BATTLERS AND BILLIONAIRES by Andrew Leigh

BATTLERS AND BILLIONAIRES: The Story of Inequality in Australia
ANDREW LEIGH
Black Inc. Books, 2013, 210 pages, $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

In Australia, notes economist Andrew Leigh, the poorest 20% of the population own just 1% of total household wealth.  The top 20%, however, hog a fat 62%, the top 1% indulge in 11%, the richest one in every thousand Australians delight in 3% whilst the richest one in every million Australians (the top 0.0001% of the population, including Australia’s 32 billionaires) luxuriate in 1.4% of total wealth, 14,000 times their population share.

Never has the shaggy myth of the vaunted Australian ‘egalitarian spirit’ been so exposed on the rock of material inequality, says Leigh in Battlers and Billionaires, since the 1900s when vast extremes of wealth divided rich and poor.  Decades of partial income redistribution via means-tested welfare reforms and real wage growth, which saw income inequality decline to its lowest point by around 1980, have been undone by rising inequality in the current era.

The rich have accelerated away from the pack, says Leigh, who illustrates the widening wealth gap by comparing  two BHP chief executives.  Essington Lewis (BHP head from 1921 to 1950) had a lifetime wealth accumulation equal to 100 times the annual average wage but Marius Kloppers (BHP head from 2009 to 2013) took in “between 180 and 270 times the average wage in every year of his tenure”.  Over the last 30 years, Australia’s top 100 CEOs have helped deliver to the richest 1% of Australians 13% of total aggregate household income growth, a $403 billion shift in income from the bottom 99% to the top 1%.

The rising tide of economic growth does not lift all boats.  Middle income earners are paddling harder to stay still whilst the lowest are slipping below the waves.  Contributing to rising inequality have been tax favours for the rich (tax-free inheritance, marginal tax cuts), a decline in trade union strength (in 1980, one in two workers were in a union, today less than one in five are) and a skewed political process in which politicians (many themselves quite well-to-do, all paid more than the average worker, and most in policy debt to corporate donations) reflect the interests of their wealthiest constituents.

Leigh’s recipe for turning economic inequality around, however, fails to match his indictment.  A Labor member of federal parliament, Leigh dutifully follows the party script.  Productivity is favoured – a worthy means (if it means better skills and training) but one that contains the ever-present ‘micro-economic reform’ sting of labouring harder and longer with fewer workers.

Better education for children of the poor is also meritorious.  The average Year 12 student from a disadvantaged background, says Leigh, has the same literacy and numeracy skills as a Year 8 or 9 student from an advantaged background, a “brutally high barrier to further study” and higher waged jobs.  Leigh, however, avoids anything too radical such as shifting government education funding to public schools from wealthy private schools, helping to terminate these bastions of privilege from their role as transmission belts of inequality through the generations.

Leigh also advocates a progressive taxation system but he is coy on whether this means increasing personal top marginal tax rates (which would scare wealthy voters) and he is averse to income redistribution through increases in corporate tax.  Besides, “hard-working entrepreneurs are vital to our nation’s success”, he says, and they must not be hindered by business taxes or by capping CEO salaries as this will, apparently, result in low quality business executives. 

Leigh’s greatest political blind spot, however, is his failure to notice that the “great divergence” in equality that resumed from around 1980 coincided, not without cause, with the advent of ‘neo-liberalism’, the religious revivalism of a lightly-fettered market economy ideology ministered, in Australia, by the deregulators, privatisers and union-hobblers of Leigh’s party under the baton of Prime Ministers Hawke and Keating, and uncorrected by the later Rudd/Gillard leadership.

Leigh notes that a large majority of Australians believe that differences in income are too large and that government has a role to play in fixing this.  More leopards have changed spots, however, than will Labor governments take to the policy barricades in the cause of equality.

