Emperor Barnett, political parties and the loving embrace of corporate money

 'Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,''

Jeffrey Sachs

2013 has started exactly the same for the corporatocracy that runs Western Australia, despite the scandals and crises that surround the Barnett Government over its loving embrace of  the corporate and business sector.

The money continues to flow from the corporate and business sector to the Liberal National Parties.

The West Australian, the state's only daily paper, reports such political corruption matter of factly and without a hint of concern (perhaps because it relies on the same corporate and business elite for its adverting revenue).

And don't expect to see the Labor Party do anything about this "political corruption". Like the Liberals they are more than happy to take corporate money. And they too take huge amounts of money by offering corporations direct access to Leaders, politicians and decision makers at various Leaders Forums and national and state 'conferences'.

Journalist Kate Batians reports that:

Big business, mining companies and property developers have continued to pour money into the coffers of the WA Liberal Party, which received the lion's share of donations last financial year.

WA Electoral Commission annual returns for 2011-2012 show property and Kreepy Krauly magnate Terry Jackson, a long-time donor, made the biggest donation to the Liberals of $250,000.

In total, the Liberals received almost $3.9 million in donations and other income compared with the Labor Party's $1.85 million and the Greens' $355,000.

The Liberal Party also received $51,445 from the Commonwealth Bank, $50,000 from Perdaman Chemicals and Fertilisers and $37,525 from Woolworths.
Wellard, the State's biggest live- stock exporter, doubled its contributions to the party from $25,000 in 2010-2011 to $50,000 in 2011-2012.

The company yesterday denied it was punishing Federal Labor over its decision to suspend live exports to Indonesia in June last year.

A spokesman said the payments were for Wellard's annual membership to the Leaders Forum, in which big companies pay $25,000 for exclusive access to Premier Colin Barnett and his ministers.

Why politicians lie so much

"The answer is simple: they are caught in the contradiction of running for office in a democracy, but in order to govern on behalf of the wealthy. They need mass support to get elected, but their policies benefit only the few and the very few. Those policies involve the abandonment of public institutions and infrastructure, and destruction of the ideals and the social contract that have been the basis of America’s promise and its prosperity, and only to continue the massive transfer of wealth upward that began in the Reagan administration. They would make most Americans poorer and social mobility ever more difficult, so that those who have the most could get most of the rest.

And who would vote for that? As a result, the campaign for a feudal America has to lie. You might say we need a new word in the language: a word for policies so far removed from reality or decency that they cannot be advocated without lying"

From an excellent piece titled Lying: The Essential Republican Strategy on one of my favourite websites No Caption Needed.

John Pilger and the political extremism that masquerades as democracy

John Pilger's latest article in New Statesman exposes the political and corporate extremism that masquerades as democracy:

Arriving in a village in southern Vietnam, I caught sight of two children who bore witness to the longest war of the 20th century. Their terrible deformities were familiar. All along the Mekong river, where the forests were petrified and silent, small human mutations lived as best they could.

Today, at the Tu Du paediatrics hospital in Saigon, a former operating theatre is known as the "collection room" and, unofficially, as the "room of horrors". It has shelves of large bottles containing grotesque foetuses. During its invasion of Vietnam, the United States sprayed a defoliant herbicide on vegetation and villages to deny "cover to the enemy". This was Agent Orange, which contained dioxin, poisons of such power that they cause foetal death, miscarriage, chromosomal damage and cancer.

In 1970, a US Senate report revealed that "the US has dumped [on South Vietnam] a quantity of toxic chemical amounting to six pounds per head of population, including woman and children". The code-name for this weapon of mass destruction, Operation Hades, was changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand.  Today, an estimated 4.8 million victims of Agent Orange are children.

Len Aldis, secretary of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society, recently returned from Vietnam with a letter for the International Olympic Committee from the Vietnam Women's Union. The union's president, Nguyen Thi  Thanh  Hoa, described "the severe congenital deformities [caused by Agent Orange] from generation to generation". She asked the IOC to reconsider its decision to accept sponsorship of the London Olympics from the Dow Chemical Corporation, which was one of the companies that manufactured the poison and has refused to compensate its victims. 

Aldis hand-delivered the letter to the office of Lord Coe, chairman of the London Organising Committee. He has had no reply. When Amnesty International pointed out that in 2001 Dow Chemical acquired "the company responsible for the Bhopal gas leak [in India in 1984] which killed 7,000 to 10,000 people immediately and 15,000 in the following twenty years", David Cameron described Dow as a "reputable company". Cheers, then, as the TV cameras pan across the £7 million decorative wrap that sheathes the Olympic stadium: the product of a 10-year "deal" between the IOC and such a reputable destroyer.

