AUSTERITY
SO WHAT
by Colin Ball
In the world
the GFC too-big-to-fail
bailout by governments,
handed over public moneys
to the big end,
and landed regimes
in big debt.
surprise surprise
this public purchase
doesn’t buy the too-bigs
as you’d think
it would in a real market.
instead
it’s socialised as debt.
suddenly,
worryingly new,
expanding budget deficits,
fiscal cliffs and sequestrations,
aging populations
and other big ideas
demand
that public debt must be paid.
especially when it is owed
to the too big to fail,
bailed-out guys,
who just got a whole lot of public money
from us.
instead
deep-hole-digging (gina’s and clive’s),
bankers,
and monstrous
money-making-business-enterprise,
loud-noised murderous-media,
their world leaders,
abbotts bishops and other mad monks
insist that
austerity
is the go,
it is the go and
the debt must be paid.
it will be paid
by ravaging
public services,
public servants’ jobs
and their services to the public
paid for,
by the public.
everything,
advises the institute for public affairs should be
cut and reduced,
rendered and slendered,
nothing mended,
reused or repaired,
repurposed or recycled like
good Pythagorean transitioners,
who cared.
universities have much to offer.
with reduced expenditure
they are mentored by - become extensions of -
commerce and industry
and think tanks.
those PR merchants of capital,
the double-speaking inheritors of
Freud and Goebbels whose
revelation
then domination
of the psyche,
make it tricky
to spot,
the difference between
ourselves, and
self-interested individuals,
vulgar economists,
politicians
and media indoctrinaires,
who make
life hot.
they tell us that the governments must
be small,
except
when collecting taxes from
us all,
to expand police and military personnel,
with the most modern and
lethal kill-wares
from hell,
while ever subsidising the privateers.
because,
the magic of the market,
a religious and reified
spectral of abstractions, this
bewitched distorted and upside down world
will handle it all
they say
this abstraction is not
absurd.
there is no alternative.
they advise
that our assets are only good
when sold,
user value only, has
no value.
our schools and hospitals,
energy production and transmission,
are in their submission,
and roads, bridges, tunnels,
railways and airports,
wharves in their seaport,
government assisted sport,
our forests and national parks,
the ABC, SBS, NITV
the CSIRO
and the snowy hydro,
will be sold.
wake up everybody,
and understand that
the market is its own end brother,
it won’t bend sister.
brothers,
sisters
listen,
to exchange and lend
is its addiction.
it wants to deregulate,
in order to speculate and accumulate,
then to appropriate and make private,
on to exterminate,
so the market will celebrate
its ownership of everything.
on our compliance in making austerity the norm?
will we watch and live as it happens
but never see it?
‘it’, what is happening
right now
all over the earth.
are we
confused, distracted
by our slow immiserations,
like froggies in warming waters?
consumed in beer, tv sport and gambling,
drugs’ doped heads?
do not understand it,
if I poor?
or indulged in cars, clothes, houses, holidays, whiskey and cocaine
if I have more?
jet mansion myself around the world
sucking in oxygen
and French champagne,
if on top
of the heap and would not see,
nor care,
if I there.
so what?
if austerities kill
that is your bitter pill,
says the absolute minority.
but good for them as the rich can buy
a cheap Greek isle,
own it all, and smile,
enslave you all,
while,
they act like
Homer’s Greek gods.
[This