Meanwhile the IPA is doing business as usual. The Falnski complaint is rather a Falski one (ODT)
“When was the last time we had a business leader come out on tax issues, or regulation issues, or industrial relations issues?”
Apparently, Mr Falnski has missed every business leader, every time they speak publicly, calling for lower taxes and less regulation. Perhaps he is unaware that business lobby groups make submissions to the Fair Work Commission on all industrial relations matters.
Take protecting our borders. We can’t have people arriving by boat because we need to protect our borders, we’re told. Compare that with their statements on globalisation and how we need to be part of the world. We need to knock down artificial trade barriers and invite the rest of the world in… even if they want to bring their own workers.
Today, the potential for economic, environmental and humanitarian change lies with workers just as it did after World War I, writes Canberra correspondent John Passant.
History can be a wonderful teacher. For example, in 1939 the U.S. turned back the boat, St Louis, with 939 Jews on board. They were fleeing Hitler and were seeking asylum.
The ship returned to Europe. Estimates are that 254 of the Jews sent back died in the Holocaust.
The “reasoning” from politicians was base and racist:
We live on the precipice, the eve of the deluge. Past civilizations have crumbled in the same way, although as Hegel understood, the only thing we learn from history is “that people and governments never have learned anything from history.” We will not arrest the decline if the Democrats regain control of the House. At best we will briefly slow it. The corporate engines of pillage, oppression, ecocide and endless war are untouchable. Corporate power will do its dirty work regardless of which face—the friendly fascist face of the Democrats or the demented visage of the Trump Republicans—is pushed out front. If you want real change, change that means something, then mobilize, mobilize, mobilize, not for one of the two political parties but to rise up and destroy the corporate structures that ensure our doom.
In his first comment on the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the murder as “horrendous” but defended the Saudi royal family and described its members as “friends”.
Trump and Netanyahu support this and assist ther Saudis doing it. (ODT)
Hodeida (Yemen) (AFP) – Over seven million children face food insecurity in Yemen and ending the country’s war will not save all of them, the UN children’s agency said.
“Today, 1.8 million children under the age of five are facing acute malnutrition, and 400,000 are affected by severe acute malnutrition,” said Geert Cappelaere, regional director of UNICEF.
Underhand Republican tactics – gerrymandering, voter suppression, more – underpin a vice-like grip on power
With the deck this stacked, it isn’t enough to win. Wresting control back from the entrenched minority will take overwhelming victory. It may take, in other words, a genuine political revolution.
The man who shot and killed two women in a yoga studio in Tallahassee on Friday appears to have posted racist and misogynistic videos online.
Police said Scott Paul Beierle, 40, attended the studio as a customer before opening fire. He also shot and wounded four people before he was tackled by people in the studio, police said. He then shot and killed himself. Police said the studio appeared to have been picked as a target at random.
today, more than 70 percent of nearly 300 murders by ideological extremists in the United States in the past decade were by far-right actors, according to data compiled by New America.
In 2017, 20 of 34 such killings were perpetrated by the far right.
Rather than criticize the extremists, Trump prevaricated, insisting that “both sides” were to blame and that there were “very fine people on both sides.”
“We have the first president in modern history celebrated by these groups, that these groups believe is on message with them. The political tides are with them,” said Singer.
The roots of Human Rights, fairness, equality, and inclusiveness were a reminder to us by Judaism post WW2. Today Israel has done a 180 degree turn and sided against exactly that and joining with Trump’s anti- Semitic supporters to form it’s own form of ultra right-wing Nationalism. (ODT)
Israel and its lobby have spent millions of dollars in recent years on campaigns to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, especially on US college campuses. They are trying to suppress the nonviolent, anti-racist boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for Palestinian rights by smearing it as anti-Semitic, while giving actual cover to anti-Semitism across the US.
