En Passant

Evidently there is an election on in Australia at the moment. I only know this because robot men and women are criss-crossing the country speaking in platitudes and offering to do nothing about war, racism, climate change, gay marriage, jobs, pay increases, taxing the rich … Hit the comments button and have your say on the election or anything else.

Nicole Colson in the US magazine Socialist Worker explains why the classified Pentagon documents on Afghanistan released by WikiLeaks present a damning portrait of who is suffering from the U.S. war.

THE RELEASE of more than 92,000 classified documents relating to the war in Afghanistan by the muckraking Web site WikiLeaks has left the Obama administration and its war partners trying to defend the indefensible.

Along with making the documents available on the Internet on July 25, WikiLeaks took the further step of providing the archive of material to the New York Times, Britain’s Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel several weeks prior to the wider release–so these media outlets were ready with in-depth articles about what the documents revealed.

The Obama White House was quick to denounce the WikiLeaks release. At first, it claimed that the documents didn’t reflect the reality of the war, since they only run through last December–before the implementation of Obama’s “surge” plan announced late last year.

When it was clear that no one bought that one, administration officials turned to criticizing the release for putting “national security” in jeopardy–while also claiming that the documents were “old news” and didn’t really reveal anything that wasn’t previously known (leading to the question of why the documents were classified in the first place.)

This last point was surely damage control–the WikiLeaks documents vividly expose the disastrous state of the U.S. war on Afghanistan.

They provide indisputable proof that the Taliban insurgency is stronger than at any point since 2001, and they reveal the scope of U.S. war crimes committed against the civilian population of Afghanistan–one of the key factors driving resistance to the U.S.–and how those war crimes have been systematically downplayed by the U.S. military.

One incident highlighted by the Guardian provides a graphic illustration of how damaging the WikiLeaks documents are.

In 2007, near the city of Jalalabad, a convoy of U.S. Marines was struck by a minivan rigged with explosives. As they raced the six miles back to their base, the Marines opened fire with automatic weapons, spraying bullets at anything in their path, including “teenage girls in fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road,” the Guardian described. “Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded” in what the paper called a “bloodbath.”

But the WikiLeaks documents show that an initial military account didn’t state that unarmed civilians were killed. Instead, the report “simply says that, simultaneous to the suicide explosion, ‘the patrol received small arms fire from three directions,’” the Guardian wrote. The six-mile rampage back to the base–which the Guardian notes was later the subject of a 17-day military inquiry and 12,000-page report–was at first described as simply, “The patrol returned to JAF [Jalalabad air field].”

The documents also illustrate how the massacre and initial cover-up sparked public fury among Afghan civilians at their American occupiers in the following hours and days. The Guardian wrote:

The logs report that nine hours after the shooting, the governor of Nangarhar province appealed to the Marines to stay at home. “He did not want more CF [coalition forces] in the area due to public hostility.” At about the same time, the Americans stopped issuing internal reports. “Event closed at 1349Z,” it read. But that was not the end of the affair.

Demonstrations ran through the streets of Jalalabad over the following days, the logs report, in which protesters broke windows and blocked roads.

A month later, in April 2007, the Afghan Human Rights Commission published a report into the shooting which said the victims included a 16-year-old newlywed girl carrying a bundle of grass and a 75-year-old man walking back from the shops. The report said the Marines may have come under fire from one source straight after the suicide bomb, but challenged the assertion they suffered a “complex ambush from several directions.”

By then, a U.S. Army colonel had admitted to the Afghans that the shootings were a “terrible, terrible mistake” and “a stain on our honor.” He paid $2,000 to the families of each victim.

Yet all of the Marines involved in the incident were later exonerated by the military of any wrongdoing.

The massacre near Jalalabad is only one war crime among many revealed in WikiLeaks’ 92,000 pages of documents. According to the Guardian, the documents show at least 144 separate instances of the killing of innocent Afghan civilians–ranging from individual shootings at the hands of CIA paramilitaries to massive, mistaken air strikes that wiped out entire families and villages at a stroke.

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UNSURPRISINGLY, THE media response to the documents varied. The New York Times, for example, seemed initially to focus less on U.S. massacres or the impact of the war on Afghan civilians than on what the documents showed about the role of Pakistani intelligence in propping up the Taliban and other forces fighting the U.S.

