Managing director of Ebono Institute and major sponsor of The Generator, Geoff Ebbs, is running against Kevin Rudd in the seat of Griffith at the next Federal election. By the expression on their faces in this candid shot it looks like a pretty dull campaign. Read on
Local bands lay down the beat against a wall of books
Last month, Archive launched a new venture in partnership with local music shop Audrey’s Music and music industry stalwarts Kitty Kitty Bang Bang. Local Brisbane bands have been given a chance to play original music in a battle of the bands format.
Each Thursday night through until the final on 13 November Archive will rock to the sounds of original music. Bands play a full 45 minute set and the evening gives three bands the stage.
Frist prize is valued at $5,000, with plenty of offer for others too.
Sally Lindenberg of Audrey’s Music said: “We’ve been very impressed with the energy and standard of the bands so far. It’s been great to give people chance to play a full set on a great stage.”
When asked about the suitability of the West End bar Sally added: “The venue is holding up a treat. It really is a good place for the bands to perform. It brings the musicians and crowd together very well”
Maybe it’s all those books on the walls helping with the sound? The presence of plenty of fans and friends is certainly making the sets a fun time for all involved. With many weeks ahead the Thursday night slot seems best spent at Archive Beer on Boundary Street, West End.
For those interested in registering in the competition, contact Sally at Audrey’s Music, Jane Street West End or email sally [at] audreysmusic [dot] com [dot] au
Daily update: Can Australia prosper in a 2°C finance world?
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Can Australia prosper in a 2°C finance world?; Aus owned solar technology makes storage breakthrough; Mt Mercer wind farm switched on in Vic; Aus first waste to energy plant set to open in WA; Emissions Reduction Fund not designed to meet 2020 target; Lismore adds solar-powered EV to 100% renewables plan; Printable solar cells close to commercialisation; Graph of the Day; Does Australia have too much electricity?; Autonomous vehicles no longer a dream; Only solar PV is exceeding expectations for clean energy; and Australia’s top manufacturing and food tech companies.
HSBC says there is now clear momentum towards a low-carbon global economy. It even coins a new phrase – 2°C finance – and is confident of a Universal Climate Agreement in Paris next year. But will Australia be open for low-carbon business?
Cold Nuclear Fusion, an intensely disputed and largely discredited method for generating thermo-nuclear fusion at room temperature conditions. In nuclear fusion hydrogen atoms merge to form one helium atom, releasing energy. In its conventional form, such as that occurring within stars and hydrogen bombs, nuclear fusion requires high pressure and temperature, which force the atoms together. Proponents of cold nuclear fusion maintain that certain catalysts can coax hydrogen atoms to fuse without extreme pressure or heat. One form of cold nuclear fusion, known as muon-catalyzed cold fusion and first suggested in the 1940s, is undisputed. The process, in which a subatomic particle known as a muon captures two hydrogen atoms and forces them to fuse, has been demonstrated in the laboratory but appears not to be feasible as an energy source. The controversial form of cold nuclear fusion was first heard of in March 1989, when two University of Utah chemists, Martin Fleisch-mann and B. Stanley Pons, reported that they had produced fusion in a test tube at room temperature by running an electrical current through heavy water, a type of water in which the hydrogen atoms are of the isotope deuterium. They claimed that the current drove the deuterium atoms into a palladium rod in the water, forcing the atoms to pack closely enough to fuse. This announcement raised a furor in the scientific community. After other researchers failed to obtain similar results with the technique, a consensus emerged that the Utah scientists had used a flawed apparatus and misinterpreted the data from the experiment. A small but vocal minority of researchers continued to pursue variations on the approach.
The Aquis Resort covers over ten auqare kilometres of cyclone prone floodplain
By Willy Bach
In case some of us have not been watching, gambling casinos are not a sustainable industry. They are a relic of our profligate past. They are the dream that has turned into a nightmare. In the USA, five casinos have gone bankrupt recently and even Donald Trump’s empire is not immune from this unraveling process. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-trump-bankruptcy-20140909-story.html
The demise of gambling in Atlantic City, NJ is a chilling lesson in how governments addicted to gambling revenue are on the road to ruination. What can be done with huge examples of junk architecture that are thirsty for water and power services and perform no productive function? Casinos rate poorly in building community resilience and a more equitable society in which to face an uncertain future of resource depletion and climate change. http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2014/s4082378.htm
It is an industry that depends on the corrupting of politics and public administration. Casino entrepreneurs like to have protection from competition and open slather conditions in which to operate, as shown by the secret deal that protects the Crown Casino profits from the Victorian government’s timid efforts to mitigate the social harm of gambling addiction. Secret deals are an insult to accountability and good governance. They also have the effect of distorting the market for more productive and socially useful industries. Inevitably, we must assume that secret deals are at the heart of NSW and Queensland casino proposals, as these states compete with Victoria in order to attract new casino industry entrants.
