THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF FIFA David Conn

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF FIFA
DAVID CONN
Yellow Jersey Press, 2017, 328 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

In no breast did the prodigious financial corruption of world football’s administrative elite beat more vigorously than that of Chuck Blazer, the head of football in the north and central American and Caribbean regional body.  Chuck was not called ‘American soccer’s “Mr. Big”’ for nothing – his bottomless appetite for high-calorie nosh gave him a gargantuan girth, which was financially matched in size by his tax-sheltered bank accounts which bulged with millions of dollars received through fraud, embezzlement, bribes, perks, gifts and inducements, so much so that not only could he afford to rent an entire floor of luxury apartments in the prestigious Trump Tower in Manhattan but to preserve one of them solely for the use of his cats.

The cat angle is just one of the juicy tidbits from The Fall of the House of FIFA by Guardian sports journalist (and Manchester City fan), David Conn, to add to what is by now a widely-known story of how global football’s governing body, Fifa, has personally enriched its leading lights through bribes and material inducements to vote for Fifa’s top office-holders and World Cup venues, and kickbacks to award broadcast and sponsorship rights.
Fifa’s off-field corruption scandals have now been exposed to such an extent that criminal indictments, arrests or investigations have grown to take in 27 of Fifa’s most senior global administrators, whilst six other Fifa officials (including the Fifa boss of four decades, Sepp Blatter) have been sacked for ethics violations.
The FBI has declared Fifa to be a RICO, a ‘racketeering-influenced criminal organisation’, and, like another notorious RICO, the Mafia, the Fifa rot started at the top.  Blatter had, like a true Godfather, kept a ‘clean-hands’ image, turning a blind eye to the graft of his lieutenants in order to guarantee, at election time, his own prestigious position (he craved the title of ‘Mr. President’) through keeping the Fifa financial gravy train well-fuelled for its executive passengers.  Blatter was also able to eschew personal crude corruption, such as cash bribes in brown envelopes, because of the dizzying scale of the Fifa President’s multi-million dollar annual salary and bonuses, and four-yearly World Cup ‘performance pay’ reward.
The final act of Fifa’s unravelling was prompted by the credulity-stretching decision in 2010 to award the 2022 World Cup to the tiny desert state of Qatar to be held in the sweltering summer.  Russia, which won the 2018 World Cup hosting rights at the same time, thoughtfully decided to destroy all computers and other documentary traces that might contain evidence of massive corruption concerning their bid, too.
The ’reform’ broom of the new Fifa President, Gianni Infantino, looks to have many gaps, however.  He enjoys the perks of the job and its reduced but still generous remuneration, whilst he has compromised the independence of Fifa’s refurbished oversight committees.  When Infantino came under early suspicion for ethical misbehaviour as President, Fifa’s new ethics body cleared him, rather unsurprisingly for a committee whose members can be sacked by the very people they are investigating.
Unfortunately, Conn spends most of his book navigating the intricate maze of FIFA corruption, too rarely lifting his eyes to take in the bigger picture – how capitalist globalisation has infected the world game by monetising sport, making profit its main guiding principle and rewarding an unaccountable stratum of top administrators (and grossly overpaid elite players and coaches) whilst starving football’s mass grass roots.  The problem with Fifa, like that of capitalism, is the familiar one of too much money and not enough democracy.

CARDINAL: The Rise and Fall of George Pell LOUISE MILLIGAN

CARDINAL: The Rise and Fall of George Pell

LOUISE MILLIGAN

Melbourne University Press, 2017, 384 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

The Vatican Treasurer, George Pell, could well turn out to be the Lance Armstrong of the Australian Catholic Church.  Like the world’s former top cyclist, who furiously denied being a drug cheat until he was eventually rumbled by dogged investigative journalists, Pell, Australia’s top Catholic, has maintained his complete innocence in the face of credible and mounting allegations that he not only covered up an epidemic of clerical sexual abuse of children by Australian Catholic priests but was himself a paedophile abuser.  The ABC’s Louise Milligan has been on Pell’s case for a while now and Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell zeroes in on the fire causing all the smoke which surrounds Pell.

