The Greek uprisings, deaths of Alexis, Michel, and November 17

– Mo'lem La'veh

by Gerry Georgatos

A youth uprising spread throughout Greece after the December 6 killing by a police officer of fifteen year old Alexandros Grigoropolous, in one of the poorest Greek suburbs, Exarcheia . Alexis threw a firebomb at a police car and one of two police officers, Epaminondas Korkoneas retaliated. A few days later in Melbourne, Australia, a youth, same age, who pulled a knife was shot dead by police officers. There is no such thing as the Greek Silence. Greece is still enduring riots, protests, rallies and more importantly riveting discourse. In Australia, aside the Australian Silence, most quarters accepted the death of the Melbourne youth as the warranted keeping of the peace.

In Greece, accountability has led to the arrest of the police officers, the resignation of officials and a Minister (it was not accepted), the possibility of the Government's toppling. Some nations tie their government accordingly to the events of the civic and social tapestry. Civil and social order is a governmental function, and when they aren't functioning the government is held responsible without recourse to mitigating arguments as are often held up to their constituents for instance in Australia.

Greece is the country that delivered the notion of democracy, where government became about the people, and therefore the people became government, hence the electorate and constituency. The redistribution of the land, of the economy, of wealth came with this democratising. Greece unfolded the first bona fide universal human rights language, and tried to refine it through Solon and Pericles, harnessed by Dracon, and obsessed by Plato and Aristotle. This unfolding human rights language has never left the Greek identity. Even while usurped by centuries of oppression under the Romans, Ottomans and the western Europeans, Greeks obsessively continue to identify with the alleged beauty and romance of their historical founding of policies of social inclusion qualified in subsequent notions of equity, equality, and justice, further underwritten by the pursuit of understanding what is right, what is good, what is universal, what is ontological and teleological.

Most newspapers in Greece have names associated with the aspirations of the unfolding human rights language, such as the Eleftherotypia (free press, with 'free' derived from freedom). Newspapers are the most prodigious business in Greece. If you travel to Greece you will find Greeks everywhere talking to each other, strangers, about the state and the human condition, at train stations, in piazzas, as if all Greece is a political agora.

Greece is a very westernised nation, with its eleven million resident Greeks very different to the many more millions of Greeks who live overseas and who identify with a past Greek experience that is not contemporary on the thousands of Greek islands and the rugged mainland. Most resident Greeks do not have religious weddings, rather civil agreements and all Greek women keep their maiden name. Greek families average only one child.

 

Greece has tried to move with the western world's capitalist presence, with meritocracy, in overture to the multinational overlords. Nevertheless, Greek citizenry, though its conservative past has been relaxed, patriarchy demolished, has refused to exclusively universally identify with capitalism and its contemporary excesses. Greeks cling to what here in Australia and in the USA people scoff as unrealistic, and that is the universal human rights accords pursued by the ancient Greek democrats. Demos are the people, and democracy is intended as a state for the people, not as a state for multinationals and the demos as their workforce.

On the 17^th of December banners hung from the Acropolis, declaring solidarity, “WE WILL DETERMINE OUR HISTORY OURSELVES...” On the 19^th of December Greek citizens, deemed as anarchists by the western press, hijacked a state television station. Greeks have a contemporary history of resisting capitalism's influences and their overlords. Greece is the only country where the CIA station chief, Richard Welch, was assassinated (1975). Greece recognises Palestine and Israel, and whether it has a left wing or less than a left wing government it will not deny Palestine's right to statehood. The US Congress has not been friendly to Greece because of these types of conscientious decrees and at one time George Bush had Greece on his nemeses list.

During the last year we have watched some of the world's governments describe the financial collapses of the share market. Most governments have separated themselves from the collapses and purport to be victims, rather than perpetrators. The Rudd and Obama Governments use the global financial crises as to excuse everything they do. The reality is that governments are responsible for them, even if they are pressured by the forces of influential multinational companies and institutions. It is governments that implement governance and structures, that enact legislation. The Greek Government has accepted some responsibility for the actions of its police force and therefore has been what other governments in terms of the global financial crisis have not been, accountable for their laws, for their civil governance.

All of Greece rose into riots at the killing of 15 year old Alexis Grigoropoulos: Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras, Larissa, Heraklion, Chania, Ioannina, Volos, Kozani and Komotini, all the major centres. Alex represents poverty, and all poverty is induced. Poverty is often kept from challenging the affluent through cruel and brutal means. Alexis is the world's symbol of the profound systemic economic crisis that can only be addressed by a redistribution of the world's resources and wealth. The response to the death of Alexis represents the distrust by the people in the institutions of the state.

