Posted by John, July 18th, 2011 - under Lies, Politicians.



Bourgeois politicians are paid to lie. They have to smooth over the class contradictions in society as best they can. They have to rule in the interests of capital but in a society in which the vast majority of people are workers.

So they speak with a forked tongue. There is nothing remarkable about this.

Sometimes the lies are brazen. John Howard was an exponent of that but got away with it because his lies often pandered to prejudice.

More importantly he presided over an expanding economy in a time before the global financial crisis and the uncertainty and worry that created. Many people could forgive him his lies.

But even though the Australian economy on the surface is sound, the memory of the GFC has forced many working class people to curtail their spending and worry rightly about the future.

The economic concerns in the US and Europe and the possibility of the GFC mark II are part of that thinking.

So workers pay attention to things they perceive to be cutting or that might cut their living standards.

A carbon tax will do that. Even on Treasury’s own figures it appears the carbon tax package will cut real wages.

So workers remember Gillard’s promise she would not introduce a price on carbon.

She is not doing that because of changed political circumstances.

To remain in power she had to do a deal with the Greens to introduce a price on carbon.

To retain power she has developed a carbon tax which won”t address climate change, but which the Greens accept because it gives them the opportunity in a few years time when the ETS might come into effect to attack workers’ living standards.

Treasury figures seem to indicate there will be a fall in living standards as a consequence of the carbon tax – 0.8 percent by 2020 and 4.8 percent by 2050. The polluters on the other hand do well.

The circumstance have changed, she bleats. True, but she has lost so many people even this explanation washes over them.

For a start she had only recently rolled Kevin Rudd as the agent of the mining companies in their campaign against a piss weak Resource Super Profits Tax and replaced it with an even more anaemic minerals resource rent tax, to the sound of much chinking of champagne glasses in mining company board rooms across the country.

So she didn’t want to scare them again. And she knew if she said she was considering a carbon price or tax she might lose the election.

But the important thing here is she lied in the run up to the last election. Just like the Liberals did with their silence about Workchoices in the run up to 2007.

Just as Abbott is doing now about industrial relations, the effect of the carbon tax, the war in Afghanistan…

Labor is lying about these issues too – sometimes, like Afghanistan, the same lies but often, like the carbon tax or industrial relations, lies in the pursuit of seeming difference but with the same objective – defence of the profit system and maximum extraction possible of surplus from workers. And power.

Of course we should be disgusted when bourgeois politicians lie to us. But we shouldn’t be surprised. That is their job.

Bourgeois politicians are the political equivalent of The News of the World. Full of shit, living in a world where lies are a dime a dozen and bent coppers and politicians fearful of the fear mongers evidently are too.