With no plan, no assurances and no assistance, Afghan interpreters have been left to fend for themselves
Author: peterimrich
The highest standard of torture in the world has been shown and set by the USA
The UK’s High Court has granted the US government permission to appeal a decision that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange cannot be sent to the United States to face espionage charges. The judicial office said on Wednesday that the appeal had been granted and the case would be listed for a High Court hearing. No date has been set.
Source: Julian Assange extradition: US can appeal denial, UK court rules
While Ivanka appears to be coolly attempting to control her own narrative behind the scenes, Donald Jr and Eric reacted to the Trump Organization criminal charges by having histrionics on camera. Eric Trump told Newsmax last week that “Don, Ivanka and I live really nice, clean lives”. Meanwhile, Don Jr posted a 13-minute video on Facebook calling the charges against his dad “banana-republic stuff”. He also (rather unhelpfully) acknowledged that the allegations Trump paid for Weisselberg’s grandchildren’s school fees were true. “My dad did that,” he said, because he is a “good guy”. A “good guy” who probably wishes he raised smarter kids. With children like these, who needs enemies?
The Treasury Department told Congress last month that under-collected taxes are on track to total $7 trillion over the next decade, or about 15% of total tax revenues that would be owed under the law, thanks in part to budget cuts over the past decade that have sharply scaled back audits. Deputy Assistant Secretary Mark Mazur recently explained to Congress that this trend has negative consequences, including higher tax rates elsewhere in the economy — that is, the costs are borne by people who follow the rules — as well as the fact that “persistent non-compliance also undermines confidence in the fairness of our tax system.” As other experts have explained, much of the “tax gap” as it is known comes from higher-income earners. While nearly all regular wage income is properly reported, other forms of income such as business partnerships and capital gains have higher rates of misreporting. (This news also comes in the context of a political environment in which billionaire executives such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have successfully avoided having to even pay federal income taxes in some years, by receiving much of their compensation as stock in their own companies.) Wall Street
Source: Wall Street Journal columnist: Defund the tax police | Media Matters for America
Trump’s Tourists
“Of the nearly 700 Republicans who have filed initial paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run next year for either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives, at least a third have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat,” the Post reported Monday. At the federal level, there are dozens of “current Republican officeholders, lining up to seek reelection, who have backed Trump’s efforts over the past eight months by questioning the validity of the 2020 result, taking legislative votes, or signing on to official efforts to overturn it,” the newspaper noted, adding that 136 of the GOP’s candidates for next year’s vital midterm races are current members of Congress who voted against the certification of President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory on January 6. Trump’s falsehood that he would have been victorious last November had it not been for cheating Biden supporters was enthusiastically taken up by the GOP at the state level, too. Despite a complete lack of substantiating evidence, that fabrication continues to be invoked by right-wing candidates hoping to win office this year or in 2022.
But sometimes an engineering solution just won’t be possible. “Some of the adaptation strategies could be that we just relocate the entire community, because for some reason we cannot defend them using in-place structures like sea walls,” says Shirzaei. This is known as managed retreat, and it’s already happening in some cities. San Francisco, for instance, is giving up part of a coastal highway by replacing two lanes with a trail so the land can better hold back rising waters.
Source: An Actual Space Laser Shows How Devastating Sea Level Rise May Be – Mother Jones
Underperforming Funds Named and Shamed A new annual performance test will compare the rolling 8 year net returns of each MySuper product with what it should have attained based on its stated investment strategy. Critically, and for the first time, the benchmark used to calculate net returns is codified in the YFYS regulations, so all funds must adhere to the same calculation methodology. This both eliminates the ability for funds to ‘game the numbers’, and allows for an apples-to-apples comparison across different funds. Funds that underperform their designated benchmark by 0.5% per year or more in two consecutive years will have to inform all members in writing, and will be barred from accepting new members while their performance remains sub-standard. The tests will, in effect, be Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for super funds. Based on the following chart from the Productivity Commission final report, there will be many APRA-regulated funds that find themselves falling short of the mark.
As the US continues its slide toward cold war with China, pressure on Australia to maintain its dominance in the South Pacific has only grown. Ever the dutiful ally of the US, Australia is now earning accusations of imperialism from its Pacific neighbors.
If you follow a rule that when a politician cries “look over there!” you make sure you stay looking over here, there’s much to be deduced from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s Intergenerational Report, before we put it up on the shelf with its four predecessors.