In a capitalist world, arguing meritocracy, every nation state is corrupt, because corruption, the circumvention of justice, is the only way to oppress the poor. In nation states such as Australia, the corruption is worse, because the police state that Australia is, is so right wing and viciously hierarchical, that it deceives its people through multinational company owned media. They determine the lead politicians and policies of this country, where dissemination is severely limited not to threaten the illicit gaining elites. In Greece where the media is freer, the brutality is often a physical one rather than the worse one we psychologically endure in this country through the subversives of silence and delusion.

For Greek governments to protect institutions as the multinationals do in Australia through a subservient mainstream media, they at times have to regress to brutal force. There is some sort of cryptic cruel honesty in brutal force, that they are not hiding their intentions and hence damaging the psyche as deeply as ours is. In Australia, South Africa and the USA the governments, media and academia deceived their people regarding Indigenous peoples and their civil rights. It may be better, cathartic, to be a warrior than an automaton. In 1963 the outspoken Dr Grigorios Lambrakis was gunned down by the pending Greek police state, the coming junta of 1967-73. The CIA enabled its puppet government, that bashed the people's right to freedom of comment. Even in those difficult times Greeks throughout Greece wrote Z on walls all over the country. Z has the phonetic murmur of the Greek word, '(he) lives'. I visited Greece for the first time during the height of the junta, in 1971. I was nine years old. I often wondered about Z, and what it really means, that even in the face of brute force, in the face of oppression the truth is omnipotent and the pursuit of justice prevails. Grigoris Lambrakis marched alone in the banned Marathon to Athens Peace Rally on Sunday, April 21st, 1963, one month before his assassination. Lambrakis, was a physician and politician, a pacifist who opposed the Vietnam war, he was left leaning without being a Communist. His funeral turned into a massive demonstration, with 500,000 of Greece's 8 million population turning out.

Alexis represents to the Greek people the worst economic indice in the last hundred years, where aspirations to live capable of select freedoms are no longer possible for most Greeks. Students want to be assured of jobs upon completion of a tertiary education but more than half will not find appropriate work for up to 20 years, and many will be unemployed their whole lives. What the world needs to notice about the Greek riots, which have spread in Europe, and intellectually throughout the world, is that the protests are larger than usual, and this is indicative of the capitalist market failures during the last year. Governments of the world are losing their legitimacy with the people. The last killing by a young person in Greece was in 1985, Michel Kaltezas, and the ranks of revolutionary organisations such as November 17 swelled. It is now worse (or better). The movement for change in Greece is immense and it threatens to export itself to the rest of the world.

Mikis Theodorakis, the famous Greek musician, composer and politician once said, “Greece is this little country, but it has been subject to very serious historical pressures. Everyone in Greece becomes politically committed.” This is what may happen to the rest of the world if the pressures are perceived as endemic and unrelenting. Theodorakis, born in 1925, lived through the Nazi occupation of Greece but he considered the brutal police state that Greece became in 1967 as the worst ordeal. He was arrested and imprisoned. Theodorakis said, “...the dictatorship of the colonels was unexpected. I was 50 years old and had two children. I was proud to be imprisoned but ashamed for Greece.”

Greece had been, since April 21, 1967, under the dictatorial rule of the military, a regime which abolished civil rights, dissolved political parties and exiled, imprisoned and tortured politicians based on their political beliefs. Right wing states such as Australia mob through silence or ridicule those who speak contrary to them and this because they so evilishly and rigorously control and limit discourse to their agenda driven leanings only. Hence, they do not have to impose physical martial law, martial law covertly exists. The subterfuge influence of politics and the oppression of civil liberties in Australia, where we are not able to disseminate freely, where we are not able to engage in legitimate discussion, where boards of directors deny policies of equitable inclusion, where we are not allowed to freely coalesce and mobilise protests and rallies ensures only those that rule over us, the overlords, harass an education. It was boards of directors that ensured the Stolen Generation and Apartheid in Australia occurred for two centuries. Greece has never been so evil, only at times the nesciently evil have foolishly by brute force gripped reins.

