Hate speech, hangovers

I guess the Malta Employers’ Association has a problem, like so many other entities, to justify its very existence, so it finds a quick solution and comes up with a memorandum on hangovers. 

I do not know, but I, too, am an employer, and if someone does have a hangover they usually turn up for work nonetheless. 

Their bad breath announces their arrival in the office, the slits which should be their eyes give the game away and their drooping hobbit-like posture at their desk confirms that vodka has hit them hard.

But that scene is rare and usually it happens to be the day after a staff party or a staff reunion, when everyone including yours truly has had too much alcohol.

The MEA should really start talking about itself and its members.

They should start to talk about bosses who fail to give the right example to their staff and who are so aloof and distant from their employees that they seem to think the people they employ are objects not human beings. 

I, too, am an employer, not the greatest one on earth but for heaven’s sake, the MEA should really turn to all its members and realise that the biggest dilemma and problem we have with our employees is that we cannot pay them more because our margins are so small, and our daily costs are horrendous.

I feel guilty knowing that most of my colleagues, who are also my staff, need higher salaries and should be paid more, and that the personal costs they face are terrible. And I also know that as a private company I have insignificant aid from the State and that the State or rather this government is only interested in promoting business and that, I am afraid, does not translate into helping the middle class. And the worst thing of all as an independent media, I am fighting on every front.

The biggest lie that politicians and economists repeat ad nauseam, is their belief that if the economy grows and by that I mean numbers, then the whole population is automatically better off.

It is simply not true, wealth does not trickle down unless the State intervenes and specifically introduces measures that increment purchasing power by directly distributing profit and wealth.

People become richer quickly because they evade tax and make illicit fiscal killings.

That is a fact and most of the culprits are employers. 

The Malta Employers’ Association did not deal only with hangovers, it also extended its silly concerns to sport injuries.

And really, I think that is when they really hit rock bottom.

To castigate people who injure themselves at sport is not only stupid, it is Dickensian.

Again the whole focus of the MEA should really be directed at educating its members the employers in realising that the world has changed.

Their reaction to sport injuries obviously stresses the fact that the people who run the employers’ association are detached from reality. When everyone is talking of the necessary balance between work and recreation, the MEA rise from the dead and try to make themselves useful and utter the most ludicrous statements.

They should perhaps preach to their overweight employer members, who run their business as if it is their personal fiefdom, to not eat cholesterol-rich foods and if they do get a heart attack they should be kicked out of their own company and castigated for their reckless eating habits.

The MEA, like so many other entities, including the unions, should revisit their constitution and very existence.

***

I cannot understand why everyone continues to tolerate the hate scribbles that flow freely from the same lonely and menopausal blogger.  It is about time that Justice Minister Owen Bonnici tackles this problem.

Bigoted writing that attacks or disparages a social group or a member of such a group is hate speech.  

I am not going to refer to those who feed and promote her hate speech, and in ‘those’ I am also including some leading members of the Nationalist Party.

But the point is that as journalists we are at the mercy of libel laws and the whims of a magistrate. When it comes to hate speech, there are no controls or limitations.

I will go one step further, the police, the judiciary and the political class are scared to take any action against the person who perpetuates hate.

Muscat’s administration, for all the criticism it gets about being excessive, is slow and reluctant when it comes to addressing the long standing problem.

The hate speech that has dominated the same blog continues unabated, it hits out at the children of politicians, even underlining that they could be handicapped, and those around politicians who are not public persons. In an effort to intimidate journalists the blogger attacks them personally and concocts stories about their sexual lives or drug habits.

The attacks are directed at one social or unique grouping. The targets of the attacks are not diehard Nationalists but those who have been critical of the Nationalist Party or more specifically in the past, of Richard Cachia Caruana.

In all these years, the IGM, the institute run by a public relations man who has not uttered a word or a whisper to condemn hate speech, and the publishing houses have also remained silent as journalists are torn to shreds.

And yet in all these years, one publishing house owned by one publisher, a banker and an insurance man have chosen to financially sustain the same despicable blogger. 

