THE ECONOMONOTONY

At this very moment in time … (and not that other moment in time, the one back there, to the left and up a bit … no, up a bit, next to the fridge … yes, that one, no, not that one, that’s the one we’re not talking about … ) … (… fucking retard) … tens of thousands of Australians are engaged hard at work, heads bowed, brows knitted and lightly beaded with sweat, the tips of their little pink tongues poking through their thin, pursed and pale lips, furiously scribbling and calculating and postulating and wondering, extrapolating this from that, and that from this, pulling a conclusion from here, and a conclusion from there, a theory, a probability, a series of infinite possibilities arising from said probabilities, pulling, pulling, pulling, pulling away, furiously concentrated on pulling, and what are they doing in there we ask ourselves, what are they building, what are they cobbling together and why, for what purpose and in pursuit of what are these sunken-chested and sallow-faced individuals engaged?

They are calculating the “cost to the economy” of “stuff”.

Here is a heresy …

Fuck the “economy”.

Fuck the “cost to the economy” of “stuff”.

Fuck your Footsies and Tootsies and Hung Low Sweet Chariots and Dowser Johnson’s and Cheese-Faced Bitch Indexes. Fuck your “market analysts” and “economic experts”, “forecasters” and “advisors” and their endless booga-boo voodoo predictions of wrack and ruin and hand-wringing predilection for doom and gloom.

Fuck the “market reports” that clutter up the daily and nightly news reports with obtuse bullshit dribbling from the mouths of bullshit-artists, shills and shell-game shysters whose sad, denuded lives comprise little more than spewing out utterly worthless speculations about the possible “cost to the economy” of this and the estimated “cost to the economy” of that, the rise of this and the fall of that.

Here is an immutable truth …

Doing “stuff” costs money.

Finding “stuff” out costs money. Making progress, advancing as a civilisation, developing something that may resemble a “culture” costs money. Science, education, health, research and development costs money. Public infrastructure, transport, homes, roads, the basic things we require in order to live a life costs money.

For living a life costs money.

What a fucking shame.

Are you ill? Have you been ill recently? Did you take some time off to recover? Time off from work? …

“You evil cunt, you sickly flyblown shithead, you neoplastic lump of swollen filth, you have inflicted your afflicted self on “the economy” and you have “cost” it. You have cost us, rancid thrush-bucket of congealed ooze that you are”

Are you old? Are you ageing? What’s that? You want to retire? Some time for yourself, you say? …

“Selfish fuck, cunt of all ages, can you not see the burden you place upon us? Can you not die? For the sake of the economy and the “cost to it”, can you not simply shuffle off to the back shed and punch a bullet through your ageing, addled brain? You scum, you spotted arse, you drained and withered harpies’ tit, we need these pennies, we need these pennies you cost us, this fistful of shiny, shiny coin, it clinks, it makes us hard, tumescent, engorged, we could cum a rainbow of riches eternal if it were not for you and your ilk, ulcerous scab on the face of the earth.

“How much have you “cost the economy?

“Let us see.

“Let us calculate, let us surmise, let us pull and pull and pull, let us pull suppositions, let us pull speculations, conjectures, a conjecture from there, a conjecture from here, blessed be our divinations in this, our holy work.”

And so.

On they plod, constantly muttering away in their sour and sociopathic monotones, muttering at us from their sterile and drab little cubicles from around the nation, surrounded by charts and maps and graphs about nothing at all, pulling and pulling and pulling and pulling in the manner of children pulling wads of crusty snot from dusty, cavernous nostrils and saving them up in old jam jars, saving them up for a rainy day, rows and rows and rows of old jam jars crammed with snot, just in case, just in case one day, one glorious day in the hopefully not so distant future, wads of crusty snot may become a common currency.

Fuck the “cost to the economy”.

Fuck it all to Hell.

Does anybody seriously believe that the ETS, a market solution, par excellence, is going to make the slightest bit of difference? That in placing all of our eggs into the capitalist basket, we are trusting in a magic talisman that can, at best, merely tinker on the margins?

Using capitalist structures and processes as a means of combating AGW is like trying to fight a live bushfire by opening up a a farmers’ market, and putting a tax on undergrowth.

And this at a time when support for ‘the market’ has never been lower.

Rudd identified the tasks of his newly social-democratic government: “credit-market regulation, intervention, and demand-side stimulus in the economy”. The first of these – regulation of the finance sector – has the banks weeping and wailing before it has even begun. Nobody should believe that “regulation” can act as a panacea to stave off risk, in an inherently crisis-prone economic system. Nonetheless, the same newspapers that fudge the facts in the news section can sometimes refrain from bullshit in the business section, and that appears to be the case here. In other words, the same banks whose deposits were kindly guaranteed by the Rudd government are now seeking to avoid regulation because it may hurt “profitability”.

Admittedly, it was not Australian financial institutions that caused the GFC. All the same, we have seen the evidence, all around the world, of ordinary people being laid to waste, financially speaking, as a result of the recklessness of their nation’s banks. As Kenneth Davidson put it in today’s paper (in the context of bubbles in both the currency and housing prices), “there should be control of financial institutions”. Just who should be doing the controlling is a question that Davidson tactfully does not answer.