Monthly Archives: December 2013

You’ll need full Marx on this exam

Posted on by
Reply

People in positions of power do not like to be criticised. The only people who want the absolute right to criticise governments are the people who are subject to the laws, rules and regulations that are put in place by governments since as often as not – possibly more often – those on the receiving end of these laws, rules and regulations do not like either what is being proposed or has been done.

The following story is therefore of no little interest. It is reprinted in its entirety from The China Daily Chinese journalists face Marxist ideology exam so the news hasn’t exactly been suppressed. And in case you don’t get the message, this is the subhead for the story, “Exam to be based on 700-page manual that prohibits published reports from featuring comments that go against party line”. The story in its entirety follows below:

Chinese journalists will have to pass a new ideology exam early next year to keep their press cards, in what reporters say is another example of the ruling Communist party’s increasing control over the media under President Xi Jinping.

It is the first time reporters have been required to take such a test en masse, state media have said. The exam will be based on a 700-page manual peppered with directives such as ‘it is absolutely not permitted for published reports to feature any comments that go against the party line’, and ‘the relationship between the party and the news media is one of leader and the led’.

Some reporters say the impact of the increased control in the past year has been chilling. ‘The tightening is very obvious in newspapers that have an impact on public opinion,’ a journalist at a current affairs magazine said. ‘These days there are lots of things they aren’t allowed to report.’

China has also intensified efforts to curb the work of foreign news organisations. The New York Times Company and Bloomberg News have not been given new journalist visas for more than a year after they published stories about the wealth of relatives of the former premier Wen Jiabao and Xi.

On Thursday, China’s foreign ministry granted Bloomberg journalists and some New York Times reporters press accreditation, allowing them to proceed with visa applications.

‘We hope this development means the New York Times reporters still awaiting their press cards will be given them soon, and all the reporters whose visa procedure is still under way will be issued with 2014 residence visas,’ said Peter Ford, president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, said in a statement.

The General Administration of Press and Publication, a key media regulator, has said via state media that the aim of the exam and accompanying training is to ‘increase the overall quality of China’s journalists and encourage them to establish socialism as their core system of values’. It did not respond to questions from Reuters about the exam or press freedom in China.

Traditionally, Chinese state media have been the key vehicle for party propaganda. But reforms over the past decade that have allowed greater media commercialisation and limited increases in editorial independence, combined with the rise of social media, have weakened government control, according to academics.

Even within the party, interpretations of the media’s ideal role in Chinese society vary. ‘Supervision by the press is conducive not only to the struggle against corruption, but also to social progress,’ said Yu Keping, deputy president of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau(CCTB), on Thursday at the Caixin Summit, a high-profile gathering of politics and economics experts organised by an influential Chinese magazine. The bureau is responsible for ‘translating and researching classical Marxist works’, according to the official webpage china.org.cn.

‘There are preconditions for the press to make contributions to social progress,’ he added. ‘One is independence – the press should not be attached to powerful organisations.’

Yet China media watchers point to a flurry of editorials after Xi spoke to propaganda officials in August as evidence of concern within the party that control over public discourse was slipping. The official Beijing Daily described the party’s struggle to win hearts and minds as a ‘fight to the death’.

Some reporters and academics, however, trace the start of the tougher attitude to a strike lasting several days in January by journalists at an outspoken newspaper, the Southern Weekly, after censors scrapped a new year editorial calling for China to enshrine constitutional rights. Xi had taken over the Communist party only several weeks earlier.

‘This was a shock to Xi Jinping’s leadership [circle],’ said Xiao Qiang, a China media expert at the University of California at Berkeley. ‘They own these newspapers. That makes it an internal, public rebellion, which made the censorship and media control mechanism look really bad.’

The strike ended after local propaganda officials promised to take a lighter hand with censorship. Some senior reporters have since left the paper, according to two sources. The Southern Weekly declined to comment.

Journalists will have to undertake a minimum 18 hours of training on topics including Marxist news values and socialism with Chinese characteristics, as well as journalism ethics, before sitting the exam in January or February. Reporters who fail the test will have to resit the exam and undergo the training again. It is not clear what happens to reporters who refuse to take it.

In theory, all reporters in China need a press card to report, although Zhan Jiang, a journalism professor at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, said many did without one. Zhan said recent scandals in the Chinese media had raised some questions about the industry’s professionalism.

A reporter for the New Express tabloid in Guangzhou was arrested in October after confessing on state television to accepting bribes for fabricating more than a dozen stories about Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science and Technology Co Ltd in Changsha. The reporter wrote that Zoomlion had engaged in sales fraud and exaggerated its profits, accusations strongly denied by the state-owned construction equipment maker.

‘It’s hard to say if this is really to improve the actions of journalists or to control them. You don’t know what [the authorities] are thinking,’ Zhan said.

