"All animals are equal but some are more equal than others."
- "Animal Farm" by George Orwell.
Police Brutality in Occupy Oakland.
This is one of those times where try as I might, I cannot bring myself to find something funny (even snide) to say, at least in the opening paragraph. The following two videos might serve to explain my state of mind.
Occupy Oakland - OWS police violence
Veteran for Peace Scott Olsen Injured
Fractured skull, serious condition.
Same event from another angle.
The leaders of various states are quoted as being 'concerned' with the cost of the protests ballooning out their limited budget. I am more concerned with the ready use of heavy-handed tactics to quash a peaceful protest in order to protect the exact same thing the Occupy movement was about - Money Being More Important Than People.
I capitalised that, so everyone who prefers reading things from conspiracy pages, Fox newsprint or whatever other anti-OWS establishment can Read My LIps and get it right. Sure, there are people in OWS who are all about personal grievances (most of these connected to the crumbling system but I digress), but the movement itself is about not letting Money talk as if it's People. The whole movement. The core idea.
The world is not a corporate boardroom or an oyster for those with the dirtiest tricks and sharpest nails, voting and democracy should not therefore, work like a shareholders meeting. The rich should not be allowed to form 'mega-persons' and have their votes count more than the others. Owning 40% of the world's wealth should NOT have allowed them to own 40% of the world's votes (which is effectively exactly what it is now).
So it's especially discouraging when we see events like these, when peaceful citizens who had served the country in the past being injured because of a random government crack down (Scott Olsen is an Iraq war veteran in the group Veterans for Peace). The people in power don't care about people anymore they care about budgets, political face (the police continue to say they acted with restraint), and how 'good' they look to their investors. Oh wait, I meant campaign 'contributors'.
Scott Olsen was a faceless person in a massive crowd, and now he is a symbol. The videos of police first injuring, then hampering efforts to save him have gone viral (over 300,000 views last count on the first video), and from here, we know that this has become a war, but one that could go unnoticed, and lost without even being fought.
Australia's Complacency
Those of us who are complacent in the illusion of 'equality' forget Orwell's timeless words in Animal Farm, and the reason that book became the keystone and compass to how we view society and the ugliness contained therein. We forget that being 'equal' in the eyes of the pigs means something very different from how we view equality. We live in the illusion that we can join the better ranks of 'equal', forgetting that this very idea was given to us by the pigs. We toil and die while the pigs wallow in the knowledge that they meant we should all be 'equal', and we are the animals who are 'more equal than others'.
We are the 99%, we are being 'equalised' into oblivion, while we pretend that striving to join the pigs is what true equality is. It's not. We don't control the police, we don't authorise the use of tear-gas, but we do all speak the right speak, walk the right walk, and hope that would drag us out of the pit of 'equality', though we know the chances of that are literally 1% in 7 billion.
Australia has public welfare, effectively free higher education with a very low interest loan from the government, pensions, superannuation, medicare, transport concessions... the list could go on. And we haven't suffered the debt crises that have driven some other big nations to the wall. So the often-heard slogan about the Occupy movement here in Australia is that 'we don't need it, they don't know what they are fighting for'.
Yet we forget how money and the media have already spoken for our democracy, many times over, and continue to do so. Australia is walking in step with America, copying its economic success and allowing its 'unique' style of government into its backyard with nary a glance backwards.
Think of Kevin Rudd and the Mining Tax fiasco. Without the public fear and hate campaign driven by the big-money holders like Gina Rhinehart, the mining tax would have probably gone through, Mr Rudd would still be PM, and the miners would have to pay a fair share of their earnings from land owned by everyone. Why is it 'equal' when the 1% can dredge our resources dry, then turn around and make us pay for it (literally), and not owe us anything in return?
It's the grand illusion of course. That if you study hard, go into the right field, get to know the right people, say the right things, and smile and nod just right, that you will make it. The rich are all about 'everyone should pay equal taxes' and 'everyone has an equal opportunity', and 'people who think they aren't equal are just bums'. Are we such idiots that we just take it for granted that people who are rich got there through the advice they give out? Do we really go out and buy books like "Rich dad, poor dad", in the hopes that the rich are all about making everyone else as rich as them?
