of neo-liberalism in practice through an analysis of the history and experience of electricity privatisation in Australia. Such realities are contrasted with common assumptions made about neo-liberalism by both its advocates and some of its opponents. The case of electricity privatisation, it is argued, highlights not only the failure of neo-liberalism to deliver its promised benefits, but also the centrality of the capitalist state and class conflict to the dynamics of neoliberalism in practice. We therefore reject the ‘withering away of the state’ approach to understanding neo-liberalism. In doing this we are contributing to a critique of the role of capital and the state in neoliberalism

Globalisation: Before and after the crisis

[Die Autorin] erläutert in ihrem Beitrag, wie es zu der Finanzkrise kam. In Folge der Ölkrise verlor die keynsianische ökonomische Theorie an Popularität. Allmählich bekam die Deregulierung des »Reaganomics« und Thatcherismus die Oberhand. Regierungen schützen nicht mehr eigene Bürger gegen die Übermacht der Konzerne, sondern sie schützen das »Business« gegen demokratische Regulierungen. Der Washingtoner Consens wurde den Entwicklungsländern durch die Weltbank und den IWF aufoktroyiert. Die Deregulierung des Finanzmarktes (uneingeschränkter Kapitalfluss inner- und außerhalb der Staatsgrenzen, Beseitigung der Regulation von Finanzinstituten und Beseitigung der politischen Kontrolle der Zentralbanken) verleitete zu wilden Spekulationen. Nur 10 Prozent des Finanztransfers betraf den internationalen Handel, der Rest war spekulativ. […] Die Finanzwelt wurde durch die massive Unterstützung der Regierungen, also durch Steuerzahler aus Industriestaaten gerettet. […] [Die Autorin meint,] dass die Finanzmärkte aus der Krise nichts gelernt haben und wie bisher operieren. Die Regierungen halten sich zurück. Dennoch sieht [sie] paradoxerweise eine Chance aufgrund der Ungleichheit des Einkommens: Da immer mehr Menschen mangels Geld immer weniger zu konsumieren in der Lage sind, könnte eine Umkehrung (höhere Gehälter, progressive Besteuerung der Reichen) stattfinden. (DIPF/Orig.

Beyond technicalities: Expanding engineering thinking

Engineering appears to be at a turning point. It is evolving from an occupation that provides employers and clients with competent technical advice to a profession that serves the community in a socially responsible manner. Traditional engineering education caters to the former ideal, whereas increasingly both engineers themselves and their professional societies aspire to the latter. Employers are also requiring more from their engineering employees than technical proficiency. A new educational approach is needed to meet these changing requirements. It is no longer sufficient, nor even practical, to attempt to cram students full of technical knowledge in the hope that it will enable them to do whatever engineering task is required of them throughout their careers. A broader, more general approach is required that not only helps students to understand basic engineering principles but also gives them the ability to acquire more specialized knowledge as the need arises