Israel’s hardline advocates show deep contempt for American Jews who stand with the marginalised and oppressed, who reject Israel’s unmitigated violence against Palestinians, who remain grounded in our communities fighting against systemic racism and injustice propagated by Trump and his authoritarian allies in Israel.
Jewish communities in the US are drawing a line: as we refuse to accept Trump’s right-wing nationalism that fomented the massacre in Pittsburgh, we also refuse to advocate for Israel as it embodies and sharpens that nationalist fantasy.
Instead, we fight for a broad-based, inclusive and just future for us all.
Indigenous groups are calling for a full investigation into Nigel Scullion’s “totally inappropriate use of Aboriginal-earmarked funds”, following revelations that as minister he approved grants to NT lobby groups to argue against land claims.
Former NT Indigenous affairs minister, Dr Jak Ah Kit, told Guardian Australia the decision to fund these groups with money set aside for addressing Indigenous disadvantage was “totally immoral and totally against the normal rules that apply”.
These midterms have seen a surge in female candidates as women rail against their president – including in Iowa’s prairie country, where being “nice” has its limits.
partisan gerrymandering — the practice of drawing electoral boundaries that favour one party over another — could be an ace up the Republican sleeve in next Tuesday’s elections.
By design, partisan gerrymandering suppresses the responsiveness of elections, stifling the translation of more votes for one party into additional legislative seats for that party.
Nationally, Democrats could require more than 55 per cent of the two-party vote for Congress to win 50 per cent of the seats in the Congress.
Virtually every politically relevant indicator points to the Democrats winning a majority of seats in the US House of Representatives at next week’s midterm elections.
Public opinion polls have long suggested an 8-to-9-point lead for a generic Democratic House candidate over a Republican candidate. President Trump’s approval ratings, in the low 40s, are historically associated with about a 40-seat loss for Republicans, more than enough for Democrats to win a majority.
It’s the type of place that you can imagine Bruce Springsteen working into a song and, indeed, he did: 2007’s Last to Die (“We took the highway till the road went black/ We marked Truth or Consequences on our map”).
A few doors down from the Grapevine Bistro, Bret Berman, a cartoonist and musician, is working at Xochi’s, a second-hand bookstore. There are some local history books for sale but he doesn’t recommend them.
They are sanitised, he says; not a word in them about the brothels, gambling dens and saloons that powered the town’s economy in its early days.
“If you told the true story of this place someone would burn a cross on your front lawn,” Berman says.
A conclusion in the Maryland emoluments case—or any of the several other ones—may be years away, but a decision to allow the discovery process to go forward is potentially enormously damaging to Trump—politically and personally. The plaintiffs in the case are arguing that Trump’s hotel is being paid substantial sums of money by foreign governments—amounts significant enough to potentially affect the president’s decision-making process. Practically speaking, Trump’s continued ownership of the hotel, along with the lack of any transparency on how the hotel operates, means a foreign government—or anyone else—who wanted to put money in Trump’s pocket has an extremely easy way to do it. The act of booking a block of hotel rooms or a ballroom at a Trump property would be, in effect, a personal payment to the president.
Given his erratic behavior, from daily Twitter eruptions to upping his tally of lies by the hour, it’s hard to think of Donald Trump as a man with a plan. But in at least one area — reshaping the economy to serve the needs of the military-industrial complex — he’s (gasp!) a socialist in the making.
Economic truth the LNP don’t want you to know and Trump hides wit the help of Murdoch. Our current economic reality and comparitive standing in the world today. Just over 5years ago Wayne Swann and Julia Gillard had us place 2nd today the the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison Government has us 20th telling us how ‘grear‘ that is and all Australians have benefited from their boom time.(ODT)
Orsen Welles film described the secondary world of art as Fake unlike Trump his description had some substance. There is often more in the selling than the art. Andrew Bolt loves this social space (ODT)
A quick glance at the seller’s business card should have set off alarm bells for clients about to pay thousands of dollars for the artwork she was offering. Not only is her own name spelled incorrectly: “Laura Loiuse Johnson” but she is the director of an art gallery that does not exist.
