Behind every great fortune is a great theft

Behind every great fortune is a great theft
By BLUE COLLAR BOHEMIAN
14 February 2006

As the new year grinds on its way Your Correspondent has been reflecting on recent events, and has come to some pretty depressing conclusions about the immediate future, given the Brave New World we are being blessed with, courtesy of our chosen oppressors.

The next big wedge?

In the wake of Ngyuen Van Tuong's execution by the Singapore Inc. Cartel for the crime of heroin smuggling on their turf, it's time to look beyond the outpourings of grief and outrage at that residual enthusiasm for the string-up from the hanging and flogging brigade that, according to the Nielsen poll, are 47 percent of the electorate.

This is fruit ripe for the picking by the right sort of unprincipled political opportunist ruthlessly determined to hold on to power by whatever means, who has seen his electoral shine fade in the wake of unpopular work laws, crying "wolf" on terrorism too many times, the Iraq atrocity further imploding, and flagrant abuse of executive power in the parliament.

Let us imagine a situation where, in the face of an overbearing police and spy agency harassment campaign, an attack on cops or spooks is perpetrated by the targets of the harassment. The overwhelming police response creates a Paris Riots situation that leads to police deaths and injuries, on top of death and injury inflicted by police on the target population. "Mainstream" outrage against the target population for defending themselves against police attack, incited by the corporate media, with "state of emergency" clampdowns to manipulate public fear, would make it easy for the said political operator to "regretfully, given the extraordinary circumstances”, call for reintroduction of the death penalty". Just wait and see.

As it is looking like Mrs Bucket's little rodent may have bitten off more than the electorate is prepared to chew with the Workchoices (Obey or Starve) laws, it's natural to expect a whole slew of stunts, contrivances, moral panics and fear frenzies to emanate from the Bennelong Bunker. With the enthusiastic support of the above-mentioned corporate media shills, a cavalcade of evil threats to Our Way Of Life will be paraded before us, with the strong message that only the Wyatt Earp of Wollstonecraft can stand up to Them, protecting Us from the seething hordes without and (shudder!) within.

While the sight of armoured riot police attacking striking workers and pickets at lockouts will no doubt look unpleasant, a moral panic is always good medicine for a government on the ropes. A terrorist outrage either provoked or perpetrated by the spooks and cops, like the Hilton bombing of 1978, would be the "Reichstag Fire" needed to float the death penalty to an anxious electorate, and the ALP would tear itself apart as Beazley and the docile fuckwits around him roll over to Howard, while the few remaining opposition members with a spine refuse to support the death penalty on principled grounds.

What if Howard can't win next time in the face of the IR and further civil liberties clampdowns? If his electoral prospects are really down the toilet, who's to say that Howard and Ruddock, and more than likely Beazley, wouldn’t find "extraordinary and urgent" reasons to suspend the next election?

I wouldn't put it past Beazley to join Howard in such a project, after all, Howard himself said Beazley would be his first choice in forming a national emergency coalition government, and I doubt Beazley has the strength of character to resist a call to "patriotic duty". After all he has a juvenile fascination with military subjects that most boys get over around the age of 12, and has talked so much shit on the subject of "security" that someone should just give him back his blanket and let him suck his thumb.

Cronulla

Welcome to the Shire, where the trash is white and none too bright. Back in the seventies, when your correspondent was a greasy young motorcycle hoodlum, I would ride to places like Cronulla and the northern beaches with my equally greasy mates to bait the locals, whom we referred to as "weeds", and "shark-fuckers". They considered themselves blonde gods, we considered them overprivileged prats. They considered us unfit to enter their local areas, and sought to drive us out. Sometimes we won, sometimes they did. There were no spy cameras then, which made it easier to get away with such things than now, but it's been going on for years in the sense of classes and subcultures clashing.

The deliberate race-baiting indulged in by the corporate media to stir up the events of December 11, and embraced afterwards by both the state government and opposition, plus the opportunity to further attack civil rights seized by the government, points to the pressures that will build to create the scenario I outlined above. And in the face of the IR changes, the political Right throws down that old and reliable divider of those it seeks to oppress, the race card, and plays it to the hilt.

