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The massive Paradise Papers leak is as big as the Panama Papers release last year,. Although it is grabbing some attention, it is not producing headlines on the same scale.
Each of these stories first came to light in a German publication (Suddeutsche Zeitung). But with the Panama Papers it was mainly WikiLeaks that brought the contents to the world’s attention. In the case of the Paradise Papers the WikiLeaks connection is missing.
The involvement of WikiLeaks in the first case, made sure that all the contents were made public. In the second case, what comes out has been more selective, although the Paradise Papers involved more than 13.4 million documents, which we are told, details more than 120 politicians around the world involved in of shore banking activities.
A massive 6.8 million of these documents were leaked from a major Bermuda based legal firm called Appleby and are in the hands of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
A group of corporate interests and very rich individuals initiated, fund and support the ICIJ and there is also an association with a formidable list of corporate media outlets around the world. These links are important, because they provide an explanation of what drives the group.
The two best known backers are the Ford Foundation associated with the car manufacturer of the same name and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. What binds this group together is a shared political mission that is encapsulated by George Soros, who wrote that the main threat to society is the rise of “laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society”.
The Soros way to carry this out, is to create a political centre that proclaims opposition to extreme capitalism, as the means of defending the existing political, economic and social order, against forces hostile to it. The method is to build a politics of compromise in connection to the class divisions that exist in society. The cry is that no one has absolute truth and harmony can only be guaranteed if conflict is ended through compromise. This means that big business must give some ground on the key issues of the day.
It is on this basis that he launched his concept of “open society,” a term borrowed from Austrian philosopher Karl Popper’s book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and is the reason why he became the number one backer of Hilary Clinton and an opponent of Donald Trump.
This is a view of the world that is shared by the consortium that has given rise to the ICIJ, which is selective in the use of information. That which serves the political mission gets priority.
Nevertheless, what has been brought to light in this exposure of extreme capitalism is in the public interest. The downside is that within the ICIJ exposure there is an unhealthy obsession with the Russian connection and a seeming determination to squeeze this into the claim that they stole last year’s US Presidential election.
No doubt the Russians showed an interest in the outcome and nudged things along where they could. This is nothing new. It also works the other way around. The American interfere in Russian elections and elections in many other countries. This is the unfortunate reality of global politics and international tensions.
Foreign interference is wrong and needs to be opposed. The danger is that over playing this card, can lead to the neglect of the most fundamental issues. In this case, Clinton was a rotten candidate, who turned out to be even more disliked than her opponent. She was the darling of Wall Street, corrupt in her own right and came across as an extremely arrogant individual, who stood for the continuation of the policies that were rousing so much anger in American society. These are these important factors that cost her the election. It was domestic factors and not Russians that determined the result.
Despite the weakness in the ICIJ handling of the issue, the much larger scale of the money laundering and tax evasion cannot be ignored. The ICIJ has had to deal with it by necessity, in the battle against extreme capitalism and this has provided another warning that the world needs urgent action from governments.
To date, the political establishment in country after country has done very little to make a difference and is a worry that will feed the growing resentment, against as regime of unequal treatment, where justice is seen to be given on the capacity to buy it.
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The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) latest economic outlook report, notes that industrialised economies are experiencing slow wage growth and Australia is at the head of the pack.
Under the heading Seeking sustainable growth: short-term recovery, long-term challenges, the latest report has downsized its prediction for Australia’s economic growth to 2.2 percent this year. The unemployment rate, even by the underestimating measure used, is expected to stay the same over the coming period.
The focus is on the absence of wages growth. The IMF suggests that the reasons are higher unemployment, the rise in underemployment, declining productivity growth and what is defined as lower inflation expectations in general, but not so much for Australia.
While the connection with a lower inflation expectation is unclear at best and may be taken with a pinch of salt, what is undeniable, is that underemployment is a major driver. The IMF is right to suggest this and has a point, to an extent at least, in pointing to an association between wages and underemployment.
This is no mystery to most Australians, who do not need an IMF report to tell them this is the way it is.
To an extent was mentioned, because the IMF overlooks the simple reality that underemployment, or the casualisation of labour by another name, is really a form of unemployment. So, when viewed in this context, the relationship between wages and unemployment remains the same, except that it has changed the way it looks.
The IMF report wrongly holds that the old nexus between unemployment and wage rates no longer holds. The problem is that is that the agency is locked into a world view, backed by economic theory that has limited connection to the real world, which blocks the capacity to adapt to anything else.
What is important is not the number of jobs on the books, but the number of hours worked, along with the relative positions of the employer and employee to exert their interests. The report does recognise the that the average number of hours worked is falling in Australia and other industrialised countries. the problem is that is goes no further.
Unacknowledged, is the failure of more than three decades of neoliberalism, which has involved an active drive to push down wages. The IMF has been one of its leading advocates.
Successive Australian governments have been zealous in applying neoliberalism and continue to be so today.
The IMF’s suggested solution to stagnated wages is that in an era of highly flexible employment, governments needs to protect and extend minimum wages and change the approach to unemployment benefits, to acknowledge that the era of full time unemployment has gone.
Measures like these will improve the safety net for the most vulnerable and are justifiable on this basis. But they will not solve the problem.
