En Passant

So to summarise, rorters on the system either reflect the drive for personal enrichment or profit that the system gives number one priority too. But the system itself is corrupt in the sense that it only exists by exploiting workers and not rewarding the working class for the value it produces.

The solution to corruption is a democratic society in which production is organised by the vast majority of people, we workers, the people who produce the wealth and will do so for the benefit of that vast majority, that is to satisfy human need, not to make a profit. That my friends is socialism.

Big business, politicians, even sports people are ripping off the system with their corruption. Tony Abbott’s expense rorts are not an aberration. Corruption is part and parcel of capitalism and a consequence of the exploitation of workers. Only by overthrowing the ruling class can we abolish the corruption of the system and its rulers and […]

The exorbitant pay rewards the top ABC managers, interviewers, commentators and news readers for playing the bourgeois game so well and guarantees they continue to do so. It also removes the celebrity journalists from the working class. Someone on $75000 in the ABC right now could do the job these over paid voices do so well for their masters and do it better because they would not be, at least initially, part of the bourgeoisie’s club.

Immigration minister Scott Morrison has attempted to erect a wall of silence around the government’s treatment of refugees writes Ben Hillier in Red Flag. But the awful truth is the government’s worst kept secret: the Manus Island and Nauru concentration camps are hellholes.

Whistleblowing hero, Edward Snowden, has revealed that Australia’s equivalent of the Stasi has been tracking the calls of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Indonesian President and a number of other powerful Indonesian politicians, including Ministers and potential candidates in next year’s presidential election. The Indonesians now know the reality of Australian imperialism, or rather Snowden has exposed it to the Indonesian masses and to Australians. Tony Abbott’s Jakarta strategy is in tatters. Good.

Labor and the Liberals have set the template for attacks on unions with their attacks on refugees. The regime of lies will continue and spread from the external other to the other within.

Defending refugees is defending the other. Defending unions is defending the other. One struggle, one fight.

Scott Morrison, Australia’s Immigration minister and devout evangelical Christian, has sent a profoundly disabled four year old child of asylum seekers to Australia’s concentration camp on Nauru. He has also separated Latifa, a Rohingya asylum seeking mother from her new baby in a Brisbane hospital and banished the rest of the family offshore.

First published in Red Flag, this feature looks at the links between capitalism and environmental destruction, the Australian media’s woeful record in failing to explain the science of climate change, and offers practical suggestions for a zero-emissions economy.

The emotional response to Rudd’s apology which was evident everywhere in Australia, well in South Eastern Australia, makes it inevitable that this as an event will be a part of future white Australian mythology about how wonderfully they have always treated the Aboriginal people. It will become part of white Australia’s long history of denial.

What might worry the ruling class about Abbott is not the fact he is a buffoon. He is after all their buffoon. The problem is he might not be able to deliver what they want. He also might not be totally controllable. He is not thoroughly imbued with safe ruling class values. The monkey might upset the organ grinders.