See ya later, Mr Trujillo! Or "Well, Hell? Oh! Telstra!"

Well, Hell? Oh! Telstra!

On the 12th February, I wrote the following “see ya later” note at the end of a rave about telstra, catholics, illegal immigrants and other matters.

As for Telstra....., Mr Trejillo would be of the New and Very Wise Direction, were he to direct himself and his baggage back to the Americas, before Australia issues a lawsuit against him for defrauding Australians of our hard stolen cheese-crackers.
Unless he wishes to be Australia's "Ken Lay", ex-Enron?
See ya, Sol....

Hers,
Omaxa bin Eartha.
Outlaw for a Just Planet Earth.
(“Dead Man Walking”)

So, I say again: “Well! Hell? Oh! Telstra!?”
(“Hell? Oh! Telstra!” is what I've typed into my mobile phone's welcome message.)

What am we to make of Sol Trujillo's departure then, a mere 14 days after I told him to piss-off??

Feels like my backroom boys an gals in the "halls of Power" have been "pushing a few more buttons for lil' meo, again?"

However, I guess the writing was already on the wall.

He came into the job, selected by the worst government Australia has had (YES they was! If GW Bush is regarded by the vast majority of pundits as running the worst administration America has had so far, and as Bush said Howard was a good guy, that clearly tags Howard and his brainless monkeys as the worst WE've ever had. I reckon so anyway.

The corporate megalomaniacal culture was rising to it's souffle of heights in the 1990s, and Howard's entry into government was supported by the corporate psychoes of Wall Street, London and Zurich, which then enabled some of the worst, and least legal laws to become formal.

These laws made Telstra a privately run corporation, and began the slide we've seen since from being a pretty-bloody-good public telephony and communications service, to the privatized abortion Telstra now is.

The basic facts are that such “utilities” as telephony & electronic communications services to the public are not designed nor have they evolved purely to provide private sleazebags massive salaries and take-away bonuses, nor are they designed to rip-the-public-off, as Telstra now does with ultra-cheap quality and content products, most all of them profit-oriented and not-in-the-least designed to give the public a smooth, secure and affordable telephonic and now internet service.

Also, communication has always been a very important part of a population's security and success.

Without language, ummmmmm.....

While most of us could quite realistically survive without a mobile telephone or a wizgiz telecom device, but now we're all too bamboozled by the enormity of “choice” available to our chaotic minds, so are sucked-in to wasting time and bucks on gimmicks like “call tones”, video and music rubbish, and the plethora of junk products we can just – but in reality CANNOT – afford, irresponsible corporate high-flyers in the 'telco's' will clean-up. But not without being a serious debilitation on the services they were originally posted to provide.

Such utilities as Telstra, like Roads and Traffic departments of Local Councils, like water and sewerage departments, electricity network departments, energy departments, education departments, and public transport sectors, were not designed to make a profit at the expense of the public.

Quite the opposite! These were all made manifest to provide efficiency, economy, and improvements to the til-then less-efficient, less economical services people needed to use or have access to. It was entirely accepted AND SOUND social management, that such utilities be subsidized.

Australia and the government have to quickly rearrange the corporate/social order here, back to the systems which had enormously intelligent employees running them, employees whose rightmindedness had them maintain the services properly, because the demon time-is-money factor had not been such an imperative, nor correct element in the equation of providing a service well.

It is right, that there was much to be desired in many government services before the corporate psychoes took over the world, and that the corporatization of some institutions was for the better.

An analogy might be the US motorcycle maker “Harley Davidson” under “Willy G” in the 1980s going right through the ancient engine design, and the rest of the Beast's bits, and redesigning the machine to come up-to-date with the rest of the auto-production world. Little had changed in the engine design since it was first made in the 1900s or 1910s!

But this is quite different to taking a government-run utility and selling it off as one or in bits to narrowminded profiteers.

