In memory of Trevor Grant: a real Australian journalist

"But all I feel is sadness; sadness not just that I'm going to die prematurely, but sadness that I live in a society that, so often and so easily, still writes off human lives as collateral damage in the pursuit of profit."

Trevor Grant

"Sport is another commodity to be bought and consumed these days, and a roll-over, puppy-dog media, which often has financial relationships with the biggest sports, ensures this process goes unchallenged."
Trevor Grant

"With Trevor’s passing, Tamils, refugees and everyone concerned about truth and justice have lost a great friend and committed fighter. His commitment - which never wavered during his illness - should inspire us to continue the search for truth and justice.  Trevor was a good and courageous man. We will miss him."

Callum Macrae, director of documentary, 'No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka.'

Trevor Grant died a week ago. He was just 65, another Australian victim of mesothelioma, asbestos cancer,  a disease caused by the callous pursuit of corporate profit.

I never met Trevor Grant, but I admired and respected his writing as a journalist, particularly his exposure of the corrupt links between sport and corporate interests and the influence of corporate thinking, and his campaigning, research and advocacy work on behalf of the Tamil people.

Grant spent 40 years as a journalist  much of that time as a sports journalist and broadcaster in the mainstream media, writing about Australian rules football and cricket. 

After he left mainstream journalism, Grant started driving a truck as a volunteer, distributing food and furniture to Tamil refugees.  Martin Flanagan tells how Grant came to become involved on behalf of the Tamil people:

"Being an affable character, he engaged them in conversation and kept hearing stories he'd never heard before, stories about rape, torture, abduction and killings. Then he met a young Tamil man who had smuggled out photos of what went on during the final days of the country's civil war between the Tamils and the Rajapaksa government, the same government the Australian government is now working with to repatriate Tamil boat people ever more quickly."

Grant ran a sports program What's the score sport? on Melbourne community radio 3CRR in which he explored how sport was captured and controlled by corporate and business interests. He continued to write articles for the Age newspaper, but most of his writing appeared in leftist publications, including Green Left Weekly,  Red Flag and Independent Australia.

For Independent Australia, he wrote about what he called 'enlightened racism' in Australian Rules Football. His articles for Red Flag, mainly on the genocide and destruction of the Tamil people by the Sri Lankan government, are here.

His articles for Green Left Weekly are here.

Grant exposed the hypocrisy of the AFL on issues of racism, homophobia and misogyny and the fear and ignorance of the unconventional and critical thinking that dominated mainstream sport.  In a 2013 article in the Melbourne Age he wrote:

"The boofhead culture that has defined male professional sport, and its mostly male media, for aeons has gone through a makeover in recent times, with the AFL putting itself at the head of social justice campaigns. But the truth is that racism, sexism and homophobia still exist in footy clubs and their big support bases. And, inevitably, a man who feels so strongly about these cruel, destructive prejudices is going to struggle to cope in an environment that gives them so much oxygen.

"The highly paid image-makers project the AFL as a broad, enlightened church, free of the bigotry of the past. But, really, it is like any other corporate environment in pursuit of a singular aim, and therefore unable to accommodate anyone who dares to step outside its rigid parameters. So often there is a difference between the public face and the private reality."

In an article about cyclist Lance Armstrong, Grant wrote about the capture and corruption of professional cycling by corporate capitalism:

"The corporatisation of cycling has been a long and arduous process but capitalism has dug in its poisonous claws and isn’t about to let go. Along the way, it has produced many victims, including Tom Simpson and the 1998 Tour de France winner Marco Pantani, a serial drug cheat who died of a cocaine overdose in 2004. Now the reputation of the greatest cyclist of all time, Lance Armstrong, whose recovery from cancer inspired so many people around the world, is in tatters."

Grant continued:

"Let us be clear about one thing. International professional cycling is first and foremost a business and run by some of the world’s biggest capitalists. The cyclists are merely workers acting under instructions from their profit-hungry bosses. Indeed, as the entire sports world pours scorn on Armstrong, it studiously avoids the real culprits – blood-sucking corporations that earn huge profits on the backs, legs, and hearts, of the riders, most of whom are paid a relative pittance. The Tour de France is the flagship of a billion dollar industry, with the capacity to catch drug cheats any time it wants. All it needs is the will. It has the money to finance revolutionary testing regimes and it has a very good idea about who is using drugs. They are their workers and this business, through the Tour owners and the sponsors, is closely involved in their workers’ performance"

Grant was a high-profile activist and campaigner against social, political and economic injustice. He worked on behalf of refugees and asylum seekers, especially from Sri Lanka, and wrote a book on atrocities in their homeland, Sri Lanka's Secrets – How the Rajapaksa regime gets away with Murder. The book provided a detailed account of war crimes committed against the Tamils by the Sri Lanka government and its foreign allies.

