What do people think of the Leveson Inquiry ? (Main Forum)

This is why the teaching of ethics and morals is so important. As I have written before, a society simply cannot afford to employ a policeman on every corner to control an entire population, let alone employing one at the front gate of every home. A society has to be self-policing in their behaviours.

Brian,

I agree entirely with these thoughts of yours. Law is a blunt instrument, a baseball bat, and sometimes it actually makes the situation worse. A very good example is how neighbourhood disputes used to be dealt with before they invented community justice centres.

If your neighbour was throwing the dog shit that your Fido left on their front lawn, into your swimming pool, the only thing you could do was to sue him for trespass, and the only thing he could do was to get a mandatory injunction against you to stop your dog doing his business on his carefully manicured lawn. The problem with this baseball bat approach to the dispute was that there was only ever going to be a winner and a loser. The winner felt vindicated, and the loser planned the next revenge. And so on went the spiral.

That doesn't mean that law doesn't have its place. If mediation over the dog shit in the swimming pool doesn't resolve the matter, the baseball bats have to come out.

If you go to Buenos Aires, you will see that no one drives within the traffic lanes. I mean no one. Part of that is because there are no cameras to enforce it, but it is also part of a "culture". And in many countries in the world, if you get pulled over by the police, you never pay a fine because the policeman's bribe is always at least half as much as the fine.

Respect for the law is very important to the whole idea of a rule of law. But it has to earn that respect as well. If people generally believe that you can buy a result in court, then it won't have that respect. That is why an independent and honest judiciary is also so important. We don't always have it here, but at least there are processes to root out those people. That only comes from a culture. It is a very fragile thing, and, as we have seen from history, it is so easy for the lizard brain to take over.

The importance of the Leveson enquiry is not so much what its recommendations might end up being. It is the very fact that it is being held, and the rich and powerful are being called upon to explain their actions. That is why there should be an enquiry into Towards Healing and the Melbourne Response. The rich and powerful Australian Church needs to explain itself. In the original version of the Good Samaritan a man was attacked by robbers and left in a ditch, but in Sydney, the man in the ditch was left there by colleagues of the priest and Levite who passed him by. The Church should explain why, unlike the rest of the community, it should act as both judge and jury in a case where its clergy are the alleged culprits.

The 'infoplosion' you describe so well, however,is accompanied by a frightening epidemic of mental illness, working poor, a new underclass of people cast aside by the relentless march of global corporations, and ruthless exploitation by the Banksters.

People have no time to reflect upon the flood of information washing over them minute by minute. Next time you go into a crowded commercial medical practice take a careful look at the faces around you.
Many of them have lost hope. Who is waiting to help them? Spiritual guides? No, Big Pharma with its dangerous nostrums according to the Medical Manual.
People ask for justice, understanding and receive a referral letter,

People are also bewildered by so many myths, such as they should not support the 'politics of envy' but instead ought to place their faith in the 'trickle down effect' created by generous people who are reluctant to be so rich but are really 'wealth creators'.

Fierce patriotism and wars are encouraged by tabloids who have contempt for the lumpen proletariat.

The statement 'No man is an island' is no longer relevant.

We are not even an archipelago with a sense of communal solidarity, but a lot of confused little islets waiting for Godot.

Jesus, the Radical Economist
By Rev. Howard Bess, Consortium News
13 June 12

Jesus made his reputation as a Jewish economist, one with very strong opinions about wealth and property, about the relationship between the rich and the poor.

He also was intensely religious and loved nothing more than debating the meaning of the law of God or Torah. For instance, he is presented in the Gospel of Luke as being a precocious 12-year-old boy absorbed in debating religious leaders about the meaning of Torah.

From early childhood he must have understood that he was seen as a brash, pushy kid from a small town in Northern Palestine, an area without religious leadership and an unemployment rate well over 50 percent.

Whether by divine wisdom or genius insight, Jesus figured out what wealthy and powerful people were doing to the poor, illiterate people with whom he lived. Primarily through his teaching and storytelling, he became identified as a populist teacher with a good deal of influence. He was good news to the poor and bad news for those who clung to their riches.

Clearly Jesus was fascinated by Torah and its application to everyday life. Luke’s gospel reports that a lettered leader of the religious community approached Jesus and asked how to attain eternal life. Jesus responded with two questions of his own: What does Torah say? How do you read it? The first question is easy to answer. The second question is the real test.

Jesus knew what Torah said, and he had strong opinions about how Torah should be read. Jesus had come to his own understanding of the property codes in the book of Leviticus. These codes are credited to Moses, but more probably come from the massive rewrite of Israelite traditions during the years of Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE.

Torah is very straightforward. Land and ultimately all wealth belong to God, who places property in the control of human beings, not as owners but as stewards who must share it and return it to God every 49 years for redistribution.

For Israelites, time was divided into blocks of seven years. Land was not tilled in the seventh year. After a series of seven, seven-year blocks of time, a Year of Jubilee was declared. During the Year of Jubilee, all land was to be returned to the control of the priests, who, in the name of God, were to make a new and fresh distribution of all land.

In other words, the wealthy were supposed to surrender their stewardship and the poorest of the poor were given land with the encouragement to be productive for God and their fellow Israelites. All slaves were set free and all debts were canceled.

At the time when the Israelite system of Sabbaths and a Jubilee was codified, the economic and political structures may have accommodated such radical economic and social changes in a one-year observance of Jubilee.