Malignant science

Towards the end of last year the ABC Science Show on Radio National reported on some exciting developments in the world of forensic science. Angela van Daal, Associate Dean of Research at Bond University has announced the development of a technique to identify the racial characteristics of someone from DNA evidence.

Unsurprisingly, the first identifiers discovered are for red hair and dark skin, so the major troublemakers, the Blacks and the Celts, can be dealt with promptly. How reassuring, I feel safer already.

This problem with malignant science largely goes back to the consequences of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and its appropriation by the British and American scientific establishment, deciding that evolution was a brutal process of competition and selection, "survival of the fittest". At the same time as Galton, Spencer, Huxley and all the other western scientific heavies were using this idea to rationalise the most egregious excesses of slavery, racism, imperialism and capitalism, on the grounds that white Anglo-American males were the peak of evolution and destined by Nature to conquer all before them, others, mainly Kropotkin, Poliakoff, and Reclus saw much more evidence of co-operation and mutual aid in nature than the Malthusian "war of all against all", so loved by the Manchester school of laissez-faire economic exploitation.

This bogus science had, by the early 20th century, given us racial eugenics, and led directly to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and mass sterilizations on "inferior" or "unfit" people in places as diverse as the US, Canada, Sweden and Australia well into the 1960s and 70s. Brutal practices such as separating indigenous children from their parents, on the most spurious and racist grounds, continued in Australia as explicit policy till the 60s, and continues in the disproportionate numbers of indigenous people entrapped in the welfare and prison systems, often going from one directly to the other.

Disturbing also is the number of scientifically skilled, and therefore intelligent people are prepared to collaborate in State atrocities by developing the most egregious and disgusting weapons, surveillance technology and torture systems. From the gas filled trenches of WWI, napalm and nuclear fire in WWII, Agent Orange in Vietnam to the depleted uranium of Kosovo and Iraq, malignant science has left a bloody stain across countless lives snuffed out or made miserable.

It was rumoured during the Reagan era that US weapons labs sought out sufferers of Aspberger's Syndrome, a type of autism, to exploit both their unusual mathematical ability and guileless lack of conscience. Such are the ethical standards of the Masters of War, who are much more psychopathic than autistic themselves.

White men in suits

Living as we are in the Emerald City, and just seen the Wizard of Oz for the last ten years go off to collect his fee for services rendered, and learnt his replacement got the job for being the most successful wheedler of funds from his corporate overlords, we can sit back now and watch the miracle of democracy unfold as Corporate Whore Party A and Corporate Whore Party B duke it out to prove one is a bigger bunch of cop-loving racists than the other.

Civil liberties are falling like Tasmanian trees as Scourge-of-all -the Wogs Debnam hops into Iemma and Scully for not declaring martial law and having all males of Arab or looks-like-Arab descent between 15 and 40 rounded up and shot, and the brave Sons of Toil have matched them in vilification and pandering to the white-trash law ’n order, hang em and flog ’em lynch mob that worship Stan Zemanek and Alan Jones, and if they can read, Piers Akerman.

As evidence mounts that the fiscal genius of Michael Egan amounts to a decade of deferred maintenance, and the ever diminishing gene pool of the ALP has thrown up the spectacles of Costa, Hatsiszergos and Tripodi, just to mention the most brutal and gormless, we can be fairly sure the Sussex St Ship of Fools is heading for the rocks. Only the equally apalling spectacle of the alternative gives the League of Trogs and Terrigals even half a chance of re-election. As if it really matters.

Dead Bastards Society

John Patrick Ducker, 1932 - 2005,
Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer, 1937 - 2005.

Good riddance to both of them. Ducker spent his time in the labour movement whoring his scabby arse to the police special branch, ASIO, and the CIA, and then went to be chairman of the board of Aristocrat Leisure, a poker machine manufacturer. Notorious for his voracious greed at Aristocrat, Ducker was the poster boy for the incestuous and despicable co-dependence of the NSW ALP Right and the corrupt and criminal linked gaming industry. I piss on his grave.

Packer, born to privilege, never knew the meaning of "enough". Suffering a childhood of illness, didn't stop Packer picking up where his father finished in growing a media and gambling empire of vast wealth and little public benefit. With a once in a lifetime opportunity to sell Alan Bond his TV station at the top of the market and buy it back at the bottom, plucking Bond like the turkey he always was, Packer then bought up big in gambling, the best way to extract money from the gullible and stupid. Never fond of paying tax, Packer had the politicians thoroughly spooked when called to answer to a Senate enquiry.