The Times wrote a lengthy note to readers justifying its coverage and explaining that it had “taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests.”

The question, of course, is whose interests would be harmed? Ordinary Americans, who have been funding the war to the tune of tens of billions of dollars each year? The Afghan people, who have suffered even worse treatment at the hands of the U.S. military than was previously thought, according to the documents? What about U.S. soldiers, who are fighting and dying in growing numbers in Afghanistan?

Just days after the release of the WikiLeaks material, a separate Times article–headlined “Afghans and NATO differ on civilian deaths”–again highlighted the disparity between what military officials claim about the war and what Afghan civilians experience.

In the story, U.S. officials disputed Afghan claims that 52 civilians were killed in a rocket attack in the southern Helmand province on July 23. High up in the article, the Times noted that “the American-led military command in Kabul said that an investigation it was conducting with Afghan officials ‘has thus far revealed no evidence of civilians injured or killed.’”

The investigators must not have talked to Mohammed Usman, who is quoted by the Times in the same article as saying he helped pull the bodies of 17 children and seven women from the rubble. “They have ruined us, and they have killed small children and innocent women,” he said. “God will never forgive them.”

Atrocities like this should at least prove that the massacres revealed in the WikiLeaks documents aren’t in the past.

In fact, the vast bulk of the information released by WikiLeaks seems to have been made classified by the Pentagon not because of any real threat to “national security,” but because of the damage such a cumulative archive of material about the war would have on public opinion on whether the U.S. and its allies should still be in Afghanistan. As James Fallows of the Atlantic noted:

[I]nformation that may be old news to insiders may seem a revelation to the broader public. Whether from George W. Bush or Barack Obama, presidential speeches about Afghanistan have not emphasized the mixed loyalties of the Pakistani security services, the frustrations of dealing with tribal leaders and corrupt officials, the extent of civilian casualties, and other items that, according to insiders, “everyone” already knows.

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MANY PEOPLE have compared the release of the WikiLeaks documents to the release of the Pentagon Papers–a classified 1968 Pentagon study on the Vietnam War that was leaked to the media by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg in 1971.

The Pentagon Papers further discredited the U.S. war machine by showing not only the true extent of the war and civilian casualties, but the way that successive administrations–both Democratic and Republican–had deliberately misled the American public about the war. As Fallows continued:

Afghanistan is different from Vietnam, Barack Obama is different from Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the raw battlefield intel from WikiLeaks is different from the inside policy memos of the Pentagon Papers, and so on. But the basic similarity of the cases involves the question of what “everyone” knows.

By 1971, anyone who had been really following the Vietnam War already “knew,” or could guess, much of what was in the Pentagon Papers. The Papers mattered because of (a) the confirmation that the government had known about the problems for a very long time, and (b) the spreading of that understanding to the broader public.

If the WikiLeaks documents, coming during what is already the deadliest month ever for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, really do mark a shift in mainstream opinion about the war, it will be because everyone [general public, press and politicians] will now recognize what “everyone” [insiders] already knew.

It’s too soon to judge the impact of the WikiLeaks documents, especially with thousands more reportedly to be released soon. But it is certain that this new window into a failing war comes as the percentage of Americans who support it has reached an all-time low.

According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in mid-July, the number of Americans who say the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting has declined from 52 percent in December to 43 percent now. Obama’s approval rating for handling the war, which was 56 percent in April, is now down to 45 percent.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration won’t end the U.S. war on Afghanistan because of declining approval ratings or because it is embarrassed by the revelations in the WikiLeaks documents. On the contrary, a few days after the WikiLeaks release, the House approved a $33 billion war-funding increase to pay for Obama’s latest troop surge–and the Obama administration, along with military leaders, reiterated its commitment to staying in Afghanistan “until the job is done.”

As the WikiLeaks documents show, that will mean more massacres and bloodshed for ordinary Afghans.

This article, by

This is the Coke and Pepsi election. There is no substance; there are no substantial differences.

There is a lot of mindless advertising to persuade us to choose one brand over the other, and puerile attempts at differentiation, but the end result is the same – fizzy and sugary no matter what the choice and of no nutritional value to the body politic whatsoever.

In fact the consumption of either of the two brands will be positively harmful to our economic and political health.

On war, on refugees, on tax, on the economy, on education, on public health, on climate change, on same sex marriage, on the racism of the Northern Territory intervention  - what stands out is not the differences but the essential similarities.

