Another old one, still remarkably fresh ...!
LOBBYISTS



Your left activist lobbyist has to assume that we live in a rational world run by rational people – that if they explain things to Government, Govt. will say “Oh silly me” and run and put it right. Which pretty much precludes your average lobbyist from being taken seriously. When Wilson Tuckey was put in charge of trees in Australia, this particular mob was being told to buzz off, that they were no longer funny.

The Green Left, even the smarter ones, could not afford to believe the evidence of their senses. The country is full of people mowing their lawns in a despairing effort to keep at bay depression born of inactivity, and both born of meaninglessness. Your lobbying activist however, has a meaning to life, something that gets him/her out of bed in the morning. They are due at a meeting with the Department of Primary Industries at the gentlemanly hour of 9 that morning. They ignore that these professional lobbyist-meeters-and-greeters all have faces like bottom-feeding fish, and are kept in dung-coloured broom closets - our Concerned Person has an identity that allows them to think well of themselves, and, perhaps, as a fringe benefit, ill of others. And Heavens, when 50% of all Internet users are playing with themselves in front of their screens, why shouldn’t they feel a little superior ?

Lobbying can work, don’t get me wrong - if you are BHP. However if you are not, it’s worth a mention to those who don’t pay attention to the Wider World, that we live in the era of Globalisation. This is the old game, Writ Large, of “Capitalism always tends towards Monopoly” as Charlie Marx was so fond of pointing out after a couple of drinks. This used to take place in different countries in a fairly unsynchronised way. Krupp supplied the weapons to both sides on the Russian Front of WW1; the biggest US corporations did business with Hitler all through WW2. And so on. Little known, like many facts the size of Mt. Rushmore, but there we are.

Anyway. There were always plenty of geographical pockets outside this game, where people traded salt for skins and feathers; you got lemons for next to nothing because they grew just down the road; lamb chops ditto. No more. And this is the point – there are to be no exceptions any more. It is a World Order. No nooks & crannies, Nowhere to Hide, as they are so fond of saying, not even Libya or Cuba.

Obviously, under Globalisation, as in any World Order old or new, there is a script, the Thing is centrally choreographed. There is no break in the logic here. The steps in consciousness may be enormous, but the steps in logic, they are little ones, and lead inevitably from one to the other. There is a central agenda, and it is detailed. Each next step is obligatory - as long as the powers that run the agenda remain in control.

These powers are the Corporations, long warned about by William Cobbett, William Jefferson, Karl Marx and indeed, Dwight D. Eisenhower. They are the Vested Interests, represented by the military and economic superpower of the US at the moment, but quite willing and able to switch to the European Union, or play both, as circumstances demand. These corporations are known as the Transnationals, since they owe no fundamental allegiance to any country, only to their own bottom line. They only roost in countries where they pay no tax, like the Cayman Islands, or little tax, such as the US, or indeed Australia.

The idea that Governments, the area-managers for this Corporate Theme Park, can be talked out of the script, by a small roomful of well-meaning people with a Spotted Quoll, is unreasonable, tragic and deluded. This blindness to the Great Wide World can only be maintained by the lobbyist’s need to maintain their self-image – self-image being the basis for many an odd perception of the world.

The economic polity is as alien to their understanding as if you had blindfolded them and dumped them in South Central Los Angeles, or Baghdad. If it wasn’t for the Bottom-Feeding-Fish-People, equally lost in the outside world, and their job-description of endless Sensible Talking, the penny might in some cases drop. Governments however place a great deal of importance on the Fig-Leaf, and your Lobbyist plays an essential part in hiding some rather Unpleasant-Looking Organs. Governments are elected, and they must maintain the fiction, within what they privately refer to as the “chattering classes”, that they are reasonable and responsible, or the Fig Leaf drops.
And if it has not dropped in the reign of Bush, Blair and Howard, then, Heaven help us, I guess it never will.