In 2012-2013, he campaigned for a boycott of the Sri Lankan cricket team in Australia and led protests outside cricketing venues. 

In an article in the Melbourne Age he described the direct links between the Sri Lankan Government's policy of murder and genocide targeting the Tamil people and the Sri Lankan cricket team:

"But what will be forgotten in the excitement is the dark side to this team. It's not so much the individual players but, what and who, they really represent. In other words, the rich and powerful in the Sri Lankan nation and an elected government that is alleged to be engaging in genocide against the poorest of its own people, many of whom are seeking refuge here. The Sri Lankan President is part of this elite and a man who loves to align himself with sport, especially cricket. He has openly influenced selection, made sure the new national stadium in Colombo was named after him, and rarely misses a photo opportunity with a star in creams. Brutal oppressors love to use sport to launder their image. But Rajapaksa can't fool anybody who reads about world affairs......

The links between this regime and the cricket team are there for all to see. The recently retired captain, Sanath Jayasuriya, is now an elected representative of the Rajapaksa government. Spinner Ajantha Mendis, named on stand-by for the Tests but likely to play in the one-day series, is a second-lieutenant and gunner in the Sri Lankan Army who saw active service in the civil war. Rajapaksa was guest of honour at his wedding last year.

The former captain, Arjuna Ranatunga, is a politician who was in the government camp before switching further to the right in recent times. He described General Sarath Fonseka, the military commander of the Tamil massacre, as a wonderful man who can "save" Sri Lankan politics."

Grant  co-founded the Tamil Refugee Council  and served as its Convener. He founded  Refugee Radio at 3CR Community Radio and organised vigils and protests to highlight ongoing human rights violations in Sri Lanka.

Grant was highly respected amongst refugee campaigners for his principled stand and campaigning for the rights of Tamil asylum seekers and refugees. One activist colleague of mine wrote about Trevor:

"I very quickly friended Trevor on Facebook, would immediately devour every article he wrote for the magazine, and was thrilled to bits to finally meet him when we protested at the MCG against Sri Lankan human rights abuse. He was a hero, a lovely man, a great writer, and he will be sorely missed for years to come by everybody with a social conscience".

In 2015, aged 63, Grant was diagnosed with mesothelioma, the result of decades of working in newspaper offices containing asbestos. He wrote about his diagnosis in this ABC article.

'What I discovered through the process of a Supreme Court action I launched in September last year shocked me to the core. Thanks to the work of an industrial hygienist whose files can pinpoint asbestos in buildings throughout the Melbourne CBD, I discovered I had been working close to the dangers of asbestos for decades, both at The Age building at 250 Spencer Street, where I worked from 1969-1970 and 1978-1989, and the Herald office on 44-74 Flinders Street, where I worked from 1970-74 and 1989-1996. Records showed workers in both these buildings, mostly printers and tradesmen working with insulation, had contracted mesothelioma during these times. I worked on separate floors from these people, but I'd had a lot of regular contact with many on the printing and composing room floors, especially as a young sub-editor. 

My first question was, how come I didn't know that I'd been working for decades in an environment that had killed people? Why isn't it compulsory for those responsible for these death-traps to notify potential victims?"

Grant concluded with these powerful words:

"I expected to be angry about all this; angry about a cynical corporation (Hardie) risking so many thousands of lives, including my own, for the sake of its bottom line; angry every time I saw the foreign minister Julie Bishop on television and was reminded she was paid handsomely as a lawyer to represent one of these vulture corporations; angry that nobody warns potential victims that they had worked in places where others had contracted the disease."

Grant was a committed trade unionist, a member of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance and was actively involved with the Australian Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), until his death. He was a committed supporter of Palestine, West Papua, and Indigenous peoples around the world.

Richard Flanagan has written this fine piece about Trevor Grant in the Melbourne Age. Sri Lankan and Tamil spokesperson acknowledge the contribution of Trevor Grant in this article. Other pieces  in memory of Trevor Grant are here, here, here and here.