The fact that there exists a 1% who owns about 40% of the world's wealth should suggest that becoming the 1% is all about grabbing what you can, minimising loss (money that goes to other people, I.E. the other 99%), and just in general acting in the best way possible to earn an extra buck, environment and welfare be damned.
Abbott is a right-wing libertarian weather-vane. Just that phrase should send alarm bells ringing. Libertarians have been known in the past to bring real economic strength, but like everything, that should be worked in moderation. Australia is seeing the effects of a too-right-wing and too-libertarian system of managing money. The drive for more growth, more money at any cost has to come into balance at some point, and it usually doesn't (because the model itself is reliant on more and more growth).
We can't possibly all believe that if all the companies keep growing, it will just mean more wages and such to spread around. We live on a world with LIMITED space and resources. It doesn't take a great leap of logic or imagination to know what happens when organisms get bigger and bigger and are competing for space and food. They starve out those that are smaller, or consume them. Once that's over the tipping point, more growth is not only not sustainable, it's actively detrimental to everything that relies on this growth.
If we look at everything OWS has been about, then look at what Australia might be like with Abbott in power, we might feel a little less good about ourselves and how safe our democracy really is.
1. In the US, the right-wing Republicans have blocked so much of the Democrats' intended bills and legislations that any major change is almost impossible. Forms that were intended to help the low and middle class families were rejected, while those that support the rich are allowed through.
In Australia, Abbott is doing just that. He's turning the whole political sphere into a circus, and this sets a bad precedent. It means whichever ELECTED government is in power, it cannot do its work. We will have 4 years of constant battling and lobbying and very little actually getting done by a government WE put in power, because the guy or gal who lost is a sore loser.
2. Taxation. Despite the moaning and griping from people who view the taxation figures and immediately go "oh wow, the poor are bums because they contribute the least % to total tax collected", the mathematics of progressive taxing goes beyond flat-value percentages. Progressive taxing is designed to collect what people can afford, that is, it aims to get money from people with as fair an impact on their lives as possible across the board.
So a flat low tax for example, would benefit the rich only - a person earning $200,000 a year can live on 90% of their earnings fine, a person earning $20,000 won't even be able to afford housing and food with 10% flat tax on income. Add that to the GST (another 10% on everything bought/eaten), and you can see why flat tax rates are only beneficial to the rich, they can afford it, the more 'equal' people can't.
And we go to the Carbon Tax here. The Carbon Tax has been so blown out of proportion by Abbott that people seem to think it's going to double living costs. Living costs have been going up, and in fact, jumped upwards with the introduction of the GST. He wants to see lower taxes/no tax on companies to pay for their emissions, and wants the rest of us (from tax revenue) to pay for it. Corporations already do many things that the normal populace can't, like hiding most of their money in offshore accounts. Their effective tax rate in the U.S is about 12-17%, it's probably higher here in Australia, but I'd guess no where near as 'equal' as what the rest of us are paying.
3. Detention. The Texas state is governed by a Republican, and last year removed the 'last meal' rights of people on death row (Texas also has the highest percentage of death penalties). Recently, they canned lunch for Saturday and Sunday, presumably because the inmates don't work on those days.
Neither the government nor the Liberals have a good solution for Detention Centres, and to be frank, the Greens are too unrealistic (there will be another blog with my suggested solution, no really). With Abbott in charge however, boats will be 'turned back', and we will be sending people off to an island. That will do wonders for their mental health, being stuck on an island with few modern facilities, no connection to the world, forgotten refugees that must rely on the hospitality of an island nation that has no understanding of their issues and probably little care. It's worse than the Malaysia deal, and it's worse that we are shopping around for the cheapest offshore detention because of Abbott's 'must say no' policy.
It seems possible that we will have Abbott as PM, though recent figures on his personal popularity aren't that inspiring. While the lobbyists (with mining money and poker machine money) have done all they can to give people false information and destroy our elected government, we're completely forgetting that the TV lies, and that we're all being spoken for, by money. Again. Kevin or Turnbull 12? Only if Gina Rhinehart stops being a grasping Orwellian pig.
Our thoughts are with Scott Olsen, and we hope he can make a full recovery.
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