Source: The real reason the budget is projected to stay in deficit for the next 40 years
Because in a real meritocracy— in a society that looks to its future productivity and social cohesion— plum jobs are available to all who strive, irrespective of their postcode or school. In a real meritocracy, the state does not actively encourage educational segregation whereby some schools have leaking roofs and others their own weather station, and then declare, as has federal Education Minister Alan Tudge, class warfare “over”. In a real meritocracy, no class of people can unselfconsciously assume they own the future.
Source: The old school tie has lost potency, but a private education still opens doors
The Morrison Government’s koala policies of extinction have finally been exposed by its own bureaucracy with the release of two major koala conservation policy documents.
Source: Morrison Government koala extinction policies exposed
This is a desperate quick fix to try to rescue power station owners from an onslaught of renewable energy they should have seen coming
if you listen to him long enough — no easy chore — Donald Trump will tell you all his secrets. Witness this line from his July 3 speech in Sarasota, Florida: “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.”
Source: Donald Trump just accidentally told the truth about his disinformation strategy – CNNPolitics
Finally, real patriotism means using your position of power in the media to inform and educate the public rather than weaponize lies and promote extremism to get more clicks. I’m talking to you, Mark Zuckerberg, and you, Rupert Murdoch. On this 4th of July, let’s commit to real patriotism. It’s not easy, but it’s the necessary hard work we must undertake to make this country better for everyone.
Source: Real Patriotism on this July 4th | The Smirking Chimp
June was an exceptionally hot month for several countries in the northern hemisphere. Since Friday June 25, at least 486 sudden deaths have been recorded in Canada’s British Columbia province as temperatures soared to nearly 50C (122F). In the United States, the ongoing heatwave has buckled highways and melted power lines. A so-called “heat dome”, where high pressure traps the heat, is being blamed for the excessively high temperatures.
Source: Mapping the hottest temperatures around the world | Climate News | Al Jazeera
A global challenge to controlling the pandemic The Delta variant is more transmissible, probably causes more severe disease, and current vaccines don’t work as well against it. WHO warns low-income countries are most vulnerable to Delta as their vaccination rates are so low. New cases in Africa increased by 33% over the week to June 29, with COVID-19 deaths jumping 42%. There has never been a time when accelerating the vaccine rollout across the world has been as urgent as it is now.
Large job agencies who dominate Australia’s privatised employment system are enjoying a boom of record profits, and even a takeover spree, while their disillusioned job seekers complain of churning and profiteering. Meanwhile, those in government on both sides of the political aisle are calling for reform. In this special investigation, Stephanie Tran reports on the failure of Jobactive.
The Australian Federal Court has ruled that the Nation’s Environment Minister and Government “has a legal duty not to cause harm to young people of Australia by exacerbating climate change when approving coal mining projects.” While the case will eventually get to the High Court, it is hard to make a logical argument that expansion or creation of infrastructure that produces fossil fuel for consumption doesn’t also increase carbon emissions.
Source: The gas-fired recovery – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Australia’s export credit agency provided more than $1.5bn in finance to fossil fuel projects between 2009 and 2020, about 80 times the amount it spent on renewables, according to a new report.
As Banks notes in her interview with Crikey’s Amber Schultz, it took a while, but people are beginning to see through Morrison and his techniques. Right from the outset of his prime ministership he was deploying techniques of spin, distraction and denial in order to evade embarrassment and accountability.And right from the outset, he was gaslighting female critics.
Source: How Scott Morrison gaslights female critics to distract from criticism
So, against a recent backdrop of the Morrison government having passed a proliferation of rights-eroding national security laws, together with pursuing closed court political prosecutions, and clamping down on press freedoms, the Coalition is now law-making by decree. A dictatorship of the few
Source: Half of our federal laws were passed without oversight – » The Australian Independent Media Network
1. The Fourth of July celebrates a revolutionary event. January 6 was a counter-revolutionary event.
Source: Top 5 Differences between the Fourth of July and the Capitol Insurrection
While there is plenty of reason to be optimistic, experts say we’re not out of the woods just yet. “Even if we are fully vaccinated and all our lives are starting to go back to normal,” Shafir says, “COVID-19 is still a pandemic.” To see our way through this, she says, we need to minimize the chance of transmission “to the greatest extent possible.” The fewer cases there are, the less opportunity the virus has to evolve. As she puts it, “The pandemic isn’t over anywhere until the pandemic is over everywhere.”
But prudish prohibitions were no match for the power of celebrity. Six years after Bernardini was the first woman in a bikini, Brigitte Bardot made The Girl in the Bikini. Pop singer Brian Hyland sang Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini in 1960. And in 1962, the original Bond girl, Ursula Andress, strode from the surf in a bikini with a knife holstered on her hip. There was no stopping the bikini taking off after that.