Corporate crime wave: Australia's epidemic of corporate criminality

“As crimes pile up they become invisible”

Bertolt Brecht

“Corporate crime poses a significant threat to the welfare of the community. Given the pervasive presence of corporations in a wide range of activities in our society, and the impact of their actions on a much wider group of people than are affected by individual action, the potential for both economic and physical harm caused by a corporation is great.”

Law Reform Commission of New South Wales

In two recent submissions, I argue that Australia is in the wake of a global and national epidemic of corporate and business malfeasance, lawlessness and criminality, and has become a haven for corporate and white collar crime.

Crimes committed by those at the top of the corporate (and political) hierarchy are routinely ignored or brushed under the carpet and Australia governments and the various regulatory authorities have failed to take action against increasingly egregious and escalating levels of unlawful and criminal conduct by corporations and business.

One submission was to an Australian Senate Inquiry into Penalties for White Collar Crime (which has since lapsed because of the government's dissolution of both houses.) My submission is available here as Submission No 18 under the banner of the Nemesis Project which I coordinate.

The second submission was to the Federal Attorney's General's public consultation on Deferred Prosecution Agreements for corporate and business crime (submission is not yet publicly available but will be here).

In the submission to the Senate Inquiry into Penalties for White Collar Crime, I argue that:

• Over recent decades legal and regulatory systems have been dismantled or loosened to remove constraints against corporate and investor profit-making and profit-taking.
• Corporate and white-collar crime is traceable to a gross failure of the law. Legal constraints have been cast aside or not applied to their fullest. Corporations and business groups have worked to limit the effectiveness of efforts to stamp out corporate crime. They make it more difficult to prosecute crimes.
• Corporations and business have actively subverted the law, as well as government regulation and ethical standards, in order to maximize their profits and ensure that resources flow to them. There has been a pervasive legal and political failure to control unlawful conduct by corporations and business.
• For decades, the regulatory authorities have failed to investigate and take action against corporate and white collar crimes.  Governments, corporate regulators and law enforcement authorities and politicians have been unwilling to take serious action against corporate criminals who knowingly swindle and harm ordinary Australians.
• The dominant response to corporate and business offending has been regulation rooted in co-operation. These strategies work predominantly to the advantage of powerful corporate and business interests.

These views were supported by numerous other submissions to the Senate Inquiry, as well as a recent report by the Australia Institute.

A submission to the Senate Inquiry by the the Economic Consultancy LF Economics provides a damming indictment of corporate criminality and control fraud within the FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate).

They contend that systemic criminal activity exists in the FIRE sector, with the full knowledge of all the regulatory authorities and State and Federal governments, and  places consumers at grave risk of having their finances and livelihoods destroyed.

LF Economics calls for much greater enforcement and prosecution of corporate and financial criminality:

Australians have been betrayed by the regulatory agencies’ neglect and continual siding with lenders and corporate management, despite their full knowledge of the catastrophic pain endured by many who have lost their homes, assets and life savings. ….. A strict focus on rules, regulations, standards, codes and penalties will have a negligible effect on control frauds because these crimes are simply ignored in reality. Two decades of fruitless inquiries and tweaking of innumerable rules and regulations has merely contributed to the losses endured by typical ‘mum and dad’ investors, now into many tens (perhaps hundreds) of billions of dollars. The nation already has an abundance of appropriate laws and regulations to contain and dismantle these control frauds, yet regulators are averse to enforcement, rendering these powers null and void.

The Australia Institute report Corporate Malfeasance in Australia shows that corporate malfeasance is endemic and widespread in Australia. Its findings include:

• Budget cuts enacted by the current government have compromised the ability to investigate corporate wrongdoing.
• There are hundreds of cases against corporations and business being pursued by Australian regulators each year, however progress is seriously impaired by the lack of staffing and resources.
•  There are fewer regulators ‘patrolling the corporate beat’ in Australia with government agencies responsible for monitoring corporate wrongdoing and malfeasance having their staffing cut between 14-16% since the 2013-14 Budget.

Despite this corporate crime wave, the Abbott/Turnbull Government is considering introducing a Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPA) Scheme to give corporations accused of wrongdoing and criminality the opportunity to defer prosecution in exchange for a monetary payment and compliance with a range of conditions. DPAs involve a shift from prosecution to compliance.