On February 21, 1973 Greek law students went on strike and barricaded themselves inside the buildings of the Law School of the University of Athens, in the centre of Athens, to have laws repealed. On November 14, 1973 students at the Athens Polytechnic went on strike and started protesting against the military regime and police state. Thousands of workers and youth joined them protesting inside and outside of the Athens Polytechnic. In the early hours of November 17, 1973, a hysterical government sent a tank crashing through the gates of the Polytechnic. 24 civilians were killed outside the campus. 45 died that day. The Greek revolutionary group November 17, terrorists to others, took its name from the date. November 17 is a holiday in Greece, schools and universities close. It is also ironic that the Zapatista Movement from the poorest state of Mexico formed itself as a revolutionary group on a November 17. The Zapatista slogan is "Everything for everyone, and nothing for ourselves."

 

November 17 was an organisation, possibly disbanded after being discovered several years ago, made up of doctors, lawyers and academics. They opposed what they alleged American imperialism and the undermining of a democratic economic establishment. I was in Greece in September 1989 when they assassinated political leader Pavlos Bakoyannis who they considered a puppet. Their assassinations and bombings stretched for thirty years and focused on the CIA and the American embassy. After the imprisonment of November 17 leaders, a group calling itself Revolutionary Struggle appeared, and on January 12, 2007 claimed responsibility for a missile attack on the American embassy in Athens.

 

Prime Minister Karamanlis of Greece wrote to Alex Grigoropolous' family, "In these difficult moments please accept my condolences for the unfair loss of your son. Like all Greeks I am deeply saddened." The 1985 killing by police of Michel Kalazis led to many years of ill-feeling and vendettas between Greek youth and the police. The Grigoropolous killing has resulted in large demonstrations outside Greece where solidarity has been defined: The Hague, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris, London, Dublin, Rome, Bordeaux, Seville, Barcelona, Nicosia, Paphos,. Many European critics have described the escalating rioting resultant from the general perception of inefficient and corrupt governments that continue to fail addressing the economic crises, and the rising youth unemployment. George Washington Bush is known for his fears that the the poor will be so problematic that they will threaten the peace and security of the affluent and their means to affluency. George has been bent on arguing for efficient separation of these people, the poor classes from the rich.

 

What many have missed in the arguments of the students and civilians in Greece, and to whom I have been talking with, such as my many academic friends and cousins in Greece, is that we have intellectual crises and not just economic crises. Greece has a more genuine University education than what Australian Universities have. For two thousand years we have been unfolding a human rights language levied by the study of political ideologues, by philosophy, by our expanding vocabularies. We are educating people who need to be nourished in what is good, what is right, what is universal, what is the meaning of life. Increasingly we are not happy to just live our lives in wage slavery and drudge through mere pecuniary gains. We want more. We want to understand justice, equity, equality and to live it in its phases as we argue its unfolding. This is obviously inextricably linked to what we need to understand as economics. We do not want to live in lies, and in cruelty and the continual atrocities and ills we plague upon one another. It is about our inhumanity that we are fighting back at, not mere unemployment and the inability to have what others have and deny us, what others flaunt. We want happiness, and that can only arrive from honesty.

 

If what happened in Athens occurred in Perth it would mean the Perth CBD would have had its central streets seriously damaged, and the downtown area hit by violent rioting on a daily basis. Tear gas and fires. On December 6, within an hour of the killing, rioting broke. By dawn 30 police officers had been injured, scores of shops and banks damaged, cars overturned. On December 7, in Athens alone 22 rioters were arrested, and this continued everyday for three weeks. On December 8, in Thessaloniki 63 protestors without Greek nationality were arrested. Hundreds were arrested daily throughout Greece throughout December's last weeks. The Greek department of Amnesty International canceled the scheduled celebrations on 10 December for the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in response to the police violence in Greece. That same day the crisis deepened when a one day general strike paralysed the country and hence highlighted the economic ideological route of the riots. 

 

On December 11, 4,000 students in Athens marched against police with some throwing fire bombs. On December 12, students attacked police outside the parliament and police fired tear gas in response. On the same day Greek police issued an appeal for more tear gas after supplies ran low. On December 14 at least four radio stations were occupied by protestors, and students marched in solidarity throughout Greece. By December 15 more than 600 schools were under occupation by students and over 150 university faculties were taken over by students. All this was only the beginning. Unions throughout Greece marched all over the country. Unions, civilians and students marched throughout Europe. The occupation of Universities in Greece only ended on December 31st, but the protests continued on a daily basis. On January 5, police officer, 21 year old Diamandis Matzounis, was shot outside the Greek Ministry of Culture by masked gunpersons when they fired 20 rounds of bullets.

