NEVER ENOUGH: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success by MICHAEL D'ANTONIO

NEVER ENOUGH: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success

MICHAEL D’ANTONIO

St. Martin’s Press, 2015, 389 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

What will America and the world be getting from ‘President Donald Trump’ if such a frightful prospect comes to pass in 2016?  Michael D’Antonio’s biography of the Republican Party’s front-running Presidential candidate gives us some clues - denial of global warming, vaccination, marriage equality and abortion; insults and worse for religious and ethnic minorities, and for women and the disabled; and a turbo-charged American imperial power.

 

The winner, on the other hand, would be big business, Trump’s true religion.  The business mogul’s early training was one of honing a Social Darwinist survival of the most aggressive (Trump thrived during his disciplinarian schooling at a military academy) combined with the pampering that only true family riches can provide (the rain-marred trials of young Donald’s paper round would be relieved by completing it in his father’s chauffeured limousine).

 

Trump likes to dismiss those born into wealth as members of ‘the lucky sperm club’ but he glosses over his own origins in one of America’s wealthiest dynasties, which made its fortune, not through honest, hard work, but through buying real estate cheap and selling it dear, from the 19^th century Gold Rush to New York in early century boom-time and 1930s Depression.

 

A family fortune of around $100 million assisted Trump’s emergence as a high-end property developer in Manhattan in the late 1970s, as did another family inheritance - the financial cultivation of politicians and government bureaucrats to secure favourable contracts, construction permits, zoning approvals and tax concessions.

 

The Trump brand expanded to every enterprise he owned (skyscrapers, hotels, casinos, airlines, beauty pageants, golf resorts, football teams, ‘universities’) and those he licensed to use the Trump brand (board games, credit cards, mattresses, deodorants, chocolate bars, neckties, steaks, cologne).  Trump’s gold-glittering name adorned the ostentatious symbols of his personal wealth - his 300 metre yacht, his $10 million helicopter, his $100 million private jet.

 

Not every business venture was a success, but because Trump’s loans were in the billions rather than thousands, he had power over the banks and other lenders who could not afford to see Trump fail.  Unlike ordinary American borrowers who were ruined by the banks if they defaulted, Trump’s creditors advanced him new loans and let his assets alone.

 

Trump made his pile through hard-headed, Trump-friendly deals.  These were driven by Trump’s insatiable greed, massive self-belief and a firm faith in the bankability of notoriety.  Trump begins each day with a sheaf of papers covering all his press mentions, positive or negative, judging their value to his brand not by their content but by their total weight.

 

With Trump, publicity is all.  Three previous Presidential electoral feints were all designed to promote his self-help/get-rich books or his reality television show, ‘The Apprentice’, a brutal ode to competitive capitalism.  Trump’s current tilt at President is motivated by the lure of becoming CEO of America, the missing political Godhead so far in Trump’s deities of “wealth, fame and power”. 

 

The political currency of Trump’s campaign, says D’Antonio, is that of a populist ‘anti-politician’, stoking public outrage against minorities whilst lambasting ‘elites’ such as the White House ‘Establishment’ and big money political donors who pay too little tax.  This resonates loudly enough with Trump’s power base – aggrieved, economically-struggling, white, southern males - to drown out their concerns about Trump’s serial lying, refusal to apologise and evasiveness on policy detail.

 

The ascent to economic and political stardom of Trump, the self-styled “people’s billionaire”, began four decades ago, says D’Antonio, at exactly the moment when working class and corporate income differentials began to diverge exponentially and when collective trade union responses to this escalating inequality receded.  Only if individuals aspired to be like Donald Trump, and if the ‘undeserving’ were delegitimised, could you find success.

 

D’Antonio’s penchant (apart from being besotted with the mechanics of business deals) is for psychological analysis, diagnosing Trump’s obsession with himself as ‘narcissistic personality disorder’.  The real pathology, however, is the environment which fosters the Trumps of the world - the economic system of winner-take-all capitalism which rewards the privileged, greedy and ruthlessly competitive.  Donald Trump is truly the poster-child for the 1%, for whom too much is, indeed, never enough.

BORN TO RULE: The Unauthorised Biography of Malcolm Turnbull by PADDY MANNING

BORN TO RULE: The Unauthorised Biography of Malcolm Turnbull

PADDY MANNING

Melbourne University Press, 2015, 442 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

The Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, likes to downplay his image as a privileged, wealthy silver-tail by touting his time as a flat-dwelling young boy from a broken family (his mother abandoned the family when Turnbull was only nine) but his upbringing was not all that humble, writes the business journalist, Paddy Manning, in his biography of the former investment banker.

 

Head prefect at the elitist and pricey Sydney Grammar, law graduate from Sydney University and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Turnbull’s remarkably soft hard times ended with his property-dealing father’s death in 1982 when the 27-year-old Turnbull, the sole beneficiary of a multi-million dollar estate, inherited well north of $2 million.

 

This kitty provided a hefty leg-up for Turnbull’s stellar wealth accumulation.  As a lawyer and political journalist, he had come to the attention of Australia’s fifth richest man, the media mogul, Kerry Packer, who took Turnbull on as his chief legal counsel.  Surrounded by money and wanting his own pile, Turnbull used $50 million from Packer and one of his corporate mates to make his private mint through merchant banking.  Million dollar corporate advisory fees and commercial investments funded Turnbull’s six-figure salary and seven-figure share dividends from his bank.

 

The Prime Minister is now valued at $200 million, helped in part by investments squirrelled away in the Cayman Islands tax haven where the ability to defer tax on capital gains effectively reduces, in real terms, the cost of that tax over time.

 

Turnbull’s political career has not been quite as straightforward as his monetary one, with Turnbull playing both centre-right and centre-left over the years.  Although joining the Liberal Party in 1973 (before leaving it a decade later after unsuccessful pre-selection bids), Turnbull had disagreed, for example, with the 1975 constitutional coup against the Whitlam Labor Government, writing that the Fraser Liberal Opposition was behaving like ‘political fascists’ in their haste to block supply and cajole the Governor-General (‘this unelected ribbon-cutter’) to sack Whitlam under the ‘reserve powers’ of the (monarchist) Constitution.

 

As late as the 1990s, Turnbull made and fielded offers to join the Labor Party, which had fewer rabid monarchists and other knuckle-dragging reactionaries, before rejoining the Liberal Party in 2000 as the natural political home for the super-rich.

 

The Liberal Party was also where an easier path to personal power could be bought by a seriously-cashed-up Prime Ministerial aspirant.  In “the biggest branch stack since Federation”, writes Manning, Turnbull took on the sitting incumbent in 2004 for pre-selection as the Liberal candidate for Sydney’s plush eastern suburbs seat of Wentworth, with ring-ins by both candidates swelling the local branch membership to half the party’s total national membership.  Turnbull’s two hundred expatriate Harvard University members helped, as did $600,000 of his own money, in Turnbull becoming, as some rudely said, the ‘Member for Net Worth’.

 

With Turnbull now Prime Minister, the Liberals hope to have found their more suave, more saleable, leader than their brand-damaging predecessor, Tony Abbott, with his overt austerity program and Royalist, religious and far-right hang-ups.  Turnbull, the high-wealth, ‘small–L’, Liberal, wraps the Party’s core economic neo-liberalism and market fundamentalism in the more palatable packaging of social liberalism (marriage equality and the like).