This election is the culmination of the final degeneration of the ALP into a thoroughly bourgeois capitalist party with union bureaucrat and middle class professional linkages, personnel and influence.

The managerial class of capitalism has taken over the Labor Party and rules in its interests and with its world view. It is the Party of symbolic reform, of grand gestures that cost little but give the impression of action.

It is the Party of the Kyoto Concerned and the Stolen Apologists who sell the image of care while delivering the knife of reaction. 

It is the Party now of ruling for sectional interests of capital, not for capital as a whole.

It rules for the polluters, the big miners, the car companies and for the big banks, for Telstra and Woolies and Coles. It rules in fear of Murdoch.

The tension in the ALP between the two roles is resolving itself in favour of particular interests of capital at the expense of the general interests of capital.

The historic function of Labor as the party of capital’s interests is coming to an end. The links with the unions now provide a steady flow of sometimes talented, often talentless, bureaucrats to warm the benches of Parliament.

These links have become the conduit for the imposition of the latest pro-capitalist reform dressed up as some benefit for working people.

They are one way streets of Labor diktats to the working class through the agency of a spineless cowering and cowardly union leadership on the gravy train of Labor patronage or its possibilities.

Julia Gillard’s triumph over Kevin Rudd gave the last rites to that dead body of reformist politics known as the Australian Labor Party.

May it rest not in peace but in torment as a ghost of principles past, watching from its twilight after-life the rise of a vibrant, lively left wing challenge to its rule, one that dares to dream life to humanity, one that dares to scream life to humanity.

Whether it’s about refugees, the war on Afghanistan, political correctness, same-sex marriage or the mining tax, in the month since Gillard won the Prime Minister’s job, she has continued, if not actually worsened, the rotten rhetoric and practice of her predecessor, Kevin Rudd.

Gillard’s attacks on refugees have garnered the government the support of some racists who have crossed over from the Coalition, but have bled much of the support that Labor had won from those who were hoping that her victory might usher in a more progressive Labor government.

The Greens, whose poll support nearly halved when Gillard took over, have now made up nearly all the loss.

The fact that Labor is on the nose amongst those who were hoping for even a gesture or two towards working-class interests and progressive politics is reflected in the letters pages of papers like The Age, with many correspondents slamming Labor’s racist attacks on refugees.

The same is true amongst supporters of same-sex marriage. Reports expressing “disappointment” have been run in the LGBTI press about Gillard’s rejection of gay marriage – announced on, of all places, the radio show hosted by Kyle and Jackie O, those paragons of moral virtue.

While Australian Marriage Equality is hoping to meet her to convince her of the error of her ways, it’s clear that Gillard’s not for turning on this question – she’s out to pander to the homophobes and nothing’s going to stop her.

True to form, the Labor left has either shut up or followed her to the right. In one of his last speeches as Defence Minister, John Faulkner has blasted critics of the war in Afghanistan, saying that the 1,500 troops are there for the long haul.

Lindsay Tanner is heading out of Parliament on a handsome pension with not even a word of criticism of Gillard.

And the unions refuse to put her on the spot. Far from it: the ACTU’s press releases might as well have come from Gillard’s own PR flacks.

So it’s good in all of this that the Greens have made some useful statements slamming Gillard’s craven capitulation to big business, racists and homophobes.

In a sharp turnaround from their virtual silence during most of the last two years, they have come out strongly in support of refugees, slamming Abbott and Gillard for their “race to the bottom”. They are promising to shut down Christmas Island and process refugees on the mainland.

The Greens have condemned Gillard for her “disregard for the disadvantaged” in maintaining welfare quarantining for Aborigines in the Northern Territory. They have also argued more vocally for the government to get the troops out of Afghanistan now.

The Greens have been rewarded for their stand for things that Labor has either abandoned, or attacks with gusto, by a lift in their polling.

But there are limits to the Greens’ positioning. The preference deal they have struck with Labor still leaves open the possibility that the Greens will not argue to put Labor above the vile Liberals in a number of seats. In fact, Bob Brown came out straight away and declared:

I totally agree with those people who last time ignored the preference directions from all the parties and put their preferences where they wanted to… Now I might be a bit at odds with… the preference negotiators in my own party there but I’m saying, this is a democratic right.

