"Acceptable corruption"

Helen Clark has conceded that the Labour Party won't be using a Pledge Card at the next election -- a concession not to the Auditor General, who found that the Pledge Card was an illegal use of taxpayer's money, but an acceptance that the Auditor General's report and Bernard Darnton's case against Clark for illegal use of public money have between them soiled the Card irreparably.

It's also an easy concession to make, given that Helen Clark (in her role as leader of the Clark Government) is organising the full weight of taxpaid resources and state power to be brought to bear to re-elect Helen Clark (in her role as leader of the Labour Party), and to silence her opponents.

Who needs pledge cards when you've issued a policy requiring departmental bureaucrats to issue advertising extolling your programmes?

Who needs pledge cards when you're enacting legislation under urgency to "throw open the gates" to unlimited parliamentary spending on your behalf so that the taxpayer pays for your campaign, you don't have to, and it doesn't count as election advertising?

Who needs pledge cards when you're enacting further legislation without proper consultation that effectively shuts down your opponents for the entire year of an election campaign? That will shut down political speech for one-third of our lives?

Who needs to worry about being called corrupt when you can just change the law to make your corruption legal?

Between them the Electoral Finance Bill the continuation of the so called Temporary Appropriation Bill deals the Clark Government all the cards in seeking re-election -- and just to make sure it ensures all the cards are marked.

No wonder "Miss Clark indicated yesterday that Labour was unlikely to fund the pledge card through the parliamentary leaders fund, if at all." Who needs it when you've got what Chris Trotter calls (approvingly) "acceptable corruption" on your side.

Where an honest or principled person might be appalled at contemplating, let alone carrying out or defending such corruption, Clark and Trotter have no problem. Both have been thoroughly immersed in post-modernist neo-Marxist structuralism, a mouthful of bullshit that stands for whole reams of freedom-threatening bollocks.

According to the pomo-wanking structuralist, we are all part of a subliminal power struggle of all against all, a struggle between collectives characterised by the battle to control the "inherent power structures" at work in society. As an example of the application of this view, according to the pomo-wanker, no matter how outrageous the behaviour it's not possible for a "minority" racist to be a racist, no matter how overt. In the words of the pomowankers who now write Herald editorials for example,

Nor may Maori activists or their supporters sensibly be called racists. Racism has nothing to do with skin colour, and everything to do with power. Anyone who argues that those arrested in Tuhoe and elsewhere last month are more powerful than the state authority unleashed on them is deluded. Or trying to win votes by any means necessary.

As an intelligent commenter says at Kiwiblog, this is not a redefinition of racism:

This has been the standard definition of racism in NZ universities since at least the early 1980’s. It has been hammered relentlessly into almost three decades-worth of students by lecturers and activitists in the humanities and social sciences divisions.

It’s no surprise at all to me to see it emerging in the editorial page of the Herald in 2007 by those former students. That was exactly the intention of those professors all those years ago.

The commenter, Tom Hunter, explains how this pomo-wank allows the left to countenance corruption without a qualm:

while the notion has been cleverly broadened far beyond racism the real impact has come from its being welded to the thinking of the modern political left. After all, they represent all the powerless and oppressed of this world do they not?

It enables any Left-wing movement to justify almost action to gain the power of the state and hold on to it, for even after holding such power for years or even decades they can still claim that they are powerless, at the mercy of mysterious, hidden forces in society that can be countered in no other way.

For all his harking back to a golden time of traditional working-class Labour action it was actually this post-modern notion of enternal powerlessness that lay at the heart of Chris Trotter’s observation that Labour’s 2005 victory represented “acceptable corruption”.

Hate is Love. War is Peace. Pah, crude! Power is Powerlessness is infinitely more subtle and brilliant.

Such is the power of poor philosophy to blind and corrupt. As long as you position yourself to "speak for the speechless," then anything at all goes including violence, naked corruption and an unconcealed grab at permanent political power. In other words, all the cards you can grab are yours for the taking.

Who the hell needs pledge cards when you've made sure that all the powers of the state are already at your disposal for your re-election campaign?