Melbourne Writers Festival – Day 3 Part 2

MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL: Dog's Tales at the Toff (Photo courtesy the Melbourne Writers Festival)  

Politics of History vs Joe Bageant
Comic Fiction
Kim Stanley Robinson
The Politics of History vs Joe Bageant
Loretta Napoleoni
Dog's Tales at the Toff

With two sessions under my belt for the day already, as lunch approached I was torn between The Politics of History and Joe Bageant In Conversation. Having been so impressed by Malcolm Fraser I opted for Hawke and his mate Graham Freudenberg, hoping for more of the same, but I really should’ve read the fine print.

As I snuck in to the back row, spying the Age’s Jason Stegar taking notes and the full audience I figured this was an important thing to be seeing. But Bob Hawke was the panel chairperson. This was Freudenberg show.

Freudenberg was a journalist, turned press secretary in the days of Calwell and went on to write speeches for Whitlam, Hawke and NSW Premiers Wran, Unsworth and Carr. He’s won awards for his books, and a Walkey for Churchill and Australia.

Hawke was in full long -er form but Freudenberg was just as bad. It was a cliché play of two old men at a bus stop, talking about the Dardanelle campaign. Hawke searched for passages to read, which were admittedly quite amusing when he finally found them. But as I looked around I could see people in the audience starting to get fidgety.

Through the glass walls of the BMW Edge I could see the balcony where at Feddish Joe Bagaent was talking, free. Time to go.

And I’m so glad I did. I’d never heard of Joe Bagaent or his wonderful Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir and Deer Hunting with Jesus until I’d wandered into the Morning Fix session on the first day but had been immediately entranced by his Virginia drawl. The restaurant was packed, mostly with middle-aged men and when the questions came round it turned out many of them were refugee Americans too.

He was talking with Jeff Sparrow from Overland magazine, and I had to squeezed into the doorway near the toilets, the only standing room left.

Bageant talked about getting out of the navy and packing his family in a volkswagon, $80 in their pockets and driving to San Francisco. Great counter culture stuff, hanging out with Ginsberg and William Burroughs, living in a tee pee and coming to know he wanted to be a writer.

He despaired at the corruption of American life, and gave an example. In his town the cancer rate is a 100 times normal levels thanks to, he says, a company called PolyOne, they make a wide range of plastisols, plasticizers and other things you can imagine aren’t good for people. The solution to the cancer problem was to build a cancer hospital, to make money out of it. ‘I mean, what the hell,’ Bageant says.

He talked about how subsistence farmers, agricultural life is seen as of ‘no-value’ because it isn’t monetised and has been destroyed by successive World Bank policies. He spoke of the deep scars left that won’t heal from the civil war, the reminders of graveyards and battleground where people’s great-grandfathers died. Everyone in his family knows where they will be buried, the same place they’ve all been buried for 300 years. And he praised Australia.

‘You guys are the richest people on the planet,’ he said. You can see the fun, the well being on the faces of everyone you see. But the same lizards are working to get it away from you, I can see that. You have money and they want it.

It’ll be interesting to see what he says next week when he’ll be on the ABC’s Q&A.

I was itching to see two sessions in the next block but hadn’t eaten, dammit when bodily functions get in the way of writing and listening to writers. I did sneak into Comic Fiction for awhile, standing in the wings watching Tony Wilson talk with Peter Rose, Andrew Humphreys and David Musgrave about writing satirical novels, only to find I was standing next to Tony’s mum, don’t you love it.

So I didn’t go to see Hugo and Nebula award-winning writer Kim Stanley Robinson, and neither did anyone else. Which is pretty shameful, leaving someone like that rattling around in a half empty BMW Edge, and I have to agree with Foz Meadows that it may have something to do with our festival going crowd. My husband was there though and he reported that Robinson’s ‘got it all going on’. A visionary of what a future society could be like. See him at AussieCon 4 this weekend.