They should actually be making it clear that they are a left alternative to Labor, not positioning themselves to appeal to disaffected Liberal voters.

Brown continues to pitch the Greens as the party that can offer a “responsible” crossbench in the Senate, not an obstructionist one. And they’re still utterly committed to a tax on carbon which will do nothing to stop global warming.

But the fact that many voters who initially had hopes that Gillard would be better have swung back to the Greens indicates that there is the potential out there to build a left-wing alternative to what is on offer from the major parties: an alternative that stands up for refugee rights, against war, against homophobia and in defence of workers’ rights.

One of the major opportunities to start to do this during the election campaign is the demonstrations that have been called around refugee rights and same-sex marriage in most capital cities.

These protests can help send a message to the politicians that we are going to stand up to their reactionary policies, and start to lay the basis for an ongoing struggle after the election on these and many other issues.

Because whoever wins the election, there is no doubt that we are going to wake up to a right-wing government that needs resisting on August 22. 

This article, by Tom Bramble, first appeared in Socialist Alternative .

I’m for a big Australia. Big in its vision; big in its heart; big in its hopes; big in its thoughts and big in its humanity. This is an Australia where all are welcome; where planning replaces the anarchy of the market; where democracy is the essence of everyday life.

Instead we have an election battle between two parochial, narrow-minded, backward looking, reactionary parties. They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.  Their hearts are full of hate and their minds are full of shit.

They are the leaders from behind. They gather their forces to retreat, retreat, retreat – not one step at a time but galloping headlong to the abyss of doing nothing.

Fuck off we’re full appears to be their real but unbidden slogan.  They couch their small Australia in terms of sustainability, population, congestion and infrastructure but their goal is the same – to blame the most recent arrivals for the problems of the system.

Shamefully some conservationists and Greens give this racism a veneer of respectability with their Malthusian mantras.

Of course Tony Abbott is pulling a swiftie when he says he will reduce immigration to 170,000 in the Coalition’s first term. Labor is on track to do more than that anyway.

The disgrace is that Labor proclaim this as a virtue rather than the outrage it is.

In 2008 we had net migration into Australia of 300,000. We survived. Some of it was Australians returning as a result of the global financial crisis. Much of it was skilled migration.  And some of it was students studying here.

Leaving aside 33,000 immigrants from New Zealand who are not counted in the figures, only 30,000 immigrants last year came from predominantly ‘white’ regions out of 158,000 arrivals.  So any debate about immigration is necessarily about race too.

In the 2007/08 financial year for example there were almost 115,000 skilled immigrants who came to Australia. Last financial year the target was just over 108,000.

Labor cut the planned skilled immigration program, according to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship website, ’by 14 per cent from 133 500 to 115 000 in mid March 2009 in light of the economic situation.’ This year it has cut it a further 7,000 or about 6 percent.

The Liberals have made much of the fact that in 2008 the net overseas migration intake was 300,000. What they don’t mention is that much of this (perhaps over 100,000) was Australian expatriates returning home after losing jobs, pay or prestige in other countries badly impacted by the  Global Financial Crisis or students coming to study in Australia who return to their home country after a few years.

The Liberals will attack international students. Last year education was our 3rd biggest export.

It earnt $18.6 bn. There were 200000 international students in higher education alone, and 491,000 all up. The Liberals will destroy international higher education.

They are protecting their mining mates and the money they make from selling our minerals, but offer education as the sacrificial lamb for the possibility of winning an election.

But the problem for both Labor and the Liberals is that the student program, and especially the skilled migration program, are both vital for the long term survival of a vibrant Australian capitalism.

So both sides will talk about cutting immigration but the reality is that the bourgeoisie will demand more skilled workers and, to a lesser extent, more international students. 

International students are a great earner for Universities and a source of cheap labour for retailers. On top of racist proposals to restrict their numbers, many international students are not coming anyway. The festival of racism led by the two major parties makes us a very unattractive education destination now.

As to skilled immigration we have grossly underfunded our training and education systems and because our booming industries like mining cannot keep up with the demand. So we bring in already trained workers from overseas either permanently or on 457 work visas for a few years.

Abbott might have ‘saved’ the mining bosses from a small tax rise but cutting immigration could do more damage to them than any tax. He’ll listen, just as Gillard will.