 

On January 9 an education protest took place in Athens rallying against police repression, corrupt politicians, and against a system that offers little hope for the many. Unlike most of the rallies it turned violent. Some hooded protesters broke away from thousands of students and threw stones and flares at police who retaliated with tear gas and flash grenades. Some 60 people were arrested and among those were 14 lawyers. The Union of Journalists for Athens Daily Newspapers did what no Australian media group would do, they protested to the Ministry for the Interior and Public Order about the police's brutal attacks and beatings.

 

International Monetary Fund Managing Director, Dominque Strauss-Kahn, warned that there was a risk of social unrest spreading unless the financial sector shared wealth more evenly.

 

In Greece, as in most regions of Europe, though there is little public support for street violence and the destruction of property, whether private or public, there is a deep well of tolerance for demonstrations, where the right to protest is held protectively. During 2006 there were massive protests throughout Greece in its universities and schools in terms of protecting free education and the improved remuneration of staff. Free education is prized so dearly that it was protected by the strikes and occupations that closed universities for up to four months. On June 1, 2006 university lecturers launched an indefinite strike against the Government's measure to introduce private universities and break up the state system of higher education. On June 9, 350 of Greece's 456 university faculties were under occupation by students. On June 27 students and political groups demonstrated outside of the OECD Education Conference, where the world's Education Ministers were meeting in Athens. I remember an arrogant then Australian Federal Minister for Education, Julie Bishop delivering a speak to 300 Murdochites in our KBLT Lecture Theatre. She spoke of the privatisation of Universities and that it was up to Australian Universities to start fending more and more for themselves and to raise funding from Alumni and the corporate sector. She had made reference to the OECD Conference in Athens. I asked her a couple of questions from the audience which she was incapable of coherently answering and I remember even her admirers in our Vice Chancellery noting her failure as I exposed her. I noted to her that Greece, where she attended the Conference, provides free education right down to tuition and all books, and it was about the national consciousness and an informed society, and that it was unlikely they would shift to fee paying education. She emphatically stated they would, and that it was the only way, and that while she was there she had witnessed the shift from free education to private. Well, two and half years later Julie Bishop is still wrong. Australia's tertiary education is now so low in standard and purpose that it is almost pointless, this is what happens when it isn't prioritised for funding by our governments and thrown to the wolves, that is the corporate sector and the contemporary management systems that describe themselves as Vice Chancelleries. You cannot oppress into outcomes as Australia has when there is such freedom as experienced in Greece as compared to Australia in terms of Greece's freer press. Australia does not have a free press, rather it is a police state, with its governance built around managing information, the big brother that Noam Chomsky believes exists, where consent is manufactured, where we do not see what Greeks are allowed to see on their televisions and hear on their news broadcasts. We live in an Australia where our ability to discover the truth is outstripped by the ability to manifest deceit.

 

 

I have been to Greece more than 40 times, and  in most years there have been long strikes that have closed banks, businesses, schools, universities, and the city centres. I keep in touch with my relatives, friends and colleagues in Greece and the protests are not just about the injustice of a singular loss of life, or about economic inequity, or the masses starving, they are inextricably linked to a pursuit of meaningfulness. People know that justice will not be wrought by some measures and reforms, they know that unless there is a radical redistribution of the economy, underwritten by dramatically different principles that much of the same will continue. In Chile, on May 30, 2006 high school student protests culminated when 790,000 students joined strikes and marched throughout the country. The problems of the world's failing capitalist market are increasing and unless George Bush's vision comes true, a moat between the increasing poor and the rich, and the USA has historically evidenced itself as a country harsh on its poor, horrendous conflicts between peoples seem evident during the decades to come.

“...freedom is not a property of the human being, but the other way around: the human being is at best the property of freedom... the essence of the human being is grounded in freedom.” (Schelling)

FOOD SHOULD BE OUR MEDICINE
By Gerry Georgatos

Wisdom is to know what to do. Virtue is to do it. We live in a world of lies, a world quickly devolving into the unsustainable in terms of human life.

Poverty is induced, stress manufactured. We argue for change in the most insignificant ways. Our politicians are our only hope, and what a terrible dependency this is in hoping to move humanity away from becoming unsustainable.

Scientists do not know enough about what they're discovering. Before they have any idea of short and long term consequences their discoveries become part of capitalism's opportunistic production processes. Today, there are some 60,000 chemical compounds in production. More than 10,000 of these are used in the production of food. Many are neurotoxic and carcinogenic. With most of them we are yet to know their long term consequences. With GMO 'foods' we do not know the long term consequences from the various genes spliced into these 'foods'.