History is buried with the dead and deformed of Vietnam and Bhopal. And history is the new enemy. On 28 May, President Obama launched a campaign to falsify the history of the war in Vietnam. To Obama, there was no Agent Orange, no free fire zones, no turkey shoots, no cover-ups of massacres, no rampant racism, no suicides (as many Americans took their own lives as died in the war), no defeat by a resistance army drawn from an impoverished society. It was, said Mr. Hopey Changey, "one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of [US] military history". 

The following day, the New York Times published a long article documenting how Obama personally selects the victims of his drone attacks across the world. He does this on "terror Tuesdays" when he browses through mug shots on a "kill list", some of them teenagers, including "a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years". Many are unknown or simply of military age. Guided by "pilots" sitting in front of computer screens in Las Vegas, the drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of lungs and blow people to bits. Last September, Obama killed a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, purely on the basis of hearsay that he was inciting terrorism. "This one is easy," he is quoted by aides as saying as he signed the man's death warrant. On 6 June, a drone killed 18 people in a village in Afghanistan, including women, children and the elderly who were celebrating a wedding. 

The New York Times article was not a leak or an expose. It was a piece of PR designed by the Obama administration to show what a tough guy the 'commander-in-chief' can be in an election year. If re-elected, Brand Obama will continue serving the wealthy, pursuing truth-tellers, threatening countries, spreading computer viruses and murdering people every Tuesday. 

The threats against Syria, co-ordinated in Washington and London, scale new peaks of hypocrisy. Contrary to the raw propaganda presented as news, the investigative journalism of the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung identifies those responsible for the massacre in Houla as the 'rebels' backed by Obama and Cameron. The paper's sources include the rebels themselves. This has not been completely ignored in Britain. Writing in his personal blog, ever so quietly, Jon Williams, the BBC world news editor, effectively dishes his own 'coverage', citing western officials who describe the 'psy-ops' operation against Syria as 'brilliant'. As brilliant as the destruction of Libya, and Iraq, and Afghanistan.

And as brilliant as the psy-ops of the Guardian's latest promotion of Alastair Campbell, the chief collaborator of Tony Blair in the criminal invasion of Iraq. In his "diaries", Campbell tries to splash Iraqi blood on the demon Murdoch. There is plenty to drench them all. But recognition that the respectable, liberal, Blair-fawning media was a vital accessory to such an epic crime is omitted and remains a singular test of intellectual and moral honesty in Britain. 

How much longer must we subject ourselves to such an "invisible government"?  This term for insidious propaganda, first used by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and inventor of modern public relations, has never been more apt.  "False reality" requires historical amnesia, lying by omission and the transfer of significance to the insignificant. In this way, political systems promising security and social justice have been replaced by piracy, "austerity" and "perpetual war": an extremism dedicated to the overthrow of democracy. Applied to an individual, this would identify a psychopath. Why do we accept it?

The lies we are told on a daily basis

Wikileaks continues to lay bare the lies told to us about Australia's involvement in the war on Afghanistan. A report in the Age today, based on cables published by Wiklileaks, shows how Australian Governments, military officials, diplomats and the corporate media deliberately and repeatedly lied about unfolding events in Afghanistan.
The Age story reports:

We squabbled with our allies, yet in public we talked of close co-operation. We frustrated the Americans with unfulfilled promises. Our politicians big-noted in public but dithered in private. Our bamboozled bureaucrats tried to make sense of the details. All along, the public was kept in the dark.

Not any longer.

Thanks to WikiLeaks, we have an insight into the diplomatic skirmishes behind the war in Afghanistan, now in its ninth year and which has cost 21 Australian lives.

Leaked US diplomatic cables expose friction between Australia and its allies, undermining the public veneer of coalition solidarity. 

And as Antony Loewenstein writes, Wikileaks also exposes the hypocrisy and decit of corporate journalists who collude with the political, military and diplomatic establishment to hide the real truth about Australia's involvement in Afghanistan.

Here is the real reason Wikileaks is being pursued with such vigor. It exposes the lies told to us on a daily basis by those who hold the reigns of power.

Australian politics is broken

image courtesy of John Spooner and Sydney Morning Herald

All this overblown talk in the media about the irrevocable change in Australian politics because of the Federal election result and hung parliament is frankly bullshit. What we are witnessing is just more of the same broken "corporate" and market-led, two party politics.

The game playing and maneuvering by the three  Independent members- Bob Katter, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakshott - and the Liberal and Labor parties is just more of the same old style partisan, two party politics that was rejected by the voters. We are seeing three "kingmakers", all associated with the conservative side of politics deciding, on the basis of their own demands, who will govern the country for the next three years.

