by Geoffrey Heard
It's late morning, Tuesday, 21 June 2011, and I'm in the duty-free store (really the GST-free store these days) at the Brisbane airport buying rum for the elite of Port Moresby's rum and coke drinkers. I've been instructed by email and text that two liters (the PNG duty free limit) of rum is required and the brand is the Australian-made Bundaberg rum. These are dedicated Bundy 'n' coke drinkers.
But as I survey the shelves, I am startled to find that the formerly expensive and upmarket Bacardi (white) rum is a couple of bucks a bottle cheaper than the formerly el cheapo Australian-made Bundy. Here's a revelation -- with the Australian dollar having taken off to a degree (and other former leaders like the USD and Euro having gone south somewhat), and the removal of tariffs on imported liquor, the price differential between domestic and imported has been turned on its head.
So with a guilty apology to Australian-made, I decide to do my Port Moresby friends a favor -- I'll take them upmarket Caribbean sunshine.
When I proudly unleash a liter bottle of Bacardi in Port Moresby that evening I'm repaid for my thoughtfulness by horrified cries of "What? We said Bundy! That stuff's just water!". When I reveal that I have grossly departed from the script and bought Frangelico instead of a second liter of rum, my name is Mud with a capital "M"!
Tough -- we're all having dinner and I'm rounding out mine with ice cream and Frangelico like I had at my farewell dinner (except that I'll be pouring the Frangelico out of the bottle, not out of a shot glass!). The team can take it or leave it. I might be a bit of a soft touch in some respects, but in regard to desserts (and rum and coke which I regard as a last resort drink), I can be as tough as nails.
Making that purchase really hammered home a point, though; one which I have been acutely aware of for some time in my own tiny business. I used to sell Australian-made books in the USA. At that time, the Australian dollar was ranging around 70 US cents. At one point, it got as low as about 55 US cents. It was quite ridiculous, of course -- at the time, Australia had as useful an economy as most others and certainly one as useful or better than America's which was already mired in up-to-the-nostrils debt with a whole lot of stuff going on -- like the idiotic invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that were clearly out of control before they began -- that were adding staggering amounts to US debt hourly.
The Australian dollar's climb coincided with a post office clamp down on special rates for overseas mail (mail is the only viable carrier for micro-business products), and suddenly, every book I shipped was making a loss! Raising prices wasn't an option; Americans are used to certain price points and won't be moved from them.
I had to switch to printing in the United States -- leaving me to ponder what to do with a roomful of brand new books which now weren't salable (I still have them).
So I was fully aware of what the currency movements had done to price relationships, but striking them so vividly contrasted in the duty-free really hammered home the point.
Tough for many Australian businesses
The ridiculous movements in the currency market make it very, very tough for a lot of Australian industries. And then, of course, the ones that are making out like bandits, the mining industry, don't want to pay appropriate taxes on gigantic windfall profits most of which are going overseas to people who have more money than they could possibly poke a stick at in a month of Sundays.
The trick in all this is the financial system constructed by the monied elite for the benefit of the monied elite. At the beginning of modern democracy, the monied elite had everything their way -- democracy slowly rolled back some of that those privileges to some degree, but money always ruled.
Now big money is bigger than ever -- a handful of modern corporations have enormous transnational power supported by the most powerful governments in the world; the USA is the prime example but it's not alone, Australia runs along like its little lapdog -- and it is busy rolling back democracy and turning relatively egalitarian societies like Australia into inequitable, unjust, undemocratic societies which are merely enormous money pumps that feed the money bags' greed. The rich are getting richer, a (very) few of the middle class are getting richer, most of the middle are getting poorer, and the poor are getting even poorer.
The process is complex and includes many subtle steps, but the underlying trick is simple. You set up a scenario where people are restricted in their movement around the globe -- nearly everyone in the world is actually a prisoner in the country they were born in, both physically and mentally -- while allowing money and goods unrestricted movement.