 

Pell, born in Ballarat in 1941, rose through Catholic seminaries and presbyteries which were hotspots for turning out paedophile priests.  He became Archbishop of Melbourne and then, in 2014, the Vatican’s No. 2 in Rome but Pell left a ruinous path of personal destruction (depression, substance abuse, suicide) in his holy wake.  If only, whilst at priest school, Pell had taken up the contract offered by Richmond Football Club to play as a ruckman for the Tigers, then a lot of people might have been spared a lot of grief (other than opposition footy players who would have discovered just how bruising the intimidating Catholic conservative hard-liner could be).

 

Whilst insisting he never had any idea what was going on under his leadership, Pell had stopped priests from speaking out about their peer’s sexual crimes and he was actively involved in moving offenders on to new parishes to re-offend all over again.

 

As public allegations of clerical abuse continued to grow, however, the Church turned to Pell, highly regarded by church leaders as an able administrator, to save the Church in Victoria from reputational and financial damage.  Pell instituted an in-house scheme which, in return for the victims’ legally-enforceable silence, paid them a paltry average of $32,000 in compensation as hush money.  This saved the Church not only too great an outlay on Pell’s $20,000-a-day defence silks, but many hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from civil suits in civilian courts.

 

Despite Pell’s labours, however, the scale of the abuse eventually came to light through a Royal Commission which had been prompted by police whistleblowers.  The Commission’s statistics were shocking - between 1950 and 2010, there were 4,444 incidents of child sexual abuse made against 1,880 priests (7% of Australian Catholic priests).  Pell’s diocese of Melbourne topped the national body count.

 

Subsequent to these revelations, Pell himself came under suspicion of being an abuser.  Milligan was central to documenting some of the alleged cases concerning Pell from his time as trainee priest to becoming Archbishop.  These included the genital groping of an altar boy at a Church camp on Phillip Island; the groping of Catholic primary school boys in Ballarat’s Eureka Pool and full-frontal exposure in the showers afterwards; indecent exposure to young surf lifesavers in the change rooms at Torquay surf club; and oral sex with choirboys in St. Patrick’s Church.

 

Pell, tipped off about a police investigation into these allegations, decided that the Vatican, which has no extradition agreement with Australia, was a safer place to be.  Further preventing Pell from flying back to Australia is a sudden-onset heart condition - medically certified by the Vatican house physician whose bag of scientific tricks includes the authentication of miracles by aspirant saints.

 

Pell is now 76 – “how long before he reaches ‘I don’t recall’ territory”, says an unimpressed Milligan.  In February 2017, a Greens motion calling on Pell to voluntarily return and assist the police investigation was passed by the federal Senate.  Pell scorned it as a ‘political stunt’.

 

The post-Pell Catholic hierarchy in Australia is now saying all the right things and displaying all the right emotions on the Church’s child abuse but, unless there is a full accounting of its past, all the way up to the former Archbishop himself, including bringing him back from his Vatican bolt-hole, then it could all just be an image management exercise.  To the victims, the refurbished rhetoric may be “as hollow as all the holy lectures they received as children, all the while that they were being raped in presbyteries, touched up in confessionals” - or flashed at, groped by and giving fellatio to Pell.

 

This hypocrisy is of a piece with what the Catholic Church (and other institutional religions) share with their capitalist (and other class society) hosts - immense power, vast wealth and a boundless waste dump stuffed full with the human wreckage inflicted by an unaccountable elite.

OCTOBER: The Story of the Russian Revolution CHINA MIEVILLE

OCTOBER: The Story of the Russian Revolution
CHINA MIÉVILLE
Verso, 2017, 369 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

1917 offered an extraordinary course in political literacy for the people of Russia.  In the February anti-Tsarist revolution, which “dispensed breakneck with a half millennium of autocratic rule”, and then in the October socialist revolution, eager workers and peasants stumbled over and then mastered a new way to speak of economic and political democracy, writes China Miéville in his narrative of the Russian Revolution.

Miéville is an English left-wing political activist and award-winning writer of fantasy fiction and magical realism, which he self-describes as ‘weird’ fiction.  The only thing ‘weird’ about 1917, however, at least by todays’ establishment political orthodoxy, is the notion that ordinary people can utterly recast their society and bring about momentous change.  They can confront the apparently immovable object of capitalist solidity – and win!  As Miéville says, the world’s first socialist revolution matters, and deserves celebration, because “things changed once, and they might do so again”.