Andrew Wilkie, the newly elected Independent member for Dennison in Tasmania rightly points out the three Independent are not acting "independently", but are acting as just another party bloc, concerned about protecting vested interests and constituency interests.

The former Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett has written how the "two party" mindset dominates the political process, although it does not reflect the reality of how most people think and vote.

As Jeff Sparrow writes, Australians can expect nothing new whatsoever, regardless of which of the big parties assumes power. Sparrow concludes:

" Under these conditions the discontent we saw at that ballot box is only going to grow"

In the face of all the media excitement and hype, it is clear where this is heading. Despite their best intentions, lofty rhetoric and "ideas for reform" the three former National Independents will form an alliance with the Liberal National Coalition to deliver Government to Tony Abbott.  

Even with the appalling performance of Federal and State Labor Governments over the last three years and the implosion of Federal Labor during 2010, the Liberal-National Coalition vote increased by just 1.4%, less than the increase in the informal vote. They were unable to win enough seats to form a government, yet Tony Abbott now claims he has a mandate to form government, and with the help of these three Independents it will happen. So despite the voters' wishes, they will get a Conservative government.

Here in the West we have the newly elected WA Nationals Member for Forrest claiming that he will be a "real" independent representing a truly independent political party. The claim is laughable. The National Party and its campaign were bankrolled by the mining billionaire Clive Palmer and the National Party in WA is still "glued" to power in a coalition with the Liberals. 

When WA Nationals Leader Brendon Grylls  tried to forge a coalition with the Carpenter Labor Government, after the WA electorate voted for a hung Parliament, his fellow "independent" Nationals opposed their leader and demanded that they join the Liberals in Government. They could not think of existing in power without their Liberal counterparts, delivering power to a Coalition government that is even more incompetent and more pro-business than its appalling Labor predecessor. 

And the WA Royalties for Region Program that the Member for Forrest wants to introduce across Australia has become a form of "pork barreling" through which public funds are diverted from needed social infrastructure and public investment  and distributed to "community" projects and favored priorities in largely Coalition electorates. 

So we have fiberglass cows, horse sculptures, lobster pot sculptures, talking toilets, motorized golf carts and hundred of sporting and recreation facilities. community halls and change rooms being built in Coalition seats across WA. In one town the local sailing club got $5m to build a boating facility, but there was no money for Aboriginal housing, despite a housing crises.

The Royalties for Region program is also using public funds to provide infrastructure that will primarily benefit large corporations, and is putting public funds into private and corporate hands.

The Barnett-Grylls Government has cut Budgets to suit Royalties for Regions. Money cut from government agencies and other austerity measures has paid for a part of the Royalties for Region Program. While the cost of Royalties for Regions has risen to $900m, the Barnett Government has massively increased charges for electricity, gas and water, resulting in serious hardship for people on low and fixed incomes. During the winter months a number of pensioners died because they could not afford to use heating during a major cold spell.

In addition, the Barnett-Grylls Government has overseen major cut backs and freezes in public spending, leading to cuts in public services, and with its privatization agenda, the result has been reductions in the availability of public services and a failure to address major gaps and needs in social infrastructure and human services.

What the so called "Independent" WA Nationals have also overseen is a situation where lowly paid education assistants who work in public schools with young children are denied a reasonable pay rise, while unskilled workers in the Gorgon Project are guaranteed $160k per year. Public squalor, private affluence.

Yes, he did actually say that!!

images courtesy of the Boston Globe

" It turns out by the way that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced"

US President Barack Obama, on March 31 2010, three weeks before BP's Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, announcing that he was permitting the greatest expansion of offshore drilling in half a century.

Political and corporate spin as an assault on truth in language

The quote below is from Chris Hedges latest piece titled The War on Language in Truth Dig:

"This emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture. Manufactured phrases inflame passions and distort reality. The collective chants, jargon and epithets permit people to surrender their moral autonomy to the heady excitement of the crowd. “The crowd doesn’t have to know,” Mussolini often said. “It must believe. ... If only we can give them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality.” Always, he said, be “electric and explosive.” Belief can triumph over knowledge. Emotion can vanquish thought. Our demagogues distort the Bible and the Constitution, while their demagogues distort the Quran, or any other foundational document deemed to be sacred, fueling self-exaltation and hatred at the expense of understanding. The more illiterate a society becomes, the more power those who speak in this corrupted form of speech amass, the more music and images replace words and thought. We are cursed not by a cultural divide but by mutual cultural self-destruction".