Thus, people are not free to move from place to place to take advantage of the best wages, for example, while capital is free to move from place to place to take advantage of the worst wages, and their goods are free to move anywhere. Then they declare "globalization" to be the great savior of the world's economic system and "protection" at national borders (against goods and money only, naturally) to be anathema, old fashioned, unfair, and nasty, and they're away towards riches even further beyond the ordinary person's imagining and to gathering even more power to make the trick even more effective.
Of course, it is all a Ponzi scheme and must collapse sooner or later, but when it does collapse, we all know who will have the most comfortable ride -- the super rich. When money becomes essentially valueless, it pays to have sh*tloads of it.
When everyone's down and they've scraped up all the money and valuables left lyng around by the crash, they'll start all over again building another huge pyramid.
The "poor" who have kept a grip on their own land like the majority of people in Papua New Guinea will do next best because they can still live off their land -- in large part, they are outside the world economy. The middle and lower classes in the developed countries will do badly because they are bound up in the money machine, are in debt to the money machine, and will have to take what pittance they are given. And, of course, the truly dispossessed, the very, very poor of areas like Sudan, Eritrea and so on, will do worst of all as has been demonstrated in depressions and recessions throughout history.
I reflect on the period in which I grew up and have through in (or in touch with) Australia -- the latter part of the 1940s, the 1950s, 1960s, even into the 1970s and 1980s. In many respects this was the democratic dream time, the high tide of democracy in both in Australia and overseas.
Today, we are participating in its end.
Of course, democracy always had its dark underbelly -- the wars against the "evils of communism" and now "terrorism" (the latter so clearly an excuse for ramping up control of frightened populations), the exploitation of the weak and poor both at home and overseas --particularly overseas, the pretense of self-determination and the granting of independence to colonies (economic colonialism is so much more profitable), and so on and so forth.
Of course, while we know all this, fighting back is difficult. The vast majority of Australians (and Americans, and Brits, and French, and Germans, and Canadians and whoever!) all know that the solution is to clamp controls on capital and globalism. But much as we talk and protest, politicians of the major parties, the politicians in control, flatly refuse to act for the good of the people -- the good of those they are supposed to be representing.
They are corrupt. Whether they take cash on the barrelhead or under the table or just accept promises of support so they can stay in power (or in the case of the enormously rich mining companies, promises of no public opposition to them), they are corrupt. They promise to represent the people, to work for the good of the people, but they do not.
They know damned well that if they moved to do what people want and fix the economy so it serves the people rather than enslaving them in the service of a tiny elite, their money masters would come down on them like a ton of bricks.
They are so afraid or their palms are so well greased -- or both -- that they stand up in public and tell barefaced lies. They sign Australia up to trade agreements that take decisions on trade out of our hands, clearly advantage our trade competitors, are unfair to our neighbors, and put disputes about trade rules into secret courts. Having signed up Australia in the full knowledge of what they are doing, they then feign looks of doleful helplessness as though it all happened by accident and not design!
I really applaud the Icelanders who broke out of the thrall of these poisonous, anti-democratic, anti-people schemes and refused to drive themselves into penury to pay off debts incurred by foreign bankers under cover of their name.
We need more of that. We need to do that in Australia.
In the meantime while we Australians are getting up the courage to act in accordance with our national myth (rugged bushmen, individualists -- in fact we are among the most urbanized societies in the world and the most politically apathetic and naive), we need to do something immediate about Bundy.
For mine, I promise to buy two bottles next time I go to Papua New Guinea. No Caribbean sunshine (get nicked, Bacardi), no Italian dessert wine, just Bundy. I swear!
I might even get a bonus by doing that -- a bit of respect from the disgruntled Moresby Bundy 'n' coke team. ###
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This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011.
The opinions and comments in this article are his own.
As we stepped through the door, I slipped the taxi fare home, two bills, a K10 and a K5 (a generous fare for the short trip), into my shirt pocket ready to pay the taxi without having to take my wallet out of my buttoned hip pocket. I realized too late that the end of that action could be seen through the bars of the gate. Careless.