 

As Manning relates, there is a “Good Malcolm” - clever, charming and urbane, the charity donor, the mild social liberal.  There is also a “Bad Malcolm” - arrogant, domineering, capable of black rages and verbal and physical aggression, the believer that charity begins at home (claiming taxpayer-funded travel allowance for staying in the family-owned, $800,000 Canberra house when parliament is sitting).

 

When it comes to the class war, however, there is only the one Malcolm, the corporate Malcolm.  As Manning writes, “there is nothing in Turnbull’s professional experience, or his rarefied social circle, that has prepared him to understand the problems faced by millions of ordinary workers”.

 

According to elementary political science, the role of the Liberal Party of Australia is to represent, protect and enhance corporate class interests.  Long before the Republic campaigner hypocritically pledged ‘true allegiance to Her Majesty’ at his ceremonial swearing-in as Prime Minister, Turnbull had pledged life-long loyalty to Australian capitalism.

 

The political trick for Turnbull is to gain buy-in to the Liberal Party’s narrow class role from those who don’t inherit millions, live in mansions or invest in tax havens.  The Abbott clunker may been traded in for the smoother Turnbull model but the class interests represented, and opposed, by both leaders remain the same.

FACTION MAN: Bill Shorten's Path to Power DAVID MARR

FACTION MAN: Bill Shorten’s Path to Power

DAVID MARR
Quarterly Essay No. 59, Black Inc., 2015

Review by Phil Shannon

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish that man would go away…….

This old and highly serviceable piece of doggerel seems almost custom-made for Australian Labor Party leader, Bill Shorten.  Even the usually perceptive journalist, David Marr, in his latest political profile for Quarterly Essay, is defeated by the indistinct and bland Shorten who, in public opinion polls, trails behind ‘Someone Else’ as preferred leader of the Labor Opposition.

Personable and capable, but not memorable, is the assessment, says Marr, of Shorten’s  time at the wealthy Catholic Xavier College, which specialises in processing Melbourne’s future judges and surgeons but which took on the working class grandson of union men.  An effective factional engineer, but politically uninspiring, was Shorten’s hallmark at Monash University in the early 1980s as a “star of the Labor Right” in the ALP Club.

Subsequent factional powerplays by this “tough backroom fighter” were the means to fulfilling Shorten’s undisguised personal ambition – first as National Secretary of the Australian Workers Union, then as Leader of the Opposition (a Labor Caucus choice, with 86 of those parliamentarians having as much say as 30,000 rank-and-file party members), and finally with the Prime Ministership in his sights.

Marr does not think Shorten will get the top job.  Personally congenial, and not without a certain small-room persuasiveness (“his best work is done face to face”), Shorten lacks the qualities to move a nation.  He is numbingly wooden and formulaic as a public agitator.  He is personally and politically close to big business - his first marriage was to a wealthy Liberal blue-blood, whilst Business Review Weekly once declared that Shorten (Master of Business Administration, Melbourne Uni) would make a fine corporate chief executive.  He is uncritically pro-US and conventional on national security and defence (Shorten was a member of the University Regiment at Monash).

He robotically intones the hollowed-out stock ALP brand identifiers of “jobs, education and health” but, says Marr, “he stands for nothing brave”.  He has no galvanising political philosophy.  He is distrusted in his own party and within the electorate as a “plotter who brought down two ALP leaders to clear his own way to power”, a “shape-shifter” always accompanied by “so many new best friends” in his self-advancement crusade.  These negatives were not debilitating whilst Shorten was pitted against the hard-right Liberal Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, but his substance is now exposed to more scrutiny following Abbott’s replacement (which post-dates Marr’s essay).

The electorate, says Marr, finds Shorten “hard to read”.  So does Marr.  Shorten slips through the fingers of Marr, who, in desperation for biographical material, resorts to an analysis of Shorten’s mirthless ‘zingers’.  Marr’s difficulties are partly due to Shorten’s sheer vapidness but also because of Marr’s failure to situate Shorten as a symptom of Labor’s fundamental political bankruptcy.

Whilst Marr delves into the grungy workings under the hood of the Labor machine, he doesn’t address just where Labor is headed or why.  For whether Shorten, the master factional mechanic, or any of the nominally ‘Left’, ‘Right’ or ‘Centre’ drivers is at the wheel, the Labor jalopy sputters along the same road to nowhere, dispensing, at best, modest, piecemeal and utterly inadequate reform whilst dedicated to its larger goal of maintaining the wealth and power of the corporate class.

Nevertheless, Marr is spot on in his observation that Shorten “has no radical designs, no great plans for reform” and “represents nil challenge to capitalism”.  The same, however, applies for Labor as a broader political entity.  The party might be running on (Mr.) Empty at the moment but even when tanked up, the party’s business-friendly and pro-capitalist political design makes it a complete lemon.

INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH: The Life of Tom Keneally
STEPHANY EVANS STEGGALL
Nero, 2015, 408 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

In 1960, the trainee priest, Thomas Keneally, abandoned the seminary at Manly on Sydney’s North Shore without any qualifications other than a Bachelor of Theology and with no skills other than Medieval Latin.  His escape from his crisis of confidence in the Catholic Church, says Dr. Stephany Steggall in her biography of the Australian novelist, was through writing, which was both Keneally’s attempt to understand, and keep at bay, the ‘madness and melancholia’ of the human lot, and his own course of personal therapy for exorcising the mental demons that haunted him from six years in an uncaring, dogmatic institution with its ‘anti-human moral code’.

The son of Irish grandparents, Keneally topped the state in English in 1951, his secondary school aptitude for the written word only reviving after his abortive religious vocational training.  He found a popular audience because of his powers of characterisation, wit and story-telling, and for his focus, through the vehicle of the historical novel, on the great moral choices faced by humanity.

Keneally’s academic critics were less universally won over, debating whether the ‘fibro’ boy from the western suburbs was a legitimate contender for the national literary pantheon.  Their doubts were not without some foundation as Keneally, with a mortgage and a young family to provide for, adopted a self-imposed income-generating regime of an annual novel (he has so far notched up 33 published novels in 49 years) which has sometimes been at the expense of patient textual polishing.

Keneally’s financial pressures significantly abated thanks to Hollywood’s Steven Spielberg, who turned Keneally’s Booker-winning novel, Schindler’s Ark, into a memorable, and lucrative, film (Schindler’s List) about the real-life German industrialist and conflicted Nazi-collaborator, Oskar Schindler, who saved over a thousand Jews by employing them in his factories in the eye of the Holocaust.

Keneally, who has always aimed to live to write, no longer needs to write to live.  In 2015, he was able to request that the $50,000 prize money that came with an Australia Council’s Lifetime Award be given instead to a mid-career writer but he continues to write at Stakhanovite pace because that is who he is.

Politically, Keneally is a moderate, centre-left social democrat.  He is a member of the Australian Labor Party and is interested in but has spurned Marxism for being a “theological” belief system, a Cold War legacy of his Catholic anti-communism which saw his early stories depict Australian communism as brutal, full of fear, deception and alcoholic Leninist wife-beaters.

