Posted by John, May 18th, 2010 - under Profit rates, Profits, Rudd Government, Rudd Labor.



It’s a lie that Labor stands for nothing. Its actions in power show it stands for war, poverty, racism and keeping the bosses rich.

On war, the ALP has bolstered troop numbers in Afghanistan as part of the insurance policy with the US called the Alliance. This enables Australian imperialism to expand its influence in the region and join with the US in containing China’s imperial growth.

What does it matter to Labor that a few misguided working class kids die for imperialism – theirs and ours?

On poverty, the Rudd Government has continued the attack on unions begun by Hawke and Keating and carried on by Howard. Fair Work Australia is but a nuanced version of Work Choices.

Its raison d’etre is to keep workers under tight control and ensure their unions don’t and can’t get out of control (ie strike for more pay). In other words Labor is about continuing the long term trend of the bosses getting a bigger and bigger share of the national cake at the expense of workers.

No wonder Clive Palmer is so fat. Labor has been feeding him.

In the 3 years Labor has been in power the position of the most disadvantaged group in Australia, our Aboriginal brothers and sisters, has gone backwards on most indicators.

They die much younger, often of the diseases of poverty, they are much poorer than the rest of us, and of course under the racist Northern Territory intervention they are subject to income quarantining that no white yet faces (although some soon will).

The intervention in the Northern Territory is not about protecting kids. It is about demonising aborigines, targeting the poor and disadvantaged and stealing their land.

Labor is even handed in its racism. It applies its ‘standards’ not just to native born blacks but to dark skinned people from overseas too.

At the moment the Rudd Government has frozen the processing of refugee applications from Sri Lankan and and Afghan asylum seekers. The situation is evidently so good in their home countries that we shouldn’t rush into these things.

Let’s leave aside the fact that Afghanistan is a hellhole of Western making and in Sri Lanka the Government is conducting a campaign of genocide against Tamils.

Labor clearly stands for something on the environment, what our esteemed Prime Minister calls the great moral challenge of our time. So great that he has postponed doing anything about it until 2012 at the earliest.

The plan Labor had for addressing climate change was in fact a set of handouts to the polluters to continue polluting. Their Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was worse than doing nothing.

There is one principle that links all these policies.

If Labor stands for anything, it stands for the defence of the profit system and the restoration and improvement of profit rates. This means at best moderating improvements in workers’ living standards and at worst attacking them.

Labor rules for capital; the Liberals rule for capitalists.

In a period when profit rates have been stagnant or falling in most of the developed world, and in Australia, almost every policy Labor has or adopts is geared to improving the profitability of Australian capitalism. That is the Party’s essence.