There is no John Street Galleries in Sydney’s Woollahra, as her business card suggests, and no such business name is recorded with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
When Crime in Victoria has dropped 9% and we are the second lowest in the country one might ask why Matthew Guy and the conservatives are flying False Flags with the help of Murdoch Media?
Trump with the aid of Rupert’s Fox News are running their anti-Immigration campaign in the US off the back of one Mexican killer and the use 15,000 American military troops at their Southern border as props to stop an “invasion” of “illegal” of some 4,000 asylum seekers who walked 1000kms, more than 50% of them are women and children. One might well ask if this is Trump’s false flag? Will his detention centers, family seperations and turnbacks “save them” too? (ODT)
It came as Opposition Leader Matthew Guy renewed his push to talk tough on crime ahead of the November 24 election, saying Premier Daniel Andrews “makes excuses for those who break the law”.
The Melbourne local government areas with the highest rate of residential aggravated burglaries in 2017 were Port Phillip (112 offences per 100,000 people) 0.11%, Yarra (100) 0.10%, Melbourne (86) 0.86%, Maribyrnong (80) 0.08% and Greater Dandenong (77) 0.07%.
“These extremely poor and vulnerable people are desperate for peace. Who among us would walk a thousand miles with only the clothes on our back without great cause?”
Fanning and Rapone urged soldiers to disavow the president’s racist attempts to portray migrants as dangerous in order to galvanize his base ahead of the elections, and work together to show Trump that they will not participate in criminalizing and endangering the lives of asylum-seekers.
As Americans, we must speak openly about the perils of white supremacy, anti-Semitism and both the rhetorical and real dehumanization of those we perceive as unlike us. Those wielding political power and influence need to publicly and clearly condemn acts of violence by extreme far-rightists and the ideologies underpinning this form of domestic terrorism.
In the meantime Trump and News Corp advertize publicly without embarassment on Fox News
Designed by Goebells in the 30s and revived Roger Ailes in the 90s and brought back for Trump today It’s the Murdoch/ Fox/Trump channel at it’s Goebellian prime. Straight from the neo-Nazi handbook of public persuasion of fear hate and racism. (ODT)
‘This is distracting, divisive Donald at his worst’
The video was discussed at length by Cuomo and Don Lemon on Wednesday.
After pointing out that “much of the footage” in the ad “comes from Fox,” a network often praised by Trump and once-helmed by Ailes, the “Willie Horton” ad creator, Cuomo called both ads “grossly distorted, bigoted, but also effective.”
With only five days until the midterm elections, Trump has returned to immigration with renewed gusto. His anti-immigration stance was critical to his success during the 2016 presidential election and “he is counting on similarly inflammatory words and images to help the GOP hold its congressional majorities,” The Washington Post‘s Seung Min Kim reported. Just this week, Trump publicly vowed to end birthright citizenship and said he would deploy as many as 15,000 active-duty troops to the border.
“I don’t see anything in this video that I haven’t heard from the president consistently for the past couple of years,” .”It’s a naked appeal to fear and hate, and it is racist,”
Al Jazeera even admitted to planting an undercover reporter inside U.S. pro-Israel lobby groups in 2017, but the channel never broadcast the final product.
The Israeli and American flags are screened on the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, on May 13, 2018, ahead of the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. (Yontan Sindel/Flash90)
The Israeli and American flags are screened on the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, on May 13, 2018, ahead of the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. (Yontan Sindel/Flash90)
Director and founder of Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, Clayton Swisher, has detailed the political reasons for this decision: a combination of Qatari government capitulation, pro-Israel lobbyists in Washington threatening to convince Congress to register the network as “foreign agents,” and false accusations of anti-Semitism against the producers of the documentary. A source told me that U.S. President Donald Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, had even lobbied the Qataris not to screen the film. Whatever exactly Israeli, American, and pro-Zionist lobbyists did, it worked, though clips of the film started leaking in the last months. The full film can’t be far behind.
