Tuesday 28 June 2016

Conventional wisdom would have it that in times of upheaval the populace will always stick with the incumbent government. Over time this has proven to be true. They seek stability out of self-interest or the fear of the unknown.

In light of the British vote on leaving the European Union the Australian media are endorsing the same line. That the Coalition will benefit from the British decision.

I take a different point of view. In order to explain allow me to meander through the past to make my argument. I need to find a starting point and it is when in 1981 the American people appointed a second-rate actor as its 40^th president.

Ronald Reagan during his term in office unleashed, probably unwittingly, the forerunner of what we call neo conservatism. In opening the political door to religious fundamentalism a new conservatism started to evolve.

One that incorporated church and state rather than its separation. Religious nutters infiltrated conservative politics giving way to the modern Republican Party, neo conservatism and The Tea Party. Along the way the American dream of individual freedom and wealth accumulation was fed into capitalism’s hunger for growth at all cost.

A lady with a bad hair-do came along as if to confirm that the world was about to go down a path that would see in just over just a few decades the wealthy become rich beyond measure. Thatcher put the worker in his place.

The far right would have untold power. The poor and middle class would unwittingly serve the building of wealth and privilege.

Now let’s come forward those few decades and see what the conservative/capitalist experiment has given us.

There is no doubt that greed rules. Greed is good and it can only be obtained via the excesses of unrestricted capitalism and conservative ideology.

The reader doesn’t need me to produce statistical data to prove that the top one percent have more wealth than the rest of us put together.

And the reader doesn’t really need me to prove just how much corruption there is in the world, that the GFC crisis was born of greed and that the world suffered enormously because of it. Greece is but one example. A country in which the wealthy thought it their right, over many years, not to pay tax.

Along came George Bush and he gave three trillion dollars in tax cuts to wealthy Americans. When asked why, he answered that they had given him the Presidency. Later he spent another three trillion on a war in which he told the biggest porky in contemporary American history to justify it.

Everywhere you look you see the rise of the far right, in France, Germany and Italy. People flock to them in protest because no one will listen to them. They latch onto the Trumps of this world as the avenue for their protest. They know he is an idiot but he will speak for them.

Nor do you need me to tell you that the political system is corrupt and we all suffer for it. So also are our financial institutions, our banks, our trade unions and the corporate world.

You don’t need me to tell you just how much all this is based on racism. Xenophobia is the right’s greatest friend.

In Australia our very democracy is under threat from a government that is extremist in its views. A self-serving government that has a hypocrite as a leader. A government that places capitalism before environmentalism.

In 2014 it proved beyond doubt that it wanted the poor to contribute more to the wealth of the rich and privileged. Its budget of that year was universally condemned as the most unfair ever.

His predecessor of course did more to damage the institutions of our democracy than any other. People are angry at anything and everything.

The people have experienced all the bullshit, the lying and some have already expressed their attitude by walking away from the system altogether.

Others are fed up with all the sanitised political gratuitous rhetoric that does nothing more than insult our intelligence. It’s been going on for far too long and people are up for a protest. We in Australia are often slow to see these things but when we do look out.

What we are seeing worldwide is people ‘protesting’. Protesting at their treatment. More often than not they are ignorant of the facts and are just protesting against anything. They just want their voice to be heard.

For 9 years now we have been living with Labor’s self-indulgent leadership wrangles and the Coalition far right ‘born to rule’ mentality.

Every time you read a newspaper you see how corrupt Australian society has become.

I believe that scandal after political scandal has at last woken us from our apathy. We are angry and we want to take it out on some one. How dare they treat us like this? Stuff the polls. We don’t give a shit about the rights and wrongs, we just want to be treated with some respect.

People are disgusted with Turnbull’s caving into the ratbags on the right of his party. He has turned out to be as bigger liar as was Abbott. As hard as that might be.

All the economic and social woes of the world stem from the rise of of the right and unregulated capitalism.

The voters are primed to take to someone with weapons of mass destruction. It might as well be the government. Don’t be surprised.

My thought for the day.

“Power is a malevolent possession when you are prepared to forgo your principles and your country’s wellbeing for the sake of it”.

Robert Kennedy 1968:

“The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages… It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom or our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”