When Trump says he did not what to “panic” the “country,” what he really means is that he did not want to drive down the stock market. In all the commentary I heard about the phrase in the media yesterday, I heard no one make this point. People were disgusted with Trump’s two-facedness, which certainly cost tens of thousands of American lives. But they still took his statement at face value as an expression of concern for the people.
Trump is a particularly stupid man who thinks he is very smart. Perhaps this lies at the root of his monumentally dumb decision to grant Bob Woodward 18 interviews
But there is a difference or two between now and 2016. For one, Trump is an incumbent; a re-election campaign is a much different thing. He’s not an upstart spitting at the castle walls. Now he’s inside – and just about everyone can see that he let in the COVID-19 dragon.
“Pillaging.” Sounds a lot like looting. But looting is bad, isn’t it? Conservatives say it is. Looting is a wicked thing—although I only hear conservatives denounce looting when Black people do it. Racism explains why the MAGA crowd loses their minds over scattered offenses against property and doesn’t bat an eye over cops shooting unarmed Black people. In any event, stealing all the oil in Syria is looting on such a heroic scale that it’s hard for some people not to admire it. One thing Trump has taught us is: if you’re going to loot, go large.
America Inc Trump’s Corporate government demanding a Mafia Commission. Trump’s “Free Trade by Extortion”
United States President Donald Trump on Tuesday repeated his demand for a piece of the action from any sale of TikTok’s US operations for forcing such a deal. Trump’s line on the US government’s receiving a cut from any deal has been slammed by critics from the outset. TikTok has been at the center of a diplomatic storm between Washington and Beijing, and Trump gave a deadline for an end to business with TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance－effectively compelling a sale of the app to a US company. “Well, I told them that they have until September 15th to make a deal; after that, we close it up in this country,” Trump told journalists. “And I said that the United States has to be compensated－well compensated－because we are the ones that are making it possible, and so we should be compensated.”
“I’m not saying the military’s in love with me,” Donald Trump said on Monday. “The soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”
An appeals court recently ruled a mass surveillance program exposed by Edward Snowden was illegal. It’s only the latest example of Washington admitting Snowden had, despite being continuously denounced by pundits and politicians, done the right thing by leaking information about the government’s massive surveillance operations.
Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has refused to say when he will release the Productivity Commission’s report on mental health, despite growing calls to make it public before the October 6 federal budget.
Murmours of Andrews being a model of what a PM should look like has set Morrison and Frydenberg off against not just Andrews but Victoria blaming the State for everything they haven’t done. (ODT)
They need him to succeed on their behalf. The Prime Minister might find that destabilising the state government during a recession and a pandemic might not please as many Victorians as he thinks.
To boost book sales, celebrity journalist Bob Woodward concealed a tape of Donald Trump that contained information about the pandemic that may have prevented thousands of deaths. This isn’t hyperbole. This is peak 2020 insanity.
Gordon Gekko jumped out of a Hollywood movie onto a TV Reality Show in need of someone someone to play the role Trump was born to play. The Snake Oil salesman no longer needed a covered wagon to come to town. America was ripe and ready. Will he steal the Peace Prize too? (ODT)
Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The embodiment of the false creed of neoliberalism, Trump cannot fathom any human action that cannot be reduced to a transaction. He cannot comprehend volunteers because that involves altruism and empathy. The narcissistic materialist is equally confounded; discomfited to discover that over 1,800 US Marines lost their lives at Belleau Wood. He sees them as “suckers” for getting killed. In brief, as Goldberg sees, Donald Trump suffers the delusion that “nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.” It’s not hard to hear the same delusion at work in the News Corp journalists who endlessly, every day twit Dan Andrews with the same questions. Why should the state pursue public health and safety instead of profits for business at any costs? Similarly, in his tedious repetition of his vacuous slogan “open the nation for business”, Trumpista Scott Morrison exhibits the same pathological indifference to others; the same failure to imagine another’s pain, along with an alarming poverty of mind and spirit which simply make him unfit to lead. He should resign over the sports rorts alone. In their own ways, the rise of Trumpism and the coronavirus pandemic have helped create an environment where Morrison and Murdoch’s minions’ claims that we must endlessly pursue selfish competition – that greed is good and might is right – are so vividly exposed as toxic aberrations and hopelessly, grotesquely inadequate to the times’ need for compassion, co-operation, community and humanity. We must expose their lies; continue to hold them to account.