The leaks prove that the Israeli embassy, often working with pro-Israel groups, spies on pro-Palestinian students and attempts to disrupt the growth of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement across the U.S. Other Zionist lobbyists want students who support Palestinian rights to be criminally prosecuted. Fake Facebook accounts are created by Israel lobby groups that only occasionally mention Israel, because the Israel brand has become so toxic. The notorious Canary Mission website, used by the Israel government to target pro-Palestinian supporters on arrival in its country, is exposed as being funded by major pro-Israel donors in the U.S.
We are left disillusioned and feeling hopeless because our government is so shackled by ideology that it can scarcely move, so immobilized by fear of contravening its entrenched beliefs that it cannot solve our nation’s problems, so sterile of ideas that it cannot think clearly, plan strategically, or put into action the changes the nation desperately desires and needs.
Murdoch also claimed that the “biggest critics of Fox News are not watching Fox News,” and that President Donald Trump does not like Fox News, but rather “dislikes us less than everyone else.”
Murdoch refused to take any responsibility for the company that he runs, instead offering a load of horseshit for an elite audience. While Murdoch claimed that Fox News just runs banal conservative programming in prime time, the network is actually broadcasting white nationalist propaganda indistinguishable from the likes of David Duke. And while Murdoch refused to acknowledge a revolving door between Fox News and the Trump White House, Trump is dialing up Fox hosts from the White House, and Fox is hiring people who leave the administration. Murdoch can pretend that Fox News is a normal news organization — and he wasn’t really pressed on the matter because Sorkin isn’t terribly familiar with what happens on the network — but the reality is that Fox News is a right-wing propaganda machine.
How pathetic is this MSM Fairfax article distancing itself from this abject neo-Nazi attack in the heart of Western Sydney. It’s this that enables troll courage. (ODT)
Cowan MP Anne Aly’s electorate office was targeted overnight with “It’s okay to be white” posters, a slogan she described as a “white supremacist neo-Nazi mantra”.
The phrase was at the centre of an embarrassing gaffe by government senators in October when they accidentally voted for a motion proposed by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson to acknowledge “the deplorable rise of anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilisation” and that “it is okay to be white”.
Why is it since Howard the Coalition seems to portray everyone as our enemies except the Anglosphere and Israel? Both Howard and Abbott have taken us to 2 wars we aren’t winning and Abbott was ready to take us to the Ukraine as well. Are we being fed the wrong information and for what purpose? (ODT)
Last December, Russian strategic bombers conducted exercises out of an Indonesian airfield close to Australia, forcing Australian Defence personnel in Darwin into a state of “increased readiness”. There were concerns the exercises may have been aimed at information gathering.
Then in March, two “undeclared intelligence officers” were expelled from the Russian embassy in Canberra, raising more questions about Russian covert activities in Australia. Two months later, a Russian training warship visited Papua New Guinea — the first visit of its kind for the Russian navy.
Isn’t this what Tony Abbott and right-wing pundits recomend for Indigenous Australia, and other Australian minorities ditching multiculturalism in favour of cultural asimilation. Indigenous, Muslim and African Australians represent over 6.5 % of Australia. Indigenous Australians represent 25% if not more Aussies in our retraing camps called prisons and youth detention centers and Dutton and Matthew Guy Islamophobic racists want more for disastrous outcomes.
China’s education camps of which we know very little represent 0.015%. There seems to be some level of heavy stone throwing at glass houses going on here with little interest in intention and outcomes. (ODT)
After years of frustration in winning the hearts and minds of disaffected ethnic groups, Dr Leibold believes Beijing has ditched its multicultural approach in favour of cultural “mingling”, or assimilation.
The prevailing party ideology dictates that social harmony can only be achieved with the “standardisation of human behaviour”.
