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The Australian Law Reform Commission’s report on corporate criminal prosecutions is scathing: “[P]rosecutions of corporations, relative to individuals, are extremely rare, even in heavily regulated sectors where corporations are most active. Corporations are most often prosecuted for relatively minor regulatory offences. Smaller corporations are more likely to be prosecuted than larger corporations. Prosecutors withdraw a significantly higher number of charges against corporations than they withdraw against individuals for corporate crimes. This suggests that existing laws present real difficulties for prosecuting corporations. … There is concern that the paucity of corporate criminal prosecutions, and regulators’ frequent reliance on civil penalty provisions, have led to a mindset that the penalties imposed are little more than a cost of doing business. It should be a criminal offence for a corporation to engage in a system of conduct, or a pattern of behaviour, that leads to breaches of civil penalty provisions.” Some of the recommendations look interesting — like broader sentencing options including community service, banning companies from particular activities, or even dissolving the business — but the ALRC wimped out on recommendations [$] that would close the loophole used by executives to shield themselves from liability.

Paul Jay: “[I]n this pandemic moment, there is the most obvious thing public sector workers, private sector worker unions should be doing, and that’s organizing the unemployed. You don’t get any dues out of it. You do it for the class. And it’s it’s I think maybe the most important thing right now that would change the dynamic of the relationship of what has been seen as privileged workers versus unprivileged workers and the growing numbers in the millions of unemployed workers. It’s like the 1930s. And there’s no short term fix to that. You know, they can try reopening the economy. There’s going to be significantly high unemployment for years to come. Now is the time for mass organizing of the unemployed. And that gets at … the link between the organized workers and the community because unemployed workers in their millions, it’s their families. It’s their cousins, their relatives. … [T]he whole working class community now is affected by unemployment.” (Support the Australian Unemployed Workers Union.)

David Roth: “It is unclear what rich people are for. In the most generous interpretation, the rich are here on earth for the same ineffably profound reasons that other people are: to create and aspire, to love and be loved, to live and die and eat the sandwiches of their choosing. But the ways in which extreme wealth continues to warp and diminish and generally impoverish the world raise the existential stakes significantly on the question. The people who have the most also tend to demand the most, and on a level that ordinary people can’t or won’t demand things. The rich fund institutions and armies of credentialed factotums to recast their greed and dull, atavistic desires as valid ideologies, and politicians spin all that corny dross into policies, and it all piles up downstream from there. It chokes, it floods. Some rich people also collect art, to be fair, although that’s mostly because art is currently the most expensive thing a person can collect.”

Greg Jericho (click through for charts!): “what we should not be doing is following the suggestions of the more unhinged libertarian groups among us who suggest we need to sack more public servants to ‘share out the pain’. Clearly the private sector has been hit harder than the public sector. But that always happens in a recession. The bureau of statistics estimates that in the June quarter private sector jobs fell 6% below where they were a year earlier, while public sector jobs were down just 0.5% … And yet suggestions that this makes it seem like the public sector is largely avoiding the recession is a bizarre way to look at the economy. Firstly it takes a twisted kind of logic to think a government should purposefully hurt public sector workers just because those in the private sector are suffering. It also has a rather blinkered view of the role of public servants. In reality most public sector work is ongoing — it needs to be done regardless of the economy. Police, healthcare workers, teachers and yes, even ‘bureaucrats’, don’t stop having work to do because unemployment rises. … And importantly the public sector works as a stabiliser in a struggling economy. Wishing it to shrink just because the private sector is shrinking is to wish for less economic activity and public services at a time when both are desperately needed.“

Scott Morrison’s gas industry council has produced the expected result — a massive boondoggle for an environmentally damaging industry that even the free market no longer supports. The spurious link to the Covid recovery is a desperate fig leaf designed to deflect criticism of this terrible plan. Ketan Joshi nails it: “Let’s be blunt. In any other universe, recovering from one public health crisis by worsening another would spark immediate backlash. An ‘asbestos led recovery’ would be career-ending; as would a ‘tobacco led recovery’ or a ‘AK-47 led recovery’. But fossil fuels have locked their harm so deeply into our lives that we have become desensitised to this incredible, radical significance of proposing to hurt humans as a pathway to helping them. What is happening here is simultaneously deadly and ludicrous.”