When I employed a journalist who had personal financial issues, most editors at drink events would comment disparagingly “How can you employ such a person.”  No one, and I mean no one, would turn round to the Malta Independent editor and express their concern that they allow Malta’s most cruel, pitiless and vicious bile writer to fill their columns.

This week this newspaper paid Peter Fenech, Louis Galea’s former canvasser and a political appointee under the Gonzi administration, and one of Simon Busuttil’s closest friends, and former PN lawyer Joe Zammit Maempel, €25,000 for a story penned by journalist James Debono. Anyone with some time on their hands should dig up the story about Jumbo Lido and see what was written.

Joe Zammit Maempel was until some time ago, the Nationalist party lawyer, but he was also a political appointee, ironically appointed chairman of the Lotteries and Gaming Authority by John Dalli. And it was then that I was also fined €7,000 because the LGA reported to the police that the late Julian Manduca had written a short piece about eating a spaghetti carbonara at Dragonara Palace and then played on one of the slot machines.

That fleeting reference to a slot machine was met with the full wrath of Joe Zammit Maempel’s LGA. I was interrogated by the police and then prosecuted. I was accused of promoting gambling and accepting money for an advertorial. There was no money transaction and yet the court as usual ignored our pleas. 

That day I remember waiting in court as my lawyer pleaded with Attorney General Silvio Camilleri not to apply the maximum fine of €232,000 and a two year imprisonment. All this for a sentence about a slot machine on a left hand page in the lifestyle section.

And for all the whispering that this newspaper was owned by John Dalli, Dalli did not even care or dare to raise a finger to intervene to stop the LGA, on the basis that numerous local publications also referred to slot machines at the Dragonara.

I stand by the Jumbo Lido story investigated by Manduca and finally put together and sealed by journalist James Debono, and yet the Magistrate chose to declare that we were guilty as hell and applied draconian fines. He went further, and I guess this is one for the Guinness Book of Records, he even accepted that a single ‘quote of the week’ under the editorial, made up of some 13 words, was libellous, and fined this newspaper €3,000.

The thinking in the court’s decision is peppered with inconsistencies which not even the appeals court under the late Gino Camilleri dared question.

Unlike others, I do not make my living from libel suits or by depending on government contracts. It would have been so easy to wave a party flag, lick arse and wait for the freebie.

Neither did I decide to childishly declare that I will not appear in front of a Judge, as Joe Zammit Maempel stated about Wenzu Mintoff’s appointment. In my years in journalism, I have stood in front of all the members of the judiciary even when I knew all about their bias and their anger for me.

Magistrate Carol Peralta, a former freemason, converted a Lm5 or €11.60 fine into one day in prison (I had revealed the news, by the way, that he was a freemason); in front of Magistrate Dennis Montebello I was fined thousands (I had revealed his illegal dwelling in Gozo) over a story about Louis Buhagiar, a former Labour minister; and with Judge Philip Sciberras, a former Labour MP and former legal counsel to Dom Mintoff, I was found guilty of defaming Dom Mintoff and also of offending the former PL deputy leader, Michael Falzon.

I am sure those judging me were not influenced by what I had written and I have accepted my fate. I have nothing on my conscience. And when I walk down Republic Street I may not smile and giggle like Austin Gatt, but I know that what I have done is because it is the right thing.

This newspaper will definitely take the Peter Fenech case to the European Court, so one should really think twice before spending our money on some lucrative travel arrangement or a new car.

The Maltese media have always faced a slanted judiciary and yet the blogger from hell, who takes everyone apart and destroys people’s lives, is left unscathed, untouched and continues to operate in a free environment and is feared by everyone.

The last time I faced a government minister and heard him complain about some awful and cruel blogs in his regard, I told him that it was his fault and that of Muscat’s cabinet.

“Legislate to ban hate speech, and stop acknowledging those guys who pay for her bills – idiots,” I told him.

The Labour administration has this gigantic inferiority complex and it finds its roots in the fact that so many Nationalists continue to believe that they and they alone have a God-given right to govern this country.

As one of my friends, a Nationalist with some grey cells and self-respect reminded me, “Our biggest problem is that we have not accepted that we have lost. It is as if we have been robbed of a right, the right to govern.”