Miéville has a novelist’s eye for a great story, and his breathless, journalistic narrative befits the dizzying pace and political drama of revolutionary upheaval, combining an impressionistic flurry of events with sparkling political tension.  Miniature character portraits humanise the legendary cast.  Lenin is a “plain not sparkling wordsmith” but his relentless political focus is “mesmerising” to friend and foe alike.  Trotsky is “hard to love but impossible not to admire … charismatic and abrasive, brilliant and persuasive, and divisive and difficult”.  The early Stalin is “a capable, if never scintillating, organiser.  At best an adequate intellectual, at worst an embarrassing one … The impression he left was one of not leaving much of an impression”, other than of something ‘troubling’ in his character.

The sweep of Miéville’s story takes in not just high politics but its grass-roots ferment, where “every queue was a political forum”, where waitresses refused to accept tips as demeaning, and where Tsarist statues were keenly pulled down, “some having been erected for the sole purpose of pulling down”.  There was a glorious profusion of hyphenated political life-forms (Anarchist-Communists, Socialist-Revolutionary-Maximalists, etc.) on the left, outshining the main political species to their bourgeois and landowning right, the Constitutional Democrats, whose name was as drab as their political vision.
Miéville explores all sorts of by-ways, including religion, that were lapped by the waves of socialist radicalism.  Muslim women, for example, found their voice – an All-Russian Muslim Women’s Congress hosted 59 delegates (including socialist and feminist Muslims) who adopted ten principles on Muslim women’s rights, including equality of the sexes, the non-compulsory nature of the hijab, and opposition to plural marriage (polygyny) without consent.
Lenin looms ever larger as the pace of events picks up, deservedly so because political leadership mattered immensely.  Miéville notes that Lenin is “easily mythologised, idolised or demonised” either as a “mass murdering monster” or a “godlike genius”.  Miéville’s Lenin, by contrast, is credible.  He was a selfless idealist but with all-too-human flaws (he was a fierce, sometimes insensitive, polemicist with his erstwhile comrades).  An intellectual who didn’t just think about but lived for the hurly burly of revolution, Lenin was utterly determined (what his detractors misrepresent as fanatical) yet tactically flexible and strategically subtle, astutely judging when “the political moment” called for “patiently explaining” or for bold action, and when to toss overboard long-held Marxist verities (such as no socialism until consolidation of capitalist industrial development) – when, in short, to be, as he put it, ‘as radical as reality’.
What also emerges strikingly from Miéville’s account is the indispensability of democracy to Lenin’s politics, to the rest of the pre-Stalin Bolsheviks and to the revolution.  From farm to factory, from soviet to party leadership, debate was boisterous, intense, heated at times, but always meaningful and prized.  Lenin, the supposed proto-Stalinist tyrant,  copped as good as he gave when it came to verbal jousts with his comrades, and more than a few times found himself in a minority in the party, and sometimes a minority of one on the Bolshevik Central Committee.
Miéville’s book is an amalgam of the journalistic, historical and biographical accounts of the revolution by Leon Trotsky, Victor Serge, John Reed and Isaac Deutscher but Miéville loses little in artistic comparison, and cedes nothing in revolutionary tone, to these writers who are clearly his strong political and stylistic influences.
Miéville’s aim in the book was always storytelling first, however, and, more than do his literary mentors, he foregrounds the theatre of revolt over the theory of revolution.  In his Epilogue, however, he offers updated reflections on how “October is still ground zero for arguments about fundamental, radical social change”.  All that the Right has to offer on this is some repeat-loop version of the malignity of socialism and its inevitable authoritarian slide into Red Terror because Marx begat Lenin begat Stalin, etc.
Miéville is much more honest and nuanced about how the post-revolution “moral and political rot” set in.  The basic cause, he says, was the devastating loss of material and human resources from imperialist war, imperialist invasion, imperialist economic blockade, imperialist-backed civil war, and, above all else, socialist Russia’s isolation arising from the post-war failure of revolution (viciously suppressed in Germany) in capitalist Europe.  These conditions fertilised the soil for what were, in the beleaguered times, unavoidable but meant-to-be-temporary retreats from a socialist democracy and economy.  The emergency reversals in policy gradually hardened into virtues under Stalin, who groomed a new generation of politically undeveloped party members into a privileged bureaucratic stratum.  A political diet as rich as it was in democracy and ideals and hope in 1917 could never sustain a healthy socialist development which lacked basic material nutrients.
What the anti-socialist warriors, then and now, can never concede is that Lenin’s Bolsheviks won the battle of ideas in 1917, in Pravda editorial, conference resolution, street pamphlet and stump speech.  The revolution was not a contest of military force and political coup played out over the people’s heads but a successful fight to win over people through debate.
The haters of socialist revolution may still be partying over the death of a socialism which they declare was manifested in the nauseous fever of Stalin and the long coma under his neo-Stalinist successors, but their celebrations are always at risk of being cut short.  The socialist idea is too resilient and that is why the Russian Revolution matters, Melville concludes, because “what’s at stake isn’t the interpretation just of history but of the present”, as he has noted elsewhere about the “extraordinary political upsets” and near misses, for better or worse (BREXIT, Corbyn, Sanders, Trump), in 2016 when “the questioning of received opinions” erupted.  1917 may have been “ultimately tragic” but it remains “ultimately inspiring” for those who want such revolts to break in the better direction.

