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Raising Hell: Issue 37: A "Sit Up And Take Notice Moment"

"I behaved unethically, for ethical reasons.” - Adnan Khashoggi, Arms Dealer.

Raising Hell: Issue 37: A "Sit Up And Take Notice Moment"

You know those times where you’ve wound up a head of state and find yourself pondering about what should be done on a question of significant global import? Well, a quick rule-of-thumb guide is to ask yourself a simple question: what would Jim Bolton think about the outcome?

And then do the exact opposite.

Bolton, for those who don’t know anything about him, is a special breed of assassin whose crawled out of the corridors of the US security. Rolling Stone once described him as a “war criminal” and they weren’t wrong. His lust for violence as seem him support just about every war the US has been in over the last half decade — including Vietnam, a conflict that Bolton also supported despite dodging the draft. The guy helped smooth the way for the invasion of Iraq, is one of the loudest voices calling for war with Iran and now apparently, World War II with China.

So when The Economist hands Bolton a thousand or so words to write approvingly about the nuclear submarine deal the Australian government has struck with the US and the UK, you have a fairly objective measure of just how dumb this move was. In just the first couple of pars, here is Bolton in full flight, gloating over the global reaction to the announcement:

“The project stunned and enraged China, not to mention France, whose technologically inadequate, diesel-powered submarines were rejected by Australia. In the Indo-Pacific and globally, the deal marks a sit-up-and-take-notice moment, perhaps a genuine pivot.”

Clearly what excites Bolton — and much of the neocon right for that matter — is just how how shocking the move was. Despite Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s folksy attempt to spin the decision on US television as a business deal (full interview here), ultimately the decision was about flicking the bird to China in the UN parking lot.

If there was one thing Bolton was right about, however, it’s that the announcement sprung on Australians early in the last fortnight was certainly a “sit up and take notice moment” — so much so that it is worth spending a bit of time to unpack the implications especially as I devoted a slice of The Death of Holden to talking about the submarine program.

Typically, whenever an announcement about submarines is made, a chorus on the Australian left begin their critique about why we even need these things anyway. The problem with this instinctual response, is it largely misses the point. As far as defence goes, submarines are the one thing that make sense in a country like Australia, which is heavily depending on global trade to function which makes us incredibly vulnerable. Park a fleet offshore for a couple of weeks to cut off the supply of oil needed to make petrol and within a month or so you’re talking about a famine as there is no way to get what we grow onto people’s plates.

Submarines are a way to guard against this problem as an admiral will think twice about pulling that kind of move when they know even a single submarine is lurking the area.

Done right, submarines are incredibly valuable like that, unlike battleships. In a modern navy there are really only two kinds of vessels: submarines and targets for cruise missile strikes. The problem when it comes to nuclear submarines is everything else. There are some advantages as I laid out in The Guardian recently, but the devil is in the fine print. Not only is the Australian government handing a blank cheque to its allies, but signing up to the Australia-UK-US alliance is basically signing up to World War II. With this deal Australia is now bound to the US in any suicidal war with China — and I say suicidal deliberately. China not only makes half our stuff, but you can bet Adelaide has been bumped up the strike list in the event of a nuclear apocalypse.

For the neocons in the US, this is a wonderful thing, but then they’ve always been comfortable letting other people bleed on their behalf — though things get worse when you look at the detail, mostly because there is no detail. The announcement amount to little more than a new military alliance and a plan to get a plan over the next 18 or so months — after having spent ten years thinking about this.

Building submarines, as you can imagine, isn’t easy. It is thought a faulty weld on a torpedo sunk the Kursk. Officially, Australia won’t be getting its mitts on these nuclear-propelled submarines until 2040 — though with the parasitic nature of military contracts, you can expect the Royal Australian Navy won’t be taking possession of them until 2050. This is on top of the ten year delay caused when Tony Abbott dicked around with the submarine project and will inevitably mean we have to lease subs from either the US or UK. Australia was supposed to have learned why this a bad idea back in the sixties when it bought its subs from the British and refurbishing them ended up costing about the same as buying a whole new submarine, but then that’s the thing about being a colony.

Finally, there is the diplomatic shitshow as the whole exchange was handled with the finesse we have come to expect. Scott Morrison — as the head of a government in trouble — may have grabbed a headline with his announcement, but within days The New York Times was reporting that US officials had begun to regret leaving their hick cousins, the Aussies, to handle things with the French. Not only did the Australian diplomatic corps keep the French in the dark right up until the bitter end — despite giving India and Japan a heads up — Morrison notified the French President Emmanuel Macron by text. Peter Dutton, meanwhile, insists Australia has been nothing but “open and honest” with the French.

The irony of it all is that in seeking to send a message to a domestic audience, Morrison has opened up his own supporters to a certain degree of risk. The French have no reason to keep putting up with Australia’s nonsense within the EU and there’s been a lot of appetite for carbon sanctions of late. If you were a Coalition supporter whose business is plugged into a global supply chain, it may prove awkward timing.

But then, we Australians knew it would end like this, and I think we can safely mark down this down in the history books as the moment when Scotty From Marketing went global.

For the Fortnight: September 15 to September 28

Reporting In

Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …

Up-Coming Events

  • You in Adelaide on 10 October? Want something to do? Well, the Context festival is on again at Adelaide City Library is on again and I’ll be on a panel talking about the future of local journalism with Gemma Beale and Anisha Pillarisetty. The show was curated by Dominic Guerrera and Writers SA — and the best part? At the price of FREE, it’s certainly cheaper than a move. Check out the rest of the program.
  • In related opportunities, if you’re Asian Australia and like to write things — or know someone who likes to write things — there’s a great PAID opportunity going with Liminal magazine — but time’s running out. Head here for details.