A DPA is a contractual agreement between government and a corporate entity that allows government to impose sanctions and set up and monitor institutional changes, in exchange for an agreement that government forego further investigation and corporate criminal indictment.

Governments and regulatory authorities (particularly in the USA and UK) have relied primarily on deferred prosecution agreements, however corporations and business continue to engage in unlawful and criminal conduct. Indeed, the criminality has intensified and become more brazen.

In the US, despite an epidemic of criminality, the authorities have been unwilling to charge and prosecute corporate criminals and one consequence of the adoption of DPA’s, is that Federal prosecutions of corporate and white collar crime is at a 20 year low.

In my submission, I argue that Deferred Prosecution Agreements are no solution to the epidemic of serious corporate malfeasance and criminality that has made Australia a haven for corporate crime.

There is no evidence that DPAs deter corporate and white collar crime and they may, in fact, encourage crime by reducing the threats of prosecution and incarceration. As the number of DPAs rise, the number of prosecutions decline.

My submission opposed the adoption of a DPA scheme in Australia.

A poetic reflection on the corporate form: Ruth Knight 'Persons'

"Limited liability is a subsidy for corporations paid not out of government coffers but from the pockets of those hurt by corporate malfeasance. It’s an avoidance of responsibility.”
Kent Greenfield

“Persons”

Ruth Knight

At the top of the city 

in a glass-chromed room 

an attorney assures the board of directors 

that the corporation is the person 

against which any or all action may be taken, 

not against each and every director joint or several. 

The multiheaded person exhales dry-iced victory 

as counsel backs out the door 

descending floor after floor 

to wait for a cab in the cold. 

Nearby a breathing bundle of rags 

sits on a grate of steam 

and waits just waits 

wondering where warmth went.

Ruth Knight's [1] unpublished poem is a precise depiction of the modern corporation and the concept of limited liability, which gives the legally constructed corporation protection from personal liability from unlawful conduct and criminality.

Limited liability is the notion that investors in a corporation should not be liable for bad things the corporation or business does. In effect, the corporation is a legal invention or fiction that allows individuals to personally profit from the activities, without being full liability for unlawful or illegal activities or activities that do harm.

Legal scholar Kent Greenfield has written about limited liability in the following terms[2]:

“When someone does not have to pay for bad behavior, it increases the likelihood and severity of bad behavior. Corporate subsidiaries drilling for oil in the Arctic, making shoes in Vietnam or harvesting hardwood in the Amazon will be more likely to spill oil, exploit child labour and destroy virgin jungle”

[1] We have been unable to find any specific information about Ruth Knight or her poetry.

[2] Greenfield, K (2011) Reforming limited liability law, the Nation, June 27 2011 http://www.thenation.com/article/reforming-limited-liability-law

Corporate executive found guilty faces a jail sentence

"Don Blankenship's conviction doesn't feel like victory but in the grand scope of more than a century of the coal industry's abuse of the people of Appalachia, it may mark a starting place....My heart aches for all those who suffered and died under Blankenship's avaricious lash. The jury showed him more mercy than he has ever shown anyone in his entire existence on this planet. Even if he serves his one year slap-on-the-wrist, we know already that justice will not be done His legacy of poisoning Appalachia will persist long after his name has been forgotten."
Bob Kincaid, president of the Coal River Mountain Watch

Recently, I wrote a blog piece Holding corporate executives criminally responsible for the deaths and harms they cause crimes about the trial of Don Blankenship, the coal baron and CEO of  Massey Energy who was on trial for criminal charges over a coal mine explosion that killed 29 miners at the Massey Energy Upper Big Branch mine in 2010. 

The Upper Big Branch explosion was the worst US mining disaster in nearly fifty years. Blankenship was on trial for violating numerous safety regulations and conspiring to hide violations which ultimately led to the underground mine explosion and the disaster.

Blankenship was a poster boy for 'crony malevolent capitalism' and ran Massey Energy as a lawless enterprise protected by the politicians, public official and lawyers he paid off.

Well, Blankenship has been found guilty by a jury of conspiracy to violate US safety laws. He was cleared of the lesser charges of lying to the Federal Government.

Sadly, he only faces only 1 year in jail, but activists and law enforcement officials praised the decision. U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin called the verdict "a landmark day for the safety of coal workers."
 