THE CASE AGAINST FRAGRANCE Kate Grenville

THE CASE AGAINST FRAGRANCE

KATE GRENVILLE

Text Publishing, 2017, 198 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

The fragrance industry really gets up Kate Grenville’s nose.  The Australian novelist has gradually worked out that artificially-scented consumer products, from high-end perfume to toilet cleaner, were the cause of her debilitating headaches and wooziness.  In The Case Against Fragrance, Grenville discovers that synthetic scent molecules literally get up the nose and attach themselves to nerve receptors causing all manner of medical mayhem in the brain and nervous system.

Scented products such as cosmetics, shampoo, soap, after-shave, moisturiser, laundry detergents, cleaning products and air fresheners have been scientifically implicated in a vast suite of health problems including migraines (around half of sufferers have them triggered by fragrance), sore eyes, breathing difficulties, asthma, skin rashes, fatigue and, with high enough fragrance doses over time, some cancers.  Over a third of all people report having some sort of health problem from fragrance.  The problems are most acute, and potentially fatal, in the growing population of clinically-diagnosed chemical sensitivity sufferers like Grenville.

Avoidance of fragrance is virtually  impossible - fragrances used by other people or in air-conditioned buildings permeate the public air space, including public transport, offices, concert venues, restaurants and shopping centres. 

None of this worries the fragrance industry, however.  Artificial scents are cheap to synthesise and have a large manufacturers’ market.  They are not subject to profit-thinning regulation - time-consuming and expensive safety testing of the chemical ingredients of fragrances is avoided when the only safety watchdog is the industry itself which magically transmutes conflict of interest between sales and safety to a rewarding confluence of interest.

Grenville devotes much of her book to unsnarling the technical tangle of polysyllabic alpha-numeric molecular chemical compounds and their heath effects, and advocates a policy of using ‘fragrance-free’ products, but only occasionally touches on broader corporate and political issues.

Nevertheless, her disgust with the industry is evident.  However nice the product smells, the fragrance industry is malodorous.  It produces an entirely unnecessary product, wastes the valuable skills of many scientists and condemns huge numbers of consumers to ill-health in known and as-yet-unknown ways, all in the pursuit of money-making.  What really stinks, however, is the capitalist economic and political system which allows it to happen.

MISS MURIEL MATTERS by ROBERT WAINWRIGHT

MISS MURIEL MATTERS

ROBERT WAINWRIGHT
ABC Books, 2017, 376 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

In 1909, Miss Muriel Matters planned to rain on the parade of King Edward V11 to the ceremonial opening of parliament by dropping a shower of ‘Votes for Women’ leaflets on his head from a chartered airship balloon trailing streamers in the white, gold and green of the Women’s Freedom League (WFL).