(Meanwhile, the progressive Andrews government is hitching itself to a prison led recovery…)

Gary Linnell: “The English overlords and land barons who ruled Ireland with an iron fist in the 19th century may not have created the poison that destroyed the potato crop, but they could have prevented the worst of the famine. They just chose not to. Profit took precedence over lives. There was no shortage of food in Ireland – those rolling pastures produced enormous amounts of wheat and beef. But most of it was destined for lucrative trade and the dinner plates of the London aristocracy. Diverting it to the starving Irish masses was unthinkable. Besides, what was the point of helping all those weak and vulnerable peasants? They were expendable and would probably die anyway. … Can you hear history’s echo? It’s the sound of coffers filling, of fortunes being made, of rich men mocking the poor, of a ruling class laughing and, yes, even revelling in their lack of empathy and compassion. It’s a sound becoming more familiar by the day. … [T]he chasm has now widened between those demanding the end of lockdowns and the resumption of business – and those preferring a safer, lives-first approach. … Empathy is dead. It’s time for the peasants to make way for profits.” The causes of a crisis might be natural, but the consequences are a choice.

David Graeber died this week. Here is something interesting he once said: “There are multiple, contradictory logics of exchange, logics of action, and cooperative logics existing at all times. They are embedded in one another, in mutual contradiction, constantly in tension. As a result, there is a base from which one can make a critique of capitalism even at the same time that capitalism constantly subsumes all those alternatives to it. It’s not like everything we do corresponds to a logic of capitalism. … Communism already exists in our intimate relations with each other on a million different levels, so it’s a question of gradually expanding that and ultimately destroying the power of capital, rather than this idea of absolute negation that plunges us into some great unknown. … You have to make your own relations with your fellow comrades, to be an embodiment of the world you wish to create. … And just as the perfect life cannot be achieved, the process of moving toward it is the good life. … I can’t imagine a world in which we aren’t revolutionary ourselves, and revolutionizing our relations with one another, and revolutionizing our understanding of what is possible. That doesn’t mean that we will not someday—perhaps someday soon, hopefully—achieve a world whereby the problems we have today will be the sort of things to scare children with stories of them. But that doesn’t mean we’ll ever overcome the need to revolutionize ourselves. And the process by which that comes about is the good life.”

Paddy Manning: “News that the Morrison government is planning to fast-track $158 billion in legislated tax cuts in the October budget should sound the alarm for the labour movement. Not only is the Coalition using the pandemic as cover to wage culture wars against its old enemies in universities, the media and the arts, but it is also using the recession to accelerate a neoliberal policy agenda that threatens to permanently undermine workers’ rights, reward the rich and beggar the nation’s finances. This would ensure radical austerity for years to come in what economist Richard Denniss describes as the ‘right-wing ratchet’. Labor premiers who have celebrated the new national cabinet, and the ACTU (which is participating in a rushed round of talks with employers), should carefully consider whether the prime minister’s all-in-it-together schtick has been entirely genuine or whether, in fact, they have been comprehensively outplayed. So far, the national cabinet has functioned as an unaccountable body that has bolstered Scott Morrison and sidelined the federal Opposition. The new labour-market flexibility reforms, introduced along with the JobKeeper legislation at a time of crisis, may prove to be a Trojan Horse for an assault on workers’ rights. Memo to Daniel Andrews and Sally McManus: are you legitimising what looks likely to be an attack on the people you represent?”

Some bad news: “A new report from the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and the University of New South Wales — using the latest available ABS data from 2017-18 — shows how far behind those on the lowest incomes are from the nation’s richest households. The report found the incomes of those in the top 20 per cent were six times higher than those in the bottom 20 per cent. That is worse than 2015-16, when the ratio was five times.” But then some good news [$]: “The government’s extraordinary income support measures have virtually eliminated poverty in Australia, according to new ­research from the ANU’s Centre for Social Research… [T]he number of people in poverty has dropped from 1.6 million pre-COVID to 1.1 million — a reduction of about a third. Moreover, the introduction of the wage subsidy and boosted JobSeeker had ‘almost eliminated poverty for some of the most disadvantaged groups’, reducing poverty rates for households on Newstart from 67 per cent before the crisis to less than 7 per cent.” Bad news again: having stumbled upon a policy that lifted millions out of poverty, the Morrison Government is going to scrap it at the end of the month.

The United Workers Union has produced a thorough report on Technology and Power in Australian workplaces: “At this present moment it is crucial we consider what a more democratic and equitable future of work and technology might look like, and how it can be achieved. A society in which data is held in common, the limits and use of new technologies collectively agreed upon and used by workers to build shared power and solidarity. Workplaces in which innovation can act in service of a broad public good — not just the narrow interests of profit accumulation.” The report makes compelling recommendations, such as the creation of “industry level worker councils to negotiate the use and scope of surveillance and other disruptive technologies in the workplace”, the inclusion of “[p]rivacy thresholds in the national employment standards,” the “[r]edistribut[ion of] productivity gains from technology back to labour via a universal basic dividend”, and a demand that “[d]ata must be held in common and not treated as private property”. UWU’s proposed Ethical framework for workplace technology is excellent, and workers should be aware of it and use it to challenge their employers when they push new tech-based schemes..