Twitter says it permanently suspended a QAnon account belonging to a family friend of the prime minister, Scott Morrison, for “engaging in coordinated harmful activity”. Twitter is in the middle of a broader crackdown on QAnon content and is attempting to reduce the amplification of accounts spreading “clear and well-documented informational, physical, societal and psychological offline harm on our service”. BurnedSpy34, a prominent and prolific member of the Australian QAnon scene, was recently permanently suspended.
Leadership: The LNP is practiced in not giving answers when asked quite the opposite can be said of Dan Andrews.
That made no sense to me. During the course of a 23-year career in DFAT, which involved briefing ministers and ministerial advisers, I cannot recall the provision of such simple and straightforward information not being provided under the circumstances prevailing in this matter. I went back:
What’s left of “team Australia” in China is now, potentially, team hostage for a regime seemingly determined to punish Australia.
We seem to have soured our relationship with China since 2016. It’s not hard to understand why. Murdoch Media was quick to change it’s praise of China to editorials that resembled Fox Corp and the LNP was quick to jump on board. The country that bugged Timor Leste started openly China accusing having agents wherever there was a Chinese face.. Australian Chinese like Australian Muslims started to feel the impact of the LNP and their media backed 1950’s and 60s attitudes to a country they celebrated when CHAFTA was signed. Yes there has been a lot of kowtowing but not to Chinese attempt at friendship.
Multiple Chinese media sources now claim the ASIO raided four Chinese journalists in Australia. Given the focus on Chinese espionage in Australia at the moment this may be true — and could possibly tip the problem on its head — but the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade would not confirm or deny it.
In the midst of a deep recession this government is seeking to lock in an inequitable income tax system under the guise of recovery. Two recent reports, however, highlight that moves to bring forward the legislated tax cuts will fail to provide adequate stimulus to the economy and will only exacerbate inequality that was already increasing prior to the pandemic.
Although the gods do seem to starting to say that it’s about time your luck ran out, Mr Morrison. Big announcement on vaccines, then a few days later the trial is halted. Ok, it’s always likely that there could be a glitch and that there needs to be a pause in a medical trial. That’s why it takes so long to get a new drug or vaccine on the market. I’m just amused that the timing was so soon after the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT. Usually the Liberals make the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT and it’s some months later when we discover that only $27.38 was spent out of the $2 billion announced owing to people not filling in the application form before the due date which was two days before the form was released to the public.
But stuff Google and Facebook, says Morrison and his gang of dollar store Batman villains, if Rupert wants something, no matter how obviously idiotic, odious or borderline corrupt, Rupert will bloody well get it. His media monopoly is the only thing keeping the Coalition in power, after all.
Irrespective of how you look at it, the Murdoch media is working with the Morrison Government to achieve its goal of controlling the narrative and manipulating the way people can find news and information. A job which they already fulfil with aplomb, but which will be that much easier without pesky Google searches and Facebook sharing platforms unearthing more and more alternative views.
Whichever way it goes, Rupert Murdoch gets what he wants. Either a new stream of revenue from Facebook and Google, or a potentially crippling blow to his emerging online news rivals.
Come to think of it, maybe the old coot does understand the internet? More likely his staff do.
In 2016, thanks largely to the antiquated, nonsensical design of its creaky electoral system, the U.S. presidency was awarded to a candidate who lost the election by nearly 3 million votes to his opponent. This elderly man, a functionally illiterate game show host and petty real estate grifter with an unbroken, lifelong trail of stiffed creditors, unpaid workers, disastrous bankruptcies, acrimonious divorces and criminal allegations, oozes at every moment a grotesque, seething and conspiracy-laced resentment against women, minorities, immigrants and what he nearly always calls “the Democrat Party.” He pours this toxic ensemble into a cocktail shaker with empty embarrassing braggadocio, adding in equal portions of a genuinely bottomless ability to lie shamelessly and an all-around lack of even the most rudimentary ability to head the executive branch of the most powerful country in the world. The resulting concoction has been force-fed to us for nearly four years now. It is the worst drink I’ve ever had.