A republican (Keneally was the first Chair of the Australian Republican Movement in 1990), he has refused a Royal-granted Commander of the British Empire title but, as an Australian nationalist, has accepted a locally-ordained Order of Australia. 

Keneally has, however, an undimmed commitment to social justice.  His novel on the anti-Semitic genocide illustrates Keneally’s dedication to social justice.  He regarded the Holocaust as the most extreme example of ‘race or group hate’, all targets of which (Indigenous Australians, refugees) he has outspokenly stood up for.

Unfortunately, the origins and trajectory of Keneally’s political and social values, and how they inform his novels, are underdeveloped by Steggall whose biography is heavily skewed towards the how rather than the why of Keneally’s art.  There is a rather pedestrian parade of the agents, contracts, advances, royalties and other sinews of the book publishing industry, vital matters to the working writer from Homebush, but which are so much commercial gristle crowding out the more literary meat in Steggall’s biographical dish.

Nevertheless, Steggall is able to demonstrate that Keneally (whose bulging literary locker sometimes sacrifices quality to quantity) “approaches greatness” and well-deserves his artistic stature.  For an absorbing story fluently-told, Keneally usually delivers, as he does for his resilient conviction that, in a world darkened and saddened by far too much tragedy, even the most flawed can find a certain moral heroism.

DANGEROUS GAMES: Australia at the 1936 Nazi Olympics

DANGEROUS GAMES: Australia at the 1936 Nazi Olympics
LARRY WRITER
Allen&Unwin, 2015, 338 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

There were none so brave in the Australian team at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 as Werner Seelenbinder, a wrestler, was in Germany’s team, says Larry Writer in Dangerous Games, his history of the 1936 Australian Olympians.  Seelenbinder was a communist, one who had miraculously slipped through the Nazi net, who planned to protest Nazism on the world stage, right in front of Hitler (the Games’ official patron), from the victory podium should he win a medal.  He finished in fourth place, however, narrowly missing his chance.  During the war, Seelenbinder joined an underground anti-Nazi resistance group which aimed to infiltrate and destroy the Nazi Party from within.  He was discovered, tortured and beheaded.

To the Australian athletes, however, the Olympics was their once-in-a-lifetime dream and they would not let reality interfere.  Reality like the first Nazi concentration camp, Sachsenhausen (only 35 kilometres north of Berlin), opening just one month before the Games, or German troops being despatched to support General Franco in Spain just two weeks before the Opening Ceremony.  Or reality like Nazi Germany’s massive re-armament, and racial persecution and discrimination including the banning of German Jews from the Olympics.

‘I put my blinkers on’, recalled one Australian athlete, adding that ‘we allowed ourselves to be used as Nazi propaganda pawns’.  ‘Of course we knew’ about fascist outrages, said another, but the Australian athletes preferred not to act on their knowledge as they rejected international calls for a boycott of the Nazi Olympics and rebuffed the messages smuggled into the Athletes’ Village by anti-Nazi groups pleading for the athletes to protest fascism.

The only Australian competitor to withdraw, fearing what may happen to him as a Jew in Nazi Germany, was the boxer, Harry Cohen, a decision made easier for him by, or prompting (he was never entirely clear), his move to turn professional.

With athlete backing, and the support of Australian politicians who saw fascism as a political prophylactic against socialism, the Berlin Olympics went on to become a propaganda showpiece for the Nazi regime.  Hitler, who had reluctantly inherited the 1931-awarded Games from Germany’s pre-fascist social-democratic government, was cool on sports generally, and the Olympics in particular, calling them a ‘Jewish-nigger-fest’, but he had come to embrace them.

They would allow a demonstration of ‘Aryan supremacy’ on the sports field, primed by the ‘shamateurism’ of under-the-table regime, corporate and private funding of Germany’s ‘amateur’ athletes.  They would facilitate the Nazi regime’s deception of  their foreign critics through suspending overt displays of anti-Semitism (temporarily removing signs such as ‘Dogs and Jews not allowed here’), keeping convict and camp labour out of sight, and reprieving prostitution, gay bars and American jazz for the visitors.  The Games would offer the prospect of uniting, or intimidating, the German population through swastika-saturated nationalism and patriotic pageantry.

The Australian team did not disrupt their Nazi hosts’ plans, their one act of defiance being to refuse to comply with their Nazi attaché’s strong suggestion that they give the straight-arm Nazi salute to Hitler during the national teams’ parade at the Opening Ceremony.  The Nazi salute was one endorsement too far of Nazism for the Australian athletes who had become unsettled by the martial atmosphere surrounding the Games, the nightly war games and the menace of Hitler’s brown-shirted thugs.

For some athletes after the Games, their unease solidified into disillusionment with the Olympics altogether for their rampant nationalism, crass commercialism and intrinsic politicisation.  The swimmer, Evelyn de Lacy, boycotted the official dinner for pre-war Olympians at New South Wales Parliament House during the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Larry Writer unfortunately doesn’t live up to his surname.  His book grinds along largely in orthodox sports journalism gear whilst his industrious emphasis on the athletic narrative relegates the political drama, and, more pointedly, the political and moral failure of Australian athletics, to a subordinate marring of the plucky Australian sporting legend.  Clutching at the old lie that ‘sport is above politics’, Australia’s ‘apolitical’ 1936 Olympians wound up as green-and-gold propaganda performers in the Nazi darkness.

ATMOSPHERE OF HOPE Tim Flannery

ATMOSPHERE OF HOPE: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis
TIM FLANNERY
Text Publishing, 2015, 245 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

The Australian scientist, Tim Flannery, became fascinated with proposals to extract excess CO₂ from the atmosphere and oceans when the billionaire aeronautics carbon-polluter, Richard Branson, in response to Flannery’s first book on climate change (The Weather Makers), invited Flannery to be a judge on Branson’s £25 million Virgin Earth Challenge prize for methods of carbon withdrawal and storage.

Amongst the entrants, writes Flannery in his latest book, Atmosphere of Hope, he found a dozen which could become “indispensable tools for our survival”.  He calls these the ‘Third Way’ of tackling global warming, superior to adaptation (living with the global pathologies of a warmed world) and safer than geo-engineering to reflect solar radiation back into space (a dangerous ‘cure’ potentially worse than the disease).

Flannery believes that some climate engineering techniques are more acceptable because they simply accelerate natural processes of atmospheric and hydrological carbon management.  Using photosynthesis to grow, for example, vegetation dines on CO₂  and stores the waste carbon as plant matter but this process is only 1% efficient.  We can force nature to do better, believes Flannery, by dramatically boosting the pace of the natural carbon cycle and storing the extracted carbon in biological (forest, seaweed, biochar) form or in synthetic products, or by sequestering it through deep or frigid (South Pole) burial.

‘Third Way’ techniques range from the unobjectionable (afforestation and wetlands reclamation) to the more problematic such as ocean fertilisation, chemically-enhanced weathering of rocks, production of carbon-negative cement and plastics, and carbon capture which is not designed simply to prolong the life of fossil fuels.

Flannery is excited by the technical possibilities and challenges of his ‘Third Way’ carbon-suckers, and his desperate desire to resurrect a habitable world is genuinely passionate, but his ‘Third Way’ project is unconvincing and, in the end, self-defeating.