As Robert Wainwright notes in his biography of Matters, the Australian-born women’s suffrage activist, fickle winds foiled the plan but, with megaphone in hand, Matters found her vocal mark and got the message across loud and clear to the crowned dunce who had referred to suffragists as ‘those dreadful women’.

Police had banned leafleting on the streets, so the WFL had naturally taken to the skies.  It was a typically imaginative leap that characterised the WFL’s campaigning style.  The year before, Matters had delivered the first speech by a woman in the British House of Commons after dramatically chaining herself to the metal grille which kept the ‘Ladies Gallery’ observers separate from the political menfolk (women could neither stand for election nor vote in Britain) at work on the floor of the chamber.

The Honourable Member for Holborn, a Mr James Remnant (the delightfully-named representative of a dying era of male-only suffrage), was stopped mid-drone by Matters as her clarion call to ‘give women a voice in legislation which affects them as much as it affects men’ rose above the angry tumult below, forcing the closure of parliament and the removal of the hated grille, with Matters locked to it, as the only way to stop her voice.

Born in Adelaide, Matters, when aged 14, was given a copy of Henryk Ibsen’s proto-feminist play, The Doll’s House, whose heroine, Nora, leaves her husband and children to discover her independence outside home and family.  Matters often used Nora’s passages in her captivating public recitations along with such fare as “the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Browning or marathon odes set to music by Richard Strauss”.

Like Nora, Matters insisted on making her own life choices, often against her father’s will - she took up acting, and scuppered her first romance to an Adelaide music celebrity when his views on women turned out to be unenlightened.

In London, Matters became the darling of the leisured class with invitations to shooting weekends on country estates.  But what was it all for, she asked herself, after a searching encounter with the exiled Russian anarcho-communist, Peter Kropotkin.  When she looked behind “the applause and the bouquets of Covent Garden … and the salons of Bloomsbury”, she saw a city of women in poverty and deprived of equality.  She had to choose – the salon or the slum, wealthy women or working women.

Matters chose the reform of society rather than to perform to ‘society’.  She would use her vocal talents on behalf of the voteless by campaigning for women’s suffrage as a first step towards broader social reforms that benefited women, including working conditions, housing, health, education, prison reform and equality in marriage.  Matters was determined to make Britain follow the suffrage path blazed by New Zealand and Australian women in the 1890s for the democratic right to make the laws which governed their lives.

Her chosen vehicle, the WFL, stood somewhere between the militant suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the moderate suffragists of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).  The left-wing WFL also went beyond the middle class WSPU and NUWSS by seeing women’s suffrage as a means to wider rights and equality for all women, including working women - “it was a feminist, not just a suffrage, movement”, says Wainwright.

What the smaller WFL lacked in members and money, however, it made up for with creative stunts, and the fearlessness of its leading activists like Matters who toured the country by horse and cart, organising, recruiting and fund-raising, and facing down, with wit and composure, the leering hecklers and violent yobs with their arsenal of eggs, flour, tomatoes and stink bombs.

Their biggest obstacle, however, was the Liberal government of Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, a man of primitive sexist prejudice (women were ‘hopelessly ignorant of politics’, ‘flickering with gusts of sentiment’, he said) but also coldly calculating that his party, wedged between wealth (and its party – the Conservatives) and the working class (and its party - Labour), would lose the votes of enfranchised women to both.

It took post-world-war political expediency to act as the catalyst for change.  Forty per cent of British men were still disenfranchised by property restrictions.  This included most of the soldiers on the hellish WW1 battlefields.  All political parties had electoral skin in the militarist game of khaki patriotism and they competed to reward working class men for their service to empire by giving them the vote.  As the men would, however, favour Labour, it was necessary to enfranchise only the ‘right’ (middle and upper class) kind of women as a counterbalance.

Property, wealth, age and educational restrictions were the class strings attached to the partial women’s suffrage law of 1918 which enfranchised only a quarter of British women.  Nevertheless, the suffrage levee had been breached and the right to vote spread to all British women over the next decade. 

Matters died in 1969, aged 92, having put in many solid decades of bread-and-butter, left-wing, feminist activism, some as a Labour Party candidate, but it was those early toppings (the first woman to make a speech in the British parliament, and the world’s first aerial protest) that were memorable – and justly historic.

