Orwellian anti-truths

This week has been particularly bad for confusion. As often happens while trying to make sense of it I came across a phrase which exactly encapsulates the phenomenon: Orwellian anti-truths.

This is where we are deluged with statements in the media which are the exact opposite of what is actually really happening. They refer to the state of affairs in George Orwell’s “1984” novel but they are very much a thing of today.

We discovered the phrase in a web-article about taxes in the US. The article was accompanied by a graph showing the changing levels of taxation in the US over the last century. The current tax levels were the lowest for close on 50 years. This is in stark contrast to the Orwellian anti-truth that is being shouted from the rooftops in the US about how high taxes are and how they should be lowered.

I’m not going any further with US taxation levels but Orwellian anti-truths are all around us and easy to notice once we start looking.

Here is an example of an Orwellian anti-truth: The mining industry is bringing Australian lots of jobs. The mining industry ads on the television paint a rosy rosy picture of this “good guy” industry.This is classic anti-truth. As mining magnate Clive Palmer demonstrated with a model of what happens with the creation of 6000 mining jobs: 3000 manufacturing jobs are lost. Mining in Australia employs 200000 people but is decimating manufacturing which employs one million people because of the high Australian dollar and low productivity rates it creates. Mining sends most of its profits (83%) overseas most of the minerals (leaving us have to compete with overseas buyers on price for our own gas) destroys towns with its “fly-in fly-out model” and there is little evidence that it is providing much employment except to overseas workers brought in.

Now an Indian company Ardani is demanding that our federal government allow it “enterprise migration permits”. Rather than use local labour or train people for the roles from the Australian workforce it wants to bring in a whole town of workers from overseas set them up out in the outback digging up Australian ore to export to India and export the profits to India. This is given the Orwellian anti-truth label of “investment in Australia” when what it actually is is a take-over of Australia a land-grab an invasion.

Several more Orwellian anti-truths on a vast scale were floating around this week.

Australia’s financial future according to the Reserve Bank of Australia will be “a near perfect outlook with healthy growth and inflation under control at about 2.5% for the next 2 years. Terms of trade have been revised higher.”

Meanwhile we heard stories from the global financial arena that would send a shiver up the spine of any prudent person. We drove to Nambour to listen to Nicole Foss talk about preparing for economic depression. Nicole is an old lady who has spent her life accummulating qualifications professional experience and sound judgment. She talked about finance because “it has the shortest timeframe” of the world-changing challenges that are set to hit us. Let me quote some of what she was saying: “We’re looking at the bursting of a global bubble – we’re facing deflation. Bubbles are Ponzi speculative schemes. People think there will always be ‘a greater fool’ but the supply of greater fools is not limitless. This is the largest bubble in history. The hangover is proportionate to the party. Bubbles will burst whether or not resources remain available. When the bubble burst in the 1930s the US had everything but money. They ‘crashed’ the operating system. In bubbles people chase momentum. They have no idea of basics. Outright euphoria builds. People collectively take leave of their senses and stop paying attention to risk. When we reach the maximum of the bubble it falls and keeps falling driven by fear which is an extremely catchy sharp emotion that spreads fast. Nicole Foss is predicting a ‘deflationary depression’ deflating the price of assets. It is not price that matters but the ratio between the money in your pocket and what something costs. What we have to look at is affordability. We have lived through a period of 3-4 decades when credit has been created in mountains. Credit is now the vast majority (95%) of the money supply. It is a vast musical chairs and when the music stops there will be about one chair per hundrend trying to claim it. The people at the top of the financial food chain realize and grab the financial ‘chairs’ first. Fantasy wealth can be extinguished very rapidly and messily. You are contracting the supply of money and credit compared to real wealth. Debt does not go away.

We drove home feeling very somber. It certainly was something to think about. Then next morning there is the RBA’s predictions of a rosy financial future. Confusing and bewildering. Where is reality?

Nicole Foss spoke for one and a half hours then took questions for the next hour.

One thing she talked quite a bit about and which the audience clearly picked up on in their questions is the debt that our young people are accummulating for tertiary education fees. She called it “Debt Slavery”. This exactly mirrors my own intuition and something I have been saying mainly in poetry for some time now. All the time she is urging us all to clear all our debts as fast as we can we were all painfully aware that our adult children were burdened down with higher education and mortgage debt that they had no hope of clearing for decades. Superannuation fund and savings may fall a huge way in value but they would not leave a debt. House price falls do not leave a debt if your home is paid off. But higher education and mortgages leave a debt for the young.

One of our sons rang from the UK. He has just made an offer for 400000 pounds for an old house. Then our neighbours put up a “To Let” sign on their home. They have bought another house and are moving keeping this one as an ‘investment’. They have done their sums and figure they can afford the repayments on their debt. They are not factoring in global financial bubble collapses in any way.

Then I received another report on the financial situation in the US this time focusing on the scale of US debt in particular and its implications for the US dollar as the currency of global exchange. There is a rapid move out of the US dollar and this author was predicting that the US would face skyrocketing consumer prices bankruptcy implosion of property values to about 10%. They talked about a global currency being proposed by the IMF the Bancor.

And we read almost nothing of this in our local papers. We are told that our banks are sound and Australia’s economic future is rosy.

Then one big bank after another lays off hundreds and hundreds of workers and puts up interest rates for borrowers. But according to Orwellian anti-truth our banks are great.

Then came another confusing door into Orwellian anti-truth. First thing next morning we got up to read the news on Radio 4RPH Radio for the Print Handicapped. And one of the first things I read was that the number of university places being offered this year was the highest ever. Universities in Australia can now offer as many places in courses as they choose and enrol as many students as apply regardless of the academic quality of those students. Many will fail. All will incur huge higher education debts.

Then I read a report someone sent me on the “Occupy Everything” movement that is happening around the globe. What on earth is triggering the huge crowds of young people who gather to protest in city squares? Well according to this report one of the triggers is the huge amount of higher education debt that is not backed up by a supply of jobs for graduates.

This made sense to me. This is wading through the “Orwellian anti-truth” to figure out what is real.

Syria is killing its own in huge numbers then I read an article that says what is happening in Syria and the whole ‘Arab Spring’ is a huge plot by the US and Western banks. Who knows what is the truth? Is Israel or Iran the villain in the car bombings that are threatening to provide a fuse for further war this time possibly nuclear in the Middle East? You’d need a PhD in Orwellian anti-truth to unravel the reality from this one.

More locally our State and local governments are fighting it out over the blame game for the 2011 floods and Wivenhoe Dam’s operation. You make sense of it.

More and more it seems that we cannot trust what we read cannot trust what we hear on radio and television. We have to cross-reference and cross-check from multiple angles with careful skepticism to attempt to tease out reality. Then we have to make up our own minds do our own planning make our own choices. Not an easy world to live in.