To be fair to Flannery, he does temper his enthusiasm with an acknowledgement of the problems that beset ‘Third Way’ climate salvation (scientific complexity, environmental risk, intimidating cost, problems of scale, decades-long lead-times, etc.) but he argues that these issues necessitate embarking on the ‘Third Way’ now to overcome such difficulties in time to avoid climate catastrophe.

This approach, however, detracts attention and resources from the urgency for economic and political campaigning to tackle global warming and its fossil fuel industry culprits now.  Although Flannery argues that ‘Third Way’ de-carbonisation must not be used as an excuse for the failure to cut fossil fuel emissions, his Pollyanna view of a capitalism-friendly techno-fix to bypass political failure on climate change is most likely to contribute to the global warming inertia of business-as-usual, no matter how bad the climate gets.

Human ingenuity, coupled with market mechanisms such as carbon pricing and trading, Flannery believes, will triumph through technological innovation propelling market economics to a greener future by making renewable energy cheaper and fossil fuels (and uranium) more expensive to energy capitalists.  This plan to skirt the major roadblock of the economic power and political influence of fossil fuel interests through science, green entrepreneurship and the market is doomed to be, at best, too gradual and ineffectual, or, at worst, counter-productive.

By not scaring the sacrosanct GDP horses, by not challenging the capitalist god of economic growth, Flannery obscures the link between global warming and the capitalist economic system that has given rise to it, a link which, as Naomi Klein has argued, is grasped by smokestack-hugging political conservatives better than most, and which underlies their climate denialism and their fierce and extremely well-funded resistance.

Flannery’s ‘Third Way’ is the grand, and risky, illusion of geo-engineering, albeit shorn of its dangerously wilder fantasies, that will keep capitalism humming all the way up to environmental Armageddon.  The ‘Third Way’ is predicated on the inviolability of economic growth with its imperative of making more profits by selling more stuff to more people.  Flannery’s future of low-carbon, ‘Third Way’ cement and plastics and electric cars would colonise ever more of the biosphere in a victory for the capitalist growth principle over a liveable planet.

GOD'S BANKERS Gerald Posner

GOD’S BANKERS: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican
GERALD POSNER
Simon & Schuster, 2015, 732 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

For an institution which proclaims that it is not possible to worship both God and Mammon, the Catholic Church has managed to do so just fine, according to the writer and attorney (and Catholic), Gerald Posner, in God’s Bankers.

The comfortable pomp-filled lifestyle of the ecclesiastical elite was vastly enhanced from the sixth century with the sale of indulgences to the lay faithful, which promised freedom from punishment for sin.  This monetising of salvation financed the building of the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Cathedral.

With Italian unification in the 19^th century, the Catholic Church lost its vast and wealthy feudal empire in central Italy (the Papal States), leaving the remnant micro-state of the Vatican teetering on bankruptcy.  The bailout came from fleecing the poor through ‘Peter’s Pence’ (morally-coerced donations from the laity) and user-pays charges for Church services such as weddings and funerals.

Money from ‘Christ-killers’ was also acceptable as the doctrinally anti-Semitic Catholic Church took out loans from the Jewish Rothschild’s bank, where it was later joined by money from authentic Jew-killers - the Vatican was the first state to recognise Nazi Germany which reciprocated by collecting, and making mandatory, the Church’s tax on German Catholics.

This tax, which alone paid for almost all the Vatican’s operating expenses, influenced the Church’s complicity in the Holocaust.  Despite Hitler’s brutal reign of terror, the Pope and his most powerful cardinals stood by whilst the Vatican Bank, which was founded during the war, remained open to Third Reich circumvention of Allied anti-Nazi economic sanctions.  God’s bank went on to become a covert conduit and repository for Nazi wartime plunder, including gold coins, rings and dental fillings from death camp victims smelted down into gold bars emblazoned with swastikas.

In the Vatican’s host country, the anti-communist Catholic Church had struck a similarly ideological and mercenary deal with Mussolini’s fascists.  In return for granting tax-exempt status to the Vatican, compensation for the confiscation of the Papal States, and payment of the salaries of all Italy’s 25,000 parish priests, the fascists, in the 98% Catholic nation, got Vatican-bestowed political legitimacy and Church-delivered electoral support.

Financial self-interest also operated, along with anti-socialist animus, in the Vatican’s reactionary politics after the war.  Conservative Italian governments earmarked 1% of income tax as a direct subsidy to its Cold War religious ally whose opposition to the Italian Communist Party was in part motivated by fear of a communist government nationalising major industries and wiping out the Church’s vast corporate investments.

With exquisite hypocrisy, the morally-stern Catholic bank chased further dividend returns by investing in casinos, arms manufacturing, printing firms that published pornographic magazines, and pharmaceutical companies that made birth control pills.

The Pope-appointed private financiers in charge of the Vatican Bank were also vectors for a host of financial scandals, including political bribes fuelled with Church funds, corrupt joint ventures with corporate criminals, and money laundering for Illegal arms traders, narco-traffickers and Mafia bosses who took advantage of the Vatican Bank’s no-questions-asked policies and its opaque audit trail.  The Vatican Bank became one of the world’s ten most popular destinations for dirty money and offshore tax evasion.

Posner concludes his exhaustively-detailed forensic indictment of the Vatican Bank and its top moneymen on an optimistic note that the dismal Papal succession of doddering old reactionaries has ended with Pope Francis (the “People’s Pope”) and his appointment of the former Autralian Cardinal, George Pell, as the “uber-cleric of the Vatican’s money” heading a newly-created Secretariat of the Economy, to cleanse the bank of its financial abuses.

This rosy prognosis, however, seems more prayer than expectation.  Francis’ reformist zeal is much more about creating an impression of doctrinal modernisation and a tweaking at the policy margins than actually changing fundamental Church teaching or institutional culture.

Pell has been reported in L’Espresso as spending lavishly on offices, salaries, business class travel and champagne, quite out of keeping with Francis’ avowed advocacy of a Church of the poor, for the poor.  His record of denial and cover-up of clerical sexual abuse of children in Australia, in part driven by a concern that legal settlement costs would open the Catholic Church in Australia to massive financial exposure, should also be cautionary.

Francis’ denunciations of ‘the mentality of profit at any price’ is likely to be just pious rhetoric, given that the aim of Pell’s new outfit is to generate more income from its assets, swelling the sheer inertial mass of Church wealth - the Vatican Bank has a $60 billion real state and share portfolio, whilst, worldwide, the real-estate assets of the Catholic Church are around $2 trillion dollars, equivalent to the G.D.P. of Russia.

None of this inspires confidence that the money-changers will be tossed out of the temple any time soon.  If the Catholic Church really wants to get a fix on sin, they’ll find it sitting right under their pecuniary noses, in their bank’s ledgers, in their Bible of capitalist wealth accumulation, in their God of Profit.

LADY CONSTANCE LYTTON Lyndsey Jenkins

LADY CONSTANCE LYTTON: Aristocrat, Suffragette, Martyr
LYNDSEY JENKINS
Biteback Publishing, 2015, 282 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

When Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton was arrested, and went on prison hunger-strike, in 1909, for demanding women’s right to vote, she was, to prevent an embarrassing political fuss, released early so as to avoid one of Britain’s best-connected aristocrats being subjected to the government’s policy of force-feeding hunger-striking suffragettes.  When arrested again, but this time disguised as ‘Jane Warton’, a poor, unglamorous nobody, Lytton was treated exactly as were the rest of the nameless, powerless, force-fed suffragette prisoners. 