So after some eating and writing, the evening approached and it was time to swallow another persepective-altering session – my first occasion to get to one of the Big Ideas sessions. This strand of the programme ‘2010 Big Ideas’ are at the RMIT Capital Theatre opposite Town Hall and over just the first weekend have included Bob Hawke talking with Barrie Cassidy, Peter Beinhart, talking on New York’s Jewish Establishment, Malcolm Fraser and Waleed Aly talking about Liberalism. I was off to see Loretta Napoleoni talking about Terrorism and the Economy.

Napoleoni has written several best-selling books on terrorism and the how entangled the global financial system has become with the business of terrorism, Terrorism and the Economy, Rogue Economics, Insurgent Iraq and Terror Incorporated. It’s fascinating stuff about tax evasion, criminal cartels, the shadow economy and the reality of the parallel Islamic finance sector that has avoided all our disasters through its requirement to be Shia compliant.

Much of what she had to say mirrored her TED talk with the same anecdotes about a yacht loving gun smuggler and how having lunch with Mario Moretti one time leaders of the Red Brigades, made her realise that talking to the head of terrorist organisations was a lot like being back in London talking to a banker. These insights are what spurred her into investigating and researching the economics of terrorism and changed the course of her life. Not surprising then that she repeats them, and a bonus for those who couldn't get to the talk.

Loretta Napoleoni has solid economic credentials (Fulbright Scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C. and a Rotary Scholar at the London School of Economics). She’s worked as a risk analyst, for banks, international organisations in Europe and the US, as a journalist and foreign correspondent. It took her over two years to research the money trail of terrorist organisations.

Part of her analysis has been to define stages in the development of terrorism organisations, and recognise how they have organised and built their internal structures with all the same MBA recommendations as the non-criminal sector, They’ve deregulated, shaken off state-control and gone global just like everyone else. The criminal sector is estimated to be worth around 1.5 trillion dollars, or about 5% of the world’s GDP.

Her most controversial analysis is her explanation of how and why we came to have the GFC we did not need to have. The way she tells it, at the beginning of the 00s the world economy was too hot. We’d had the Asian melt-down, the tech wreak and still the economy was too hot. Interest rates were going up to try and cool things down and in early 2001 were around 6% in the US. Come 9-11 and the decision to go to war the US government, Bush, Cheny et al. needed a way to fund it without putting up taxes. So they issued government bonds.

But the rate of return on US Bonds, competing against the bonds of other countries and high interest rates wasn’t good, so interest rates had to come down. Low interest rates make bonds relatively more attractive offering a better real return. By the summer of 2003 interest rates were down to 1.2%, that’s in two years. It was supposed to be to avert a recession, but it went far beyond what was necessary and far too quickly.

This disproportionately low cost of credit, allowed many people in the US to take out mortgages who couldn’t in more normal circumstances afford them, and the risk that posed allowed for the securitisation and subsequent asinine trading of debt across the global economy, which eventually imploded. I can’t say I buy it completely. It’s a little too neat. But wow, a lot of the economics made sense. Her call, is for a people to demand more ethical banking, to be active and demand banks serve the society they were created to serve.

Staggering out of that session, into the dark night, looking at the way trams trundled down Swanston, the mash up of Melbourne life along Swanston Street.

‘Scuse me, sorry to bother you, ‘scuse me, spare some change.’

Interrupted thoughts, and down a few gold bits. The slightly despressing normality of it all. I was trying to comprehend what anyone is supposed to do about a shadow criminal economy that huge. It seemed a good time for a drink.

Luckily there were drinks available in a hot crowded room with no available chairs, at the Toff up the road. Perfect. As a bonus it was where some people who usually hang out in a similar environment but in St Kilda were getting up on stage to tell stories, quite entertaining ones. It was a tale wagging the dog kinda night.

Josephine Rowe spoke beautifully about men who can’t find their way home and I will never look at ride on mowers again in the same way. Kalinda Ashton did the same for Christmas decoration. Dave Caruthers made me chuckle, ah crazy violent bikers, god love ‘em. DBC Pierre in his adoptive Berliner grandfather’s over-sized jacket. There was Elif Batuman, don’t ask her to mind your canoe, Carmel Bird, don’t ask her to feed your child and Tiffany Murray, ask her mum to make you a meal.

Time for bed.

MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL
27 August to 5 September
For further information and ticketing go to www.mwf.com.au