For all his professed "patriotism", Packer kept his companies in Caribbean tax shelters and bolstered his public reputation by making tax-deductible donations to things he found he might need, like defibrillators in ambulances, costing him a lot less than actually paying tax like a PAYE taxpayer. When you are obscenely rich you have the wherewithall to be generous to those whose loyalty you can exploit to serve your own purposes, leading to the "heartwarming" tales of Packer's generosity.

Packer famously once said, after being revived from heart failure,"I've seen the Other Side, and there's nothing there, so you can behave as you bloody well like and it doesn't matter".

This credo he lived up to to the hilt. Ethical considerations were not high on his list of priorities unless they were of some personal benefit.

Balzac said "Behind every great fortune is a great theft".

We wait to see what his son now does with the money, as he'd been hanging out for his father to drop off the twig for years, if evidence to the One-Tel phone company collapse enquiry is to be believed. Kerry Packer has gone to that eternity of oblivion from which we come and to which we return, and he won't be missed. Except by his pilot, who didn't even get his kidney back.

Well readers, that’s all the shit that I'll be slinging at the moment, and there's plenty more where that came from. Anyone, with any decency and self respect, with any sense of whats right and wrong, must be appalled at what this society is becoming, or what is being revealed as the thin veneer of "democratic freedom" is stripped away and thrown in the dustbin of history. The only proper response to this, as represented 1984's O'Brien, the thought policeman who told Winston Smith that the future is "a boot smashing into a human face forever", is to pull off the leg wearing the boot and shove it up Big Brother's arse, leaving him to bleed to death.

As Stan Goff, an ex-US marine who had the scales fall from his eyes, was quoted as saying in the latest issue of Adbusters Magazine (an excellent read!), "Revolution is not a choice between capitalism and socialism. It is a choice between the violent overthrow of the existing order or our extermination by that order. Is that clear enough? Do we need a little sugar with that?"

Indeed.