Journalist and historian Jeff Biggers wrote that Blankenship's conviction was a "historic first step in holding mining outlaws accountable for their reckless operations." Biggers continued;

 

"For the first time in memory for those of us with friends, family, miners and loved ones living amid the toxic fallout of the coal industry, this conviction may only serve as a tiny reckoning of our nation's complacency with a continual state of violations, but it could begin a new era of justice and reconciliation in the devastated coal mining communities in Appalachia and around the nation."

The Corporate Crime Reporter quotes University of Maryland Law Professor Rena Steinzor, the author of Why Not Jail?: Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction, who has argued for more aggressive prosecution of corporate executives:

“This conspiracy was the primary cause of an enormous explosion that killed 29 men in the worst mine disaster in 40 years. Although the jury was not presented with the question whether Blankenship was directly responsible for the explosion, it did decide that he played Russian roulette with his miners’ lives.  By underfunding efforts to comply, harassing employees to ignore safety rules so they could “dig coal” faster, and threatening managers with dismissal if they worked to solve ventilation and other problems at the mine, Blankenship made an already hazardous workplace into a horror show that made men fear for their lives every time they journeyed thousands of feet underground.”
 

The Corporate Crime Reporter quotes Rob Weissman from Public Citizen:

“Today’s guilty verdict should send the message to coal company executives that society will no longer tolerate this trade of miners’ lives for coal and profit. Indeed, it should send a message to CEOs across the country: No more recklessly endangering workers’ lives, and you will be held criminally liable if your actions – and inaction – cost lives.”

Articles about the decision are here and here.

Cutting 'red tape' and the rise in workplace fatalities

Last week here in Perth, three young men went to work but did not come home.

Benjamin White, Joe McDermott and Gerry Bradley all died at their place of work. 

Joe McDermott and Gerry Bradley were crushed to death by a concrete panel that fell off the back of a truck at a building site run by Jaxon Constructions. Benjamin White was an Alcoa worker who fell off scaffolding at Alcoa’s Kwinana Refinery.

The causes of the deaths are not yet known.

Their deaths bought to five the number of workplace fatalities in the last two weeks in WA, including a mineworker killed when his truck rolled over at a mine site and a 28-year-old contact worker who died of yet unknown causes at the Northern Star Resources Paulsens Gold Mine in the Pilbara.

Since July, there have been 17 workplace fatalities in WA. In 2014, WA had the highest number of workplace fatalities in 7 years and 2015 may be even higher.

Workplace fatalities continue to rise in Australia. Three to four workers die each week in Australia.

In 2014, 185 Australians were killed at work. The most five dangerous industries are 1) transport, post and warehousing 2) farming, forestry and fishing 3) construction 4) mining and 5) manufacturing.

So why is the number of workplace fatalities escalating?

Australia wide, the number of deaths in the mining industry has soared due to cost cutting, pressure to ramp up production, the high number of inexperienced staff due to redundancies and anxiety about job security, all of which impact on workplace safety.

Another factor contributing to the rising workplace death toll is the business inspired “war on red tape” waged by the Abbott/Turnbull and the Barnett Governments, which scraps laws and regulations to allow corporate and business non-compliance and self-regulation.

Reducing the burden of regulation and so-called ‘red tape’ is one of the Abbott/Turnbull Government’s top 5 priorities. The deregulation agenda aims to remove regulation and promote self-regulation by business as the best way to protect worker safety.

These pro-business campaigns aim to reduce and remove any constraints on corporate and business profit taking. As Malcolm Turnbull said in May 2015:

"One of the important things we should do is make sure we remove as many obstacles to enterprise and entrepreneurship as we can. That is one of the reasons the Abbott Government has been so assiduous in culling regulation and red tape”.

Here in WA, the Barnett Government’s Red Tape Reduction Program similarly aims to make it easier for business and corporations to make profits.

However, red tape reduction, combined with funding and staff cuts to regulatory agencies, has the effect of reducing the level of investigation and prosecution of safety regulation violations. Occupational health and enforceable safety regulations and rules and workers compensation are redefined as ‘red tape’ and cut through deregulation.

In the case of workplace safety, cuts to health and safety and removal of regulation and enforceable safety rules and regulations, threatens lives and increases the risk of workplace harm and fatalities.

Tougher enforceable workplace laws and penalties are needed for employers whose negligence results in death. The average fine for a workplace fatality is around $100,000. Company directors need to be made criminally liable and face prosecution and penalties such as jail and serious fines if workers die because of their negligence.