Leigh refreshingly notes that economics is not about “maximising money” but “maximising wellbeing” but this will not be assisted by his advocacy of ALP market managerialism as the only ‘left’ alternative to socialism.  Leigh simplistically cites the economic and social failure of the former Soviet Union as evidence of the failure of the Marxist egalitarian principle of ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’.  Leigh concludes that “perfect equality” is “impossible and undesirable”, producing only neo-Stalinist monotony and greyness, and that society must “reward effort” through cash.

This prescription depends on measuring personal worth by money and calibrating the merit of ideas, arts and technology by a money culture.  By contrast, a democratic socialist material equality, where the battling majority would not have to worry about their next meal whilst a rich few, as Leigh notes, quaff their $900 bottle of 1971 Penfolds Grange Hermitage at “about $20 a sip”, is both possible and desirable.

KILLING FAIRFAX (Pamela Williams) and FAIRFAX: The Rise and Fall (Colleen Ryan)

KILLING FAIRFAX: Packer, Murdoch & the Ultimate Revenge
PAMELA WILLIAMS
HarperCollins, 2013, 352 pages, $39.99 (hb)

FAIRFAX: The Rise and Fall

COLLEEN RYAN
The Miegunyah Press, 2013, 302 pages, $32.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When Australia’s richest person, the multi-billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart, moved to add the title of media mogul to her CV, the inspiration came, say Colleen Ryan and Pamela Williams in their books on the Fairfax media, from the Rinehart-financed climate change denier, Christopher Monckton, who advised his wealthy patron in 2011 to take over a newspaper to give Australia ‘a proper dose of free market thinking’.

Alarmed by the former federal Labor government’s tax on mining super-profits, Rinehart had become a barricades activist, shouting herself hoarse at anti-mining-tax rallies before eyeing off a powerful stake (19% at last count) in the Fairfax stable of newspapers, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Financial Review.

The wealthy have long invested in Australia’s establishment media as a money-making venture but Rinehart’s aim was not further immediate enrichment, which was unlikely given the shape of Fairfax’s business model (busted) and share price (tanking), but political influence.

Rinehart is not the first member of “Australia’s moneyed establishment with deep enough pockets to fund a dream to control Australia’s quality (sic) press”, says Ryan.  From the founder, John Fairfax in the 1840s, to the half-century reign of the “moneyed intellectual”, Warwick (Snr), the Fairfax press was solidly conservative, the family ruling with a heavy hand, punishing any independent-minded editor lest, as board minutes recorded, ‘we might wake up one morning and find the communist line taken in any of our papers’.

Only with the accession from 1977 of Warwick’s son, James, did the Fairfaxes realise the value of ‘quality journalism’ as a corporate brand, although this was not merely a marketing ploy - employed during this “new era” were such gifted and progressive journalists as David Marr and Wendy Bacon.

What undid the successful Fairfax business, says Ryan, was a convergence of “managerial incompetence, family rivalry, vengeful politicians and boardroom bastardry”.  Labor premiers and prime ministers were upset by the accountability they were subjected to in the Fairfax press and Prime Minister Paul Keating retaliated with changes to media laws which favoured Fairfax’s media rivals, Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch.

Fairfax’s slide accelerated from 1987, when the youngest Fairfax, Warwick (Jnr), believing he was being denied his inheritance, launched a “financially insane” takeover, his greed driving the business into crippling debt and receivership.

These financial tempests might have been weathered, however, were it not for the internet.  Fairfax had had a virtual monopoly of classified print advertising for jobs, homes and cars in Sydney and Melbourne and these ‘rivers of gold’ ($700 million in 1997, for example) subsidised the papers’ better, investigative, journalism.  When internet advertising start-ups with their cheaper on-line rates came looking for capital injections for their fledgling businesses, Fairfax missed the boat and James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch cashed in, taking Fairfax’s classifieds business from them and thus turning off the financial life-support.  As James Packer rightly put it – ‘Fairfax thought they had a journalism business when what they had was a classified advertising business’. 

