The goose and the common

“War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength”

– George Orwell

Mark Carney’s powerful oration at the latest Davos World Economic Forum encouraged a damascene transformation from Kantian to aretaic ethics. We’ve seen this movie many times and it was merely dancing on a pinhead. The discourse is littered with Orwellian doublespeak and regurgitates the beloved third way, which was embraced by Bill Clinton, Tony Bliar, Kevin Rudd and Anthony Giddens.

Despite the sesquipedalian rhetoric that underpins corporate social responsibility, most predatory transnational conglomerates and their sociopathic entrepreneurs consider ethics is a region or county somewhere near London in the United Kingdom. Maybe Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell were engaged as the scriptwriters.

The former governor with the Bank of England and investment banker recently announced the Ksi Lisims Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) joint venture on British Columbia’s northwest coast would be expedited. The statement provided another green light for the circumvention of statutory approval processes and demonstrated further subservience and capitulation to transnational corporate interests. This will influence the final investment decision from the project’s American owners and its treacherous Manhattan based financiers.

The C$10 billion project is a consortium involving Nisg̱a’a Lisims Government, Rockies LNG Partners and Western LNG. Streamlining approval processes amidst offers of significant federal and provincial subsidies undermines any concept of due diligence and provides the principal proponents with a malevolent freedom to harm and impunity.

Appointment of the Nisg̱a’a Lisims Government as a project partner is a corporate cunning stunt that was traditionally employed to thwart commercial fishing restrictions throughout native title waters. This typically involved engagement of an indigenous chief as the merchant fleet captain and the sophism of trickle-down economics was verified through a cask of red, white or rosé paint stripper.

Project consortiums with landholders have been used extensively across many resource projects amongst developing nations such as Papua New Guinea and are fraught with legal complexities. It inevitably degenerates into a lawyers’ picnic over crown land, native title and Indigenous land rights. Following the prolonged imbroglio, the local communities or villagers eventually receive some breadcrumbs. Qu’ils mangent de la brioche or more recently, let them eat nothing.

The Ksi Lisims project is entirely owned by Western LNG, a Texas based US company, which is financed through those heinous private equity predators, the Blackstone Group and Apollo Global Management. Stephen Schwarzman is the flamboyant chief executive officer at Blackstone and was previously global leader of mergers and acquisitions with the now defunct Lehman Brothers and remains a confidante of Agent Orange.

Apollo’s co-founder was the notorious Leon Black whose cherished acquaintances and business partners included that repulsive rock spider, the late Jeffrey Epstein. There is no requirement to join any dots, it is simply painting by numbers and if you lie down with dogs, you catch fleas.

Moreover, as Charles Dickens once proclaimed, credit is a system whereby a person who can’t pay, gets another person who can’t pay, to guarantee that he can pay. Despite the replacement of Stephen Harper as prime minister, the neoliberal gravy train rumbles along and its entrenched skulduggery and organised spivvery has failed to raise any red flags with the incumbent federal and provincial Canadian authorities.

The Ksi Lisims project website is littered with beguiling corporate hogwash and its alabaster patina of perfection masquerades the recurring neoliberal dig, dump and depart strategy that prevails throughout the fossil fuels sector. There is no detailed information on the Western LNG board of directors or its seasoned executive leadership team but it will undoubtedly consist of several hatchet-faced militaristic sociopaths from the alumni at New York’s West Point Terrorist Academy.

Exploration, development and commissioning phases of the Ksi Lisims project are underpinned by teamwork using its Let’s Work Together corporate slogan, which is relentlessly reinforced by an indoctrinating neoliberal fallacy of a rising tide lifts all boats. Following initial shipment of the LNG cargo, this collective coherence will rapidly deteriorate into a rabid Darwinian dog fight where profit is privatised and losses are socialised.

Most of the project equipment will be prefabricated by Samsung Heavy Industries in South Korean shipyards using migrant precariats or peons. The modules will then be shipped to northwestern British Columbia and assembled like giant Meccano sets at the Pearse Island project site. This will be accomplished using an inculcated and subjugated team of Fit in or Fcuk off (FiFo) civil, electrical and mechanical redneck mercenaries in designated laydown yards and at the floating liquefaction terminal.

Drilling and fracking of countless upstream exploration or production wells will escalate across the Montney formation in the Western Sedimentary Basin. This will require construction of gas processing, compression and water treatment facilities with a vast network of interconnecting gas pipelines and high voltage alternating current (HVAC) transmission lines. Processed gas will be delivered to the terminal by a high pressure pipeline that crosses the picturesque Nass River basin and its many pristine tributaries, which are a diverse spawning ecosystem.

Bechtel Corporation has been awarded the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract for the project and is renowned throughout the resources sector for its militaristic and philistine corporate culture. The rapacious corporate buccaneer participated in the initial development of the Panguna copper mine on Bougainville Island and the Ok Tedi gold mine in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea. Early earth works on these projects required extensive defoliation of the unscathed natural environs. This involved widespread and indiscriminate application of toxic herbicides that would have left the late Rachel Carson spinning in her grave.

During the 1970s, George Shultz was a member of Bechtel’s executive leadership team. He was eventually appointed US Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan and influenced manipulation of US foreign policy. This was subsequently described by the late Harold Pinter as…. Kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in.

The Rockies LNG Partners includes Woodside Energy, a scrofulous barbarian that was embroiled in the Timor Leste espionage scandal. This involved wiretapping of Dili’s state government offices to gather confidential information, which eventually secured access to lucrative oil and gas reserves in the Greater Sunrise field under the Timor Sea.

The corporate recidivist also hired the former Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer as a private consultant following his retirement from politics. More recently, Ian Macfarlane, a federal Minister for Industry and Science under Malcolm Turnbull and Ben Wyatt, who was the Western Australia state treasurer, were appointed as directors with the swashbuckling brigand.

Electrical power will be supplied through a C$6 billion north coast transmission line provided by the British Columbia provincial government. Its construction will be funded through taxpayers and enables connection of the Ksi Lisims project to the BC Hydro grid.

The Ksi Lisims joint venture will replicate the duplicity and dishonesty associated with the development of major oil and gas projects across Australia. The corrupt birth of the coal seam gas industry in Queensland involved a consanguineous relationship between its state government and the fossil fuels sector. It also implicated the unimpeachable and embattled warrior prince, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor during his controversial role as the UK’s special representative for International Trade and Investment.

Much of the malfeasance was corroborated by several courageous whistleblowers including Sally McDow, Fiona Wilson and Simone Marsh, who were repeatedly intimidated, disparaged and eventually crushed. Meanwhile, an administered lawlessness fabricates legal illegalities, which become components of a visceral system of gangster capitalism underpinned by an insatiable quest for financial power.

Queensland and British Columbia are not just toponyms. The poor are a goldmine and the coal seam gas and Ksi Lisims LNG projects are traditional examples of colonial looting, which merely transfers wealth from the canaille to the aristocracy amidst escalating energy prices and that anonymous English oral tradition resonates:

“The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from the goose.

 

The law demands that we atone

When we take things we do not own

But leaves the lords and ladies fine

Who take things that are yours and mine.

 

The poor and wretched don’t escape

If they conspire the law to break;

This must be so but they endure

Those who conspire to make the law.

 

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

And geese will still a common lack

Till they go and steal it back.”