What sort of humanity are we living in when we know benzene is a carcinogen and where studies show higher leukaemia rates amongst petrol station workers? The benzene levels in our environment are dangerously high. Fluoride which ravages our auto-immune functions is banned in 9 European countries but not in Australia.

Nine tenths of what is consumed from our supermarkets are toxic - physically and mentally. They are addictive and hence in terms of over production unsustainable consumption as the earth's resources are decimated for pure misguided opportunism. Food should be our medicine, as it had been for most of the history of all organic life.

One hundred years ago the reported cancer rate amongst humans was less than 3% and now it is over 30%. Heart disease was rare. Arthritis was rare. Diabetes was rare. Organ failure was rare. Strokes were rare. The types of depression we now know of were rare. To believe that we correct something by amputating a limb or surgically removing tissue or an organ is ludicrous. Food was once our cause for health and for healing. What is on offer in supermarkets and stores is debilitating and deathly toxic matter, with chemical compounds and gene splicing that we do not have sufficient published evidence of their long term consequences.

This is the mistake that we are making not only with food, but with all forms of radiation, nuclear and uranium energies, with water resources, with the decimation of natural habitats, with congested urban planning. We are moving with such rapidity into events and more so for the purpose of monetary gain for the few, that we dismiss with immoral bravado the need to understand that which we venture into.

I could go into detail and provide the long list of horrific diseases and deformities associated with our expedient rapture into introducing new chemical compounds and the ability to harness energies into humanity; for instance the diseases associated with genetically engineered tryptophan and the excess radiation levels that we do not see but affect us.

Only extensive long-term tests can ensure minimal long term consequences. Gene therapy is a greater problem. With tryptophan we could not foresee the side-effects of the genetic manipulation of simple bacteria. How on earth then can we foresee the consequences of inserting genes from animals, including humans, into foods?

The multinational companies, and the excessive self interest groups will not consider sustainability before profits. The tobacco industry to this day continues on with its damaging effects and lies. We need politicians who will stand up to the selfish and the crazed scientists and tell them 'stop', and let us be considered and thoughtful.

We cannot save humanity without radically moving away from the insanity we have shifted ourselves into. If we look at we consider food, we may discover health, and through this address and reform the health industry and the ability for governments to fully fund it. Through this we will address needless over consumption and radicalise our sense of economics and hence have the capacity for distributive and egalitarian economics and be able to appropriately feed everyone. We will hence have less need to rapaciously decimate the earth's resources and our habitats. We need this philosophy to address all understandings, planning and policies in all our domains. Everything else is cowardice and gibberish, and an impossible pathway to save humanity, to make it egalitarian and a healthy, worthwhile one.

CORRUPTION AND ANTI-CORRUPTION

preface – THE LEHMAN BULL
By Gerry Georgatos, Written 28.12.2008

No longer does anything cease to amaze to me. When Lehman Brothers collapsed on the premise of a default into a hasty en masse bankruptcy filing I wrote an unpublished letter to the editor.

 

I noted that I did not understand why they defaulted into the bankruptcy filing. As soon as the federal government did not approve further assistance to them in an almost child like way, as if virulently spoiled, they filed for an unplanned bankruptcy.

 

Very poor, and reckless, therefore gross misconduct, executive management may have got them into trouble. Nevertheless when in trouble they continued this poor executive management at the 11th hour. They could have restructured to minimise the fallout rather than cry at not being bailed out again.

 

Executive management promises to maintain a duty of care to all its creditors and stakeholders. The bankruptcy needed to be planned. I did not understand why they didn't produce a substantive bankruptcy plan and file under the structured Chapter 11 bankruptcy. By immaturely rushing into bankruptcy they generated gross hysteria, and grossly devalued their shares, portfolios and derivatives.

 

According to external auditors they could have forestalled this with a planned bankruptcy and responsibly managed the value of the company and sold off available assets and returned more to creditors and stakeholders than will be returned, less than 10 cents in the dollar to most of them. It's the old story, bail out and forget about those who propped it up.

 

The US Government's Pension Benefit Guaranty, which is a pension insurance arm, has little likelihood of any real return.

 

The Executive management bailed out, paid themselves out, paid out the Federal Reserve what it was owed, $63 billion, as if to protect themselves with the Government! and hastily sold off devalued assets to Barclays. It only makes you wonder about the close knit circle of big business. I questioned all this at the time and what I perceived as a lack of propriety and lack of adherence to obvious management fundamentals.