Source: July 5 in history: World’s first bikini is unveiled in Paris
It would be alarming if it wasn’t so, well, expected. The reception to an excerpt from former Liberal MP Julia Banks’ book in a weekend newspaper fell into two depressingly familiar camps – government supporters and critics. Both camps scrambled over each other in the race to discredit and dismiss Ms Banks, giving priority to their own political allegiances rather than address the real issues raised by her book.
Source: Julia Banks: Book reveals – again – that men are behind sexist politics
I have it on good authority – not the PMO’s office, no definitely not, we don’t need another six month long inquiry into who knew nothing and what they didn’t say about what they didn’t know – that the Prime Minister reached out to Ms Banks and tried to understand but she was too upset to express her reasons clearly and what can a bloke do when a woman just says that she’s leaving because of the disgusting behaviour and bullying of the people in charge except shake his head and sigh and make another curry. Say what you like about Mr Morrison. I always find him an inspiration.
Source: Scotty The Inspiration For My Own Four Phase Plan! – » The Australian Independent Media Network
We at least saw that Tony Abbott could ride a bike and not just SPIN
Even when they do get distributed, the anecdotes of dysfunction in the system are manifest. For example, a GP who found himself with many more Pfizer doses about to expire than he could possibly use tried to swap them with a state health authority which could have used them up in a day and given him supply with a longer shelf life. But the Commonwealth would not facilitate this and recommended unused doses be destroyed. Friday’s national cabinet wasn’t a step forward, it was but a stark illustration of the problems in our vaccination rollout. The crumbling confidence in the national cabinet process to achieve unified purpose, and the gaslighting of our medical experts, doesn’t help. Nor does the spectacular lack of transparency about what vaccine supplies we have got coming, or what the government is doing about accelerating supplies in any way possible. Nor does the fact no one wants to say how much of the population needs to be vaccinated before we can open up. The magic numbers we need are the ones about vaccine supply.
Simon Birmingham says voters chose Morrison government last election as he refuses to rule out similar programs in the future
Recent speeches by two senior figures at the Reserve Bank of Australia have contained disturbing inaccuracies, writes Alan Austin.
Source: Reserve Bank of Australia spruiks the Coalition with false information
My thought for the day The left of politics is concerned with people who cannot help themselves. The right is concerned with those who can.
This was and still is Phase 1 one of the Morrison Government Plan
Just when you thought it couldn’t, political integrity has dropped another notch. I thought we reached the low point in our rorting degradation last year when Gladys Berejiklian was metaphorically caught with her fingers in the paper shredder over $252 million worth of politicised council grants. The NSW Premier effectively said: ‘Yeah, it’s crook, you might not like it, but that’s the way it is, so too bad’. But on Sunday federal Finance Minister Simon Birmingham went further when confronted with the Morrison government’s $660 million #carparkrorts. According to the leader of the government in the Senate, it’s all our fault, “it’s what electorates expect”. At least Ms Berejiklian was capable of admitting to the pork barrelling.
Source: Government rorts drop political integrity down another notch
And now that we’re 245, it seems as though we should be old enough to take an honest look at various dumb and awful things about our birth, and stop believing in preposterous myths.
Source: At 245, America’s Old Enough to Be Honest About Its Founding
Fox hosts Larry Kudlow and Tomi Lahren are scheduled to participate in Republican Party fundraisers in the coming weeks. The two network employees are doing campaign events even though Fox claims it has a policy against such practices.
Even the billionaire former CEO of UnitedHealth was able to buy his way out of his financial crimes by paying a few hundred million dollars. It’s the norm, not the exception, in America’s executive suites. We should not have a two-tier justice system like this in the United States. It’s time to end Rich Man’s Deals and hold people with well-stuffed money bins to the same level of accountability as the rest of us.
Source: Cosby Got Trump’s Sweetheart Deal | The Smirking Chimp
One of the largest ransomware attacks in history has spread worldwide, affecting thousands of businesses and forcing Swedish grocery store chain Coop to close all 800 of its stores because it could not operate its cash registers. It follows a scourge of headline-grabbing attacks over recent months that have been a source of diplomatic tension between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin over whether Russia has become a safe haven for cybercriminal gangs.
Source: Swedish supermarket chain shut as massive cyber attack spreads
From the ’60s New Left to the persistence of a mass-membership Communist Party today, Marxism has had a huge impact on Japanese politics and culture. Japanese Marxism is a highly creative tradition that deserves to be better known and understood outside Japan.
