Dingo bytes
NSW Premier Bob Carr is bucking for "Hog of the Year": although he's got heaps of competitors he's right up there. Carr and his gang of pro-business thugs took away the right of people to use common law to sue for damages and lay waste the rights of workers to compensation for work-related injury. Consider asbestos victims. Most of their claims target James Hardie Industries, Australia's biggest asbestos producer until the stuff was banned in the 1980s. Hardie knew for decades that asbestos was deadly but criminally kept the information under wraps. Carr secretly planned to cap asbestos claims by setting up a fund and taking away the common law rights of victims. He was saved the problem of doing so when Hardie itself set up a fund last year. How convenient. Then, earlier this year the Hardie fund was found to be $800 million short. Astonishing! Not only that, Hardie ceased to exist in Australia, setting up its headquarters in Holland, thereby ducking the payment of compensation. How much did Carr know about this in advance? I'll leave it to your imagination.* * * The Federal Government wants a mentoring program put in place in schools to help wayward boys, who, if they don't knuckle under will be locked up in prison camps in the desert and then deported to a war zone. Or is it that they want to have children asylum seekers in wealthy private schools mentored about their behaviour during riots and tear gas attacks? Children are children, after all, and the Howard Government is using and abusing them in all sorts of ways. So it was that at the same time as Education Minister Brendan Nelson was announcing a mentoring program for "problem" male school students, a report from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission was condemning the Government's human rights abuses of asylum seeker children in detention. The report found that the little prisoners have been traumatised by fires, tear gas and water cannons and are carrying out mass self harm. As for the mentoring business, would you let your child be indoctrinated by some individual loaded up with the values of this government?* * * CAPITALIST HOG OF THE WEEK: is McDonald's. While not wishing to chortle over someone's illness, the colorectal cancer surgery the new president and chief executive of McDonald's has undergone is simply too close to poetic justice to ignore. Charles Bell grew up in Australia with McDonald's, literally. He began his burger odyssey as a teenager and rose through the ranks, no doubt quaffing a goodly amount of the fibreless, high fat product on the way. The millions of obese, junk foodies around the world who have been hoodwinked into the artery-clogging, fast food habit would appreciate the irony. Incidentally, Bell took over from Jim Cantalupo, who recently died suddenly of a heart attack, aged 60.