Lytton, says Lyndsey Jenkins in her biography of the rebel aristocrat, was having none of the government’s class-based double standards.  She was a defector from her class.  By her own admission, she was one of those privileged women of social status who lived ‘futile, superficial, sordidly useless lives’, resigned to an uneventful life of routine domesticity and tedious social rounds but who was quietly seething with frustration at the hollowness of it all. 

With the women’s suffrage campaign, however, Lytton connected her personal dissatisfactions with the broader oppression of women and became politically radicalised.  At age 40 and with a sense of purpose at last, Lytton discovered the world of political protest.  The shy, awkward wallflower became petition-taker, pamphleteer, public speaker, organiser and stone-thrower.  The latter, and the arrests it deliberately courted, was a tactic of the militant suffragettes in Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) to dramatise women’s political exclusion by ‘making Britain ungovernable’.

Although the WSPU had dismissed working class women as agents of change and concentrated instead on the leisured class of women with wealth, power and connections, Lytton (the WSPU’s biggest recruit, offering “celebrity brand endorsement”) never lost sight of labouring women who, she said, ‘needed a political voice much more than did women of my class’.

Although the autocratic and conservative Pankhursts had remained permanently imprinted on a loyal Lytton since the moment of her political awakening, she supported many of their dissident former colleagues, including the youngest Pankhurst, and socialist, Sylvia.  When the WSPU suspended their suffrage campaign and fell into patriotic line during World War 1, Lytton supported conscientious objectors and sent money to German civilians in hardship.

Jenkins argues that the restricted female franchise (for women over thirty and university graduates) which was granted in 1918 was the result of the WSPU’s commitment to the war effort (recruiting, nursing, arms–making) proving that women were ‘worthy of citizenship’.  It is likely, however, that the voting reform had more to do with the government not wanting to rekindle an old war at home over women’s suffrage.  The winning of the women’s vote on the same terms as men eventually came in 1928 but not before Lytton, never a healthy person, died in 1923, barely a decade after, and hastened by, her torture by force-feeding.

Jenkins is prone to celebrating “heroic individuals”, thus reinforcing the already elevated role of the privileged class rebel, but, as Jenkins also notes, Lytton’s personal transformation, including her dramatic individual experiment in class inequality, was also part of a broader political and social transformation for women beyond just equality at the ballot-box.

MAX HARRIS Betty Snowden

MAX HARRIS: With Reason, Without Rhyme
BETTY SNOWDEN
Arcadia (Australian Scholarly Publishing), 2015, 518 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

In combining commerce and literature, Max Harris acted on the advice of his Adelaide University economics professor to ‘become a businessman and write poetry on the side’, says the art historian, Betty Snowden, in her biography of Australia’s controversial modernist poet, columnist, bookseller and publisher.

Before enlisting in the world of commerce, however, writes Harris, ‘I was in the communist business’ at Adelaide’s prestigious St. Peters’ College where ‘I went around collecting money for Republican Spain’ in the 1930s.  The scholarship boy of humble origins took great proletarian delight in outraging ‘the State’s Best Families’ at the elite secondary school.

Harris’ distaste for right wing class prejudice continued at university and earned him a dunking in the River Torrens by conservative students who objected to one of Harris’ leaflets criticising the anti-communist Prime Minister, Robert Menzies.  Harris’ solace, as always, was literature – after digging latrines as an undergraduate conscript to the Citizen’s Military Force during the war, Harris would hide in them to read Proust.

Complementing his political non-conformity, Harris promoted a literary radicalism of avant-garde poetry, writing and art.  Adelaide’s staid cultural establishment did not take kindly to Harris and the new artistic wave.  The Advertiser panned Harris’ poetry (which could, in truth, be intimidatingly obscure) as full of ‘turgid profundities’ and ‘tangles of surrealist imagery’ but it was the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax which subdued Harris.

In 1943, three conservative poets, one of them James McAuley, the “stridently anti-modernist and anti-communist” founding editor of the CIA-funded Australian cultural magazine, Quadrant, hoaxed Harris’ literary magazine, Angry Penguins, with a parody of modernist poetry, concocted from unrealted phrases culled from random books and presented as the work of ‘Ern Malley’, a fictitious mechanic and insurance-peddler.

In part, as the perpetrators claimed, the hoax was a ‘serious literary experiment’ which probed the weaknesses of modernism but it was also ideologically driven and, as Snowden observes, a “cruel trick” to play on the 23-year-old cultural experimenter.

The Ern Malley affair turned from embarrassment to potential prison-time when the state prosecuted Harris for obscenity, alleging that the poems were indecent and ‘suggestive of sexual intercourse’.  It was a moral witch-hunt driven by the Catholic right from which Harris escaped with a fine.

Poetry and literary journals were never going to pay Harris’ bills or court costs so he took to bookselling, using aggressive discounting, cheap remaindered books and an extensive mail-order business, to turn Adelaide’s iconic Mary Martin’s bookshop from a convivial cultural hub for poor artists and uni students into a national, commercial book-chain.

Not everyone was pleased by this foray into cultural corporatism.  Despite Harris’ social progressivism and poppy-lopping egalitarianism (he called the pedestal-dwelling Menzies a ‘towering non-entity’), the left were suspicious.  The Communist Party member and novelist, Judah Waten, in response to a politically hostile book review in one of Harris’ magazines, let rip against Harris (who could come across as a bit of a toff with his silver-topped cane and elite social circle) as ‘Quick Quid Maxie, the pet of the reactionary-moneyed highbrows’.

A full appreciation of Harris, who died in 1995, struggles to surface, however, from Snowden’s book, which is more a collection of letters strung together with lists (of house and bookshop locations, articles and acquaintances) than a synthesis of the raw biographical data.  The Harris that Snowden doesn’t quite pin down was ideologically eclectic (Rupert Murdoch gave him news-space for over two decades) and capable of both profundity and populism but stuffy convention was always his target.

Harris’ own self-assessment of initiating the ‘creative flowering and ideological renewal of a rather brutish and proudly anti-intellectual minor nation’ is close to the mark.  There was much in conservative Australia that could do with a vigorous shake-up and Harris did his colourful bit.  The millionaire entrepreneur and cultural provocateur, remained, at heart, ‘a stirrer’.  He deserves to be remembered as more than just the dupe of the Ern Malley hoax.

CLARKSON Gwen Russell

CLARKSON: The Gloves Are Off
GWEN RUSSELL
John Blake Books, 2015, 285 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

There are many more lowlights to the career of the car-obsessed television personality, Jeremy Clarkson, than his assault in March this year on the producer of his motoring show, Top Gear, in a row over the lack of a hot meal after a day’s filming, which put the BBC employee in hospital with a split lip.

