This month, 37 state governors began their terms – 26 of them newly elected, and the rest re-elected. As the New York Times has reported, almost all of them have called for austerity programs that, if implemented, will amount to an attack on the living standards of working people and favor the interests of corporations and the wealthy:

The prescription? Slash spending. Avoid tax increases. Tear up regulations that might drive away business and jobs. Shrink government, even if that means tackling the thorny issues of public employees and their pensions…“The rhetoric has grown very similar,” said Scott D. Pattison, executive director of the nonpartisan National Association of State Budget Officers. “A lot of times, you can’t tell if it’s a Republican or Democrat, a conservative or a liberal.”

Governors across the country openly intend to use the fiscal crisis of the states to break the power of public employees’ unions. In Ohio, incoming Republican governor John Kasich has called for outlawing teachers’ right to strike, stripping 14,000 state-financed child care and home health care workers of their collective bargaining rights, and the repeal of prevailing wage laws concerning public contracts. Legislatures in 16 states are planning to pursue legislation that would require public sector union members to “opt in” before their unions could spend dues money on political campaigns. None of this is surprising – public sector unions have long been a target of the right and Democratic centrists – but the anti-union campaign is also being waged against private sector unions as well. Officials in ten states plan to introduce legislation to repeal the agency shop, potentially spreading “right-to-work” laws in areas outside the traditionally anti-union South and West. State fiscal crises have given neoliberals in both parties the opportunity to drive a stake in the heart of the labor movement and complete the neoliberal counterrevolution launched almost 40 years ago.

All of these developments shed light on the role of government in coordinating and pursuing the interests of capitalists in a bourgeois democracy. My own state of New York provides a particularly interesting and instructive example of this phenomenon. Corporations and conservatives have long complained about the power of public and private sector unions in state government (at over 25%, New York has the highest unionization rate in the U.S.), but have not had an effective organization to pursue their agenda at the state level until recently. As a candidate and now as governor, Democrat Andrew Cuomo has not only called for business to organize but has actively facilitated the process as well, resulting in the formation of the rather dramatically named Committee to Save New York, whose board is composed primarily by the representatives of wealthy financial and real estate interests – including Felix Rohatyn, the key player in the neoliberal resolution of the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis.

Few people outside the US would probably be aware of the dire financial situations facing most US cities and states. Since the global financial crisis, almost every state in the US has plunged into a "financial crisis".

Interestingly, Andrew Cuomo, the conservative Democratic NY governor has felt the pressure from the Occupy Movement and is now considering progressive taxation reform, including higher tax rates for the wealthy.

Most Americans believe the biggest problem with taxes is that wealthy people don’t pay their fair share, according to poll results published Tuesday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

The feeling of outrage over the privileged classes is growing, according to the poll results, which only confirm the widespread anger that has helped fuel this fall's Occupy protests on Wall Street and nationwide.

However, when its broken down by voting intention (Democrat/Republican), the numbers change significantly.

Analysing over 150,000 tweets posted from January 12 to 19, 2011 using the hashtags #sidibouzid’ or ‘tunisia’ and over 200,00 tweets posted from January 24 to 29, 2011, containing the hashtags ‘#egypt’ or ‘#jan25,′ a huge wealth of information on how content on Twitter is being received, depending on who’s doing the tweeting.

In both Egypt and Tunisia, bloggers, journalists and activists were the most prominent in disseminating information, accounting together for 43% of the accounts tweeting about Egypt and 44% tweeting about Tunisia, versus just 7% representing mainstream media accounts in each of the countries.

This sheds an interesting light on how Twitter is being used in journalism . While all major mainstream media outlets have a strong presence on Twitter, some with millions of followers, when it comes to how information spreads through Twitter – when it’s coming from personal, individual accounts, it is likely to reach a larger audience.

In the case of both Tunisia and Egypt, it is possible that having journalists on the ground, reporting directly from their Twitter accounts made for more immediate impressions. While any journalist probably has to be cautious about what they say on Twitter, the immediacy of reaching their readers through tweets, in the heat of the moment, is far more honest.

Read a bit lower in the article, where it talks about how journalists interact with each other. Very interesting.

In each case the information spread, was digested (which takes some time, contrary to pundits who insist that absence of an immediate polling decline means the attacks “aren’t working”) and mulled over. As that happened, the candidates, who to one degree or another benefited from the electorate’s lack of information about them, tumbled.

This post, by conservative Jennifer Rubin, explains the eventual collapse in support for the extreme-right wing Republicans, Perry, Cain and now Gingrich.

Her point should be noted by pundits in Australia: opinion polls don't react instantly to events. The drivers of poll changes aren't "what happened this week", but rather they are accumulations of impressions gained over weeks or months that "trickle down and across the electorate".