Fairfax’s response was massive cost-cutting and sackings, beginning a corporate death spiral where the job cuts eroded journalism resources, leading to further revenue decline - a recipe for self-defeating organisational cannibalism.

Whilst both books focus on the mind-numbing minutiae of intra-corporate rivalry, with the narrative wheels spinning furiously in the bog of “conflicted deals and relationships at the top of the media world”, only in passing does the broader picture of Australia’s big media emerge, revealing that the ‘free press’ is free only to those rich enough to buy or inherit it, including the ‘quality press’.

The Fairfaxes were all millionaires as were most Fairfax board chairs and directors mentioned in the books.  The board government treat the Fairfax media in the same way as Fairfax’s major investors do – as a profit-making enterprise.  As one such investor put it - ‘This is a business.  You have to maximise return on capital.  It is not there for the workers, the public or the politicians …’

The real business, of Fairfax as of any other corporate newspaper, is ‘monetising’ their readership, to a small extent through sales (thus needing to provide a small and sternly policed space for diversity of views) but primarily through advertising.  The corporate media are capitalist businesses, selling a commodity (their market audience) to capitalist advertisers who will withhold their dough if newspapers become tribunes of democracy instead of material generators and ideological defenders of the dollar.

Rinehart is simply less sophisticated about hiding this reality.  After her success through board membership at Channel 10 in getting the irritating conservative and climate change denier, Andrew Bolt, his own Sunday morning television show, Rinehart demanded that her shares do the same at Fairfax  by giving her the power to hire and fire editors.  For good reason, the in-house joke amongst Fairfax journalists was that the Sydney Morning Herald would become the Sydney Mining Herald. 

The Fairfax media may have, as a minority hobby, strayed from the pack by “holding politicians accountable, scrutinising the bureaucracy, exposing corporate crooks and environmental bastardry”, as Ryan puts it, but this was only ever a calculated strategy of ‘corporate badging’.  Fairfax pursued only the ‘bad apples’, individual corporate crooks and political rorters, not the rotten capitalist system as a whole, a system which has buttered the Fairfax bread for 150 years but which is now starting to turn rancid for Fairfax through the far-sighted digital greed of its big business media rivals.

Damned If I Do PHILIP NITSCHKE with PETER CORRIS

Damned If I Do
PHILIP NITSCHKE with PETER CORRIS
Melbourne University Press, 2013, 237 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

Dr. Philip Nitschke has chalked up a couple of unwanted achievements – as the author of the first book to be banned (in 2007) in Australia in 35 years, and as only the third person in the 190 year history of the Oxford University’s Oxford Union debate to have had his invitation withdrawn, sharing this tainted honour with Holocaust denier (David Irving) and the founder of the far right British National Party.

As the biography by Nitschke and Australian crime novelist, Peter Corris, shows, however, the offensive iniquities of the latter are poles apart from Nitschke’s transgression which has been to be the public face of the humanitarian cause of voluntary euthanasia (VE), the right of the incurably and intolerably ill to end their physical agony and mental anguish through a merciful assisted death - a thumpingly popular, but still illegal, policy supported by 85% of the Australian population.

Nitschke never intended to make VE his life’s work, though it flowed seamlessly from his progressive political antecedents -  an Adelaide and Flinders University sixties’ activist at on the Vietnam War, Aboriginal rights, apartheid, nuclear weapons, uranium mining and US military bases.  By the mid-1990s, Nitschke’s championing of the Northern Territory’s bill to legalise VE, and his use of the new law to assist four patients to die, had thrust him into a campaigning role he took to with expertise and passion.

His opponents did not lack passion, either, but theirs was a rigid zealotry shorn of compassion as well as logic and respect.  A palliative care Professor sledge-hammered fascist innuendo from a play on words (‘Nazi-Nitschke-Euthanasia’) whilst the Australian Medical Association’s Northern Territory Branch President, ignoring Nitschke’s history of land rights activism, accused him of being a racist, seeking to use the Territory’s VE law to exterminate Aboriginal people.

