En Passant

Seventeen billion dollar woman Gina Rinehart has warned against the rest of the country using the mining industry as a giant ATM. Evidently she can’t afford it.

As both Labor and Liberal governments attack or will attack the poor and working class maybe it is time to make some big withdrawals from the Bank of Rinehart to provide for socially useful spending.

Palmer is a filthy rich miner and resort owner. I think it will be a titanic task for the old dinosaur to win any seats let alone the majority he says he has his eyes on, with him as Prime Minister. It really is tin foil hat time. However his complaint, that there is no difference between Gillard and Abbott, is in one sense correct. The Labor Party and the Liberals are both parties of neoliberalism. They may disagree about the best way to oversight the shift of wealth to the rich and capital from labour and the poor but they share that common goal. Such is the degeneration of Australian politics that no-one on the Labor Left or in the mainstream union movement has made public the same criticism and fought openly against Labor Party neoliberalism.

There are no easy solutions to the horrors capitalism unleashes every day but our task must be to build mass revolutionary socialist parties in country after country to enable workers to challenge the system that terrorises them daily in their workplace and terrorises the globe. That won’t happen overnight but it is an historic necessity, needed right now.

There will be no official tears for the 323 cadet sailors and others on the Belgrano whom Thatcher ordered executed. Rather Thatcher’s funeral will be a celebration of their deaths in a crude re-writing of history to defend the warmongering of the British ruling class today. The past is a tool in the battle of the present for the future.

That is why it is right for the people who suffered at the hands of Thatcher and who continue to suffer at the hands of her political descendants on both sides to celebrate her death and continue the fight against Thatcherism today.

What Labor’s limp, flaccid, weak-kneed, spineless and gutless response has done is lock in superannuation as an onshore tax haven for the lurks and perks men and women for decades. The rest of us will pay through the nose for the wealthy to enjoy their lavish toe tapping, hip shaking, grog guzzling brain dead lifestyles in retirement.

What is missing in all of this, in Australian politics, is a socialist alternative here and now to mobilise workers to defend their interests in Australia. The Marxism 2013 Conference over Easter in Melbourne is bringing together a thousand people that, with unity as one of its main foci, may lay the groundwork for building just such an organisation.

Such is the degeneration of Australian politics in response to the fall in profit rates around the globe since the late 60s and early 70s that minor differences between the 2 major parties have become the grand debates. My pin head can fit more angels on it than yours!

Gillard and Abbott are using racism to try to win the vote of sections of the working class. Since Labor can’t win that support by badmouthing refugees and locking them up in concentration camps its new approach has been section 457 temporary employment visas and the racist argument that they are used to take ‘Aussie’ jobs.

Is the Wildersisation of our politics proceeding at an increased pace?

Perhaps it is, given that the ALP rather than opposing this racist filth on principle, has joined the Liberals in the race to the racist bottom, making racist vilification, slander and even physical attacks part of the culture of life in Australia.

Last week the mining companies sent a shot across the bows of the Labor Party government with advertisements purporting to show how they really do pay a lot of tax. According to the ATO statistics for 2009/10 73% of mining companies were non-taxable. The mining industry has the highest percentage of non-taxpayers of any industry – about 12% higher than the average.

Tell me again Labor why we can’t tax these corporate bludgers as they plunder our resources?