On April 6 this year I wrote the following (can I claim prescience here?) when Tony Burke was appointed Minister for Population:

His role is to square the circle on population, what we might call the third way between the xenophobes who want no immigration and the ruling elite who want more immigration. One possible Labor compromise  is growth in regional and less developed centres and stagnation in the major cities. 

Business is mostly concentrated in the big cities, apart from the miners and agribusiness who have their headquarters there but their productive enterprises in the bush and beyond. Most capitalists need workers in the cities, not regional and outback Australia.

So the unplanned anarchy that is capitalism will continue to crowd new arrivals into the big cities.  What Governments won’t do is spend any money on improving life in the crowded working class suburbs with better public transport, public housing, public hospitals and public schools let alone allow ordinary people to plan the future to meet human need.

Labor and Liberals won’t and can’t spend more on people because that would require taxing big business much more to pay for better cities.

It’s far easier for the two major parties of capital to rail against immigrants and asylum seekers than to do anything that would actually address the real problems of overcrowding and congestion.

Fair dinkum, I despair. The platitude twins talked in similar terms about boats, population and sustainability; about doing nothing on climate change; about health and education; about killing Afghans; about mom and apple pie.

Well maybe not the latter exactly, but certainly there were lots of Australianisms and appeals to nationalism. 

The differences were minor. As Gillard said at one stage ‘If you drill down you’ll find a lot of agreement there…’

Interestingly the female part of the Channel 7 worm supported Gillard and the male part Abbott.

Overall it was a win to Gillard’s version of doing nothing. Her lack of vision trumped Abbott’s.

There was little or no discussion of infrastructure, of paying for services by increasing taxes on us rather than the rich, of the forthcoming attacks on health and education spending, of the looming double dip recession and the plans of both sides to address it, of any grand plan for dealing with climate change.

This was the battle of the sandpit kids over who gets to dig in it as the bulldozers destroy the playground.

The lack of differentiation is not surprising since Labor has abandoned any pretence of supporting workers and rules exclusively for the rich. That is why Gillard emphasised her staring down of the teachers’ unions in the fight over the private school propaganda website My School. I’m surprised she didn’t mention she wants to jail building worker Ark Tribe for being a unionist.

The ‘debate’ marked a further degeneration of Labor as a party of reform, let alone of the left.

A Labor Prime Minister attacking the Liberals for daring to tax big business. A Labor Prime Minister too frightened to say the budget might go back into deficit in case of a recession. A Labor Prime Minister calling people smugglers “evil”. Shame Shame Shame!

So this was a debate that grated – a struggle as to who could dog whistle loudest on refugees the best; as to who could stop the boats; as to who could set up a  regional processing centre; as  to who would do nothing on climate change; as to who could be tough on unions…and so on with reactionary slogans ad nauseum.

The only interesting thing all night was watching the worm turn – from women supporting Gillard by  a noticeable margin to men supporting Abbott whenever either spoke.

Clearly there is a gender difference in the support for the leaders. 

Women support Gillard.

They are in for a rude shock if Gillard wins Government. She will rule for her class, not her gender. Our troops will continue to kill women in Afghanistan. The 18.2% gender pay gap will worsen. Aboriginal women will die earlier than non-Aboriginal women.

And as for any token reforms, such the pathetic parental leave scheme, they will disappear if the global economy worsens and Labor unleashes itself as the attack dog for capital.

As for the execrable Abbott, he was Gillard in a suit and tie. Like Gillard he had no substance, and talked in slogans. Like Gillard he wanted to appeal to the racists and xenophobes.

All in all a fitting end to the grate debate. The worm beat the two grubs.

Labor will create a citizens’ assembly to examine the evidence on climate change, the case for action and a market-based approach to reducing pollution.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday, announcing the ALP will do nothing on climate change.

A citizens’  assembly to look at climate change over 12 months? And then to deliver a report that says we have moved towards a consensus on… you guessed it, the government’s preferred climate trading scheme, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

This is the scheme that rewards the polluters with billions and is actually worse than doing nothing.

This will be not be an assembly – its role is to dissemble – and it certainly won’t be of the citizenry. It will be hand picked and full of ruling class sycophants and other earnest free marketeers. 

What ruling class politician actually wants to hear what ordinary working class people think, let alone allow them any say in policy or law development?