Fanaticism also marks the conservative Christian lobby whose influence on governments and mass media is way out of proportion to their tiny base.  Censorship of Nitschke has been rife in the Murdoch press (with savage opinion pieces and ad hominem attacks), the Fairfax press (which denies Nitschke fairness and right of reply) and commercial television (which banned a VE advertisement).

BBC reporters are obsessed with the smear-laden question - ‘Aren’t you making a lot of money out of death’ – which resists all answers by Nitschke that his VE organisation (Exit International) grosses $500,000 a year from which Nitschke draws a modest $50,000, a fraction of the income he could earn as a doctor.

Cyberspace is filled with censorship (YouTube content removed, Google sponsored ads disallowed, PayPal accounts frozen), cyber-vandalism (Wikipedia’s content on Nitschke hacked) and the rancid extremities of the blogosphere inhabited by extremist Christian moralists.

The former federal Labor Government has attempted to add an e-book by Nitschke to porn sites slated for their proposed mandatory internet filter, whilst the Queensland state Labor government authorised police raids.  Last-minute cancellation of speaking and workshop venues has curtailed Nitschke’s freedom of speech and Nitschke is periodically threatened with medical de-registration.

More surprising is the level of hostility to Nitschke shown by some erstwhile comrades in the right-to-die movement who want to restrict VE to only the terminally ill, in contrast to Nitschke who believes that VE is a fundamental human right that should be available to all who understand death (i.e. excluding children, the mentally impaired and those with psychological conditions able to be helped through medical means) and also including those with chronic, but not terminal, suffering and those who have compelling non-medical reasons to seek death.

Those with a limited, doctor-mediated VE approach focus exclusively on law reform whilst Nitschke’s is a DIY strategy which places control of VE decision-making, and its technical means, in the hands of patients, a practical approach which he combines with political activity for reform (Nitschke has been a Greens and an independent candidate in federal elections, and has most recently campaigned for the Australian Sex Party).

Less strong on making the philosophical case for VE (covered more comprehensively in Nitschke’s earlier book, Killing me Softly), Corris’ interview-biography fills out Nitschke the person, including his life outside VE, from the South Australian country boy born in 1947, through all the emotional storms of failed relationships, to what the future may hold if he is de-registered (a career in stand-up comedy, not something that a genuine ‘Dr Death’ would contemplate).

Peter Corris has made a useful addition to his stable of ‘collaborative autobiographies’, profiling those, like Fred Hollows and environmentalists, who have led “an active life, devoted to a cause I approve of, and pursued with a courage and commitment I admire”.  At last, Nitschke has found more appropriate company than those of fascist bent that his enemies assign him to in their holy war in the cause of human suffering perpetuated by the cruel moral tyranny of church and state.

CLIVE: The Story of Clive Palmer by SEAN PARNELL

CLIVE: The Story of Clive Palmer
SEAN PARNELL
HarperCollins, 2013, 328 pages, $39.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When the local council denied planning permission for the Queensland National Party’s media director, Clive Palmer, to build a sixty-six townhouse development on peaceful rural land in Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast in 1984, Palmer’s party and state government mate, Russ Hinze, helped the rich guy out by overturning the council decision.  Shortly after, Palmer made the second largest donation ever to the Nationals, writes Sean Parnell in Clive: The Story of Clive Palmer, “directing $15,000 from his company that had purchased the property”.  Palmer well knew the utility of politics for personal business.

The lure of money governed the business family that Palmer was born into in 1954.  Anti-communist, conservative Catholics, they stamped their son with the same template.  At the University of Queensland in the early 1970s, Palmer took on the campus socialists and feminists, most vigorously through the Right To Life Association and its anti-abortion ‘pregnancy counselling’ front, and he became close to the Liberal and Country Parties and their state government headed by the authoritarian, anti-democratic Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Dropping out of university into a law firm, Palmer’s potential legal career came to a rapid halt when he complained to a Liberal politician of police verballing of suspects which he had uncovered.  An anonymous death threat soon after led to Palmer harbouring a lingering bitterness towards the police-protecting Liberals whilst remaining reliably conservative, and avaricious.