Casinos often require special dispensation, special planning permission and/or relaxations of environmental, economic and social constraints. In other words they receive special advantages not available to other businesses. The only way to get this kind of privilege is via political campaign donations and promises of other benefits and/or directorships. State governments that agree to casinos and grant these advantages are then hooked on their share of profits gained at the expense of their constituents.
In order to ensure we elect people who have the public interest at the core of their being we have to discourage those who are in politics for personal gain and sectional interests. In the case of NSW, a government led by someone who exercises poor judgment over a bottle of Grange Hermitage cannot be entrusted with the negotiations for dealing with Australia’s richest man. Thanks to Independent Senator, Nick Xenophon for standing up and speaking out. http://www.nickxenophon.com.au/blog/nick-slams-vic-government-fixing-deal-with-jamie-packers-casino-/
The latest post is her paper from the roundtable on Leo Panitch & Sam Gindin’s Deutscher Prize winning book The Making of Global Capitalism, at the Historical Materialism Australasia conference last weekend in Sydney. Elizabeth spoke alongside Panitch, Mike Rafferty, Martijn Konings and Mike Beggs. She argues:
More concretely, based on their analysis of the state as related to the balance of class forces, the authors conclude that the state needs to be transformed politically if it is to function to reflect a different balance of class forces. So, for example, Leo argued in his Wheelwright address on Wednesday that we need to rebuild the institutions — unions and labour parties — or create new ones, and to nationalise and ‘decommodify’ that which should be a collective right: public transit; water; the banks. He agued we need to reclaim the concept of state planning and argue for higher taxation in return for collective goods. Similarly, in the conclusion to the book Leon and Sam argue that ‘today’s revived demands for social justice and genuine democracy [can] only be realised through…a fundamental shift of political power, entailing fundamental changes in state as well as class structures’.
Yet such a perspective — of a series of dramatic transitions in the existing policies, functions and responsibilities of states needing to occur prior to genuine socialism being possible — seems to bear little connection to the wider structures of social class forces where capital remains dominant over labour. Consequently, the ability of collective agency to transform societies from below seems to rest on somehow converting states that have remained impervious to democratic transformation. It is not clear to me how the authors intend to resolve this paradox.
Elizabeth has also written on “Arbitration & the ALP: Union strength or impasse?”:
Arbitration was a process where the state bought labour and capital together, in an institutionalised form, in order to settle matters in the national (and therefore the dominant class’s) interest. In reflecting on Gramsci’s words that open this post (penned in consideration of the different political currents in the Risorgimento in Italy), it is necessary for us to ask how the dominant class came to lead and dominate the labour movement in this way. The emergence of arbitration in the period of federation – celebrated by many unionists and Marxists as a symbol of the strength of labour in the colonies – should be seen as a key mechanism by which the hegemonic class led allied classes and dominated opposing ones. In this way, it is also a moment of failure – the failure of an independent working class project to emerge and the subsumption of labour’s interests into the dominant class’s project. This took place not simply because the strikes were defeated in the midst of economic crisis, but because of the development of arbitration as a mechanism of class hegemony to manage class conflict over the longer term. Arbitration, from this perspective, was an integral part of constructing class rule in Australia and the ability of the dominant class to lead all others in that historic moment.
Finally, she has also written a piece called “Where in the World Does Neoliberalism Come From?” on the new Progress in Political Economy website run by the University of Sydney’s Department of Political Economy:
[Raewyn] Connell and [Nour] Dados argue that mainstream theoretical work on the emergence and transmission of neoliberalism is dominated by two narratives: 1) that neoliberalism is about the spread of certain ideas amongst a network of right-wing intellectuals (based in Europe and the United States); or 2) that it is a mutation of capitalism resulting from a crisis of profitability. As a result, the story of neoliberalism in mainstream theory is of a phenomenon arising in the global North (and the US & UK in particular) and later exported to the global South. Such an interpretation places the global North at the centre of the account of the development of neoliberalism and, they argue, eschews the experience of the global South. Moreover, and as Raewyn [has] emphasised … it fails to emphasise that neoliberalism was a global process from the start.CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST
– See more at: http://left-flank.org/2014/09/08/capitalist-state-neoliberalism-industrial-arbitration/#sthash.y3iTwKVC.dpuf