One of the most frustrating things about political commentary in these times of instant polling and the 24 hour news cycle is that pundits and the Press Gallery journalists are only able to interpret political events through the prism of a week. Poll changes are all about last week's events. Unfortunately, this is not how public opinion is formed.

Claire Watson, 24, has expressed her concerns about how and why The Age accessed personal information about her, which she had agreed to share with a local MP but not with the newspaper. The public servant, who appeared in a story by Age journalist Royce Millar last year as part of the broadsheet's investigation into the ALP database, said her views had been "distorted" and "words had been put in my mouth".

"I feel my privacy has been breached by the journalist, not the ALP," she said. "I agreed to share information with the ALP, but not with The Age. He seemed dodgy and was pleased with himself. He was so indignant with the ALP, but it is clear he was hacking my file. He was trying to whip me into outrage about it."

Journalists employed by The Age, including Royce Millar, admitted that they illegally gained access to an electoral database operated by the Labor Party and searched for private records of prominent Victorians, as well as terms like "lesbian".

This hacking has been defended by various people as in the "public interest". However, Millar and The Age were able to find no wrong-doing, no suspicious activities engaged in by the Labor Party, no smoking gun. Nothing. They had no cause to hack into that database. It was a fishing exercise.

Now, it looks like Royce Millar tried to pressure a local Melbourne resident into saying she was outraged at her details being kept on the Labor database.

Some people have also dismissed this affair by saying that it is a victimless crime. In fact, Royce Millar and journalists from The Age have perpetrated a crime against everyone whose records they accessed.

Claire Watson has come forward saying that it was "creepy" that Royce Millar had access to her confidential information.

The News of the World came to grief because journalists routinely breached the privacy of celebrities, politicians and normal people. They hacked phones, but they also hacked computers, email accounts and private records. The hacking was routinely "fishing expeditions" with no public interest.

Of course, the News International/NOTW hacking was on a massive scale. In principle however, Royce Millar and the other journalists who illegally accessed that database are no better than the NOTW journalists who hacked private information in the UK. The only difference is The Age isn't a Murdoch paper and the database was operated by a political party.

What we see though, is that Millar and The Age violated the privacy of scores, possibly hundreds, of Victorians.

The National Energy Market, like many around in the world, is based on a merit order, where the plants with the cheapest marginal cost of fuel get preference. They bid into an energy stack until demand is filled. The price of electricity for that period is set by the bid of the last generator into the stack.

For decades, this has meant that the brown coal generators in Victoria, shoveling in cheap and dirty coal from their doorstep, go first, followed by black coal, gas, and then gas peaking stations when demand is really high. But the rollout of renewables has changed those dynamics, because their marginal cost of generation is next to nil, so they go first, forcing other generators further up the stack, meaning prices are pushed down, and some fossil fuel generators miss out altogether.

This has been a well documented effect in Europe and elsewhere, and is considered a virtue by the the International Energy Agency, which says the merit order effect has meant that cost savings on wholesale energy prices have, in some cases, more than compensated for the cost of the subsidies that got the renewables built in the first place. Looked at another way, EU Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger said this week that this means the ultimate cost of completely decarbonising the grid is the same as business as usual, as the higher upfront cost is offset later by the lower running costs. This is good. But in Australia, the established energy industry considers it to be evil, because it threatens the very business model of current and future fossil fuel generation investments.

The depth of their feeling was revealed in the draft energy white paper released earlier this week. The Investor Reference Group, which includes some of the major generators, market regulators, bankers and bureaucrats, said it is concerned about the “suppressing” impact on wholesale energy prices caused by the deployment of renewables, which are supported by the LRET.

I get Climate Spectator in my inbox daily, but rarely read the stories in detail (who has time?), but this is a story everyone involved in climate action should read.

The long quote above tells a story that should be a national disgrace. This should be major news across Australia, not just left to a niche publication.

I am appalled by it, and I am even more appalled if what Giles Parkinson writes about the fossil fuel lobby pressuring the Vic Labor government to "wind back the state's renewable energy target". Utterly disgraceful if true, and an indictment on the Minister.

Williams said VTA had received expert advice that this policy would see TAFEs receive significantly less funds to train apprentices in areas of skill shortage. There would be diminishing support for TAFE provision of VET in schools and in addition some TAFE and university dual sector programs and campuses would have to close. He said redundancies were already happening.

The lead paragraph in the hard-copy is not online, so here it is:

Marketised vocational education and training in Victoria could be read as a plan to drive down the basic wage of VET/TAFE workers and hand over public money to just about any private provider, some of them shonky, while forcing public TAFEs to cut services, programs and facilities and potentially merge or close down.

Labor's Skills Reform policy, which I campaigned against in 2008/9, was a bad policy when it was first mooted, and all the problems that were raised are coming to pass.