The biggest weakness in the report is that it in no way challenges the existence and growth of underemployment. The stock argument remains, and that is that the best way to improve the jobs market is to increase productivity. There is not even a hint of steering away from this.
Increasing productivity means more quantity of goods and services created in a given period of time. Contrary to the claim sometimes made, Australia, like other industrialised countries, has a high level of productivity.
This has been brought about by a combination of high skills levels and the application of new technologies. The form that rising productivity has taken has been the replacement of labour by these new technologies and the associated re-organisation in the way work is done.
An outcome of this has been to feed an ongoing increase in the relative oversupply of labour. This is what unemployment is.
Employers finding that they have relatively greater strength to impose their will, have not backed off taking advantage of the opportunity. And they have been supported by government to wage an assault, which takes the shape of turning full time jobs into lower paid and often causalised work, provided by labour hire firms.
The government has moved in and helped by slashing jobs in the public sector and has set up the Fair Work Commission to strengthen the hand of the employers. The recent decision to cut penalty rates is a case in point.
While increasing productivity there has been a fall in the cost of doing business for those that can operate on a large enough scale, there is a paradox, in that it has at the same time, particularly in the higher tech areas, has caused a fall in prices, while those in relatively lower tech and more labour intensive areas, have been squeezed by higher costs and an inability to compete without raising prices
Falling prices have led to a lower rate of return per unit, a rate of return on investment, wilting investment in the real economy and the economic stagnation.
Responding to a systemic problem, employers are using higher real unemployment as a tool to offload the cost of running the business onto the wage earner.
The second paradox is that while it might look good on the short-term balance sheet of individual businesses, the longer-term effect, if it occurs on as big enough scale across the economy, is that it will inevitably shrink the available market.
We are already seeing a trend to lower consumer spending. And this contraction of the market comes around to hit the bottom line, induce further economic stagnation, if not contraction. Life is made more difficult for the employers that pushed in this direction and it is made even more difficult for those on which the burden had been imposed.
For as long as agencies like the IMF and governments like those that Australia continue to ignore these realities and fail to act appropriately, they will continue to be part of the problem.
A solution to the problem is not easy because it is systemic and correcting this requires operating the economy in a way where it is not driven by the major employers and takes the form of working together and rewarding for effort.
At the very least, there is a need for significant government intervention to slow the rot, taking the form of simultaneously enforcing acceptable wages and conditions of employment and applying a plan to grow a new economy that will provide a new supply of job opportunities.
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Selling public assets has created unregulated monopolies that hurt productivity and damage the economy, according to Australia’s consumer and competition tsar, who says he is on the verge of becoming a privatisation opponent.
In a blistering attack on decades of common government practice, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said the sale of ports and electricity infrastructure and the opening of vocational education to private companies had caused him and the public to lose faith in privatisation and deregulation.
ACCC chairman Rod Sims says privatisation is hurting productivity. Photo: Vince Caligiuri
“I’ve been a very strong advocate of privatisation for probably 30 years; I believe it enhances economic efficiency,” Mr Sims told the Melbourne Economic Forum on Tuesday.
“I’m now almost at the point of opposing privatisation because it’s been done to boost proceeds, it’s been done to boost asset sales and I think it’s severely damaging our economy.”
Deregulating the electricity market and selling poles and wires in Queensland and NSW, meanwhile, had seen power prices almost double there over five years. Photo: Glenn Hunt
Mr Sims said privatising ports, including Port Botany and Port Kembla in NSW, which were privatised together, and the Port of Melbourne, which came with conditions restricting competition from other ports, were examples where monopolies had been created without suitable regulation to control how much they could then charge users.
“Of course you get these lovely headlines in the Financial Review saying ‘Gosh, what a successful sale, look at the multiple they achieved’,” Mr Sims said.
“Well of course they bloody well did: the owners factored in very large price rises because there’s no regulation on how they set the price of a monopoly. How dopey is that?”
Mr Sims, who recently launched legal action against Medibank Private alleging it concealed changes to health insurance policies to boost profits ahead of its privatisation, said billions of dollars had been wasted in the scandal-plagued vocational education sector since it was opened up to the private sector.
A deal to privatise the Port of Melbourne was struck in March with conditions that restricted competition from other ports.
Deregulating the electricity market and selling poles and wires in Queensland and NSW, meanwhile, had seen power prices almost double there over five years, he said.
“When you meet people in the street and they say ‘I don’t want privatisation because it boosts prices’ and you dismiss them … recent examples suggest they’re right,” he told the room of influential economic and policy experts.
“The excessive spend on electric poles and wires has damaged our productivity. The higher energy price we’re getting from some poor gas and electricity policies are damaging some of our productive sectors.”
Mr Sims said he was growing “exasperated” as governments including the Commonwealth became more explicit in trying to maximise proceeds from asset sales.
“I think a sharp uppercut is necessary and that’s why I’m saying: stop the privatisation,” he said.
Mr Sims also used the forum to continue a public stoush with opponents of a proposed “effects test”, saying they were relying on “bogus” arguments against the Harper review proposal to give the ACCC powers to block action that had the purpose or effect of substantially lessening competition.
The Productivity Commission last week joined the Business Council of Australia, the federal Labor opposition and the supermarket giants in opposing the so-called “effects test”, which is a pet policy of National Party MPs including Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce.
Continue reading Privatisation has damaged the economy says ACCC chief
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