In the meantime alt-Right Politics and Media like News Corp who have a fundamental disbelief in human rights and equal opportunity rail against Aid. Their stance is anti -Semetic in that didn’t the Jews simply bring to mind the notion of a fair go something alt-Conservatives Fox Sky and Murdoch’s Companies deny? (ODT)
“China is committed to friendship and common interests and we put the greater good before our own interests,” he said.
“To some people, I would say this: rather than pointing fingers at other’s contributions it is better to take the efforts to do more things that will benefit the Pacific island states.”
Mr Wang said all countries, including China and PNG, had a right to development and to “seize the opportunities” that come with it.
“If that is realised, it will make this world more harmonious and more peaceful.
“So China’s development poses no threat to anyone.”
He went on to say that “any attempts to block the development of developing countries” such as China and PNG would “represent a most severe injustice” and would leave a “disgraceful chapter in history”.
Key points:
China is investing billions of dollars of infrastructure into Papua New Guinea
China’s Foreign Minister insists the funding comes with no strings attached
He says the two countries are committed to taking bilateral relations “to a new height”
In other words, terrorism is practiced by marginalized groups that cannot influence government’s policies through legitimate means. However, developments on the violent far right since the victory of Donald Trump, I’d argue, present a different reality.
The nonprofit Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. rose by 57 percent in 2017, the largest single year increase since it started recording such statistics. My own data set documents all far-right violent incidents since 1970 – not just anti-Semitic ones – and was first published in 2012. It reveals that in 2017 the United States experienced a 70 percent increase in violent attacks perpetrated in the name of far-right ideology.
Could a victory at the ballot box actually facilitate violence? Examples from other countries indicate that this may not be such a rare phenomenon.
Member for Hughes and chairman of the Coalition backbench environment and energy committee, Craig Kelly, seems to split his time between appearing on Sky After Dark and 2GB, and posting clickbait headlines on his facebook page.
But the most cursory investigation shows Craig is either deliberately misrepresenting the articles he links to by cherry-picking a sentence or two, or he is a gullible fool who doesn’t bother reading the stuff he is being fed by others. Considering the volume of links he posts, I would suggest the latter.
Scientists from around the world issued a stark warning to humanity Tuesday in a semi-annual report on the Earth’s declining biodiversity, which shows that about 60 percent of mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles have been wiped out by human activity since 1970.
“the right-wing media and the Republican Party started to fuse into this single entity.” In 2016, Fox helped make Trump, Ailes’s longtime friend, president of the United States. Sherman says “there’s almost no daylight now between the agenda of the White House and the agenda of Fox News. … Trump is the logical conclusion of entertainment and right-wing media taking over the Republican Party.” President George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum has concluded that “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”
Or as Max Boot, another disillusioned conservative, writes, “The frightening thing is that the right-wing media will be here long after Trump and the current crop of Republican politicians are gone.” And hence eruptions of random, terrifying reactionary violence will endure as long as Fox and its friends do.
Ever seen a lying POTUS? You can find one in Trumpland a curiosity theme park intended to terrify like Jurassic Park (ODT)
“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits,” Trump said during an interview with Axios scheduled to air as part of a new HBO series.
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Republican Party is not directly responsible for the spike in hate crimes toward minorities. But it is indirectly responsible in three ways:
1. The party has largely allowed itself to be captured by the alien ideology of Trumpism
2. The party is running at least 16 far, far right extremists [with two ‘fars’] for national office, and many more far right extremists [with just one ‘far’].
3. Media catering to the GOP, such as Fox Cable News and right wing talk radio, is vicious toward minorities and often uses dog whistles against Jews.
While the Democratic Party is not entirely free of far right racists, the phenomenon in that party is tiny compared to the problem in the Republican Party. This difference comes in part from the way the three considerations listed above are entangled with and reinforce one another.