The presidential election is just 56 days away, and as Donald Trump struggles to gain ground in key states, he is increasingly relying on deceptively altered media to bend reality in his favor.
The DOJ wants to substitute the U.S. government for Trump as the defendant in the suit brought by author E. Jean Carroll, who has accused the president of rape.
The outcome, as things, stand, promises to be traditional in geopolitics and health. Old divisions and inequalities will be reasserted with marked savagery. The rich and affluent will get first dibs and first jabs; the impoverished will have to wait their turn. And the virus will continue to do its work.
What’s odd is RTA the Russian News agency is calling the research into this a hoax. Why would that be? Is it because bikers tend to be Trumpsters
It was a 10-day celebration of big bikes and inalienable American freedom for which more than 400,000 people descended on a South Dakota town. But, three weeks on, the 80th Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is feared to have been a “super-spreader event”, with doctors recording scores of coronavirus cases linked to it.
Iowa City and Ames endure worst surge in the country as cases have risen sharply across the whole midwest
coronavirus cases have risen sharply across the whole midwest in recent weeks putting the region at the forefront of America’s pandemic. The region accounted for six of the eight states with the highest number of new Covid-19 cases by early September even as infections fell in other parts of the US previously among the worst hit.
North Dakota has the largest number of positive cases per capita in the country over the past 14 days. Iowa and South Dakota are enduring the highest percentage increases. Missouri has seen more than 1,300 new cases a day on average over the past week.
“No government should let a single company control the biggest newspapers in every capital city bar one, plus a television station, plus the national newswire,” Rudd said. “Let alone an American billionaire like Murdoch
This article seems to be misinformed saying the Chinese forced two Australian journalists out. The left on the advice of the Australian government which has had an increasingly tenuous relationship with China since Abbott came to power. A relationship politicized by the demands of the USA and domestic politics. Australian Foreign policy has shifted dramatically in the last 7 years noticeably for the worse. The LNP cut in foreign aid and Abbott’s eagerness to be more involved in Europe created a vacuum and opportunity for China which they now seem to be paying the price.(ODT)
The Chinese Communist Party’s international state media mouthpiece, Xinhua, published a report overnight claiming the Australian intelligence agency recently raided the residences of Chinese journalists in Australia, questioned them and seized their computers and smartphones. Current Time 0:45 / Duration 2:10 Two Australian journalists rushed home from China Two Australian journalists rushed home from China Scott Morrison wants ‘graphic’ TikTok video taken down Two Australian journalists rushed home from China Two Australian journalists have landed in Sydney after being pulled out of China by their news organisations for fear they were no longer safe. Scott Morrison wants ‘graphic’ TikTok video taken down 2:06 Up next Scott Morrison wants ‘graphic’ TikTok video taken down LIVE: Marise Payne addresses the media Greg Hunt addresses the media Treasurer outlines changes to JobKeeper PM and Home Affairs Minister address the media LIVE: PM and Home Affairs Minister address the media Senior Australian government sources confirmed questioning took place, but said it was normal procedure and it shouldn’t be compared with the treatment of Smith and Birtles who had been forced out of China.
Australia is waging an intensifying espionage offensive against China – sending agents to China to spy, gather intelligence and recruit assets, instigating defection among Chinese nationals, spying on Chinese students and organizations in Australia, feeding fake news to media to hype up the “China espionage theory” and even in early years attempting to install wiretaps in the Chinese Embassy in Canberra, the Global Times reported in June, citing a source with a Chinese law-enforcement agency. Multiple Australian espionage cases uncovered by Chinese law-enforcement agencies showed that Australia is a veteran in spying against other countries and precisely “the thief who is crying stop the thief” as it steps up infiltration, spying and technological theft operations against China, the source told the Global Times.