Palmer became a self-made real estate millionaire during Queensland’s interstate-migration-driven property boom on the Gold Coast where he bought cheap and sold dear, a strategy which was to deliver him billions during the mining boom, beginning with iron ore deposits in Western Australia followed by the promise of even richer returns from coal in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.

If Palmer, a lavish donor to, and life member of, the National Party thought that he owned the new Queensland Liberal National Party government then he was disillusioned as he ran into a government speed-bump.  His new China-export coal project lost its Labor-ordained ‘significant project status’ when his claim to favoured state support for rail and port infrastructure was out-lobbied by Galilee Basin competitor, Gina Rinehart, and her coal export deal with India.

The taste of sour grapes infused Palmer’s deteriorating relationship with the conservative parties.  His opposition to the new state government’s public sector job cuts was a pretext (he had sacked a hundred workers at his Queensland nickel refinery) for a swipe at a government which had materially harmed his business interests.  Seen as destabilising or splitting the ruling conservative party, Palmer was jettisoned by the Nationals and went on to form his own, eponymous, conservative party.

Lest anyone think that this latest political venture is a merely a continuation of protecting Palmer’s profits and conspicuous consumption (high-end cars and boats and planes, racehorses, soccer clubs, Club Med Resorts, replica Titanics and robotic dinosaurs), Palmer presents a front of selfless generosity through philanthropy and gifts to his employees.

The climate change denialist doesn’t, however, bother with any green camouflage about global warming from his coal exporting, exposure of the Great Barrier Reef to pollution from his nickel refinery’s tailings dam, or the threat to the protected dunes and bush posed by a massive expansion to his luxury resort at Coolum on the Sunshine Coast.

Whilst Palmer can only speak ill of environmentalists, he will hear nothing bad about his former National Party idols and mentors convicted of, or who narrowly dodged, corruption charges for misappropriating taxpayer funds and accepting bribes from developers.  These noble souls (Bjelke-Petersen, Hinze, et al) are, according to  Palmer, persecuted innocents, ‘brave and courageous’ all.  Legal prosecution, however, is a course of first resort for the highly litigious Palmer towards any person or entity which threatens his profits or reputation.

One outcome of Palmer’s legalistic aggression is that voices critical of Palmer are, for fear of being sued and bankrupted, under-represented in Parnell’s book.  The result is an overly benign portrait of Palmer, the celebrity miner-politician, in a book that is fascinated by the “colourful Queenslander’s” every new venture but which is short on analysis of Palmer’s political philosophy, ethical values and social policies, which, like Palmer, offer nothing to those not love-struck by money and power.

BIG COAL by Pearse, McKinght & Burton

BIG COAL: Australia’s Dirtiest Habit
GUY PEARSE, DAVID McKNIGHT, BOB BURTON
Newsouth Publishing, 2013, 257 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

You don’t have to look far to see why Australians are locked in an absurd and vicious circle of climate change, burning more coal to, for example, run more air-conditioners to cope with the more severe heatwaves from the global warming resulting from burning more coal.  The reason why Australia is hooked onto such coal-mad absurdities, say Pearse, McKnight and Burton in Big Coal, is because the economic and political power of Australia’s coal industry has pushed a more than willing political elite to support the mining and export of coal in a country which is the world’s 4^th largest producer, and 2^nd biggest exporter, of the largest single source of global greenhouse gases – coal.

The climate change cost of coal to Australia (devastating weather extremes, bushfires, droughts and floods) is the latest pricey instalment of the addiction to coal, following that fossil fuel’s grim history of lung-blackened, maimed and dead workers, and toxic landscapes and poisonous air in mining communities.