Attorneys for Kansas militia members who conspired to bomb a mosque and apartment complex housing Somali immigrants have asked the court to take into account at a sentencing hearing next month what they called President Donald Trump’s rhetoric encouraging violence.
Defense attorneys for Wright argued that since Trump’s election the nation has seen an unprecedented increase in civil rights violence, repeatedly citing White House statements such as calling Islam “a dangerous threat” and painting Americans as “victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad.”
As recently as Tuesday, when their motion was filed, his attorneys pointed to another Trump tweet saying that “some very bad people” are mixed in the South American migrant caravan and calling it is “an invasion” of the country.
“As long as the Executive Branch condemns Islam and commends and encourages violence against would-be enemies, then a sentence imposed by the Judicial Branch does little to deter people generally from engaging in such conduct if they believe they are protecting their countries from enemies identified by their own Commander-in-Chief,” Wright’s lawyers wrote.
This is dangerous precisely because the violent, xenophobic nationalism espoused by Trump is the same kind espoused by Netanyahu and Bennett, who repeatedly incite against Palestinians, African asylum seekers, and leftists. Groups like AIPAC and the ADL — in refusing to call out the GOP’s white nationalism, in conflating all Jews with Israel, and in unfairly scapegoating Muslims — are giving them cover and distracting us from what is actually happening.
What is behind Morrison and Dutton’s refusal to show even a semblance of humanity? Sacrificing the lives of children to appeal to the racist voters in marginal seats is inexcusable. There is no moral high ground in torturing innocent people to prevent others from boarding boats. “Groupthink” is a plausible explanation for why it has taken so long for moderate Coalition party members to break ranks. The psychological theory known as “cognitive dissonance” partly explains the warped justification for ongoing detention.
But nothing explains the sheer callousness and cruelty displayed by the likes of Morrison and Dutton who have right before them the evidence that Operation Sovereign Borders secured Australian waters, and equally so, that indefinite detention is causing catastrophic harm.
There are only two conclusions to be drawn. Dutton, and Morrison alike, are so incapable of absorbing irrefutable fact, so oblivious to bluntly delivered information, and so manifestly inadequate at assessing matters of significant public interest, they are not fit to hold office.
Or they are simply the meanest politicians Australia has ever seen.
A new report by the University of NSW, commissioned by the CFMMEU, sketches two futures for the 8000 direct employees in Australia’s 23 coal-fired power stations: one is a just transition into new jobs with no forced redundancies, emulating Germany’s Ruhr district; the other is the entrenched poverty left by market disruption in coal districts like Appalachia in the US, where pointless ideological warfare takes the place of proper planning. Given that 10 coal-fired power stations have shut down in Australia without a transition plan since 2012, and the Coalition’s science-deniers are in charge of energy policy, still trying to stave off the inevitable decarbonisation, this country is on course for the latter.
Hazelwood was the prime example of what not do: the Greens argued for years for a just transition, but the major parties at state and federal level were in denial. Suddenly, when the time came, workers got short notice and power prices spiked across the National Energy Market, even though the closure was completely predictable. Now, says Sheldon, when AGL does the right thing and flags that it will close Liddell in 2022, “it gets canned for it”.
When a Corporation controls the State you have Mussolini’s version of heaven (ODT)
Going after Labor leaders is one of Rupert’s favourite pastimes. Rather than hunting lions in Africa or tigers on the Punjab – That’s way too dangerous and way too hard and goes nowhere towards right wing corporate control and exploitation of society.
If there’s one man in the world who might ever possibly build a device to control the weather and freeze us all unless the governments of the world pay him several hundred billion dollars and recognize Fox News’s copyright of the phrase “Fair and Balanced,” it would be Rupert.
![President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump visit a memorial outside Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 30, 2018 [AP Photo/Matt Rourke]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2018/10/31/5f413f706e6c4742b141bf0ce24ac519_18.jpg "Why Israel does not mind Trump's anti-Semitic supporters")
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