 

It is frustrating to read that external auditors, they who also charge bloated millions for these audits, are stating the obvious. They state it will take years to unravel the company. It seems companies spend more time working on veneers and disguised trails than on transparency. Maybe there should be no such thing as an internal audit. It didn't work for WA Inc and Rothwells, nor Lehman's, nor thousands of others.

 

During the last several years I have come into close contact with many 'big business' types, many of our high profile executives, government and their highest office bearers and to my surprise they are just not that smart. Not that smart in that which they manage and govern is not rocket science, is not that hard to do. They make things hard by hiding behind protocols and the abuse of what today is termed as good governance and small manageable Executive Boards. The expertise they are being paid in the hundreds of thousands as government officials, as high level bureaucrats, as 'public' institutional executives, including universities and hospitals, and the ridiculous millions to corporate executives, just isn't there. We are paying for nothing. The expertise required to manage and govern is grossly exaggerated.

 

Pay people properly at all levels, and at the top pay them no more than what they're worth. No executive deserves a million dollars. All of a sudden they may start managing rather than worrying about their personal remuneration, payouts, profiles and how to hide their gross mismanagement.

 

first chapter – THE ROAD TO HELL By Gerry Georgatos, Written 1.4.2009 The ways we have gone about trying to address, and in reality merely recycle, the 'global financial crisis' are crazy. The Czech President said it best in terms of the 'stimulus packages'; that they are the 'road to hell'. Let us remember that four/sixths of the world are always in crisis, in poverty, a poverty imposed by us who are now whelmed by this so-called financial crisis. Let us understand that half the world has no idea of what this financial crisis is about and that half the world has not been touched by it. Most of our global citizenry do not own a home, have no savings, have nothing to do with banks and financial institutions. They are perennially disregarded. The 'global financial crisis' is a 'global "credit" crisis'. This "credit" is not one of merely advanced payments to people with an alleged capacity to pay them off with interest over a long period of time. This "credit" crisis is one of fabricated valuations, such as through property, capital equity, debentures, shares and other stock and about what people are worth in the workplace. It is about goods and services intentionally over valued in the ugly pursuit of greed. CEOs and Boards of Directors should be held responsible for their greed and their complicit silence in the pursuance of greed. This greed has become a culture of pervasive intrusion into the 'western world's organisational culture of 'big' and 'small' businesses and entrepreneurship. Goods and services are inflated beyond their real value, and thus at some point, as has happened again and again, we enter financial recessions, depressions and other associated crises. Borrowings cannot be met in order to meet the continuum of irresponsibly valued equity and commodities. When values crash borrowings are complexified by the drop of false values to realer values. Corruption is responsible for false valuations. The stimulus packages serve no other purpose than to recycle the over inflated valuations that have kept us in trouble. The stimulus packages are short term measures to distract humanity into a false sense but they cannot fix the endemic problems. Impossible. In only less than one century our economic system through this credit and valuation crisis, which deny equitable policies of social inclusion, has endured a baker's dozen recessions and crises. These management failures have demonstrated that our economic understandings are misplaced and unachievable. We are heading into hell. Obama and Rudd do not know what they're doing, other than supporting desperate bids by the IMF, the Reserve Banks, and the multinationals to prop up the toxic economics that serve only the ugly interests of the very few. It is disgraceful that people are being set up for failure. People are being enticed into buying homes with 14K to 21K first home buyers grants. Most are buying them at 400K. Will they be worth 500K in five years, accommodating CPI and repayment schedules? What if property prices crash to their real values, then the mortgagee is in trouble, ala the homebuyers crisis in the USA? Should people be mortgaging for their first home, paying up to 50% of their income in repayments, for say a 380K mortgage that by the time it is repaid in say 23 years will have cost them close to a million dollars at today's rates alone? What if unemployment rises, and wages stagnate but CPI and bank lending interest rates rise, how will the mortgagee cope and what will be their quality of life, in this one off life that we have? And what in heaven's sake are the banks and financial institutions doing in exploiting further credit card and personal loan lending to people? So what are the real purposes of the stimulus packages throughout our 'westernised world'? To set up through the en masse misery of the people the selfish hopes of the onced cashed up over valued multinational enterprises? It is a disgusting comment by Rudd to declare that the economy may be doing well because the stimulus package improved last December's revenue for instance for Coles and Woolworths! This is not how a good economy works, by no means. Senator Bob Brown of the Greens, in a token gesture at our Senate, was correct when he argued we should reign in executive management's remuneration. It is powerfully indicative of what is wrong with our economic systemology. He is correct in terms of minimum and maximum remuneration, standards, behaviours and practices. This is good economics. It is about responsible valuation and budgeting. No one person is worth a thousand times more than another and no bona fide economic structure can afford this ugly avarice and only through ugly exploitation can it sustain this greed for an extended period. Who will rise to the occasion and bring justice and method to the economic order of things? Those who will rise to exact change must first understand the underwriting to systemically good economics. We have been failed by our politicians, who don't seem to have a real clue, and who fail to appropriately regulate and audit multinationals and big business, and by our Unions, and I am a Union member, who thuggishly argue the member's interest only rather than good practices and who make little positive difference in economic management other than to improve remuneration practices and working conditions, and our media who does not investigate the problem itself but focuses on the effects. Rather than trap more people into misery we have to bite the economic bullet. We have to revalue property to real values, and revalue all capital equity and goods and services. They have to be affordable to everyone in order to ensure a sound management system devoid of financial collapses and radically shifting GDP, CPI and all forms of inflation. These horrific sways and troughs ruin people's lives and perpetually exclude the poor, let alone induce poverty. Australia is heading to economic disaster. Germany and Japan are in deep recession and doing it tough. Maybe they'll pull out quicker into a more sedate economic order for a while but Australia will linger into real recession long after some of the other countries pull out into a recycled economic steadiness, then boom and then the repeated collapse. In the end, the collapses can only go on for so long. So many have occurred in only a short time, and a century is a very short period. As we are, we are not sustainable. Marx, and I am not Marxist, in Das Kapital was correct about the collapse of this excessive capitalism. It is not sustainable if it is not founded in affordability, in equity, in real valuations and in appropriate remuneration. Yes, we have to recost the values of property, and yes many will lose values they presumed they once had. The banks and financial institutions must be reshaped to accommodate these revaluations. We have to better understand investment including debentures and other stock and value them accordingly and have them regulated, and yes we have to ensure appropriate minimum and maximum standards in remuneration and expenditure practices. We have to limit enterprises to a reflection of their capacity so as not to stress the economic potential of the enterprise especially in terms of job security. By going down the way of economic truths not only will life improve for more people in western countries but also in the presumably developing, and thus far excluded, nations of the world, who harbour four/sixths of acute and chronic poverty. Economic truths, if applied, will benefit everyone.

