Friday, March 23, 2012

En Passant » Is Clive Palmer mining nuts now? #Auspol

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Is Clive Palmer mining nuts now?

http://enpassant.com.au/2012/03/22/is-clive-palmer-mining-nuts-now/

If Clive Palmer had been wandering the streets of Sydney late at night muttering about how the CIA was funding the Greens, and calling them traitors, anything could have happened to him. Who knows, he might have been tasered.

But that doesn’t happen to mega rich nutters – only Brazilian students and indigenous people.

Last week Tony Abbott and the rest of his brain dead crew were making a song and dance about Craig Thomson’s medical certificate and diagnosing him.

Let me offer a little bit of advice to our medical experts in the Opposition. Don’t worry about Thomson’s certificate. At least he has one.

Ask Clive where his is. After all, he is the Coalition’s biggest donor.

But maybe Clive is on to something. Think about it.Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian has been painting some Greens as unreconstructed Stalinists, Trots, commies…

The CIA has been known to support radical nationalists before, the Khmer Rouge for example. If you read The Australian I’m sure you’ll find Pol Pot is alive and well and living as a Greens’ member somewhere.

Why wouldn’t the CIA fund the Greens?

The CIA created Al Qaeda. That worked out well.

They supported, funded and armed Saddam Hussein against Iran. That worked out well.

They engineered a coup in 1953 against the democratically elected Mossadeq Government and installed the Shah. That worked out well.

The CIA supported a coup against the democratically elected Government of Salvador Allende in Chile.

But how very inscrutable of the CIA. Fund the commies in the Greens to destroy the Australian economy. We are of course, unlike China, such a big threat to the US economy.

Those nasty unions could stop Clive’s profits in a moment. What better way to destroy the Australian economy? Come on Clive, maybe the CIA is funding the AMWU, the CFMEU, the MUA. Whaddya reckon?

Of course Palmer’s attack on the Greens was driven only by altruism; there is no self-interest involved. A multi-billionaire mining magnate complaining about the Greens trying to defend the environment? Nah, no self interest at all.

But hang on, if the rhetoric of the miners is to be believed, the biggest threat to mining is not the Greens but the Minerals Resource Rent Tax. Presumably the ALP is also funded by the CIA. Oh, hang on…Come back Mark Arbib, all is forgiven.

You know Clive, we socialists want to destroy capitalism. What better ploy from the CIA than for them to fund us to destroy the Australian economy and make the world wonderful for US capitalism. They’d just better make sure those evil socialist ideas of democracy and production to satisfy human need don’t catch on elsewhere, like in the belly of the beast, eh Clive?

Palmer has spent most of his life getting his own way. Now he’s got a party he funds fulsomely about to be elected in Queensland so presumably regulation of mining will be relaxed.

Palmer is not used to people opposing him digging up the ground for his profit. When he meets this oppositon he is so used to getting his own way he can’t explain it.

So he makes up conspiracy theories.

Someone so divorced from the reality of ordinary working people has delusions – not of grandeur, but of hubris. It’s almost a case of ‘l’etat, c’est moi’ from Napoleon Clive. And maybe for Palmer it is also a case of ’les tartes, ils sont moi.’ Self-evidently his interest is the ‘national’ interest, that is, the interest of all the ruling class.

When the Sun kings of profit get challenged the ideology of their empires is threatened and the nudity of their worth stands for all ordinary working people to see. So having not lived in the real world of work, of labour, they do what they always do – invent a self serving story.

Most of the time is it almost believable. It has resonance with working people because of their lived reality. You know, lies like the mining bosses care about jobs.

But not Clive Palmer.

The difference between you and me and Palmer is that his wealth means that his views are plastered all over the capitlaist media. And his general message – the Greens are dangerous – gets out to all.

Of course, the Greens are the best thing capitalism has going for it – sensible neoliberals. But they threaten the sectional interests of some capitalists to save capitalism itself so the Palmers of the world vilify them.

Ruling in the interests of capitalism over sectional interests of capital used to be a role the ALP performed before it capitulated completely to neoliberlaism. The Greens now seem to be stepping into the breach. Palmer’s outrageous attack is a warning to them not to take on that role.

Unfortunately the Greens won’t actually use their balance of power in the Senate to force the Labor Party to do anything radical.

But their rhetoric threatens the dominance of ideas of the likes of Palmer and some of his activities in a small way and the rentiers like Palmer fear the Greens might one day grow a political backbone.

If the economy worsens or the Greens actually begin to exercise some power instead of being Democrats in waiting, what Palmer said about them will be a small taste of much worse to come as the rich maggots squirm and worm to protect their rotting patches.

Posted via email from The Left Hack

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