Bits and Pieces: Up Yours Edition.

The latest in Australian work relations?

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According to the ABC's Lorna Knowles and Elise Worthington

"Young charity workers were forced to lick underwear, cross dress and take part in obscene cigarette rituals, according to lawyers suing the marketing giant Appco.

"The shocking allegations are the latest to emerge as part of an $85 million class action against the Appco Group in the Federal Court of Australia.

"The Appco Group is one of the world's biggest fundraising agencies and rattles the tin on behalf of some of Australia's best known charities, including Surf Life Saving Australia and The Starlight Foundation."

Since last year and up to about the first half of this year, the news was about how foreign non-white young workers were being underpaid and blackmailed by their largely foreign, non-white bosses, franchisees of 7-Eleven.

As if to show that Australian capitalists are colour blind, now he have this latest, seemingly involving largely Australian-born, presumably of all races, young workers.

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Glenn Greenwald, Doug Henwood and others were right: the anti-Jeremy Corbyn backlash in Britain and the anti-Bernie Sanders backlash in the US confirmed their predictions. Class contradictions inherent to pseudo-Left parties would be sharpened.

They were more right than they knew: the same phenomenon affected the so-called "centre-right, conservative, libertarian" parties, as the cases of Brexit in the UK and Donald Trump in the US illustrate.

As a reaction, the "relatively affluent, professional Democratic voters" in the US started talking about the need to "write off" the white working class in toto for their alleged general support to the Trump campaign (never mind said support comes mostly from Southern whites of all income, educational, and professional levels, including the relatively affluent, professional Republican voters).

Now comes Thomas Edsall's latest New York Times column, doing the rounds among the Lefty intelligentsia. Edsall reports that the talk now is not only about the convenience to "write off" the white working class, but the whole working class. You can't accuse them of being racist.

There may be more votes (!!??) and money, Edsall writes,  among "major segments of the corporate universe, especially high tech", which "have become Democratic mainstays".

And, on top, now the anti-capitalist youth is also mentioned as another cause of trouble for team HRC. From that to become "deplorables", "irredeemables", "parochial" (meaning "narrow-minded, illiberal, intolerant, conservative") is just a matter of time.

So far, Australia has escaped that phenomenon and the idea of a non-labour Labor Party isn't gaining traction, yet. Let's see how long that lasts. But at least the meme of the Aussie democratic oligarch was already breached here.

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Make no mistake. The pseudo-Left parties are merely electoral machines to provide filthy parasites and sycophants of the rich their leaders with cushy jobs and to exchange favours with wealthy patrons and donors. Their "pragmatism" is merely an euphemism for "political expediency and convenience": their political expediency and convenience. Their denunciation of "ideology" is just a justification for their lack of principles.

That's a bloody lesson history has taught anyone willing to learn

That realisation may be painful for those who still harbour any kind of illusion about them, but in the long run it could be a good thing. At any event, better now than under fire.

Update:
8-11-2016. And speaking of pseudo-Left parties and their natural vocation to betray the people who put them in positions of power:

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