powered by FreeFind		Behind every great fortune is a great theft By BLUE COLLAR BOHEMIAN 14 February 2006 As the new year grinds on its way Your Correspondent has been reflecting on recent events, and has come to some pretty depressing conclusions about the immediate future, given the Brave New World we are being blessed with, courtesy of our chosen oppressors. The next big wedge? In the wake of Ngyuen Van Tuong's execution by the Singapore Inc. Cartel for the crime of heroin smuggling on their turf, it's time to look beyond the outpourings of grief and outrage at that residual enthusiasm for the string-up from the hanging and flogging brigade that, according to the Nielsen poll, are 47 percent of the electorate. This is fruit ripe for the picking by the right sort of unprincipled political opportunist ruthlessly determined to hold on to power by whatever means, who has seen his electoral shine fade in the wake of unpopular work laws, crying "wolf" on terrorism too many times, the Iraq atrocity further imploding, and flagrant abuse of executive power in the parliament. Let us imagine a situation where, in the face of an overbearing police and spy agency harassment campaign, an attack on cops or spooks is perpetrated by the targets of the harassment. The overwhelming police response creates a Paris Riots situation that leads to police deaths and injuries, on top of death and injury inflicted by police on the target population. "Mainstream" outrage against the target population for defending themselves against police attack, incited by the corporate media, with "state of emergency" clampdowns to manipulate public fear, would make it easy for the said political operator to "regretfully, given the extraordinary circumstances”, call for reintroduction of the death penalty". Just wait and see. As it is looking like Mrs Bucket's little rodent may have bitten off more than the electorate is prepared to chew with the Workchoices (Obey or Starve) laws, it's natural to expect a whole slew of stunts, contrivances, moral panics and fear frenzies to emanate from the Bennelong Bunker. With the enthusiastic support of the above-mentioned corporate media shills, a cavalcade of evil threats to Our Way Of Life will be paraded before us, with the strong message that only the Wyatt Earp of Wollstonecraft can stand up to Them, protecting Us from the seething hordes without and (shudder!) within. While the sight of armoured riot police attacking striking workers and pickets at lockouts will no doubt look unpleasant, a moral panic is always good medicine for a government on the ropes. A terrorist outrage either provoked or perpetrated by the spooks and cops, like the Hilton bombing of 1978, would be the "Reichstag Fire" needed to float the death penalty to an anxious electorate, and the ALP would tear itself apart as Beazley and the docile fuckwits around him roll over to Howard, while the few remaining opposition members with a spine refuse to support the death penalty on principled grounds. What if Howard can't win next time in the face of the IR and further civil liberties clampdowns? If his electoral prospects are really down the toilet, who's to say that Howard and Ruddock, and more than likely Beazley, wouldn’t find "extraordinary and urgent" reasons to suspend the next election? I wouldn't put it past Beazley to join Howard in such a project, after all, Howard himself said Beazley would be his first choice in forming a national emergency coalition government, and I doubt Beazley has the strength of character to resist a call to "patriotic duty". After all he has a juvenile fascination with military subjects that most boys get over around the age of 12, and has talked so much shit on the subject of "security" that someone should just give him back his blanket and let him suck his thumb. Cronulla Welcome to the Shire, where the trash is white and none too bright. Back in the seventies, when your correspondent was a greasy young motorcycle hoodlum, I would ride to places like Cronulla and the northern beaches with my equally greasy mates to bait the locals, whom we referred to as "weeds", and "shark-fuckers". They considered themselves blonde gods, we considered them overprivileged prats. They considered us unfit to enter their local areas, and sought to drive us out. Sometimes we won, sometimes they did. There were no spy cameras then, which made it easier to get away with such things than now, but it's been going on for years in the sense of classes and subcultures clashing. The deliberate race-baiting indulged in by the corporate media to stir up the events of December 11, and embraced afterwards by both the state government and opposition, plus the opportunity to further attack civil rights seized by the government, points to the pressures that will build to create the scenario I outlined above. And in the face of the IR changes, the political Right throws down that old and reliable divider of those it seeks to oppress, the race card, and plays it to the hilt. Malignant science Towards the end of last year the ABC Science Show on Radio National reported on some exciting developments in the world of forensic science. Angela van Daal, Associate Dean of Research at Bond University has announced the development of a technique to identify the racial characteristics of someone from DNA evidence. Unsurprisingly, the first identifiers discovered are for red hair and dark skin, so the major troublemakers, the Blacks and the Celts, can be dealt with promptly. How reassuring, I feel safer already. This problem with malignant science largely goes back to the consequences of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and its appropriation by the British and American scientific establishment, deciding that evolution was a brutal process of competition and selection, "survival of the fittest". At the same time as Galton, Spencer, Huxley and all the other western scientific heavies were using this idea to rationalise the most egregious excesses of slavery, racism, imperialism and capitalism, on the grounds that white Anglo-American males were the peak of evolution and destined by Nature to conquer all before them, others, mainly Kropotkin, Poliakoff, and Reclus saw much more evidence of co-operation and mutual aid in nature than the Malthusian "war of all against all", so loved by the Manchester