second chapter - THE CORRUPTION AND CRIMES COMMISSION and the Parliamentary Inspector
By Gerry Georgatos, Written 30.1.2009


The CCC is an imperative, we cannot do without it and certainly should not coalesce to agree to it being part time or ad hoc. The Parliamentary Inspector is necessary. Both should be separate to each other in order to ensure bona fide good and just governance.

 

Separation of powers should be defined as ensuring no influence can be exerted as to the assessment of dissemination by any involved parties, that is the complainant and respondent, their vested lobbyists and hired lawyers.

 

It is ludicrous to believe that we live in moral ideals that have all forms and levels of government and their public institutions and public concerns above reproach.

 

We cannot forget WA Inc. We cannot forget the collapse of Rothwells and its clear links to the highest offices not only in WA but the Commonwealth. We cannot forget the history of our police, not only in WA, but Australia. The Norris and Costigan Royal Commissions may not have proven anything but they did unearth extraordinary allegations which over time are slowly proving that they could have been true. We will never read the highly sensitive materials because even with the Freedom of Information Act many are not available for 75 years since the convening of the Commissions.

 

We should never forget the Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody. We should not forget the Wood Royal Commission, and the links between Government and 'big' business. We should not disregard the fact of the number of 'colourful' identites we constantly read about in the media who are involved with 'big' business, the State and the Commonwealth, and who seem to be above the intentions of the law.

 

We should never forget that two of this State's highest office bearers, O'Connor and Burke, were convicted and incarcerated. O'Connor at one time was also the Minister for Police.

 

How can anyone ever state that we do not need the CCC, even if it is flawed, as all things are? Structures are people. Committees are people. Governance is interpreted by people. We need as many checks as possible. The WA Liberals and Laborites have former Ministers under question, Malborough, Crichton-Browne, Bowler, D'Orazio and others. This is the contemporary crop. Research the history of every State.