Reporters had little doubt about the aim of the exam. ‘The purpose of this kind of control is just to wear you down, to make you feel like political control is inescapable,’ said a reporter for a newspaper in the booming southern city of Guangzhou.

Mitt Romney – the movie

Posted on by
Reply

This is the trailer of a documentary that will be released on January 24. Romney was followed and filmed for six years with these results. I still wait upon the name of that magic Republican who could have won in his place. Instead American can spend the next three years trying to work out how to see a doctor without bankruptcy proceedings while living standards fall back a decade or two. You got Mr Cool as your president instead. Enjoy.

Some really useful Christmas advice

Posted on by
Reply

And it doesn’t have to be about Christmas either. From a Dorthy Dix reply to a common question, which means even more to me now that I am the parent and I have children who might be wondering about these same things:

As a mature adult, there are those rare, important moments when you are asked to show up, and pretend. You are asked to play an elaborate game of make-believe, for the sake of someone from another planet who nonetheless is a good person and made more than a few sacrifices on your behalf.

Now, if you were physically abused by your mother, or if she said things like, “See, son, I knew you’d never amount to shit”? That would be different. If you were gay and she rejected that and refused to accept your partner as part of your life? If she actively and aggressively fought against what you stand for? That would be one thing. Does her refusal to accept and acknowledge exactly who you are and how you choose to live hurt you to your soul? I’m not hearing that, but if that’s the case, then, sure. Do your own thing, knowing that the pain of playing along with her charade would ruin your entire vacation.

But if you can simply step back and accept that you’re two different people, with different quirks and beliefs and stubborn notions, if you can swallow her ridiculous rules and tolerate her tribe’s idiotic lectures without feeling like your psyche is being violated and injured, if you can grasp that she wants a SYMBOLIC CHILD of hers to be there for the whole routine, for every prayer and invocation and celebratory breakfast and chaotic present-unwrapping, to demonstrate that she is loved and appreciated as a mother by at least one of her kids, then you should rise to the occasion and give your mother what she wants.

You should do it because your mother isn’t battling you over your choices, day after day. She’s not telling you, day after day, that you’re doing it wrong. She wants you to get married and have kids, which makes her exactly like 99% of the mothers out there. Her wanting that doesn’t make her particularly awful. If parenting brought her immense happiness, she naturally wants the same thing for you, as repetitive and closed minded as that might be.

Your mother doesn’t fight with you all the time. Her primary battleground is Christmas. She wants this one thing from you. She wants it to an irrational extent. It makes her weepy and enraged. She wants you and your partner there, pretending that you fit right in. She wants you to pretend that you are a good Christian son. She knows that you aren’t, but for 48 to 72 hours she wants you to pretend that you are.

Now, some people will tell you, “It’s enough that you go and make an appearance.” But that isn’t the same thing. She wants you to stay under her roof, for emotional reasons. Do you know how it must feel, to be cooking and cleaning for your husband’s kids and grandkids, when only one of your kids will even hang out at all, and he’s only around for a few hours before he disappears? I’m not trying to give you shit, I’m just trying to make you see how lonely this holiday spectacular actually feels for her. You say you’re grateful that she gets her postcard Christmas. But she doesn’t really get that. It’s only a postcard Christmas if her own kids are there, trust me.

Personally, I think you should give your mother exactly what she wants. Arrive on the night of the 23rd and stay until the evening of the 25th, then flee to a hotel room. I would push to stay in the same room as your partner, but I wouldn’t make a stink about it if she refuses.

If other people really matter to you, then show them that you really mean it. Read the whole thing since there is no one I can think of for whom this isn’t excellent advice, and you might hopefully find out a few things before it’s too late.

From Five Feet of Fury.

Herbert Hoover on the Great Depression

Posted on by
Reply

One of the most extraordinary sentences I ever came across, and I no longer have any idea where, was from something written in around 1939 where whoever it was wrote that the 1930s are going to be completely mis-remebered, and this had entered his head because he’d heard someone the other day refer to “The Hungry Thirties”. He thought such a notion was preposterous and could say so then because everyone would have understood what he meant. Now “The Hungry Thirties” is exactly how the period is remembered and my political education began at the hand of my Father for whom the Great Depression was the most important personal landmark of his life. His socialism had arisen then and it stayed with him till his last days on earth.

The following passage, though, is from Herbert Hoover who was enraged by the way the 1930s have entered into our common consciousness. He, of course, has his own reasons for wishing our historical memory was other than it was, but he couldn’t write what he wrote if it were so off centre that everyone who was there then would see it for themselves. The first para in the quoted passage below is from the editor but the rest is Hoover himself. It is from an excerpt contained in a review of a manuscript that was discovered in 2009 of Hoover’s writings during his post-presidential period. The book is The Crusade Years, 1933–1955 and edited by George H. Nash.