Iceland prosecutes and imprisons corporate criminals

Iceland has shown how to deal with fraudulent banks and bankers who engage in market manipulation, plundering of people's savings and unlawful activity. 

It has prosecuted them as corporate criminals. Twenty six (26) bankers have been sentenced to a combined 74 years in prison for crimes relating to financial fraud and criminality.

It is a lesson other countries, including Australian could learn.

One lesson is that prosecution of corporate fraud and criminality makes good economic sense.

When the global economic crisis hit in 2008, the people of Iceland suffered  more than any other country, largely due to the actions of the country's banks. The savings of 50,000 people were wiped out, plunging Icelanders into debt and placing 25 percent of its homeowners in mortgage default.

Rather than bail the banks out, Iceland decided to prosecute bankers who were held criminally responsible for Iceland's financial collapse. The Iceland government appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the bankers:

In two separate Icelandic Supreme Court and Reykjavik District Court rulings, five top bankers from Landsbankinn and Kaupping — the two largest banks in the country — were found guilty of market manipulation, embezzlement, and breach of fiduciary duties. Most of those convicted have been sentenced to prison for two to five years. The maximum penalty for financial crimes in Iceland is six years, although their Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments to consider expanding sentences beyond the six year maximum.

Iceland's approach to the global financial crises was very different to other countries. Rather than bail out, or fine the banks and impose devastating austerity measures, Iceland let its banks go bust and focused on strengthening its social welfare policies.
 
Bankers who committed financial crimes were indicted and imprisoned.  The Iceland Government paid off loans for consumers, forgave homeowner debt (up to 110% of the property value).

Iceland also introduced capital controls restricting what people could do with their money.

The government imposed a 39% tax on those who send their money offshore.
 
As a result Iceland was able to bounce back.  The Iceland economy has “recovered” and is growing faster than US and European economies. In 2015 the IMF declared that Iceland achieved economic recovery faster than other countries, without compromising its welfare model of universal healthcare and education.

When Iceland’s President, Olafur Ragnar Grimmson was asked how the country managed to recover from the global financial disaster, he replied,

“We were wise enough not to follow the traditional prevailing orthodoxies of the Western financial world in the last 30 years. We introduced currency controls, we let the banks fail, we provided support for the poor, and we didn’t introduce austerity measures like you’re seeing in Europe...........Why are the banks considered to be the holy churches of the modern economy? Why are private banks not like airlines and telecommunication companies and allowed to go bankrupt if they have been run in an irresponsible way? The theory that you have to bail out banks is a theory that you allow bankers enjoy for their own profit, their success, and then let ordinary people bear their failure through taxes and austerity. People in enlightened democracies are not going to accept that in the long run.” 

Who are the teachers and educators who inspired us?

This photo from 1953 shows four-year-old Ross Munro and his neighbour Phillip Noble playing in an asbestos sandpit in a residential backyard in Wittenoom in WA's northwest. Residents purchased the deadly tailings which were commonly used as sandpits in backyards for the purposes of children's play and also to reduce dust around houses.

When I read Chris Hedges latest piece about inspiring teachers and educators I thought of Ross Munro.

Chris Hedges, the American journalist, writer, war correspondent and political activist and campaigner has written a moving eulogy to one of his educational mentors and inspirations- the Reverend Coleman Brown who taught Hedges at Colgate University. Hedges writes that Coleman:

had the most profound impact of all my teachers on my education. I took seven courses as an undergraduate in religion. He taught six of them. But his teaching extended far beyond the classroom. The classroom was where he lit the spark.

Hedges describes how Coleman Brown used poetry to highlight the powerful sacred forces that writers and poets struggle to express:

"Coleman would read poems and cherished prose passages out loud as I met with him in his office. It was about the musicality of language. His sonorous voice rose and dipped with intonations and emphasis. To this day I still hear his recitation in pieces of writing and poems......... Poetry, he taught me, is alive. It must be felt. It has a hypnotic power that, as Shakespeare understood, is a kind of witchcraft. And poetry, along with all other writing, is just a spent, dead force if you do not surrender to its spell."

In thinking about the influence of his educational mentor, Hedges has written a beautiful summation of the significance and value of education:

"Education is not only about knowledge. It is about inspiration. It is about passion. It is about the belief that what we do in life matters. It is about moral choice. It is about taking nothing for granted. It is about challenging assumptions and suppositions. It is about truth and justice. It is about learning how to think. It is about, as James Baldwin wrote, the ability to drive “to the heart of every matter and expose the question the answer hides.” And, as Baldwin further noted, it is about making the world “a more human dwelling place.”

