- The Guardian
- Issue #2025
Well may we say God Save the Queen […] Just two instances, from the time she first sat on the throne in 1952, dutiful representative of the colonial empire and its historical crimes. In the decade 1952 to 1963 British forces crushed the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, forcing between 160,000 and 320,000 Kenyans into concentration camps. Kenyan tribes are currently suing Britain at the European Court of Human Rights for land theft and torture. A few years after Nigerian independence in 1960, British forces with Nigeria’s military crushed the Biafran succession movement. Around one million people of the Ibo ethnic tribe were killed or starved to death.
In the truly chaotic nature of capitalist production farce becomes tragedy becomes spoof. In WA, alumina refinery owner South32 is importing coal after a syndicate it owed $1 billion forced one of the two remaining coalmines in the state – the one that supplies the refinery – into receivership. More than 600 jobs are threatened.
While on the subject of mining monopolies and attendant chaos, some figures: From September 2020 to June 2022, mining company gross operating profits more than doubled, from $35 billion to $81 billion. In contrast, non-mining company operating profits fell from $80.7 billion to $69.6 billion. Global oil and gas shares have risen by more than fifty per cent in 2022.
Which brings me to that graft-and-corruption churning metaphor for capitalism, the casino. Money laundering being chief among the activities of organised crime, casinos (along with the four major banks) are the obvious places to do it. There are law enforcement bodies in pursuit of these perpetrators – AUSTRAC, Australian Federal Police, Victorian, and NSW police, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Australian Institute of Criminology. There’s been the Bergin inquiry, the Bell inquiry and royal commissions in Victoria and Perth, and the Gotterson inquiry into Star casino in Queensland. But not one prosecution. As Tim Costello from the Alliance for Gambling Reform noted, “Casino operators are obviously a protected species like no other in Australia’s corporate landscape. What other company could be found guilty of such egregious failure and not have their license to operate taken from them?”
PARASITE OF THE WEEK: is the PM and his conga line of suckholes (to use an appropriate line from a former Labor PM) who went to London at taxpayers’ expense and paid homage to a decomposing royal cadaver. Meanwhile, here in Australia, various groupings which claim to support an Indigenous Voice in parliament, continue to quake in their boots before the Alter of Private Property, alongside the outright representatives of capital worshiping at it. In London, PM Albanese and his entourage joined the celebration of great wealth and power derived from colonial plunder – including the attempted genocide of Indigenous Australians – fittingly symbolised by a dead monarch. The gathering was seen as an opportunity by the competing members of the Western alliance to give the illusion of unity in promoting capitalism’s God-given right to continue exploiting the world’s finite resources in pursuit of endlessly increasing profits.