Projects

  • Cracking COVIDSafe - An examination of the machine that made the COVIDSafe app, a piece of software that promised to hack the pandemic (complete).

  • Laramba’s Water - Laramba is a remote Indigenous Community in the Northern Territory which has been drinking uranium-contaminated water since 2008. We tried to find out what why (on-going).

    1. ‘High levels of uranium in drinking water of NT community’ (NITV, 31 July 2020).

    2. ‘Company remains shtum on plans to filter Laramba's contaminated water supply’ (NITV, 21 October 2020).

You Hate To See It

A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…

  • Get That Company Scrip

    Let’s recap: Covid-19 has killed 4.9 million people world-wide — 1220 of them in Sydney alone. Whole ecosystems are beginning to collapse as humanity has shown it would rather make another buck than stave off extinction. Meanwhile, humanity has been circling the wagons around the rich, even as the world richest men build themselves rocket ships for a jape. One of those men — the one whose gleaming Amazon warehouses ringed by slums and whose workers have to piss in bottles because they can’t stop working — is now reinventing the Company Town for the Information Age. But then, as the faithful scribes at Bloomberg.com tell us, we need to forget all that talk of wealth distribution and really just lean in to the inevitably of debt peonage for these “factory towns” as they are, after all, the future of the global working class.

  • A Picture, A Thousand Words

    And the US department of Homeland Security really is just leaning into the horror. Agents from the security agency were photographed this last fortnight astride horses in their cowboys as they whipped desperate Haitian migrants attempting to flee across the border. Documentation of the incident comes complete with video, but fear not, the Homeland Security is conducting an investigation into Homeland Security which, we assume, will clear everything right up.

  • Justice For Some

    Nicholas Drummond, you might say, has had a rough year. Over the course of 2021, the 20-year-old graduate of Sydney’s elite Knox Grammar school has seen his dog die, his girlfriend leave him, a family member pass away and an attempt to prosecute him for assault after he told a woman to “put her tits away” and then punched her in the face when she demanded an apology. Don’t worry about Drummond though, the story has a happy ending. After appealing his conviction to the New South Wales District Court, Judge Richard Sutherland declined to record a conviction against the young man so that he could continue to coach soccer around young people. Sutherland sympathised with the plight of the young man, explaining his decision by saying: "[He made] a lewd and completely inappropriate remark towards someone he didn't know but whose dress might have been perceived by a former student of Knox to be provocative.”

  • Stocks! So Easy A Hamster Could Do It

    Looking for investment advice? Meet Mr Groxx. Since he started trading cryptocurrencies in June, his portfolio is up 20% and is currently outperforming Warren Buffet and the S&P 500. In the interests of full disclosure, however, we do need to let you know that Mr Groxx is also a hamster, one who lives in a cage rigged to allow him trade cryptocurrency and whose entire operation is live-streamed to Twitch.

  • Move Over, Barefoot Investor

    While the majority of us may find something darkly comical about the Polyanna-ish view of modern capitalism usually taught in schools, we can at least appreciate how one American primary school gave their class a first-grade education in the workings of the modern financial system. Now if we can only package it up into a five-week course paid for with seven easy installments…

Failing Upward

Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…

  • We here at Raising Hell could kiss Barnaby Joyce — and let’s be honest, with his history there’s a fairly good chance that could actually happen. When we started this satirical sub-branded section of this newsletter, we absolutely couldn’t have asked for a better walking, talking proof of concept. After all, the man in the Ten Gallon Hat, once consigned to political oblivion, has since returned to the national stage and, having learned there are absolutely no consequences for people like, he has spent the last two weeks just letting it all hang out there.And boy, howdy, we are there for it. Take, for example, his total flex upon hearing the news of Christian Porter’s resignation. The former Attorney General — the most senior law officer in the land — may have accepted a bunch of money in a blind trust to pay his legal fees, but even as the shredders were still running on every Freedom of Information request filed with Porter’s Office, Barnaby was already smoothing the way for his return. While serving as the Acting Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce summed up Porter’s situation as a “bad day at the wicket” and added that though the former Attorney General had now “gone over to the corridor of the nearly dead”, he should “be given another chance at some future time.”Our man Barnaby, however, wasn’t done. Later in the week Joyce took to telling the ABC what stories it should examine as part of its editorial agenda and when it was pointed out that the state broad caster was not exactly in the business of publishing government propaganda, Joyce replied, “not really, we have to pay for you” — effectively shouting the quiet part through a megaphone.On ya, Barnables.

Good Reads, Good Times

To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight…

  • Jeremy Martens has this in The Conversation covering the wholesale slaughter with which Europeans colonised the region south of Perth — it makes for grim reading.

  • Political Economist Mark Blyth nailed Australia this last fortnight when he described us as a “ultimately a giant carbon polluting global menace with a really good PR department”. For more, see this explainer of how Big Oil’s changing its rhetoric on climate change and enjoy the feeling of deja vu as you recognise the federal government’s key talking points.

  • One of the more interesting developments out of this pandemic is how the world is now effectively closed. Matthew Hockenberry, Associate Professor at Fordham University had this long Twitter thread explaining how global supply chains are slowly breaking down.

  • Having a grown up with my other reading stories of the Moomintrolls, I was pleasantly surprised to learn how the amorphous troll creatures created by Finish illustrator Tove Jansson had become anti-fascist symbols.

Before You Go (Go)…

  • Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal or through encrypted message Wickr Me on my account: rorok1990. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
  • And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!
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Jamie Larson
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