Gwen Russell’s homage to Clarkson, although trying to show him as a “cultured and thoughtful” Renaissance Man, does concede that Clarkson, his brain stuck in reptilian gear, has offended women (with cheap sexual metaphors when describing cars), gays (homosexuality is ‘repulsive’, ‘grotesque’), a wide array of foreigners (Germans, for example, whom he is still fighting the last war against), environmentalists (he would only use an environmentally-friendly car ‘as an outside toilet’), New Zealand Maoris (threatening to drive over a sacred beach) and striking public sector workers (who should be executed in front of their families).

Clarkson hates speed limits, speed cameras, drink-driving laws, bus-lanes, cyclists, the science of global warming.  He likes smoking, hunting, the hairy-chested novels of Tom Clancy, and, above all, powerful and noisy engines.  He has a fully-fledged fighter jet as a garden ornament.

Lacking erudition (he is no Stephen Fry), Clarkson is a middling standard entertainer reliant on crude national stereotypes, ethnic prejudices and sexual innuendo, whose appeal is primarily to a narrow stratum of men - motoring enthusiasts, unreformed sexists, opponents of ‘political correctness’, conservative wailers against the ‘nanny state’ (he regards occupational health and safety regulations as ‘the cancer of a civilised society’). 

His banner-waving for this constituency moaning over their diminishing advantages has, however, made Clarkson wealthy.  He was pulling in £3 million a year from the BBC, ran a large fleet of expensive cars, and owned a six-acre estate in the country, a swish apartment in London and a £1.25 million holiday home in the tax-friendly, no-speed-limit Isle of Man.

Clarkson has returned the economic favours to his employer many times over, bringing in £50 million annually to the BBC’s commercial arm.  Right up until Clarkson’s violence against one of their employees, the BBC defended their money-dynamo.  Clarkson was just a jester, they said.  Those offended by Clarkson’s bigoted, racist, sexist and homophobic slurs that passed for wit simply couldn’t take a joke.  His critics are just po-faced purists getting the wrong angle on a ‘professional controversialist’ who doesn’t mean what he says.  Despite Russell joining this exculpatory chorus, her book-length fan letter, if handled with protective gloves, does enough to show, however, that the television clown’s utterances betray the values of the man.

The model for Clarkson’s animus towards the state and what he sees as its throttling of individual freedom and stifling of the entrepreneur was his self-employed family’s highly successful Paddington Bear toy business.  This upbringing predisposed Clarkson to worship Margaret Thatcher and her decade of economic opportunity, unfettered by state or unions, for the financial go-getter.  He is the full Tory ideological package.

Like the young, truculent schoolboy he was, the now tattered, middle-aged Clarkson is still taunting authority, says Russell, trying to portray him as a subversive wit.  Not all authority is jeered at, however.  Immune from Clarkson’s derision are the monarchy, the military, corporate titans and Empire (or what’s left of it - the Falklands).  He is utterly unthreatening to the powerful that matter under capitalism.  Clarkson has never really grown up – he still plays with (Big Boys’) Toys and he bullies, with verbal and physical abuse, the powerless and those he sees as inferiors.

THE COAL FACE Tom Doig

THE COAL FACE
TOM DOIG
Penguin, 2015, 121 pages (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

Coal burns, so it is no surprise that coalmines can catch fire in a spectacular, Hades kind of way.  The massive, open-cut coalmine next to Hazelwood Power Station in Morwell, Victoria, says the writer, Tom Doig, in The Coal Face, has around three hundred spot fires every year, punctuated by bigger blazes lasting days.

In 2014, on the extreme fire risk weekend of February 8th-9th, the mine caught dramatically alight (from either bushfires, or a pre-existing spot fire) and burned out of control for 45 days. The residents of Morwell, and the broader Latrobe Valley, breathed choking smoke and harmful chemicals in what was Victoria’s worst ever industrial disaster.  It had, however, been preventable, thus turning a public health emergency  into a corporate crime.

With Hazelwood’s shrinking coal reserves becoming increasingly uneconomic to mine, thus slating the mine and power plant for future closure, millions of dollars of fire-suppressant sprinklers and steel water pipes had been removed and sold for scrap.  Fire-preventing rehabilitation and in-fill of the worked-out but still coal-laden seams had not been done.  There had been no clearing of firebreaks.  All this saved money for the mine’s French multinational owner, GDF Suez, the largest power company in the world with annual profits of over $100 billion.

GDF Suez didn’t get this big by being ethical.  All the water and fire-fighting defences at Hazelwood had been concentrated on protecting the operational area of the mine and the power plant, not on protecting the community.  These priorities proved highly profitable – whilst 90% of electricity production was lost for the first 24 hours, it was money-making “business as usual” for the next 44 days of the fire.

For the people of the Latrobe Valley, however, it meant a continual chemical soup of microscopic particulate matter, noxious gases, toxic heavy metals, and carcinogens and mutagens. “Already home to some of the least healthy people in Victoria” from the background air pollution from coal mining, many of the region’s residents were pushed closer to, and some over, the mortality edge with at least eleven immediate probable deaths and widespread short and long-term serious morbidity.

They weren’t content, however, to be just victims.  They organised, attracting over a thousand residents to Morwell’s “first ever mass community protest”, led, often enough, by people discovering their political voice for the very first time.  They ran a candidate in the state election, taking 11% of the vote away from the government incumbent and forcing the incoming Labor Premier to promise and deliver on a thorough scientific investigation of the fire’s health impact.

With the fire still smouldering and a future public health tragedy slowly brewing, with employees still banned from speaking out under threat of dismissal and a firefighting cost to the Victorian taxpayer of $32 million, Doig’s little book shows that, once again, coal has proven to be good, not for humanity, but only for corporate wealth and power.

THE DARK BOX John Cornwell

THE DARK BOX: A Secret History of Confession
JOHN CORNWELL
Profile Books, 2015, 288 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Sceptics have, says the lay historian of Catholicism, John Cornwell, in The Dark Box, seen the ritual of Catholic confession as a convenient sin/confess/sin-again cycle allowing the faithful to continue, with a clear spiritual conscience, their secular transgressions of the flesh.  Cornwell’s  history of confession, focusing on its link with clerical sexual abuse of children, backs up this assessment.

Confession had its early origins in primitive Christianity as a theatrical manifestation of religious mania (sackcloth and ashes, self-flagellation, etc.).  Ensuing clerical power elites employed it as a political tool, backed when needed by force, to combat heresy by Catholic sects and Protestant dissenters.  Confession lives on as a means for the imposition of an antiquated morality on the Catholic population and as a handy keep-out-of-jail mechanism for felonious priests.

Over time, confession’s frequency increased from once-in-a-lifetime to annual to weekly, and its target audience widened from adults and post-pubescent youths to, in the twentieth century,  pre-pubescent children when the strategy of ‘getting them young’ was seen as crucial to repelling the challenges of secularism, materialism, science, atheism and socialism.

This expansion of confession significantly increased the opportunities for priest-confessors to materially prosper through selling absolution and to carnally revel through sex with penitent women and children who felt they could not refuse the desires of God’s representatives on Earth.

The effect of confession on children has been debilitating, “inculcating an oppressive sense of guilt and shame, especially for their bodies”.  Catholic moralists’ obsession with masturbation (‘every sperm is sacred’) soared to the top rungs of the elaborate hierarchies of sin, outranking even rape, in the Catholic seminary training manuals for priests.  The confessional procedure was baffling to the very young who had no understanding of sex and had to be instructed in its ways and means by often too-eager priests. 