My thought for the day “The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages … It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom or our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” (Robert Kennedy, 1968).(John Lord)
If wealth continues to concentrate at the top, no one will be able to contain the corrupting influence of big money on the American system and the anger it unleashes. As Justice Louis D Brandeis once said, “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Marie Antoinette reportedly said “Let them eat cake” when told the peole had no bread. Trump moment came when he said he understood the cop who shot Blake 7 times in the back “he chocked” “it was like missing a three foot putt”. Marie went to the Guillotine will Trump? (ODT)
All points well-taken. But we can go deeper here. The president’s “three-foot putt” analogy doesn’t just reveal the sordid worldview of an impulsive man. Trump’s vile equivalence between a golf putt and police violence has so much more to tell us about the bubble of enormous wealth that has always enveloped him — and so many others of his super-rich class.
But that is not the question being asked on October 17. What voters have to answer is this: does regulation offer a better pathway than prohibition when it comes to reducing harm in our society? Five decades of failure would suggest one of those options offers more hope than the other.
Having reported the long, epic ordeal of Julian Assange, John Pilger gave this address outside the Central Criminal Court in London on September 7 as the WikiLeaks editor’s extradition hearing entered its final stage.
As the Julian Assange hearing resumed, the WikiLeaks founder formally declined to be extradited to face a superseding indictment issued by the US in June. Protesters and lawyers say the prosecution will stifle press freedom.
#ScottyFromMarketing wants a fall guy for 1st recession in 30yrs: Dan Andrews. Nothing is Scott’s responsibility: aged care failure; dodgy Covid app; slow stimulus when Covid first hit; no infrastructure plan to rebuild confidence. All aided by Murdoch’s Liberal protection racket
AUSTRALIA IS entering treacherous waters. After more than a quarter-century of economic growth, the country has now gone into recession. And not just any recession — the deepest downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The recession brings many self-evident problems, from high rates of unemployment to widespread business failures. But there is a less obvious danger that we overlook at our peril — the role of vested interests in the economic recovery.
If wealth continues to concentrate at the top, no one will be able to contain the corrupting influence of big money on the American system and the anger it unleashes. As Justice Louis D Brandeis once said: “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Donald Trump is a pathological liar. According to documented reports he has told more than 20,000 lies and distortions since he has been president. This is, obviously, deeply disturbing behavior for anyone who is president of the United States.
Trump’s incoherence, his temper, his impulsiveness, his breathtaking ignorance — all of it was well-known among the top tiers of the Republican machinery. … Not once did I ever hear any concern that just maybe they were working to install a useful idiot who truly was an idiot.
Hitler simply burnt the books sacked anyone that didn’t support or might not support the Nationalist version of history and it’s symbols in any Institution throughout the country. Trump is just cutting funding.(ODT)
Trump has claimed systemic racism is not a problem in America. Trump’s comments come in the middle of a nationwide reckoning on race sparked by protests against racism and police violence. Suggest a correction
When one writes satire, it’s sometimes hard to write something serious and have people realise that you’re actually just writing what you actually think, particularly if one is simply describing the political situation in countries where people like Scotty, Boris and Donald are leaders. However, I felt that I should note the passing of Dave Graeber, the writer of two of my favourite non-fiction books, Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.
Most recently, on Friday, August 7, close to 300 workers in Truganina, in Melbourne’s west, followed suit. Their warehouse, run by the Toll Group, is a major distribution center for Kmart. In an industry with low pay and widespread casualization, Toll is one of the most ruthless employers, often employing staff via labor-hire agencies in order to sidestep their legal responsibilities. After trying and failing to intimidate the casual workers, who make up nearly half the workforce, Toll held out for just one day before giving in to the workers’ demands.
The process of shifting wealth and income from the poor and middle to the rich continues apace. Alan Austin examines the latest national accounts. FOR THE FIRST TIME since 1959, when Australia first published detailed national accounts, the share of all income going to corporations has risen above 30%. Simultaneously, the share for employees has fallen below 50% for the first time ever.
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