Wednesday, April 03, 2013

What Murdoch and Packer tell us

Business magnates are not usually patriots. Look at the recent utterances of Rupert Murdoch and James Packer. They have accused the Gillard Labor Government of "racism" and "xenophobia". Why? Because the Gillard Government has promised to crack down on the rorting of 457 visas, on the basis that local workers should have a shot at Australian jobs before companies fly in workers from abroad:
Mr Murdoch told Sky News on Tuesday the way the government was talking about the visa scheme was "pretty disgraceful and racist".

"I'm a big one for encouraging immigration; I think that's the future and a mixture of people, just look at America. It's just fantastic," he said

...Billionaire James Packer last month used a speech to the Asia Society to warn politicians from all parties against sending xenophobic messages overseas.

"Some of the recent public debate does not reflect well on any of us. Even worse, it plays on fears and prejudices and is completely unnecessary. We are all better than that," Mr Packer said.
 
Murdoch and Packer aren't concerned about traditional Australia. They want open borders and the least interference possible with the movement of labour internationally. Even the smallest hint of national preference is damned by them.

Why bother pointing this out? It's important to understand the influence of money and material self-interest on politics. If a society makes the owners of multinational corporations the most wealthy, powerful and influential members of the community, then how can that society reasonably expect to hold together? The multinational business magnates are likely to use their influence to push the idea that their own international business interests should take precedence over such matters as communal identity and continuity.

Therefore, if we are looking to re-establish somewhere a more traditional community, we have to favour a different kind of business model, one which creates a class of people who are more likely to support the traditional society.

One possible way to do this would be to emphasise smaller businesses selling to local markets. If a community gave some kind of preference to local businesses, and these businesses were reliant on local markets, then there would be a financial reason for this kind of business class to support the maintenance of communal cohesion (and not just to see people as atomised, interchangeable units of consumption or labour).

The effect of this could be institutionalised in a number of ways. The easiest would be to encourage the formation of a "domestic traders and manufacturers association" - one which could specifically represent those reliant on an in-group loyalty for the security and prosperity of their businesses. Another, perhaps more difficult, possibility would be a modified guild system in which everyone, whether an owner, manager or worker, reliant on these industries would be represented (e.g. a clothing industry guild or a computer industry guild). This guild system could have the possible advantage of drawing people to think about the larger industrial interest rather than more sectional, class-based ones (this might not work in practice, but it's worth considering).

At any rate, we need to have a business model that fits with, rather than undercuts, a traditional community.

13 comments:

  1. That's an interesting paradox.

    Despite the fact that the far-left hates capitalism, capitalists are very content to embrace the same anti-racism and anti-traditionalism that characterises the far-left. Left-liberals and right-liberals alike are keen on immigration and multi-ethnicity.

    Evidence for this can be seen in the promotion of race-mixing in advertising. Large corporations want to promote multi-ethnic imagery in their advertising because it's inclusive, diverse and representative of a broad customer base.

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  2. I think your proposed "guild" system would run into anti-trust (anti-monopoly) legal problems in the US. Don't know about Australia. To say nothing of the "human rights" issues that would arise if there were some ethnic/religious/racial component of the in-group definition.

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  3. Second anon,

    I'm not sure if we have anti-trust legislation in Australia - I haven't heard of it here (there does exist anti-price fixing legislation). Anyway, you could respect the letter of the law whilst still pushing ahead in the direction you wanted to go. As for the in-group definition, that obviously does run against the grain of liberal understandings. It depends on how long liberals continue to target white communities as special cases. Liberals don't seem to mind the congregation of minority groups together if said minorities aren't actively and violently anti-liberal (which then brings on calls for assimilation etc). And you never know what kinds of opportunities might arise - the state government in South Australia, for instance, recently promoted itself as a good place for British immigrants due to cultural affinities.

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  4. Despite the fact that the far-left hates capitalism, capitalists are very content to embrace the same anti-racism and anti-traditionalism that characterises the far-left.

    In general, yes. That means:

    a) We need a business model which encourages loyalty to the community.

    b) We need a social model which doesn't concentrate power and influence amongst a small group of business magnates.

    As for (b) that would include overcoming the isolation of those most likely to support a traditional community, i.e. finding ways to join them together in institutions that can have influence in society.

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  5. Australia has experienced a 17 percent population increase in a single decade due to immigration. Do Australians really fathom how huge and unsustainable an increase that is? 200,000 new immigrants a year equates to 5 million new immigrants in a single generation, meaning that non-ethnic Anglo-Celtic Australians will comprise well over another 20% of the population in just a generation's time.

    This is outright population replacement.

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  6. "Murdoch and Packer aren't concerned about traditional Australia. They want open borders and the least interference possible with the movement of labour internationally. Even the smallest hint of national preference is damned by them."

    The fact that Murdoch traded his Australian citizenship for an American passport for business reasons tells us everything we need to know about his views on the nation-state. He obviously has no concept of national loyalty. To him, matters of national identity and culture are irrelevant. He is a prime example of what Samuel L. Huntington labelled "Davos Man", global economic elites who "have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations."

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  7. Right-Liberalism aka Classical liberalism = Capitalism/Consumerism

    Left-Liberalism aka Modern Liberalism = Communism/PC Orwellian Environment

    Both are sides of the same coin. First of all, attack the global elites and rootless cosmopolitans through making sure that corporations aren't seen as people.

    Second, many laws have to go. There are so laws for so many things, some of them outright contradicting, clashing or crashing with another, that it doesn't make sense. Words have lost their meaning. The bureaucratic technocrat needs to go.

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  8. It's called distributism. It suffers from a lack of de-abstracting, but it is what you are speaking of.

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  9. The need is real, and the news on Mark Zuckerberg’s entry into politics with a pro-open-borders high-tech billionaire's club confirms it. (Story at Politico.) This looks clumsy as a beginning, but the sheer power of the forces being brought to bear means it won't stay that way.

    It's obvious that you can't reward these people enough that they will become loyal. They have everything our societies can provide, in insane abundance, and they still want to do away with us.

    It is not a matter of them having some grievance about how their talents were under-rewarded or restrained, which if that grievance was remedied would make them gentle. They cannot be appeased.

    Due to their positions of advantage in the communications web as well as their sheer wealth, they are bound to be effective.

    Conservatives need a counter-strategy and ways to organize countervailing resources.

    It may be difficult to imagine success. But there's no reward for not trying, except to be wiped away by a continuous flood of mass immigration into all white countries and only white countries, supported by forced integration (for the whites only, while non-whites are free to play us-vs-them games).

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  10. Conservatives aren't interested in trying. The elites are not as powerful as they seem, there is much hollowness that can be effectively exploited. But conservatives (and I mean true conservatives, not right-liberals) just aren't interested in effective strategies and planning.

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  11. Anon (above),

    I think things are starting to shift. We've got our group going here in Melbourne, the Sydney Trads are active, the Traditional Britain Group are setting up new branches.

    There's also a big movement underway in Europe (the Identitarians) though I'm not sure yet what to make of them politically.

    The main thing now is to keep the momentum going: to focus positively on the growth from a purely internet based movement to the development of local associations. It's a big step forward.

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