The policy is basically a voucher system, allowing private training providers to access large amounts of public funds by enticing students away from public TAFEs. Even worse, businesses can set up their own training organisations and require workers to enrol in internal skills programs, and access public funds while doing so.

The so-called Skills Reform is basically an exercise in privatising a large part of the public's funding for training and vocational education. It is a bad, poorly conceived policy and has now been proven a failure. All the promises that public TAFEs and the people that work at them, would receive support, and would not be negatively affected, have been ineffectual.

The entire policy is a sham, and should be abolished. The mooted $1.2 billion in funding for the sector is little more than privatatisation of public funds. Meanwhile, public TAFEs, their students and staff, face redundancies, course cuts and an effective pay cut.

Tribunal president John Conde told a press conference that Ms Gillard’s new salary was "not unreasonable".

He said it was important that Australia paid its politicians well enough to attract and retain people from all walks of life in the Parliament.

"I think our view was that this is an appropriate level for a backbencher salary," he said.

"It's necessary to have a salary sufficient to attract and retain people of capacity, but no-one would suggest that this is a level of remuneration that would rival private sector employment."

Let's be clear. John Conde's argument in favour of a large increase to the pay of politicians and senior civil servants is utter rubbish.

Let's also be clear: politicians absolutely deserve to be paid. In fact, in the early days of Australia's colonies, MPs weren't paid, which precluded ordinary people from working class backgrounds to run. Proper pay for MPs is essential for our democracy. Income should not be a factor that would exclude someone from running for parliament.

But Conde's argument is bollocks. In this day and age, people run for parliament to serve, not pay. People of "capacity" (which I presume Conde to mean, people from the private sector, given the rest of his sentence) have plenty of incentives to run for parliament without needing a large salary.

There is no doubt that senior politicians should be adequately compensated. The idea that so-called "people of capacity" will be enticed to senior positions in the public sector (or retained) due to high salaries is nonsense. It flies in the face of all the research about public sector pay.

I also think it is ludicrous to compare MPs salaries to the private sector. Parliament is not like a company, and the Prime Minister, Ministers and back-benchers are not like CEOs, VPs or managers.

If there is a comparison to be made from one sector to another, then back-bench MPs should be compared to managers in the community sector -- charities and non-profits. A wage of $120-180,000 would be acceptable.

Of course, the various perks that the remuneration tribunal is proposing to be scrapped have been outrageous for many years and it is a reform that is long over due.

As for the rate of pay increases for MPs and senior public servants, it should be tied (in the case of MPs) to the rate of minimum wage increase (2-4% annually) or the average public wage increase negotiated by the CPSU (approx 3-4% annually). This would meet most public expectations.

Mark Arbib could have made sure that the revolt by leading sports administrators over pokies never happened. A politician of his supposed calibre should have foreseen the political danger with Andrew Wilkie's demand, and should have been working on it every day for the past year.

Someone like Arbib would have heard Wilkie's high-minded position on pokies during last year's negotiations on government and known immediately that it was a dagger at the heart of two of Labor's major sources of funding: pubs and clubs. Aside from unions and property developers, NSW Labor's major funding sources are the alcohol industry and the outlets that sell it. NSW Labor have been extraordinarily generous in handing out pokie licenses to pubs and clubs, which have in turn donated millions of dollars to NSW Labor, and so on. The overlap between members of licensed clubs and those who vote Labor is significant, to say the least.

In the absence of a Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Imposing Limits on Poker Machine Gambling, someone like Arbib should have done the groundwork with pubs and clubs and the gambling treatment lobby, proving himself to be the sort of deft politician that he and others imagine him to be. He couldabeen someone who solves problems rather than someone who runs away from them shrieking "it wasn't me!". He couldabeen indispensable, the sort of power-behind-the-throne that Graham Richardson was after the 1990 election. All gone, and too late now.

Who else could have seen this policy through? All the other factional wide boys were busy with actual policy, in communications or financial planning or whatever. Arbib is the Minister for Sport, for goodness sake: what else does he have to do? The Minister for Sport doesn't re-engineer the economy or comfort the stricken. The Minister for Sport doles out cash to popular sports in the hope that the popularity of that sport might rub off onto the Minister and his party. It isn't like he was organising some nationwide effort to curb obesity or get people engaged in mutual community activities or something.

Arbib's political antennae should have been twitching overtime at an issue like this - if he had any.

Andrew Elder, a perennial political blogger gets it right on the money with Arbib's abject failure to defend the Federal Labor Govt over pokies reforms. Add this to his long list of failures from the failed NSW Labor Govt and Sussex St, and even steadfast True Believers like me are questioning his elevation to Assistant Treasurer.