Buying back the farm: Q&A

Ask this question to anyone who is opposed to the partial sale of government energy businesses (which it seems from the media is everyone except a handful of detested capitalists): What’s wrong with buying them back?

Is it because they are afraid the companies will be much more valuable on the stock exchange and investors won’t sell?

Submissions to the select committee considering the bill have come up with this and crazier ideas. Some argue that selling the businesses makes no sense when the government can borrow at rates below that of private investors.

If that's so, it pose any another question for these financial illiterates: Why doesn’t the government buy up every business if it can borrow cheaper than any one else, have lower borrowing costs and run them better?

Oh, they might say, private investors will just push up power and coal prices to create bigger profits, making the company more valuable and thus too expensive to buy back.

But if this is the case, won’t the government’s majority shareholding become more valuable as well…?

Then there’s the sharemarket listing, which as every self-respecting socialist knows is just a casino for the rich.

If the share prices of the partially owned SOEs crumble, as might happen, doesn’t this prove the government should have kept full ownership and prevent investors from losing out?

This time to buy shares, of course, is when they are cheap, as any canny investor knows because it lowers the overall cost of the investment and is more profitable when the stock rises again.

Well, it becomes a circular argument and at that point you can probably call it quits if nothing has sunk in. It also brings us back to the original question and what is happening in Argentina, where the former state-owned oil company has been summarily seized from its Spanish owners.

Why is the Left, in its embrace of borrowing-for-growth as a counter to unpopular so-called “austerity” policies, so afraid of re-nationalisation, as the Argentinians are doing? Or do the socialists know something about government borrowing and ownership of businesses that we don’t already?

The making of a disaster film
A choice piece of viewing popped up during the Histrionic Channel’s recent Titanic centennial.

I say “histrionic” because many of the channel’s documentaries have sensationalised narratives and are packaged in the endemic repetitive formula that reminds you constantly of what you have just seen and are about to see (have attention spans between commercial breaks fallen that low?).

Despite these annoyances, there are amazing stories and the archive footage is often compelling. This proved the case with The Nazi Titanic, which told of the making of an epic film that was first conceived in 1940.

It was intended by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to be an exposé of venal and ruthless British capitalists, who were prepared to risk the lives of crew and passengers in pursuit of a profit on the sharemarket (the company was not, in fact, listed).

If you’ve heard that narrative before, it might tell you something about who writes film plots or makes political claims and their similarity to Nazi ideas.

Third Reich metaphor
As the Nazis told it, the baddie, of course, was Star Line chairman Bruce Ismay, just as he was in James Cameron’s 1997 film and the recent Julian Fellowes-scripted TV mini-series. The main difference was that the hero, who warned the captain of the iceberg danger, was a fictional German first officer.

The documentary traces the troubles that beset the epic, which was at $180 million in today's money was one of the most expensive ever made, and how its director died (possibly from suicide or even murder) in jail before its completion in 1943.

By then the war had turned against Germany and Goebbels realised the graphic disaster footage, far from just presenting capitalism in bad light, would be viewed differently in a nation facing defeat and heavy bombing.

Rather than inspire Germans to a bigger war effort, it would probably add to their demoralisation, he surmised. The film depicted the hapless fate of victims aboard a sinking ship, with leadership marked by cowardice, stupidity and hubris, as well as showing people in panic and “every man for himself” mode.

Goebbels banned it for German audiences but it screened in many other countries, including South America. (The footage was realistic enough to be lifted, without credit, for the British film, A Night to Remember, in 1958.) The German version is listed in IMDB as well as Wikipedia and has been available on DVD.

A tragic footnote to the film, and the Titanic story generally, tells of the Cap Arcona, which had 5000 concentration camp survivors and was wired to explode when it was sunk unknowingly by British bombers in the port of Neustadt not long before the war ended. Much of the Nazi film was made on the Cap Arcona; only 350 survived.

Titanic isn’t the only Third Reich film that has been doing the rounds. In DVD rental stores you will find an excellent German new release called Jude Suess: Rise and Fall, which recreates one of Goebbels’ most notorious films and which also screened in many parts the world during wartime.

Another is the hard-to-watch A Film Unfinished, which screened here at a festival in 2010. This Israeli-German production is based on footage taken by Nazi film-makers when depicting the lives of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.

The anti-nuclear legacy
The passing of Larry Ross in Christchurch aged 84 recalls the halcyon days of the anti-nuclear movement during the Vietnam war.

He arrived here from Canada breathing fire and brimstone about the imminence of a nuclear attack on New Zealand if it remained an ally of the US.

His theories were outrageous to most peaceniks even then (after all, the communists he was mixing with supported China or the Soviet Union) but no one could match his indefatigable campaigning and voluminous press clipping service.

While most radicals moved on to other causes, his legacy of anti-nuclearism remains. Japan shut its final reactor the other day, effectively making it a non-nuclear country and possibly staying that way, according to the Guardian.

But I could find no sign of a conspiracy to suppress news of a major new nuclear threat from Japan, as someone mentioned on Radio New Zealand.

NBR cartoonist Bob Brockie, wearing his scientist’s hat, wrote the other day in his World of Science column (not available online) of the lack of news from Japan about radioactivity.

It seems, more than one year on, there isn’t any. As Bob says, the tsunami killed 15,000, the Fukushima explosions killed no one.

Many displaced people can go back home but few have done so. “The residents no longer trust the government or the scientists, thanks to media and environmental alarmists,” Bob writes.