Whilst Australia’s coal-fired power stations produce one third of the country’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions, it is the $48 billion coal export industry which is Australia’s main contributor to global warming.  Whether burnt in Mumbai or Shanghai for electricity generation or steel-making, Australian coal is at the forefront of catastrophic climate change.

Unconcerned with planetary survival, whilst lavishly enriching themselves from the coal rush, are the mining nouveaux-riche, billionaires like Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer and Andrew Forrest, who have mastered the art of picking undervalued coal reserves that can then be on-sold to multinational mining companies at many times their initial value, in turn rewarding the giant companies’ owners - the big banks and large institutional investors - with bloated profits.

Greasing the money-making wheels with $9 - $12 billion in subsidies are coal-friendly Australian governments.  State governments further assist with a genial mining lease approval process, compulsory purchase of prime agricultural land for mining, public funds on tap for private company rail and port infrastructure and obedience to coal industry lobbyists’ commands to hamstring renewable energy alternatives such as cutting household solar-panel feed-in tariffs and tightening the regulatory screws on wind farms.

In return for governmental services rendered are the royalties paid by the coal mining industry to state government coffers (plus occasional personal enrichment along the way for corrupt ministers).  These royalties, however, mask the long-term cost to the states of climate change - one major natural climate-change-related disaster can wipe out several years of royalties (cyclone Yasi cost the Queensland public purse $7 million in 2011).

The federal government also chimes in through winding back mandatory renewable energy targets, and the tried-and-failed market mechanisms of emissions trading schemes and carbon taxes with their generous and self-defeating industry compensation.  Where any sign of government resistance is met (through mining super-profits taxes, for example), the industry’s propaganda power and deep pockets are mobilised for poll-damaging “big budget advertising blitzes to turbo-charge their behind-the-scenes lobbying campaigns”.

Corporate-government harmony is always maintained, however, in the public spruiking of the grossly exaggerated economic benefits of coal mining.  The coal industry’s 46,000 employees is a tiny percentage of a total labour force of over 11 million, whilst the industry’s self-portrait of itself as an altruistic job creator is undermined by its programs for driverless trucks and trains, and automated drilling rigs, loaders and shipping operations.  Sucking up valuable capital, infrastructure and government funds, as well as labour, the coal mining industry results in a structural distortion of the economy away from job-rich economic sectors towards an environmentally dead-end industry.

This is not, however, the message delivered by governments, which act as Big Coal’s public relations hacks.  State Premiers and Treasurers have been quick to dismiss as a ‘politically correct debate about climate change’ any concern that the bushfires, droughts and floods of recent years may be related to coal-burning in favour of stump-speeching the economic credentials of their state’s coal-fired power stations and coal export markets.

Close behind government on the image management is the coal industry.  For fiscal peanuts, coal corporations and peak mining bodies buy good-will and a permanent stake in the community through funding local, state and national groups.  Recipients of the don’t-mess-with-the-sponsor goodies include sports of all kinds, helicopter rescue, kindergartens, universities, hospitals, koala habitat restoration and many more.  Xstrata Coal is typical, providing $14 million to fifty community organisations in 2012, a barely visible half a per cent of its $2.2 billion profit.  Such cheap philanthropy is a common corporate strategy but the coal industry’s calculated benevolence is of grave concern because “no other industry in this country has ever threatened to cause harm on the same global scale – not asbestos, nor tobacco, not even uranium”.

The soothing corporate syrup flows with added sugar-coating from the public relations barrel with reassurances that coal’s carbon can be rendered harmless through technical fixes.  Carbon capture and storage (CCS) still has its hymn-singing corporate zombies and political droids, despite decades of fanfare having been muted by commercial reality (carbon-scrubbers are expensive), time constraints (even if CCS works it would be deployed too late globally to avoid critical climate warming), practical hurdles (distant storage sites requiring a vast network of pipelines) and health risks (in high concentrations, CO2 is a toxic, potentially fatal, gas).