 

High Offices have been found to have had prominent decision makers with either themselves or their spouses involved in maintaining establishments of gambling and licentiousness. I have read this State's history and many of you have lived it.

 

WA Inc took over this State, with investments, and levels of control, in over 1000 corporations. Even our media in order to survive gained leverage by being conservative. The Western Mail of the 1980s collapsed because it tried to be independent in its views and commentaries.

 

Whisteblowers do not yet have their voice and appropriate protection in this State. During 2003 a well meaning Attorney General Jim McGinty spoke in Parliament about the courage of whistle blowers and that new legislation would protect them. Yet, only a year later, three major whistle blowers warned others that conditions were not protective.

 

Government, on all levels, and public concerns, even those 'corporatised', have not heeded the lessons, the witness. There are many who rule executively, who circumvent protocols and procedures, who abuse the intentions of prescribed pathways, who turn Boards into tools, who create Executives and Boards with likeminded individuals or those bent on self interest.

 

Many WA institutions still follow what should be the outdated examples of power bases, cliques and unwarranted excessive executive power. They have not learned from WA Inc, and the near decimation of the State. They only work harder to appear that they follow prescription and even harder to make themselves less transparent. Public and Private Sector standards are not above reproach. Internal audits are exactly that and no external audit is full proof. We know this from the media's discovery of collapsed councils, corrupt councillors, of corporate collapses, of governmental mischief and misdeeds.

 

Governments and Institutions do not have a demonstrated tendency to compensate the victims and seek clear solutions, rather they have demonstrated a tendency to discredit whistleblowers, to mob them, to abuse them by silence or ostracisation, and to neglect the victims, whether individual or groups or the State.

 

The late Professor of Politics at UWA, Patrick O'Brien wrote, "Executive government determines salaries from the Governor down and has the power to award honours and social status. It determines who shall be Queen's Counsels in the legal profession and thereby who shall be among the highest and most privileged income earners in the state.

 

It appoints members of the governing councils of universities, hospitals and other 'public' institutions. No monarch of old had such powers of patronage. When it is considered that most of these powers can be exercised without reference to parliament, it can be said that the real and potential powers of the office of Premier are literally awesome.

 

Moreover, in combination with its vast powers of patronage, the subtle but decisive shift of power to the executive government has the potential of transforming our system into a mammoth favours dispensing machine in which those who have been given the right entry cards or who have paid sufficient dues to the ruling party have every chance of punching jackpots for themselves until the general revenue is exhausted. Thus, and without exxageration, government in Western Australia can easily become a giant 'pork-barrel' greased by the Premier and cabinet; an instrument for serving not the public interest but private and even corrupt interests."

 

We need a CCC that is powerful, and we need a Parliamentary Inspector with the right to make public reports. It is not a problem to question one another but it is a problem to do away with either or both. The FOI Act needs to be amended and all materials should be made available to the public and all members of government sooner rather than what much of what is classified is currently unavailable till.

 

One strong indicator to when organisations should be scrutinied without delay is when their CEOs and Executives are major shareholders and when they are afforded extraordinary remuneration. This historical indicator has often proved an inextricable link to not necessarily outright fraud and theft but rather a moral corruption of process and intentions. In the end deep at heart we all know that no CEO or Executive office bearer is worth millions, there are only so many hours in the week, and only so much expertise that any one person has. It is a myth that the best minds and expertise will be attracted only by significant remuneration to a calling in Government or to an Executive position in a public concern. When money is the driver there is much lost. The most significant contributors in history have provided their passion and expertise at minimal financial cost to the State or the public concern.

 

Instead of ridding ourselves of balances and checks we should be concerned as to how to improve them, how to separate them from conflicts of interests, and how to best protect whistle blowers, how to encourage conscientious objection and justice.

the next chapter – JUSTICE, WHERE THE BLOODY HELL ARE YOU?

By Gerry Georgatos, Written 1.9.2009

As always this is up to all of us. As overwhelming as the forces against one another are we are only as good as our example and our preparedness to disseminate, to dissent and to conscientiously ensure our conscience and our lived experience are in line with another. Example is our only immortality. If enough rise, change happens.

“A theologian said that all will be well with me and all permitted to the degree that I obey the Council, and he added, 'If the council were to declare that you have but one eye, despite the fact that you may have two, it is your duty to agree with the Council.'

I replied to him:

'Even if the whole world were to affirm that, I, utilising whatever reason I may possess, I could not acknowledge such a thing without a rejection of my conscience.'” (K.Kosik)