Many children were exposed to desperate sexual predators whose sexuality had been suppressed and distorted by enforced priestly celibacy.  The unsupervised intimacy of confession gave Catholic priests access to a large pool of vulnerable, trusting, fearful young children.  Clerical paedophiles, perhaps four to ten per cent of priests (three times the rate amongst the general population), took advantage to groom young penitents for sexual abuse outside the confessional, and, often enough, during the act of confession itself.

The priests’ victims were terrified of reporting their experience because that would commit the further high-ranking sin of violating the ‘seal of the confessional’, whilst the perpetrators of sexual abuse could also use their own confessions to wipe their slates clean, either by linguistic dissimulation (‘I performed an impure act with another person’, not ‘I am a priest and I raped a nine year old boy’) or by absolution by a fellow member of the clerical club.  One Queensland priest, a sexual abuser of boys for over a quarter of a century, went to confession 1,500 times with thirty priests for which his only penance was prayer.  Each confession was a spiritual cleansing, ‘like a magic wand had been waved over me’, he said.

The practice of confession, notes Cornwell, is in decline, fuelled by the divergence between Church teaching and lay practice on sexual behaviour (particularly concerning contraception, abortion and homosexuality).  Cornwell, a cautious Catholic re-convert, is anxious to absolve the contemporary Church by stressing its newly-minted emphasis on ‘counselling’ over confession, and ‘wrongs’ over sin, but concepts central to confession (sin and absolution, and purgatory, heaven and hell), however, remain fundamental to Catholic theology, storing up a potentially potent mix of undemocratic clerical power, reactionary politics and the abuse of earthly passions in the Catholic Church.

HACK ATTACK Nick Davies

HACK ATTACK: How the Truth Caught up with Rupert Murdoch
NICK DAVIES
Vintage Books, 2015, 443 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

At Britain’s annual press awards in London’s Savoy hotel in 2011, Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World accepted, with no hint of shame, the prize for ‘scoop of the year’ for its exposé of corruption in Pakistani cricket, beating the nomination of the freelance/Guardian journalist, Nick Davies, for his six-year investigation of the criminal phone-hacking scandal that was engulfing Murdoch’s flagship gutter-press rag.

Hack Attack is Davies’ step-by-step account of how he unearthed the “dark arts” of snooping used by News of the World, in the process displaying the “secret world of the power elite and their discreet alliances”, the “casual arrogance” of press, police and politicians snubbing the law and covering up their wrongdoing.

What started as a minor skirmish which saw one private investigator and one journalist jailed in 2007 for hacking the mobile-phone voicemail of a few Buckingham Palace staff, ended in a major route and the ignominious closing by Murdoch of Britain’s biggest selling newspaper.

Guided by sleazy public voyeurism rather than legitimate ‘public interest’, and driven by a bullying managerial imperative to ‘just get the story’ regardless of ethics or legality, Murdoch’s stable of British tabloids had pioneered phone-tapping, email hacking and break-ins to dredge up the “most intimate, embarrassing and painful” secrets, usually involving sex and drugs, from the private lives of the famous and not-so-famous.  Confidential personal information was stolen from police and government databases using false pretences and deception (‘blagging’) and through cash bribes paid to corrupt employees.

News of the World  took the phone-hacking criminal enterprise to stellar heights, with thousands of victims spied on.  It was a practice deeply embedded in the paper, including amongst Murdoch’s editors who themselves directly commissioned dirt-bag private investigators or condoned their journalists’ use of them.

Yet, as the Guardian began to publish Davies’ revelations, there was a marked “shortage of people willing to get in a fight with Murdoch”.  The rest of the press (both tabloid and ‘quality’) were mute because they had their own dirty ‘dark arts’ linen to conceal.  The “senior ranks of the criminal justice system” (top cops, government prosecutors) waved everyone on.  The police were anxious to protect their own bent coppers who were on the take, were keen to butter-up a press to run only good police news stories, and were desperate to keep their own secret sexual affairs from the prying eyes of News of the World.

The then Labour Government (despite its own prominent targets of the phone-hacking) was inert.  Their politicians either ideologically embraced Murdoch’s neo-liberal values, or feared the Murdoch safes rumoured to contain dirt files on politicians, or cowered before Murdoch’s power to make and unmake governments - for the last 36 years, “no British government has been elected without the support of Rupert Murdoch”.  The incoming Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, appointed as his media and communications chief the Murdoch editor who had supervised the phone-hacking operation.

Both governments had invited Murdoch, his editors and his Chief Executive Officer into their inner sanctum where the price paid to keep Murdoch on side and stay his hand on mobilising News Corp readers as election-punishing “ballot fodder” was to soft-pedal on News Corp’s transgressions, to adjust media policy to promote the corporation’s business expansion, and to involve Murdoch in government appointments and Cabinet reshuffles.

Davies contrasts the elite’s kid-gloves view of the phone-hacking scandal with “the version that was being shown to me by a small collection of nervous off-the-record sources” – journalists, private investigators, the managers and lawyers of various celebrities, morally upright police detectives and government whistleblowers.

What brought the Murdoch fortress crashing down was the spread of the phone-hacking victims from the rarefied world of celebrities to common people whose targets included a murdered schoolgirl (Milly Dowler), the victims of the 2005 terrorist bombings in London, and, unforgivably to Establishment patriots, the families of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This development made the News of the World product-line toxic to the entire Murdoch brand, and threatened Murdoch's plans for government sanction for gaining sole control of the TV news channel, BSkyB.  Millions of pounds of revenue were also being lost as corporate Britain withdrew their advertising.  The Church of England disinvested its £3.7 million shareholding in News Corp.  Facing such business pressures, Murdoch cut his losses and closed the paper in 2011.

This outcome would not have been possible without Davies’ forensic skills of investigative journalism.  Not content to recycle press releases, or write “propaganda masquerading as journalism”, Davies demonstrates how “the best stories are the ones which someone somewhere doesn’t want you to know”.  His accomplishment is testament to his infinite patience and unwavering attention to detail (virtues which, be warned, the reader of his book must also possess – its focus is microscopic).

“Truth had won a battle with power”, writes Davies of the phone-hacking wash-up but, he adds ruefully, “very little has changed”.  “Some people resigned and Murdoch suffered a brief humbling” but the police strengthened their anti-whistle-blowing powers and politicians’ doors have remained open to Rupert and his clones.  News of the World was relaunched as the Sun on Sunday, whilst twelve months after the Dowler story, News Corp shares rose by 23%, the company’s value rose to $73 billion, and Murdoch’s personal annual income hit $30 million.  “The power of the elite” remains, concludes Davies.

As with many Murdoch-centric books on the media, Davies’ treatment of the non-Murdoch media elite is under-developed. Ungrounded in a critical analytical framework of the media under capitalism, the focus on the grubby excesses of Murdoch can make his more moderate corporate and state media rivals appear more meritorious than they warrant, including ‘lefty’ papers like Davies’ The Guardian.  The phone-hacking of people’s private lives should be exposed but so should capitalism’s destructive hacking of people’s economic and political lives.  This is rarely part of the job description of any media which is based on and respects the boundaries imposed by the profit principle.