Hundreds of years later, however, when Jesus lived and taught, the combination of Roman rule, compliant fat-cats and religious elites made the observance of Jubilee impossible. So, almost every Israelite knew what Torah said, but the prescription had not been followed in anyone’s memory. The poor had given up on the idea of a Year of Jubilee, but apparently not Jesus.

According to Luke’s gospel, early in the public ministry of Jesus, he went to a synagogue gathering and read a passage from Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. God has sent me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release of captives and liberty to the oppressed. This is the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Everyone in his hearing understood what he was saying. Israelites had gone too long without a Year of Jubilee. It was time for the wealthy to turn loose what they had accumulated. It was time for the poor to receive their full stewardship.

But most poor people had taken on the understanding of life that their oppressors presented and taught. It was true then; it is still true today. So, the Year of Jubilee code was regarded as impractical. However, the principles of the ownership of God, the end of slavery, and economic justice still were possible.

The Israelites who held wealth and power knew what was in Torah, but they were not interested in reading it with new eyes of compassion and justice. (When Jesus finally took his message to Jerusalem – riding in on a donkey to mock the rich who favored horses and turning over the money tables at the Temple to protest religious corruption – he was deemed an insurrectionist and was executed.)

Jesus died almost 2,000 years ago, but the laws of Sabbaths and Jubilees are still on the books today. Torah still has a powerful message, especially since the evils of greed and mindless ownership are with us in ever growing magnitude. Resulting inequities and injustices surround us.

We Americans live in a secular society, but Christians have a responsibility to influence and to train the conscience of our fellow citizens. Here in election season, Jesus appears on the scene and asks the same two questions: “What does Torah say? How do you read it?”

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer, Alaska. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.

Yes, part of the problem I'm finding, Annie, is simply one of finding the time to watch it all. In one sense it is like watching paint drying, or grass growing — but to me watching a cricket match can be like that LOL. That highlights that in a sense we need these "intermediaries" in society — journalists and the media — who can accurately provide us with "concise summaries". The trouble is all of us, yes even the humble "nobody", have agendas and biases. Essentially what the Leveson Inquiry is about is trying to reduce the influence of those "agendas and biases" — particularly when they are able to be exercised by people with lots of money, or, like Rebekah Brooks and a lot of politicians, have climbed to positions of power without having access to huge piles of money in the first place.

My own view is that the Law and Parliaments are too blunt an intrument to create an ethical culture. They are not unimportant but a society cannot put all its eggs in the basket of believing that politicians, judges and policemen alone can create an ethical or moral society. It in fact might be an argument as to why a society needs institutional religion — although it might be also argued that the current corruption in institutional religion is a major reason why so many in society are no longer listening to religious leaders. Certainly I continue to believe a good education system plays a huge role. The trouble with education systems is that a society does to see the fruit of their work for decades, generations or centuries into the future.

One of the problems in the Western world at the moment is that many of the lizard brain elements in the leadership want to render the education system back to simply "skills for the marketplace" training — young people are "trained to be a unit in the productive economy" rather than there being an emphasis on being trained as citizens and the vocational aspect of education is the dancing partner not the one "calling the tune".

As James has pointed out on numerous occasions, it is simply insane with the institutional churches in this country being some of the most vehement critics of the introduction of ethics classes into the public education system. If the "lizard brains" in the church leaderships had been doing their jobs effectively (i.e. keeping the people in the pews) there possibly would be no call for "ethics classes" in public education.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]

A little earlier he made the point that the (ethical/moral) culture in an organisation is set at the top. I think that is very true and I think the breakdown we're watching at the moment — the reason why society needs a Levison Inquiry at the moment — is because of the "breakdown" that occurred at the very top of the Murdoch empire.

And isn't this what is happening with the Catholic Church? The culture of secrecy came from the top and was even enshrined in Canon Law. Now secrecy, at least in relation to clerical abuse of children, has had to be abandoned.

But now we have a culture of dishonesty, coming right from the top, where the Pope himself will not acknowledge and apologise for his own central role in the cover up. It doesn't matter what porkies have to be told, the institution of the papacy has to be defended.

And any criticism, any questioning of that culture, any pointing to the overwhelming evidence, is immediately dismissed as "anti-Catholic", as shrill and as meaningless as the cries of "anti-Semitic" for anyone who criticizes Israeli colonialism on Palestinian lands.

Brian, I hesitate to question you on anything since I am at the stage of life now when, we are told, I cannot change a long-held opinion but are you not over-stating the case when you equate the filthiness of the manner in which Murdoch does business with the horrors done by the Germans who were tried at Nuremburg?

I have learned to have some understanding of the thinking of so many Germans during the 1930s-early 1940s when they flocked behind Hitler. At Versailles, and for 12-odd years after, the Allies of the Great War conducted themselves not always well in regard to Germany, which left open the way to renewed war.

Murdoch and his grubby family are chicken-feed compared to the Nazis, as was Nixon.

On another matter, whilst I have you, yesterday you wrote of 'Union thugs'. Yes, mate, there are such men......but who came first, Big Business thugs or Union thugs and who continue to rule the roost??
Many CEOs and CFOs, together with many, many shareholders, a majority widows may it be said, work to deny a fair go to employees.
Not to mention the far too powerful media of all descriptions.

All the vast majority of Australians want is a fair go.