In the presidential contest of 1944, Hoover’s indignation boiled over. Democratic Party leaders and pro–Roosevelt campaigners repeatedly sought to discredit the Republican presidential nominee, Thomas Dewey, by portraying him as an intellectual lightweight who would be a puppet and “mouthpiece” for Hoover and reactionary ‘Hooverism’ if elected. Unwilling to countenance any longer the Democrats’ attacks upon his record, Hoover composed the scathing rejoinder printed here.
_____

The greatest lie told in this whole campaign has been that the Depression of 1930–32 was caused by the Republican Party; that the Republicans did nothing about it; that the people were allowed to starve and were compelled to sell apples; that the country was in ruins; and that Roosevelt rescued it from complete wreck.

This lie has been promulgated in a thousand speeches, in millions of scurrilous pamphlets and circulars. Mr. Roosevelt has himself given currency to it. . . .

The broader facts are and history will record that the depression was world-wide; that its major origins were in Europe; that it swept in on the United States like a hurricane; that it originated from the aftermaths of World War I, including the Treaty of Versailles; that by action of the Republican Administration 18,000,000 people were under organized relief and that any consequential hunger and cold were prevented; that the Republican Administration took drastic measures to protect the peoples’ savings from the storm by creating the R.F.C., the Home Loan Banks and by expanding agricultural credit institutions. There were failures mostly in State Banks not under Federal control.

History will also record that the depression was turned world-wide in June and July of 1932; that we were on our way out with employment increasing but that recovery was halted when business confidence was shaken by the impending election of the New Deal; that with the election the whole country further hesitated awaiting the new policies; that rumors quickly spread that Mr. Roosevelt would devalue the currency; that in consequence, people tried to get their money from the banks and that speculators tried to ship it out of the country; that Mr. Roosevelt upon Mr. Hoover’s request refused to reaffirm the promises he had made the night before election not to tinker with the currency; that Mr. Roosevelt refused to cooperate in other directions with Mr. Hoover to stem the tide of fear—fear of what? It was of the New Deal, not of a retiring administration. It was a panic of bank depositors induced by the New Deal and Mr. Roosevelt. After the banks were reopened it was found that 98% of their deposits were good.

History will also record that the rest of the world, not having a “new deal,” went straight out of the depression and recovered its employment by 1934–35; that unemployment here in the United States continued on a vast scale for six years of the New Deal; and that it took a war to get us out of it.

The whole of the story put over by the New Deal orators is the most gigantic dishonesty ever known in American politics.

Nothing Hoover wrote here is contradicted by anything I know and quite a bit fits into what I have seen for myself. Literally every other market economy emerged from the Great Depression in 1932-33 with the sole exception being the United States. But Hoover himself has a lot to answer for, including the public spending, his wages policy, the higher interest rates and the Smoot-Hawley tariff. But that Roosevelt might have created the very uncertainty he needed to win the election, and then brought along with him the far left ideologues who ran his policies for him, the truth about the New Deal is far different from what you might otherwise have thought from looking at the standard histories.

Herbert Hoover and the New Deal

Posted on by
Reply

Herbert Hoover’s memoir written in the 1940’s and 50’s had lain in vault until discovered in 2009. It is now being published under the title, The Crusade Years, 1933–1955. This is from a review of the book:

Now came the final phase of Hoover’s career: his remarkable ex-presidency. For the next thirty-one and one-half years, in fair political weather and foul, the former chief executive became, in his self-image, a crusader—a tireless and very visible castigator of the dominant political trends of his day. He behaved as a committed ideological warrior more persistently and more fervently than any other former president in our history.

Why? Most of all, it was because Hoover perceived in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt not a moderate and pragmatic response to economic distress but something more sinister: a revolutionary transformation in America’s political economy and constitutional order. Having espied the unpalatable future, Hoover could not bring himself to acquiesce.

Here is an excerpt from the review. The first paragraph is by the editor, George Nash, the remainder is Hoover himself.

Editor’s note: The paragraphs below are taken from the earliest extant fragment of Hoover’s memoirs relating to his post-presidential years. He probably composed it by hand in September 1944. In this brief essay he identified the poisonous ‘philosophical error’ that had come to dominate American politics during the New Deal years, an error he deemed it his moral duty to combat.
_____

The period from 1933 to 1938 in America was dominated by a clash in philosophical ideas to which I felt it was my duty to apply every bit of strength I possessed. I was convinced that a great error had come into liberal thinking, which threatened to destroy the magnificent civilization which intellectual and spiritual freedom had builded and which was its impulse to progress. . . .

