Leo The Leak Gets Job With Lobbyists

It happens all the time - a politician retires from public life and gets rewarded by the corporate elite for services done. Leo Varadkar has been in hot water for leaking secret documents to lobbyists.

So now he gets a job with a Washington based PR firm with dozens of big corporate clients. He’s not the first or last: Former Taoiseach Brian Cowen sold the country out to Shell Oil and was given a seat on the board of Topaz Oil by billionaire Denis O’Brien. Enda Kenny got a job with vulture fund VentureWave Capital.

“We are thrilled to welcome Leo Varadkar to our team,” said Matt McDonald, CEO of Penta Group. Varadkar had already advertised his love for lobbyists when he leaked a confidential document, a proposed GP contract agreed with the Irish Medical Organisation to his friend, Dr Maitiú Ó Tuathail.

His mate was lobbying Varadkar as president of the rival National Association of General Practitioners. Details of the leak were first reported by Village Magazine in October 2020 but the DPP and Standards in Public Office decided not to prosecute Varadkar despite his breaking of the Official Secrets Act.

We need to understand a basic fact: we don’t live in a democracy. The rich call the shots and simply buy off politicians. We get to vote every 5 years for which group of gangsters will do the bidding of the corporate elite - but we don’t get to vote on whether or not we remain subjects of that corporate elite.

If voting could change that they’d abolish it.

Now our class, the working class, should vote tactically. We should vote in a way that weakens the establishment parties. But anyone who doesn’t tell you that the game is rigged will just become another puppet of the rich.

“Universal suffrage (voting) is the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state" wrote Friedrich Engels a long, long time ago. He’s still right of course.

Voting tells you how people think our problems can be solved. But it doesn’t solve those problems. It gives you an insight into where people are at.

To truly take on the rich requires a rebellion of working class people and the setting up of a new kind of democracy, a worker’s republic, where all representatives are elected by assemblies of workers and subject to recall if they break their word.

Until we get there politicians will continue to be bought and sold by the corporate elite.