TRUE BELIEVER: Stalin’s Last American Spy

KATI MARTON

Simon & Schuster, 2016, 288 pages

 

Review by Phil Shannon

Breadlines, mass unemployment and Nazis made Noel Field a communist in the 1930s.  This gentle, intelligent son of American Quaker pacifists, however, was to be betrayed by Stalin, the man Field thought embodied the socialist vision, writes Kati Marton in True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy.

 

A progressive but, as Field reflected, ‘typical middle class intellectual’, he worked in official government channels (the US State Department and the League of Nations), trying to influence international affairs away from war.  This strategy proved frustrating to the young Field whose skills and idealism were being squandered by politically self-interested diplomacy and institutional ineffectiveness.

 

An Ivy League graduate of ‘good breeding’ and ‘distinctly a gentleman’, as his government examiners put it, with boundless talent (he completed a four year Harvard degree in just two), Field was marked by Moscow’s agents as a suitable intellectual for recruitment to their undercover spy network.  At the same time, Field finally figured out whether he was ‘a Socialist, a Liberal, or a Radical, or a Democrat’ and threw in his lot with the only ones – the communists – who had the political inspiration and energy to overthrow all he detested – war, inequality, class exploitation, racism.

 

Field was thus recruited in 1935 to Stalin’s intelligence network (the NKVD), providing them with classified US documents.  Stalin, being Stalin, however, was more interested in his secret police keeping in check potential political opponents than learning of Hitler’s military designs on Soviet Russia.  Field, an unquestioning Stalinist, was ineluctably drawn into the dictator’s Great Terror – first, as enabler, and then as victim.

 

Amongst Field’s Soviet control officers was Ignaz Reiss, a Soviet spy who had broken with Stalin - ‘Our paths part … [you are] a traitor to the cause of the working class and socialism’, Reiss rashly but bravely wrote to Stalin himself, guaranteeing his liquidation.  Field willingly agreed that, should Reiss get in touch with him in Geneva, he would alert the NKVD.  Although other Stalinist plotters got to Reiss first, Field was an aspiring accessory to political assassination.

 

As guilt-by-association spread in ever-widening circles amongst Stalin’s intelligence periphery, the paranoia inevitably lapped against Field, too.  Even though his war work in Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Vichy France for a non-government humanitarian aid organisation rescuing refugees trapped by fascism was skewed towards the saving anti-fascist communists for repatriation, this political ulterior motive counted against him in the view of Stalin.  Western communists were regarded as politically suspect by Stalin, tainted by their capitalist cultures and for having the quaint habit of seeing (Trotskyist) international revolution and Stalin’s Mother-Russia-First ‘Socialism in One Country’ as the same thing.

 

Named as a Russian spy by a communist renegade appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Field feared an FBI subpoena and sought safety in post-war ‘communist’ Czechoslovakia in 1949.  It was a fateful decision.  Handed over to the hard-line Stalinist secret police in ‘communist’ Hungary, Field was called an American spy and abused, beaten and tortured into naming all his contacts, dooming hundreds of European communists as ‘Fieldists’ (a pejorative as mortal as ‘Trotskyist’ or ‘Titoist’) to show trials and Stalinist repression in Moscow’s satellite subsidiaries in eastern Europe.

 

After five years of grim prison in Budapest, Field abjectly came to agree with his jailers that he was guilty.  His only avenue of escape from execution was as a Cold War trophy, an ‘American progressive’ who had renounced his Western capitalist wickedness by seeking asylum in the ‘communist’ east, which Field duly requested in 1954.

 

Field was a sad, broken, betrayed man, given the job as editor of a turgidly Stalinist, English-language journal in Hungary.  In its pages, he dutifully denounced the 1956 Hungarian anti-Stalinist revolt as a counter-revolutionary ‘White Terror’ plot properly snuffed out by Soviet tanks.   

 

Field died in 1970.  His state funeral would have been an embarrassment to him, as his mourners mumbled the long-forgotten lyrics to unfashionable revolutionary songs, including the Internationale which had so stirred him in his socialist epiphany decades ago.

 

Kati Marton is a line-and-length anti-communist (“Marxism curdles into Leninism, then hardens into Stalinism” is her political creed), so she fingers Marxism as the Original Sin responsible for Field “never [being able to] abandon the faith which gave his life meaning”, despite all the degeneracy of Stalinism.