The citizens’ assembly is a Rudd like trick to give the impression of doing something when not actually doing anything at all on climate change. Remember the 2020 summit?

We don’t need consensus through talk fests, through dissembling. We need leadership now on climate change.  That won’t come from Gillard or Abbott. It can only come from us - mobilising in the streets and workplaces.

After all the scientific evidence is clear, and until Rudd and Gillard caved in to the big polluters there was a consensus on addressing climate change.

It was important sections of the bourgeoisie, like the power companies and the miners, who opposed the science in the name of their profits, and won support from the party of sectional ruling class interests, the Liberals, after removing Turnbull from his leadership position and installing Abbott.

What an irony. The mining companies knifed Rudd and installed Gillard, just as they knifed Turnbull and installed Abbott. The contest for the Prime Ministership is between two party leaders the mining magnates have put into power.

That is one of the reasons the election debates are non-debates, the policies the same.

When Gillard announced the citizens’ assembly the revolutionary French national anthem came to mind.

Aux armes, citoyens, Formez vos bataillons, Marchons, marchons!

To arms, citizens, Form your battalions, Let us march! Let us march!

As if that isn’t enough, there’s a later verse which seems so apposite.

Tremblez, tyrans et vous perfides	Tremble, tyrants and you traitors
L’opprobre de tous les partis,	The shame of all parties,
Tremblez ! vos projets parricides	Tremble! Your parricidal schemes
Vont enfin recevoir leurs prix ! (bis)	Will finally receive their prizes! (repeat)
Tout est soldat pour vous combattre,	Everyone is a soldier to combat you
S’ils tombent, nos jeunes héros,	If they fall, our young heroes,
La terre en produit de nouveaux,	The earth produces new ones,
Contre vous tout prêts à se battre !	Against you, all ready to fight!

 

Ah, but Gillard’s proposed citizens’ assembly is not about moving the masses forward to struggle and victory; it’s about further demobilising them and replacing doing anything with doing nothing.

Labor is one of the parties of the tyrants of capital, a traitor to our class. I dream of the day a mass movement recognises this and echoes the words of La Marseillaise – tremble tyrants and you traitors…

Voting Green isn’t going to fundamentally change anything. They are the party of market solutions to climate change. The market isn’t the solution – it is the problem.

 The time is nigh for a socialist organisation which aims to build the struggles outside the talkfest of Parliament and charades like a citizens’ assembly, and mobilise tens and then hundreds of thousands to campaign for real, progressive reform.

So let us not talk falsely now
The hour’s getting late.

And as the hour gets later and later, Gillard and Abbott fiddle while the earth burns.

All power to real citizens’ assemblies. Working people can take power into their own hands through their own democratic institutions. Only then will the talk fests of inaction dissolve and the grave threats facing humanity – climate change, mass starvation, war, disease  – begin to be addressed.

A citizens’ assembly? WTF? More procrastination on climate change. Refugee bashing. Sustainable population as the new racism. No real difference between Labor and the Liberals on most issues. And meanwhile the possibility of a global double dip recession re-emerges and no one talks about it. Hit the comments button to have your say on these or any other issues.

I have no truck with constraining debate on the big questions. I am for frank, open, honest national conversations…

Prime Minister Julia Gillard in her Lowy Institute speech arguing for the racists and xenophobes to join the discussion about immigration and population.

So why then, Prime Minister, is the Canberra Labor Party Government threatening activists with fines for putting up posters advertising the equal love rally on 14 August – one week before the election?

The idea that we are all equal is rubbish. When it comes to free speech and its exercise this is doubly so.

If, like Rupert Murdoch, you own a multinational media empire, you control the mechanisms for the distribution of information and opinion and the way it is distributed. You can create or slant the ‘news’.

So it was no accident for example that during the invasion of Iraq 174 of Murdoch’s 175 newspapers editorialised in favour of the invasion and ran stories justifying it.

Ordinary working class people don’t have that sort of sway. We have very little say in how society is run.

Every 3 years we get to tick a box choosing which capitalist party will manage capitalism for the bosses. In between times – zilch, zero, nothing.

And at work democracy and free speech are suppressed.  Almost every workplace is a dictatorship – a place where voting for your bosses and debating what to do are banned and quashed.

Before the election, Julia Gillard, like John Howard before her, said she wanted an open debate free from the constraints of political correctness.