THE MONOPOLISTS Mary Pilon

THE MONOPOLISTS: Obsession, Fury and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favourite Board Game
MARY PILON
Bloomsbury, 2015, 313 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

Monopoly has never been just a boardgame, not to the American feminist and anti-monopolist, Lizzie Magie, who invented the game’s forerunner in 1904, nor to the US corporate giant, Parker Brothers, which, in seeking to gain a copyright monopoly on Monopoly, stole Magie’s idea in 1935 and ideologically cleansed her game from an anti-monopolist instructional tool into an endorsement of monopoly capitalism.

The journalist, Mary Pilon’s, history of Monopoly’s copyright scandals narrates the American origins of the hugely popular boardgame, better known in Australia through the version licensed to English manufacturers with its London properties from Old Kent Road to Mayfair.

With powerful monopolies dominating key industries and unrestrainedly gouging consumers at the end of the nineteenth century, strategies to ‘bust the trusts’ were being sought by progressives, amongst them Henry George, the ‘single-tax’ politician who proposed to reduce poverty by taxing only property and leaving working class income untaxed.

Magie was a single-taxer who invented her Landlord’s Game to spread the Georgist word.  Her game had two sets of rules – one for a single-tax economy where no player could monopolise wealth, and one for monopoly capitalism where all wealth concentrated to just one player.  Modified, hand-made versions flourished during the next three decades.

Amongst the commercial fans of Magie’s game was a Depression-hit salesman, Charles Darrow, who claimed it was his invention when he sold his intellectual property rights to the game, which he had patented as  Monopoly, to Parker Bros. for $7,000 in 1935.  The rebadged game went on to sell and make millions for Parker Bros.

Parker Bros., who were aware that Darrow’s patent had been fraudulently obtained, were vigilant in protecting their sole control of their ill-gotten money-spinner.  Rival financially-themed games, and even unrelated games with the ‘-opoly’ suffix in their title (including Theopoly, designed by priests), were bought out or legally threatened for patent infringement.

The most serious potential obstacle to Parker Bros.’s bogus copyright was taken care of by paying the game’s true inventor, Magie, a measly $500 for her original patent for her Landlord’s Game, allowing it and its anti-big-business ideology to fade into obscurity whilst its monopolist set of rules became the sole set of Monopoly rules, endorsing corporate concentration and greed as players aimed to bankrupt all others.

When a new ideological challenge emerged in the 1970s from an anti-trust economics professor and anti-Vietnam-War activist, Ralph Anspach, with his Anti-Monopoly, Parker Bros. deployed the usual threat of litigation, supplemented by commercial intimidation of Anti-Monopoly’s potential distributors and sellers, and a vindictive display of corporate power in ostentatiously burying 40,000 copies of Anti-Monopoly in a Minnesota rubbish dump when an early court decision went Parker Bros. way.  In 1983, however, after an epic eight year legal stoush, Parker Bros. finally lost their case against Anti-Monopoly, an appeals court ruling that Monopoly’s Georgist progenitor had long been in the public domain, rendering Monopoly’s trademark void. 

Like Anspach, Pilon is enamoured of the anti-monopolistic battle by little business against big business.  Capitalism, they believe, can be beneficial for all if only the “right to compete” were not stymied by the titans of corporate America and their profit-bloating, restrictive copyrights.  Even in an oligopoly of small entrepreneurs, however, the profit principle is behind the harm the capitalist economic system does and this needs to be challenged.  There is a boardgame, and concept, for that - the Marxist academic, Bertell Ollman’s, Class Struggle – one to which all the players exploited by capitalism can share common ownership.

SELLING STUDENTS SHORT Richard Hil

SELLING STUDENTS SHORT: Why You Won’t Get the University Education You Deserve
RICHARD HIL
Allen&Unwin, 2015, 227 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

‘When I leave, it will be like it never really happened’, bemoans a dejected student to Griffith University Associate Professor, Richard Hil, in Selling Students Short, his investigation into the “hollowing out” of the modern university education experience in Australia.  Many of his student interviewees report a similar alienation, a lack of connection with other students, the atrophy of teacher-student interaction and an uninspiring, narrow pursuit of a vocational qualification that together make for the social and intellectual “blandscape” of today’s campuses.

Personal enlightenment and the public good have both evaporated from “University Inc.” which has been re-purposed for the needs of free enterprise rather than free enquiry.  Market values, corporate culture and a “tighter tertiary-industry fit” are ascendant in what are now “job-training centres and feeders for the industrial economy”, pumping out credentialed ‘products’ (graduates) fit for purpose (industry needs).

Starved of significant government funding, Australia’s universities have taken on the trappings, and soul, of the corporate world.  Courses which lack immediate economic utility are culled whilst multi-million dollar marketing budgets entice “tertiary shoppers” in a “mad scramble” for undergraduate market share.  Brand promotion, free iPads and other loss-leader enticements are used to attract enrolments to secure the revenue stream from hefty tuition fees.  The removal of government caps on student numbers has invited universities to take in anyone, including the sub-literate and semi-numerate.  Student quantity is valued over quality.

Crammed into overcrowded classes, the student hordes are taught by an army of 67,000 low-wage casual teachers, stressed by oppressive administrative and bureaucratic demands.  This academic proletariat is heavily populated by a glut of PhD post-graduates, trained in their redundant droves for prestigious university research jobs they will never get by university administrations because they attract rare government funds of $100,000 each.

Amongst the most aggrieved of Australia’s university students are the 223,000 international students (one quarter of the total student population).  This particular income river is highly prized by university accountants because of international student fees which are  up to three times those for domestic students.  Fraudulent entry processes which falsify academic records and English language skills let in the unsuitable, wastefully divert resources into intensive remediation, and encourage plagiarism and “soft assessment”.

Compounding the decline in the quality of education, campus culture withers due to the time pressures of employment (80% of students work to support the costs of their study), resulting in missed classes and rising drop-out rates, especially for the bargain-basement education offered by on-line tuition.  To cap it all off, unemployment, or lack of employment in their chosen field, awaits many graduates, whilst all are mugged by a long-term debt of up to $100,000.

The corporatisation of higher education results in the depoliticisation of university life, churning out graduates with the professional skills needed to administer, but not critically challenge, the hegemony of “global capitalism”.  Universities now manufacture the politically passive brain-worker whereas they once produced critically aware citizen-graduates.

Hil laments the bygone age of the liberal university when the rigorous exploration of ideas in a “joyous, passionate and engaged passage through higher education” was assumed.  Hil’s book could have benefited from an historical analysis of the tension between, on the one hand, the university’s role in preparing the workforce essential to capitalism and, on the other, its antagonism to that system’s political-economic values.  This tension has been present from at least the time when universities were essentially elite finishing schools for the sons and, more rarely, daughters of the ruling class to the contemporary era of the university grinding out capitalism’s technical-managerial class.  Neo-liberalism has been very bad news for what was once a “community of scholars”.

A hopeful Hil notes that pockets of academic resistance remain, that student protest has not been extinguished and that the (market-agnostic) humanities still account for the majority of undergraduates who remain the least unhappy students because they are doing what they really love, irrespective of what the market deems directly utilitarian.  Hil’s fervent and deeply-felt book maps out the ground still to be fought over for the purpose of the modern university.