 

Yet, her account of Field’s final two years shows that deep inside even the coldest-hearted Stalinist, there was no guarantee that the first flame of revolutionary idealism could ever be entirely extinguished.  When the Soviet military crushed the 1968 Czechoslovakian revolution, Field wrote no defence of the Kremlin’s action in his journal, and he stopped paying his party dues.  Field’s final gestures had rekindled the remaining embers of dissent against political injustice that had made him a “true believer” in the first place.

PLANET JACKSON: Power, Greed & Unions BRAD NORINGTON

PLANET JACKSON: Power, Greed & Unions

BRAD NORINGTON

Melbourne University Press, 2016, 328 pages

 

Review by Phil Shannon

Michael Williamson, top dog of the Health Services Union (HSU), used to joke that ‘nothing’s too good for the workers - and their representatives’, as he brazenly defrauded the union to generously enrich himself.  $5 million worth of generosity – that’s an awful lot of life’s little luxuries like fine wine, retail goods, international holidays, mortgage repayments, home renovations, Mercedes, speedboats and private school fees.  Just one lavish, boozy lunch with his cronies would burn through the annual dues ($600) of one of his low-paid union members (hospital cleaners, orderlies, clerks, porters, etc.), writes journalist, Brad Norington, in Planet Jackson.

 

Williamson’s thieving was accomplished through misuse of his union credit card, through HSU business supply contracts at grossly inflated prices from companies fully or partially owned by himself or his family, and through nepotism and cronyism (he put eight family members on the union payroll whilst his mistress received $155,000 a year for two days ‘work’ a week).  For a creative flourish, Williamson claimed reimbursement for false claims of muggings and burglaries of union money.  Obviously, the poor chap must have been struggling to get by on his annual salary of $700,000.

 

Other senior HSU officials aped his example.  Craig Thomson, a protégé of Williamson, trousered $250,000 to fund his successful 2007 Australian Labor Party (ALP) federal election campaign, and embezzled $24,000 to spend on prostitutes, sporting memorabilia and firewood, amongst the dishes on offer from the smorgasbord of personal goodies supplied on other people’s dimes.

 

Kathy Jackson was a $1.4 billion financial embellisher in her mentor’s mould – her favourites from the corruption buffet were fashion, medical services, hi-fi gear, groceries, liquor, camping equipment, shopping trips to Hong Kong and divorce settlement payments to her ex-husband.  During the 2004 Boxing Day sales, Jackson ran up $7,000 in a single day on her union credit cards.

 

Jackson was the most cynical of the three, blowing the whistle on Williamson but only in an internal power struggle - so even that act of honesty was self-serving.  Noble whistle-blower was the “perfect cover” for her own corruption, says Norington.

 

The HSU thieves were all addicted to greed.  Even when Thomson faced ignominious defeat in the 2013 elections, he decided to stand again as an independent - just so he could milk the taxpayer by claiming a ‘resettlement allowance’ of $97,000 for defeated  incumbents.  Jackson, when publicly disgraced, tried to mine a new income seam by getting her hooks into a retired, dementia-suffering QC for a share of his $30 million estate, whilst having herself appointed as executor which gave her access to his bank accounts.

 

Norington examines in minute detail every sordid nut and filthy bolt of the HSU leaders’ corruption but only occasionally lifts his eyes to examine a greater corruption than that of a few light-fingered union officials, namely the industrially and politically corrupting intersection of the ALP and its affiliated unions.

 

Williamson, Thomson and Jackson bartered their union bloc votes for factional influence and potential plush parliamentary careers in the ALP whilst Labor politicians needed their factional union allies, even the crooked ones.  Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, opportunistically motivated by retaining office, publicly covered for Thomson, whilst the party paid his enormous legal bills to keep him from going bankrupt, losing his seat and bringing down the minority Gillard government.

 

The HSU Three, even whilst they were shamelessly diddling their union members, saw the ALP, the self-proclaimed ‘party for the workers’, as a suitable political home for themselves.  That tells us something, something unwholesome, about where the ALP’s loyalties really lie – with the labour elite, at the expense of the workers they claim to represent.