The error in ideas came first in the form of Socialism but had made little progress prior to the first World War. The root of the error was that government operation of economic instrumentalities, or government direction of their operation other than establishment of rules of conduct, could short-cut all human ills and produce immediate Utopia. This gigantic poison of liberty received a great impulse from the government agencies created to mobilize the whole energies of peoples in total war. Here the impulses of patriotism to produce and labor and the fear of the enemy were substituted for free will. After the war the inevitable flood of misery, of impoverishment and frustration furnished the hotbed for the growth of this gigantic error. It developed over Europe in various forms—all from the same root. Communism, Fascism, and the milder forms of Statism, were heralded by well-meaning and generous-minded men as to the new road to life. They were joined by demagogs and seekers-for-power. The ultimate end was slavery, whether in Communistic or Fascist form. This philosophic error had spread mildly in American thinking, but attained no dangerous proportions until the world-wide depression struck us with all its violence, misery and exposure of wrong-doing.

It was certain in my mind that the New Deal was but one form of this same error in ideas and that it was my job to fight it. But fighting a philosophic idea among a people who had never thought in these channels was not only a difficult thing in itself, but one must contend with demagogic promises of Utopia to a suffering people and the obvious needs of reform in the system itself.

The American people at large had scarcely heard the word ideology. They had developed and they had lived and breathed a way of life without defining it as an ‘ideology.’

Some people will believe anything

Posted on by
Reply

This is from an email soliciting money for The Skeptical Inquirer:

What needs to be on our agenda? Recent surveys suggest that Americans believe some outlandish things, often in astonishing numbers:

Last spring, Public Policy Polling found that:

  • 13 percent of Americans think President Obama is the anti-Christ. Another 13 percent weren’t sure—they only thought it might be true!
  • 20 percent believe there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism; 34 percent weren’t sure.
  • 37 percent think global warming is a hoax; 12 percent weren’t sure.
  • 28 percent believe that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is actively conspiring to rule the globe through an authoritarian world government—you know, the New World Order. 25 percent were unsure.

I think it’s the same 51-37-12 split here in Australia which may be the same split in both the Federal Cabinet and the Opposition front bench. Which is why we may keep wasting money on this stuff until hell freezes over, literally.

“Cheap money is not the sustainable path to prosperity”

Posted on by
Reply

How fortunate this country is to have Glenn Stevens running the RBA. From todays Australian:

THE government should focus on productivity-boosting reforms rather than rushing to bring the budget to surplus, Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens said yesterday.

At the second of his twice-yearly appearances before the House of Representatives economics committee, Mr Stevens suggested further interest rate cuts were unlikely to help lift economic growth.

Mr Stevens said monetary policy was stimulating activity outside the mining industry but weak confidence, the lacklustre pace of reform and a high currency were retarding the growth rate.

‘There are few serious claims that the cost of borrowing per se is holding back growth … monetary policy can’t force spending to occur,” he said in Canberra.

‘Cheap money is not the sustainable path to prosperity.’

Not only is it not the path to prosperity, it is the road to ruin. But like so much else with economic policy, unless one understands how and why these policies work, others won’t be able to repeat them. Just the same with Peter Costello and his near-immaculate management of the Australian economy, 1996-2007, years that coincide with sustained prosperity, rising real incomes and an almost continuous fall in unemployment.

And funny enough, this self same Peter Costello was in the news today as he is about to take on the Chairmanship of the Future Fund, at the moment on a temporary basis. Of course, a great appointment, but this in particular caught my eye:

But Mr Costello . . . said the fund should only pursue investments that deliver a return, playing down suggestions it could be used for nation-building projects.

“Nation-building” projects apparently mean “loss-making” projects, and that’s by definition! You know, the kinds of things Labor specialises in. That is, projects that lose money, make us poorer but give themselves a warm inner glow as they spend our money even faster than we can earn it.

It’s a great pleasure to see a return to sanity, and if it really turns out that both the Paid Parental Scheme and renewable energy targets are to be wound back, things might really start to look up.

The Abbott Government had better wake up

Posted on by
Reply

Andrew Bolt has added one more post after his Christmas farewell and just in case you might miss it, let me link to it. Titled, The two Tims: why the Abbott Government cannot compromise with those now savaging Tim Wilson, here is what I think is the core message:

The Abbott Government had better wake up. There is zero chance of it ever placating its intellectual enemies with any compromise to its agenda. It is in a cultural war, so it may as well be hated by its foes for following its principles than despised by its friends for offering compromises to those who will accept none.

For anyone with a sense of compromise and good will towards all, the left is hard to fathom. But for the left, politics is religion, not a pathway towards finding the best way to manage our collective affairs. There are hatreds there that no compromise will satisfy. It’s not like the cricket where you go off to the pub together after the match. This is tribal and unforgiving. I’m with Andrew Bolt on this. They represent little more than a hatred of success and achievement. If you want to understand Labor, just think of Craig Thomson and his HSU credit card and Julia with her slush fund. For many on the left, genuine concern for others seems to be the farthest thing from their minds.