Many of us have had or known teachers and educators who paved the way for such inspiration and passion, either in ourselves or in others.

At both secondary school and university I had teachers- sadly too few- who managed to create and light a spark like that which Hedges describes. One was  John Croft, a secondary school teacher of history who bought to life the study of history and triggered my lifelong passion for the power and relevance of historical understanding and analysis as the basis for social thinking and action.

As  a young secondary school teacher I worked with an English teacher named Ross Munro, who brought alive the power of the written and spoken (and sung)  word to his students. Each day outside his classroom would be a quote, extract or lyrics from a text- a book, a play, a song, a poem- which was designed to engage, to provoke, to encourage thinking. 

Ross was  a man much loved by his students. Even now, some of those students still speak about his influence and legacy.  

Ross died young, aged just 38, a victim of the horrors and indiscriminate cruelty of asbestos and the neglect of mining corporations and government agencies. Ross was a victim of perhaps the greatest industrial and corporate crime in Australian history.

Ross was one of the 'Wittenoom kids' who spent their childhoods exposed to asbestos in the town of Wittenoom  in north-west of Western Australia who have gone on to develop a range of cancers and are dying at a rate well above the average population of mesothelioma.

Ross became the first non-mine worker to win a mesothelioma claim against CSR in January 1989, just before his death. His appalling treatment is documented in Ben Hills book Blue Murder.

More on Ross and events and the human cost of asbestos are  here and here

(1) Mining of the deadly blue asbestos at Wittenoom, 1106km north of Perth, commenced in the 1940's and ceased in 1966 and the town was later closed after airborne fibres in dust from mining operations were found to cause malignant mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis and other serious diseases

The criminality of excessive executive salaries

Excellent  article by Raewyn Connell on the need to expose and challenge the theft and plunder perpetrated by corporate executives. 

Connell writes:

"The very top corporate managers now sit on top of a tall tree of bonuses and incentives, which have become an institutionalised and expected part of income. (Board remuneration committees scrutinise “comparators,” and executive search firms compile the data). Inside this world, it seems common sense that the top managers’ bonuses and incentives should be higher than all the rest. How could it be otherwise? That would be an insult to the most excellent.

There is also an effect of the “financialisation” of modern capitalism – the growth of finance capital, and its hegemony over the industrial and agricultural capital that ruled the roost in other eras.

The mind-boggling scale and reach of contemporary financial markets hasn’t exactly replaced other forms of economic activity – we still produce the goods and services. But it has changed the frame of reference for corporate elites. They now live in a world where gigantic profits are often made without any commitment to productive investment, and where financial operations constantly impinge on industrial, mining and trading corporations. Even inside corporations, the separation of control from operations has grown. The new head of Rio Tinto, Sam Walsh, made his mark by automating the firm’s iron ore operations in the Pilbara, locating the control rooms down in Perth. (And happily eliminating part of the Pilbara workforce.)

Inevitably the point of comparison for corporate managers shifts from their own businesses to the world of international finance. At the same time, the financialisation of the business world makes the elite packages, of which the larger part is almost always the bonuses and incentives rather than the simple salary, easier to pay and more normal in appearance.

These trends are not the whole explanation of the great rise in executive incomes, but they are a considerable part of it. The neoliberal era, almost everywhere in the world, has seen rising levels of economic inequality. In the developing world, neoliberalism has meant increased unemployment and massive growth in the informal economy. In rich countries there is some informalisation but also a sustained squeeze on welfare incomes (the removal of sole parents’ benefit is a recent Australian example). There are growing gaps in the wage structure, and a much less progressive tax system than a generation ago. Corporate executives are among the most spectacular beneficiaries of this society-wide process.

To put it in a nutshell, the corporate managers are not earning wages. Markets have little to do with it. They are building fortunes. Their organisational power enables them to claim a share of the expanding financialised capital in the modern economy, and convert part of that share into extremely high incomes. Within an environment of privilege, this claim becomes a matter of common sense and routine. And though there are many critics of the result – the anti-globalisation movement, the Occupy movement, and some of the unions – there is not at present any social force that has been able to reverse it.