Telstra, when it was still Telecom, was one of the first government instrumentalities to be “corporatized” as I remember. This wasn't to privatize it, but to improve it's function and efficiency, which were seen to be fairly inefficient. It's likely that privatization WAS even then, on the agenda for the telco, what with the long term desires the planet's elite always have for turning every thing and product into another golden goose for themselves. But then we were far from shaving-off local council departments to private scammers, and the Post Office was doing it's reasonable best, under government authority.

Time makes no difference to some aspects of “service” in providers like the telcoes, or in the roads and traffic depots, apart from bringing in improved facilities. Services can be improved with technology certainly, but underneath all those hardware improvements, the service is still, a service, and service's duty is to serve the public to make their lives more efficient, less costly, easier and OH! Happier.

I would be very surprised if any serious user of the modern Telstra-type services would say that the actual “service” not the bits-and-pieces or gimmicks, is upto scratch.

Every aspect of what Telstra offers a user like me, have been either cheap and nasty quality products, failing constantly, or an outright rip-off. Just as we should expect from a private rip-them-off-wherever-we-can corporation.

Most Australians would agree with my assertion that the Federal government would be doing the best thing for telecommunications and for the public by bringing Telstra back into public ownership.

But hey!? Can we clean-up the whole business of telephonics as well, by resurrecting the world-leading Telecom Research and Development departments, and dedicating them to designing and providing the users with products which are affordable, and that simply do the job, which is telephony, internetery and modern comms without all the distractions of gimmicks to suck the users' pockets dry?

Innovation is one thing, but when it gets to the point of innovating because we can, and because there's a market in it, we really have to slow our thinking apparatus down a bit, and reassess our stupidities.

In the same vein, I put the argument (to myself) that the majority of mature people would be very happy with a car which transported them from one place to another safely, economically, smoothly and quickly, was reliable, and cheap to maintain. A car which would run for forty to fifty years, and parts, rarely needed for a solid design to begin with, affordably and easily available after 50 years.

The miserable cars of mid-20th century Asia and Soviet Russia rattle to mind, yes, and we dread any resort to such base basics in transportation.

But alas! Short of an axial wobble making a terminal big-dipper of the planet, modern technological methods and hardware are pretty-much here-to-stay. We've made THE most tremendous leap forward in the last twenty years, from the somnambulic days of oil leaks and grip-free tyres (my 1950s and 1970s BSA motorbikes), to this era of interminable invention and......... profit-centred, planned obsolescence gimmickery.

As the last year of the Global Everything Meltdown (GEM) has shown us, most of the excess which is bringing the planet down, has been invented profit-oriented gimmickery (mortgages!?), and in the last breath, fairly fucking USELESS to the upliftment of the species.

So, as we re-public-ize the utilities the sick CEOs of Zurich and Hongkers (SICK? Pathologically mentally ILL, MAYTE!) stole from us these last ten to twenty years, let us... US-The-Government! The DEMOCRATIC Government, ALAS WE, THE PEOPLE! try to actually provide the public and the corporate worlds with those necessary SERVICES for the sake of providing a service, and not weighted too much toward the profit-margins and CEO walkaway bonus packs.

The same applies of course to the government's restructuring of the finance and lending sectors.

People NEED Homes, and food, and clothing. But the availability, affordability and security of a HOME are pretty much what will decide whether the person and family live to be fruitful, happy, ever-improving People, or degrading debauched and destitute.

So, what right, what legal right, what ethical right has ANYONE got, in forcing others to pay beyond their means, and beyond their capacity to not be noticeably debilitated, for a Home, while the bankers and covens profit to the extent they do from mortgages and home loans?

“NONE!” I say I say.

The GEM has shown everyone on Earth that Humanity has quick to be ready, to GET REAL about the essentials of a secure Home, secure food supplies, secure incomes etc, and so maybe we can bring the ruthless banks back to Earth, by Correcting the Rules so that Science in Economics is what determines how they rip-us-all-off, and by how much?

(?)

Hohum?

Telstra? Thanks for exposing the 'dark side' of global corporatizing, Mr Trujillo. Have a nice Flight!


Max Not A Lot Of Money, and next to no sense, most of the time!
Forests of Godolonia
Uluruba.