PARALYSIS

Courtesy of The Atlantic

There's a reason for it. Backgrounded a thousand times. 
The only intelligent empath in the surveillance teams had been dispatched to other duties. Go figure. As secretive and as compromised as the man had been, Old Alex liked him. 
If there was one thing that could be guaranteed, it was bureaucratic ineptitude.
Always place the worst person in the wrong position. After all, what did it matter. It wasn't their money.
They became friends across invisible divides. Patient. Boring at best. A Gentleman's Agreement. 
A Million Wild Acres was nothing out here in The Wild 'Burbs. Compromised. Everyone was so badly compromised there was no room to move. 
They gathered their intell and did nothing with it. 
Who was going to interview him? 
As a journalist with decades of experience, he had interviewed thousands of more people than their best interrogators had. 
And they were short staffed and top heavy, full of managers and protocols and procedures, policies for doormats. They could not move without breaking a public service regulation. Well, more than they had already broken. 
And so it went on in a mind numbing paralysis. The law of diminishing returns. 
Surveillance doesn't work on a person like this, he had heard them say a long time ago. The initial act of intimidation, surveillance as threat, disappeared, instead creating nothing but counterproductive impacts.
But nobody had paid any attention, certainly not the jobsworths. It wasn't their money.
We were confounded by misery. Trapped in dismal circumstance. Unable to reach out. Compromised, completely compromised. 

Don't tell me you don't know what love is When you're old enough to know better When you find strange hands in your sweater When your dreamboat turns out to be a footnote I'm a man with a mission on two or three editions And I'm giving you a longing look Everyday Everyday Everyday I write the book. Elvis Costello.

The country itself was just as compromised, a paralysis that was already leading to the death of the old culture.

THE BIGGER STORY: 



From Mungo Macallum:

Australian government has in recent years, become debased – opportunist, secretive, poll-driven, fixated on short term political gain and unwilling to engage in serious issues when (as is always) they interfere with its internal wranglings.  It has been depressing and demoralising, and the public has responded by branding our parliamentarians a bunch of untrustworthy go-getters, obsessed with their own well-being rather than the public good. 

But after last week it will be hard to maintain that sanguine proposition – we have struck a new nadir, a depth of greed and amorality that is unlikely to be beaten. Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to allocate $3.8 billion (that’s $3,800,000,000 in real money) to promote the export of killing machines is the end of the road.

There have been times when we have been more zealous than others, but our default position has been on the side of peace – the side of the angels.

And it is this history that Turnbull has abandoned in what can only be seen as cynical betrayal of our (and we had thought his own) values and ideals in the desperate search for a few bucks. His attitude appears to be the rationale of every drug dealer, every provider of pornography – if I don’t do it. someone else will, so why should a Australia not aspire to become one of the top ten world-wide merchants of death.

Turnbull’s warriors have already signalled their willingness – eagerness, indeed – to flog the stuff to just about anyone who will pay for it. Only a few weeks ago our ebullient Minister for Industry Christopher Pyne was spruiking the sale of Australian weapons to Saudi Arabia —  those wonderful folk who brought us 9/11 and are now committing war crimes in Yemen before moving on to subdue their own dissenting citizens by any means they deem necessary.

But of course the Saudis are considered our allies – well sort of,  they are the allies of our great and powerful friend, so near enough is  good enough – and thus they are, by definition, worthy recipients of any horrors we can offer them – if, of course, the price is right. And it needs not be added (but will be interminably among the government’s talking points) that there will be jobs involved – well, there may be a few, and there would want to be at the cost of $3.8 billion.

In fact, we can confidently predict just 3,800 jobs, eventually. We know that figure because the price of government assistance (read: taxpayer handouts) to defence procurement works out at a cool one million for every new worker employed.

But wait, there’s more – our killing machines will not only secure our own base for keeping up a steady supply of our own weapons (most of which are being licensed to foreigners anyway, and thus providing minimal profits to Australia) but revive our ailing manufacturer industry, the one successive governments have run into the ground. The once thriving automobile sector could have been saved by a fraction of the cost to be lavished on the warmongers but that would have been economic irrationalism, picking winners and we couldn’t have that.

Fortunately (and the only conceivable saving grace of the moral turpitude into which Turnbull is seeking to immerse us) we probably won’t have to: the experts in the field assure us that the already established merchants of death will effortlessly freeze out such a bumptious upstart in what has become a seriously cut-throat (and that is itself a euphemism) industry.

Let’s face it, they know all about real wars, so a trade war with an uppity neophyte should be a doddle. And if  this happens (and frankly it should) Turnbull’s latest thought bubble will be revealed as an utter failure in every sense – not merely unforgivably depraved, but hugely wasteful and simply stupid. What a way to start the new year of rewards for all.