Transparency, facts and truth are not a hallmark of the Liberals or the Morrison government, and Morrison fudges and lies about everything he touches. The king of tourism and economic geography turning fibs into gold, for himself of course. The pandemic like quarantine, border control, refugees, robodebt, the Indue cashless welfare card, bushfires and global climate change are among the many critical topics in his coal bunker of precious lies. Even other Liberal bimbos like Simon Birmingham, Minister for Finance insist in having their say on public record outside of their ministerial portfolio, blowing off at Labor State premiers on this pandemic and public health, politicising anything that moves, and like Morrison, what the fuck would he know about it!
Malcolm Turnbull is a professional critic of the government but his assessment of the rollout is widely shared. “I can’t think of a bigger black-and-white failure of public administration than this” he told the ABC. “The reason we are so far behind is because the government last year didn’t buy enough vaccines, they didn’t buy nearly enough Pfizer and they didn’t buy any Moderna.[…] It is a comprehensive failure of administration […] you can’t put a gloss on it.” Morrison goes into Friday’s national cabinet with some states demanding a lowering of arrival caps and complaints about Pfizer shortages. There’s deep irritation about the shambles flowing from his AstraZeneca remarks. Meanwhile nearly half the country has been in lockdown. The default position of the PM – who lay low all week after Monday night’s appearance – is gloss. But it will be hard for him to apply any shine that doesn’t immediately rub off.
Source: Grattan on Friday: The pandemic is now putting the ‘experts’ in their own world of pain
We have been currently in the First Phase for 18months of unfulfilled promises Mr Morrison
“It should have always been the plan. It should have been a race. It’s taken [the PM] 18 months to realise it. And Australians are paying the price for his complacency,” Mr Albanese said on Twitter.
Source: Australia needs COVID rollout and reopening targets, experts say
The caller’s tone was bullying, short and swift and coldly calculating. It was Morrison. I’d been trying to speak to him all day; I wanted to tell him directly to get his bully boys to back off. He made offers that had been made before by his emissaries, including Frydenberg. He offered to send me to New York as the United Nations delegate, all expenses paid, for months in a lavish hotel (at taxpayers’ expense). I declined. He offered to “negotiate with Bill [Shorten, then opposition leader] for a pair”. A parliamentary pair is when the two political parties rebalance their numbers for voting when an MP is absent from the chamber for personal, parental or sick leave reasons. It could have effectively meant I’d be on “unlimited sick leave”, or more likely “unlimited mental health leave”, for the remainder of the term. The fact that this would align with the “emotionally and mentally unwell” narrative was not lost on me. “I am not sick,” I said.
Source: Former Liberal MP Julia Banks on the Canberra bubble’s bullying boys’ club
Scott Morrison’s two political debacles this past week, the vaccine rollout and the carpark grants program, have more in common than first appears. They are two sides of the same coin that is Morrison’s approach to leadership.
Source: What Scott Morrison’s latest political debacles have in common
he is reportedly happy about the indictments, “thrilled” they are what he thinks of as light charges, and already anticipating how the cases can be leveraged for his big comeback in 2024 because it will “hurt Sleepy Joe.” He plans to make this latest “witch hunt” a theme of his upcoming rallies and since his political career has been built upon relentless whining, which his followers eat up with a spoon, he may just be right.
Source: Yes, Trump should be “thrilled” by this week’s news — indictments and all | Salon.com
The FBI had its largest number of arrests related to January 6, this week. Those weekend warriors for Trump are flipping, fast. By David Neiwert
Source: Those January 6 ‘Patriots’ Are Fast Becoming Snitches | Crooks and Liars
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s death at 88 is an occasion for me to recall some of my own writing on his sinister role in the Iraq War. Rumsfeld wanted to invade Iraq so badly he just made up shit to justify that action. In a Salon article I noted that the day after 9/11, [anti-terrorism czar Richard] “Clarke reveals that Rumsfeld was already, on the afternoon of Sept. 12, “talking about broadening the objectives of our response and ‘getting Iraq.’”
Source: Donald Rumsfeld, Torturer, Serial Liar, Butcher of Baghdad, dies at 88
This week, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres presented a report to the 75th General Assembly on the “Promotion and protection of the rights of children: promotion and protection of the rights of children: Children and Armed Conflict” It had a damning section on the situation in Israel and Palestine The report notes some violations by the Palestinian Muslim fundamentalist party-militia, Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, but the number is minor compared to the violations charged against Israel. The Guterres’ report begins,
Source: United Nations Accuses Israel of ‘Grave Violations’ against Palestinian Children
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