Yet here in Canberra activists have been threatened with fines under the Litter Act for putting up posters advertising the Equal Love rallies on 14 August. It is in my view no accident that these threats have come during the Federal election from a Labor Party Territory Government.

Opposing same sex marriage is one of those many many issues on which Julia Gillard’s Labor Party and Tony Abbott’s Liberal Party agree. The ‘left-wing ‘ Stanhope Labor Government here in Canberra introduced civil union laws last year but watered them down under the treat from Rudd Labor to overturn them because they looked too much like gay marriage.

The campaign for equal love is one of the few vibrant mass campaigns in Australia. It has seen tens of thousands demonstrate this year around Australia for equality.

There will be demonstrations across the country on 14 August for same sex marriage. These were organised well before the election but serve just to highlight Labor’s hypocrisy on equality and its support for systemic homophobia.

Labor wants to do everything it can to minimise any disruption to its ‘vote for us we’re not Liberals campaign’. Equal Love demonstrations threaten that illusion of Labor difference.

So how does the Canberra Labor Government respond? It threatens activists with fines for littering for putting up posters advertising the Equal Love rally. 

At the time the new litter laws were introduced I said in an article on this blog on the 22 February last year called Labor cans free speech

$50,000 fines for postering.  That’s what Labor’s A.C.T. Chief Minister and civil libertarian Jon Stanhope is proposing in a new Bill. The Bill is an attack on free speech.

In a class divided society it is an attack on the free speech of those who don’t own or control the means of communication; those who don’t have the money to pay for advertising in the media.

Free speech, Gillard’s commitment to open discussions with the Australian people, Stanhope’s commitment to human rights – all are thrown out the door if our nominal rights allow any sign of opposition to the ALP to emerge and threaten in a minuscule way Labor’s re-election chances.

So much for free speech. So much for human rights.

Show your support for equality for all and for free speech by attending the Equal Love rallies on 14 August. The Canberra rally is at 1 pm in Petrie Plaza near the merry-go-round in Civic. For details of demonstrations in other cities visit the Equal Love site.

There seems to be a political consensus on one thing: we need unity through adversity.

Whether it is the conservative British PM David Cameron urging that “everyone pulls together, comes together, works together”; the liberal President Obama outlining how “the success of all of us is built on the success of each of us”; or the Greek Socialist Party PM George Papandreou insisting, “It’s time to roll up our sleeves and all work together,” politicians of all stripes, on both sides of the Atlantic, are emphatic that we are all in this mess together.

Yet every week new examples of double standards come to light as the rich continue to push the burden of their errors onto the most vulnerable. Every week the “responsible economic management” we are having shoved down our throats is more clearly shown to be a giant fraud, the “unity” an illusion. Last week was no exception.

Hypocrisy #1: the US property elite

It wasn’t long ago that establishment figures were pointing the blame for the financial crisis at its very victims. Larry Kudlow, former chief economist and senior managing director of Bear Stearns, made the case in 2008 for holding the working poor culpable:

“Members of Congress…[through] their liberal guilt consciences, forced banks and lenders to make lousy substandard loans… Not everyone can afford a home…some people have to rent, that’s just the way it is.”

Suffice to say that Kudlow is not a renter. The real problem back then, as everyone now knows, was that the ultra-wealthy were speculating – gambling hundreds of billions of dollars and financing their bets through piling up debts of their own.

Last week the New York Times ran an article showing that little has changed. The wealthy are, it pointed out, defaulting on mortgages at higher rates than anyone else: “[H]omeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing cheques to their lender…”

How could this be? Aren’t the wealthy more educated? Don’t they, by definition, have more money than everyone else? The article explains:

“…data suggest[s] that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment. ‘The rich are different: they are more ruthless,’ said Sam Khater, CoreLogic’s senior economist…

“[T]he rich do not seem to have concerns about the civic good uppermost in their mind, especially when it comes to investment and second homes… The delinquency rate on investment homes where the original mortgage was more than $US1 million is now 23 per cent.”

In other words, “shared sacrifice” is a chimera in the US housing market. With the orgy of property speculation seemingly at an end, the wealthy are junking their deteriorating investments – investments that could provide shelter for every homeless person in the US but that will instead stand empty because the rich can’t turn a buck on them.