Connell's arguments remind me of those of criminologist David Friederichs who argues that the corporate culture and practices that provide for and justify excessive executive compensation for corporate executives not only creates what he calls "crimogenic conditions" but are likely to lead to the taking of money that belongs to others.

In a paper titled "Exorbitant CEO compensation: Just reward or grand theft" in the Journal Crime, Law and Social Change  David Friedrichs argues that executive compensation packages should be considered as a form of white collar crime.

For Friederichs it is time to criminalize this behaviour. He calls it a form of robbery:

""Walking into a bank with a gun and demanding money from a teller is one way to steal money... Walking into a corporate boardroom and securing from the board's compensation committee, made up of cronies, paid consultants, and even relatives, compensation of millions sometimes tens of millions or hundreds of millions is another way to steal money. The principal differences are that the second way of stealing money pays much better, is all too often legal, and does not result in criminal prosecution and imprisonment. This needs to change"

The practices of excessive executive compensation are viewed as standard business practice rather than as part of a spectrum of corporate criminal behaviour that goes unrecognized and unpunished. 

That is how corporate power works. It redefines reality to serve corporate and private interests.

As both Connell and Friederichs argue its time to challenge that.

The deadly human cost of capitalism and the corporate fashion industry

all the images on this page are by Ismail Ferdous

On the 24th April 2013, the eight storey Rana Plaza Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,138 people and injuring another 2,500. One hundred and forty workers are still unaccounted for. 

The building housed 5 garment factories where poorly paid Bangladeshi workers made clothing for wealthy and high profile Western clothing labels. 

The Rana Plaza collapse was the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry and the deadliest accidental structural failure in modern human history.

The Rana Plaza collapse exposed the underbelly of high profile western fashion corporations who are key players in a supply chain in which Bangladeshi workers are paid a pittance and forced to work in unsafe and deadly sweatshop factories making clothing for western markets.

Rebecca Prentice explores the causes of the disaster in this article, pointing the finger directly at the inner workings of the global capitalist economy:

We might ask ourselves whether the disaster at Rana Plaza is the natural outcropping of a system we have created: a complex array of arms-length relationships between retailers and suppliers; working conditions hidden by both the intricacies of the global supply chain and its geographic dispersal; a regulatory regime comprised largely of voluntary compliance with ethical codes set by multinational corporations; and a lack of protections for labour organisers in low-income countries. 

The collapse sparked record worker protests and exposed the rampant abuse, dangerous conditions, and retaliation for organizing faced by Bangladesh's estimated 4 million garment workers, 80 percent of whom are women from rural areas.

On the day of the collapse the Bangladeshi photojournalist Ismail Ferdous was in Dhaka and took these haunting and chilling images of the collapse and its aftermath. 

Ferdous's work features in this short documentary. 

His images pay tribute to those who died, as well as those who worked to free people from the rubble. Ferdous also photographed clothing labels in the rubble that show the direct connection between high profile fashion labels and the deaths in the collapse.

Twelve months later little of substance has changed. 

Progress in identifying missing workers is painfully slow and the owner of the building has yet to be charged by police. Protests in Dhaka this week highlighted a whole series of grievances and unresolved issues for the families of those who died in the collapse.

Families who lost loved ones and bread winners have received little or no compensation from a trust fund set up by the Western retailers whose clothes were made at the factory. 

The fund contains only $15m compared to the proposed $40m, as only half of the western retailers have deposited funds. The first payments of $640 for each of the survivors and families of the deceased were only made this week.

A list of the corporations who have made no contribution to the fund is here.

Attempts to sign the Bangladesh Safety Accord – a legally binding contract between brands, retailers and trade unions in Bangladesh that makes independent safety inspections of 1,000 factories and public reporting mandatory, has been hindered by ideological differences and the decision by some large brands to sign separate, less stringent agreements.

Alexandra Hartman writes:

International corporations have barely been impacted by the fallout. In fact, some of shareholders' prices for certain implicated companies rose just months after the collapse. So far, corporations' responses have been a patchwork of safety reviews and public statements with little bold effort done to right any wrongs and compensate losses. And consumers, in large part, have forgotten.

Here is Humayun Kabir of the South Asia Solidarity Initiative:

"Very little has actually been done to change the situation that led to the disaster a year ago. There have been a lot of people struggling to get compensation for victims and trying to change business practices of international buyers and practices of factory owners. One of the ways we can keep these issues on the agenda is by saying that this disaster that happened is not a distant memory. We shouldn't forget about it."