|
June 14, 2010
In The Age Clive Hamilton makes an excellent point about the mining industry's outraged backlash over the Rudd Government's super profits resource tax in relation to democracy.
This adds to a point that Peter Martin had made earlier in the week:
If our government can't pull this off, can't exercise its sovereign right to introduce economic reform in the same way as have other governments when they reduced tariffs, taxed offshore petroleum and taxed goods and services, it will have diminished what is seen as possible.
Hamilton's point is about the exercise of power by multinational capital in a liberal democracy. He says:
A small group of obscenely rich people are acting in concert to bring down an elected government that wants to tax super profits. They want to install a new government sympathetic to their interests.
What we are seeing in its starkest form is a conflict between the raw power of capital and the public interest; a conflict that is disguised by the mining industry and the mega rich owners of capital saying that they are the victim:
The profits that mining companies make from extracting Australia's natural resources have soared, and the return going to the public hasn't kept pace. Even the mining lobby accepts this as well as the resources super profits tax being a better tax than the state mining royalties it will in effect replace.
The state mining royalties are calculated on the volume of dirt rather than dollars, and it has meant that the overall profit share from mining has turned dramatically in favour of resources companies. Now we are in the midst of a boom and the national government is exercising its ownership rights over the land. As the owner of the mineral resources the national government wants to increase the charge for the right to exploit those resources.
The response by the mining companies has been a fear campaign (all those jobs lost) marked by hysteria (communism in Canberra) and lies (eg., the super profits tax is retrospective). It has been supported by partisan hacks in the media ---Business Spectator comes immediately to mind, and "Robert Gottleibsen in particular.
Hamilton adds that:
The mining industry has been basking in its own success since its brilliantly successful campaign to defeat the introduction of an emissions trading system. It was an exercise in political thuggery rarely seen in this country. No remorse was felt over the direct thwarting of the popular will embodied in a government that won an election in which both main parties promised an emissions trading scheme.
He adds that the mutterings of Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer about the spread of communism in Australia are laughable for their paranoid absurdity. What we are in fact seeing is not an attack by the proletariat on the bourgeoisie, but the brutal assertion of power by the richest people in the country.
|
Andrew Forrest, Clive Palmer and Gina Rinehart would not be getting a fraction of the traction they're getting if... many, many years ago... the corporations hadn't conned the workers into believing they we major beneficiaries of business.
Somewhere along the way (I'd guess the mid-80s) the public swallowed the line that big business was their friend. We are all in this together etc.
So now think we have so much tied up in the well-being of the corporations that we dare not inconvenience them. That is, we simply cannot bite the hand that feed us.
Never mind that the other hand is firmly gripping our balls!
Goodness me! Just look at the tripe BP is pushing to dodge it's responsibilities! Apparently any penalty imposed against BP is a slap in the face to the struggling "mum and dad" shareholders back in the UK. booooo! etc.