Yet find one editorialising former investment banker who now comes out to lay blame on the rich for placing downward pressure on house prices and increasing the prospect of a double dip recession. There are none. The rich are, according to the orthodoxy, being rational investors. Their empty homes will trickle down into the empty plots of the working class…

Meanwhile, workers in the real world continue to be thrown from their homes as they lose their jobs or fall into negative equity. They endure not only the humiliation of being told by the financial establishment that their lives and the lives of their families are worth less than a prefab, but also the indignity of the economic innuendo that home foreclosures are caused by illiteracy. It’s the same old Kudlow garbage dressed up as respectable opinion.

It is breathtaking and infuriating.

Hypocrisy #2: the European Central Bank

The European Central Bank (ECB) is a fierce proponent of austerity for European member states. The message from ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet is that governments have to slash and burn spending, cut the fat from the public service, pull socks up and tuck shirts in. Governments have been responsive:

In Spain, Prime Minister Zapatero has announced spending cuts totalling  €15 billion in 2010 and 2011. Public service wages will be slashed by 5 per cent this year and frozen in 2011; more than €6 billion will be cut from public investment;

France’s minimum retirement age will be lifted gradually to 62 from 60 and all government spending will be frozen between 2011 and 2013;

Portugal will impose a five per cent pay cut for senior public sector staff;

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel will cut welfare spending by €30 billion and cut public sector payrolls by up to 15,000;

Italy is delaying retirement dates, instituting a government pay freeze and pressing for cuts to health and education spending at a local level;

Greece is instituting a public sector pay freeze until 2014, cutting bonuses and allowances, freezing pensions, lifting the retirement age for women, and increasing taxes on petrol and cigarettes among other things;

Ireland has already seen three austerity budgets which have gutted social welfare payments and public sector pay;

Britain has released a horror budget the likes of which has not been seen in generations.

However, sometimes a government will go a bridge too far. Such is the case with Romania. They have applied a 25 per cent pay cut to the public sector (so far so good for Jean-Claude), but in the process forgot themselves; they applied the cut to Central Bank staff as well.

Jean-Claude, who “earns” a cool €300,000 per year, was not impressed with this cut. A swift rebuke from the ECB followed for the Romanian government:

“Member States may not impair an NCB’s ability to employ and retain the qualified staff necessary for the NCB to perform independently the tasks conferred on it…”

Of course bank staff, like everyone else, deserve to have their pay packets protected; but just when did such an “impairment” clause apply to the ECB and other financial institutions? What about the “tasks conferred on” governments by the people who elect them? They don’t get a mention.

Only nine months ago, George Papandreou, leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, was the emphatic victor in the Greek general elections. He promised to keep pay rises above inflation and make the rich pay for the crisis. That was his mandate.

That mandate has turned into a democratic deficit as Jean-Claude and his ilk tighten the screws. The elected government’s ability to “employ and retain qualified staff” has been acutely impaired by unelected bankers. More, the government has been given specific directives – and threatened with a capital blockade if they don’t comply.

This is rank (bank) hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy #3: European corporate taxes

As part of the previous stimulus programs, value-added tax (VAT) rates were temporarily cut across Europe in order to stimulate spending. A VAT taxes basic consumption expenditure. As such it disproportionately targets the poor, who spend a far greater portion of their income on basic consumption than the rich.

Now that a phase of fiscal consolidation has begun, Greece, Portugal, Spain Romania and Britain have announced VAT rate increases, which will apply on top of the restored rate. Others will likely follow.

At the same time, however, new data from the statistical office of the European Commission shows that corporate tax rates have “continue[d] their rapid decline throughout the EU”, dropping 1.3-1.5 per cent on average over the last three years – on top of a 10-11 per cent drop over the previous decade.

So the poor are being forced to tighten their belts past the last notch while some of the biggest corporations in the world are having their profits – and with them, executive bonuses – boosted.

This is the hypocrisy of governments crying for unity while privileging the privileged; it signifies a mass transfer of wealth from the working class to the ruling class across Europe.

More examples of the hypocrisy of the rich will be forthcoming. They can’t help it – they are not motivated by considerations of consistency. On the one hand they are parasites. On the other, their social position is only assured through cultivating the impression that they are productive members of the community.

Hypocrisy is the logical outcome of such a contradiction.

This article, by Ben Hillier, first appeared in Socialist Alternative.