As CCS has been shown to be a mirage, however, so, too, is its ‘green’ cousin - carbon capture and recycling (CCR).  For algae, CO₂ acts as a growth steroid and feeding them in algal ponds adjacent to power stations and steel mills can turn the green weeds into bio-fuels, fertilisers, soil-enriching biochar and food for cattle and fish farms.  The process, however, depends on a non-renewable fossil fuel, releases the carbon when consumed, and only works in sunlight, therefore, at best soaking up only a half of its CO₂ food source.

The book’s authors have done a superb job in digging up the dirt on coal.  Ending the world’s addiction to this dangerous product starts here in Australia, in King Coal’s castle.

THE BRACEGIRDLE INCIDENT by Alan Fewster

THE BRACEGIRDLE INCIDENT: How an Australian Communist Ignited Ceylon’s Independence Struggle
ALAN FEWSTER (with a Foreword by Humphrey McQueen)
Arcadia/Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013, 173 pages, $39.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

In 1937, Ceylon’s British Chief of Police reported that ‘it is clearly dangerous’ to allow the Australian Communist, Mark Bracegirdle, to remain in the country ‘stirring up feelings against employers of labour and against the British Government’.  Ceylon’s top cop found a willing listener in the colony’s Governor who authorised Bracegirdle’s deportation.

As Alan Fewster recounts in his account of the ‘Bracegirdle incident’, the deportation was technically bungled, setting off a political crisis in Ceylon and igniting “an altogether more systematic and aggressive attack on British rule”.

The English-born Bracegirdle had left  Australia for Ceylon in 1936, ostensibly to become an apprentice tea-planter.  The working conditions of the 600,000 imported, bonded Indian Tamil labourers appalled him – living in dismal barracks unfit for cattle, subject to fines and corporal punishment, bending their backs even if sick with malaria, and denied education - literacy ‘will give them ideas in life above their station’, said Bracegirdle’s superintendent, who soon sacked his ‘rather Communistic’ protégé for ‘fraternisation’ with the labourers. 

Joining Ceylon’s small communist party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), Bracegirdle played a highly effective role, as a first-hand witness of, and defector from, the planter class.  This made him an ‘undesirable’ to Ceylon’s imperial authorities, too, but their attempted deportation of Bracegirdle overstepped the mark by demonstrating Britain’s absolute power over everyone, including the compliant indigenous elite (the Sinhalese aristocracy, rich land owners and others collaborating, for their own gain, in the administration of British governance) who had been granted limited authority via a restricted suffrage local parliament.

When this tame assembly of conservative nationalists and moderate reformists recognised that Britain’s colonial power could potentially be used not just against white communists but Ceylonese worthies like themselves, they protested with fist-waving, sarcasm and a resolution opposing Bracegirdle’s deportation.

The Supreme Court decision that Bracegirdle’s arrest was illegal capped a huge political humiliation for British rule and a significant propaganda, and membership, victory for the now-800 strong LSSP which went on to become the “dynamic new force” in Sri Lanka’s independence struggle.

Fewster, a former diplomat, is most focused on the ructions in the colonial governmental apparatus in Colombo and Whitehall whilst Bracegirdle the Marxist is more insubstantial, mainly because his motives and deeds (reported, inaccurately at best, by police spies) were sparsely recorded.

So, whilst Fewster is on sure, if rather dry, ground in the upper civil service strata, the rest of his political analysis is somewhat unconvincing speculation, namely that Bracegirdle did not come to Ceylon to radicalise the tea estate workers but, as a Stalinist agent, to pull the Trotskyist-leaning Ceylonese Marxist leadership into pro-Moscow orthodoxy.  That Bracegirdle actually succeeded in the former and failed in the latter suggests, rather, that loyalty to Moscow for the communists of the 1930s could nevertheless coexist with a genuine commitment to revolutionary activism.