school of laissez-faire economic exploitation. This bogus science had, by the early 20th century, given us racial eugenics, and led directly to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and mass sterilizations on "inferior" or "unfit" people in places as diverse as the US, Canada, Sweden and Australia well into the 1960s and 70s. Brutal practices such as separating indigenous children from their parents, on the most spurious and racist grounds, continued in Australia as explicit policy till the 60s, and continues in the disproportionate numbers of indigenous people entrapped in the welfare and prison systems, often going from one directly to the other. Disturbing also is the number of scientifically skilled, and therefore intelligent people are prepared to collaborate in State atrocities by developing the most egregious and disgusting weapons, surveillance technology and torture systems. From the gas filled trenches of WWI, napalm and nuclear fire in WWII, Agent Orange in Vietnam to the depleted uranium of Kosovo and Iraq, malignant science has left a bloody stain across countless lives snuffed out or made miserable. It was rumoured during the Reagan era that US weapons labs sought out sufferers of Aspberger's Syndrome, a type of autism, to exploit both their unusual mathematical ability and guileless lack of conscience. Such are the ethical standards of the Masters of War, who are much more psychopathic than autistic themselves. White men in suits Living as we are in the Emerald City, and just seen the Wizard of Oz for the last ten years go off to collect his fee for services rendered, and learnt his replacement got the job for being the most successful wheedler of funds from his corporate overlords, we can sit back now and watch the miracle of democracy unfold as Corporate Whore Party A and Corporate Whore Party B duke it out to prove one is a bigger bunch of cop-loving racists than the other. Civil liberties are falling like Tasmanian trees as Scourge-of-all -the Wogs Debnam hops into Iemma and Scully for not declaring martial law and having all males of Arab or looks-like-Arab descent between 15 and 40 rounded up and shot, and the brave Sons of Toil have matched them in vilification and pandering to the white-trash law ’n order, hang em and flog ’em lynch mob that worship Stan Zemanek and Alan Jones, and if they can read, Piers Akerman. As evidence mounts that the fiscal genius of Michael Egan amounts to a decade of deferred maintenance, and the ever diminishing gene pool of the ALP has thrown up the spectacles of Costa, Hatsiszergos and Tripodi, just to mention the most brutal and gormless, we can be fairly sure the Sussex St Ship of Fools is heading for the rocks. Only the equally apalling spectacle of the alternative gives the League of Trogs and Terrigals even half a chance of re-election. As if it really matters. Dead Bastards Society John Patrick Ducker, 1932 - 2005, Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer, 1937 - 2005. Good riddance to both of them. Ducker spent his time in the labour movement whoring his scabby arse to the police special branch, ASIO, and the CIA, and then went to be chairman of the board of Aristocrat Leisure, a poker machine manufacturer. Notorious for his voracious greed at Aristocrat, Ducker was the poster boy for the incestuous and despicable co-dependence of the NSW ALP Right and the corrupt and criminal linked gaming industry. I piss on his grave. Packer, born to privilege, never knew the meaning of "enough". Suffering a childhood of illness, didn't stop Packer picking up where his father finished in growing a media and gambling empire of vast wealth and little public benefit. With a once in a lifetime opportunity to sell Alan Bond his TV station at the top of the market and buy it back at the bottom, plucking Bond like the turkey he always was, Packer then bought up big in gambling, the best way to extract money from the gullible and stupid. Never fond of paying tax, Packer had the politicians thoroughly spooked when called to answer to a Senate enquiry. For all his professed "patriotism", Packer kept his companies in Caribbean tax shelters and bolstered his public reputation by making tax-deductible donations to things he found he might need, like defibrillators in ambulances, costing him a lot less than actually paying tax like a PAYE taxpayer. When you are obscenely rich you have the wherewithall to be generous to those whose loyalty you can exploit to serve your own purposes, leading to the "heartwarming" tales of Packer's generosity. Packer famously once said, after being revived from heart failure,"I've seen the Other Side, and there's nothing there, so you can behave as you bloody well like and it doesn't matter". This credo he lived up to to the hilt. Ethical considerations were not high on his list of priorities unless they were of some personal benefit. Balzac said "Behind every great fortune is a great theft". We wait to see what his son now does with the money, as he'd been hanging out for his father to drop off the twig for years, if evidence to the One-Tel phone company collapse enquiry is to be believed. Kerry Packer has gone to that eternity of oblivion from which we come and to which we return, and he won't be missed. Except by his pilot, who didn't even get his kidney back. Well readers, that’s all the shit that I'll be slinging at the moment, and there's plenty more where that came from. Anyone, with any decency and self respect, with any sense of whats right and wrong, must be appalled at what this society is becoming, or what is being revealed as the thin veneer of "democratic freedom" is stripped away and thrown in the dustbin of history. The only proper response to this, as represented 1984's O'Brien, the thought policeman who told Winston Smith that the future is "a boot smashing into a human face forever", is to pull off the leg wearing the boot and shove it up Big Brother's arse, leaving him to bleed to death. As Stan Goff, an ex-US marine who had the scales fall from his eyes, was quoted as saying in the latest issue of Adbusters Magazine (an excellent read!), "Revolution is not a choice between capitalism and socialism. It is a choice between the violent overthrow of the existing order or our extermination by that order. Is that clear enough? Do we need a little sugar with that?" Indeed.