No definitive answers are presented in the book on Bracegirdle’s ‘ulterior motive’ but what is clear is that he continued his left wing enterprise until his death in 1999, including smuggling refugees from Nazi Berlin through fake marriages to young Jewish women.  From Sri Lanka to Germany, Bracegirdle lived and breathed true internationalism and solidarity.

THE PASSION OF BRADLEY MANNING by Chase Madar

THE PASSION OF BRADLEY MANNING: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower
CHASE MADAR
Verso, 2013, 181 pages, $19.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The issue in the trial of Bradley Manning, the source of tens of thousands of US military and state secrets leaked to Wikileaks, is, in some eyes, simple.  ‘He broke the law’, lectured President Obama, conveniently overlooking, as Chase Madar comments in his book on Manning, the routine violation, when it suits the political upper crust, of the principle that ‘rules are rules’.

“Washington leaks intentionally as a communication medium between elite officials and their preferred journalists”, much of it top secret, a classification higher than anything Manning released, says Madar.  Laws (against aggressive wars, torture or “mass illegal wiretapping”, for example) are also not laws when broken by the powerful (the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, the federal domestic security bureaucracy).

The perpetrators of these criminal infractions are not arrested and held in abusive solitary confinement for years, facing show trials, life imprisonment or possible execution, like Manning, but “receive solicitous treatment in the media and Sunday morning network gabfests”.

It was the official secrecy surrounding the political elite’s habitual criminality that prompted Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst, to blow the whistle on what his government “has done – and is doing – all over the world”, documented in war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan and in State Department cables which explain through ‘non-PR-versions of world events and crises’, as Manning put it, ‘how the first world exploits the third … from an internal perspective’.

Manning’s intent was “historically informed and political”, says Madar, aimed at, in Manning’s words, ‘worldwide discussion, debates and reforms’ concerning transparency in government.  Manning’s detractors, and even some of his more liberal sympathisers, have, however, done their best to ignore his clearly stated political motive, focusing instead on Manning’s sexual preference, gender identity, a ‘troubled’ psychology and, as a gay, “alienated and brutalised by the Army’s macho culture”, his military dysfunction.

It is tempting, though trite, says Madar, to see Manning’s political dissent as a result of mental health problems.  As Madar argues in response, the numerous gay soldiers in the US military, and its plentiful mentally ill soldiers (“the leading cause of death among active-duty US troops over the past four years has been … suicide”) are not psychologically predisposed to “declassify public records”. Stereotyping information rebels as being a bit weird deliberately devalues their moral conscience and political courage. 

As Manning himself has noted, the red herrings of his personal psychology matter only in the sense that ‘I’m way way way too easy to marginalise’.  His status as a gay, soon-to-be-transgender atheist, says Madar, “unsuits Manning thoroughly to be a poster-child for the cause of transparent government” by allowing the powerful to pathologise rather than politicise him.

Where the real sickness lies, says Madar, is with Washington’s self-interested and paranoid “over-classification of government documents”.  The National Security Agency has just got around to declassifying military documents from 1809, the CIA still keeps documents from World War 1 classified whilst the Department of Defence has finally declassified the Pentagon Papers (which document the secret history of the Vietnam War) a hardly-more-sprightly four decades after they became publicly available in book form.

This government mania for document secrecy, plus censorship of former officials, will continue to “distort and stifle public debate on vital issues of war and foreign policy”, says Madar, whilst a “national panic about leaks”, sauced with “chauvinistic nationalism”, is meant to discourage potential leakers from letting in any sunshine on what the American government gets up to in its citizens’ names.

This anti-leak deterrent has been exercised most energetically by President Obama, who came to office as the “whistleblower’s friend” promising a government Age of Aquarius but whose Department of Justice has launched more prosecutions against leakers, including Manning, than all previous presidencies combined.

Completed just before Manning’s trial verdict which carries up to 135 years jail, Madar’s book is a highly useful, thoroughly spirited contribution to the campaign to free Bradley Manning, the next stage in the task of liberating truth from its jail of government secrecy.