https://iview.abc.net.au/show/four-corners/series/2020/video/NC2003H023S00
Author: peterimrich
Unfortunately, the damage that Covid-19 causes is almost certainly not confined entirely to the death rate. We may not know for some time exactly what else it causes, but even now we have enough evidence to know that there are other problems out there. Letting everyone get infected is a strategy that, even ignoring the enormous death toll, could leave us much worse off as a society.
The trouble is The LNP aren’t about to kick up a shitstorm about that (ODT)
The Labor Party in Australia speaks a progressive language on climate change that it rarely enacts in policy. Now, under cover of the health crisis, the Victorian branch is expanding deforestation projects and onshore gas exploration.
via After the Bushfires and Amid the Pandemic, Australia’s Fossil Fuel Industry Is Gaining Steam
Leader ship in Trumpland : Releasing Stone Locking Fauci away (ODT)
But as the Trump administration has strayed further from the advice of many scientists and public health experts, the White House has moved to sideline Fauci, scuttled some of his planned TV appearances and largely kept him out of the Oval Office for more than a month even as coronavirus infections surge in large swathes of the country.
Fauci is sidelined by Trump’s White House as he steps up blunt talk on the pandemic
Pauline Hanson certainly tried. Sky News is supporting her moves (ODT)
via ASIO briefing warns that the far-right is exploiting coronavirus to recruit new members – ABC News
You know he’s desperate when he starts calling a real threat to the lives of our soldiers fighting on foreign soil a “hoax.” Trump is a threat to our national security. He’s not a president. He’s a co-conspirator with dictators who are enemies of this country. He’s a traitor, and he needs to go.
Offenders can intercept payment invoices, or create their own, and funnel victims’ funds into their own accounts. Businesses and individuals make their payments as usual, but unknowingly pay the offender.
via $2.5 billion lost over a decade: Nigerian princes lose their sheen, but scams are on the rise
With the Cormannator’s departure, the LNP loses the only politician in its ranks capable of successfully sooling Paul Keating’s “unrepresentative swill”. And this is a serious problem for a Government financed in part by the Murdoch Shilling. Cormann, who does not blink, is the only senior Government Minister with the smarts to strong arm a Bill through the Senate. This Bill — yet to materialise — would fulfil Murdoch’s goal of selling-off the ABC.
With Cormann’s departure and the status quo in place in the Lower House, the demise of the ABC will not happen in the foreseeable future.
via Hasta la vista, baby! I won’t be back. – » The Australian Independent Media Network
All Aboriginal people suffer in every aspect of their lives from racism. The denial of self-determination is racist (12). Racism is evident in the education system, the legal system and the political structures of Australian society (13). It exists at the legislative and bureaucratic levels and weaves down into public opinion. Aboriginal people have had to contend with the European attitude of white supremacy. The issues I have discussed are all bound together with racism (14).
These major issues indicate that a history of racist views and policies began in Australia in 1788 and still manifests society today. History books account of the struggles of Europeans to claim this continent as their own, whereas a curtain of silence has shielded generations of students from recognising how European expansion swept away the land rights of the original inhabitants.
In the advancing colonisation the Aboriginal people were conveniently treated as part of the country’s past. ‘History,’ proclaimed an old uni lecturer of mine, ‘treated Aboriginal people as little more than impediments standing briefly in the way of inevitable white progress across the nation’ (15).
Trump has revealed his 2020 campaign strategy: He will do everything to exploit cultural tensions to overcome the fact that so many Americans would answer Reagan’s famous question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” with a resounding “no.”
via Trump has revealed his 2020 campaign strategy (opinion) – CNN
“Voters are understandably upset about the direction of the country,” Rubin emphasizes. “They do not put their hope in the virus simply ‘disappearing.’ They want the government to actually do something about the surging pandemic and mass unemployment, not to mention systemic racism. Like it or not, the buck stops with Trump, whose base seems to be crumbling.”
via ‘Down in the Dumps’: There’s a Dark Cloud Hanging over Trump and the GOP | The Smirking Chimp
The facts
The fact is that the UK has 28 times more deaths from Covid than Portugal (and how many strokes and heart attacks in the UK were registered on death certificates as “stroke” or “heart attack” and not a Covid-related incident?), yet the UK has only six times Portugal’s population.
The fact is that Britain has registered 44,131 deaths from Covid-19 compared with Portugal’s 1,587. The fact is that Britain has registered 284,276 positive tests, compared with Portugal’s 42,782 cases.
Appreciation for Aboriginal art, music and other cultural values has already spread the world over. Might opening these doors wider offset the losses felt by mining giants from denying the destruction of Sacred Sites? Please join your voice to the outcry and help our great country finally save our First Peoples’ Churches, Political Offices, Historical Libraries and Burial Grounds for future generations.
via An Australian Outcry – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Marxist ideas did spread far and wide. And they informed socialist practice. In his famous book Hammer and Hoe: Communists in Alabama During the Great Depression, Robin D.G. Kelley describes a conversation with Lemon Johnson, one of the black leaders of an American Communist Party-led Alabama sharecroppers union. When Kelley asked how they were able to win some of their demands in a 1935 cotton pickers strike, Johnson “pulled out a dog-eared copy of V.I. Lenin’s What Is to Be Done and a box of shotgun shells” and said, “That’s how we did it. Theory and practice.”
To all those concerned with the “elitism” of reading Marxist theory, I think Lemon Johnson and Vera Zasulich, if they were still around today, might reply: are you so arrogant as to think that you have figured out the complexities of the capitalist world and the proper strategies for transforming it all by yourself? Then, as organizers who took the effective communication of socialist ideas seriously, they would probably try to turn this idea into a meme.
Republicans that have spoken with Trump in recent days describe him as depressed and “down in the dumps.” “People around him think his heart’s not in it,” a Republican close to the White House said. Torn between the imperative to win suburban voters and his instincts to play to his base, Trump has complained to people that he’s in a political box with no obvious way out. According to the Republican, Trump called Tucker Carlson late last week and said, “what do I do? What do I do?”
“When the government equips police departments like they’re equipping the military, we undermine healthy relationships between the police and the community,” explains Equal Justice Initiative director Bryan Stevenson. “We have created a culture where police officers think of themselves as warriors, not guardians.”
via How the Police and the Pentagon Are Bringing Our Wars Home
Nothing left but to be the leader that DIVIDES the nation; (ODT)
“Instead of living up to the most basic responsibilities of his office this Independence Day, Donald Trump is still downplaying the virus, calling for a slowdown of testing, bucking social distancing guidelines, and showing Americans why we can’t afford four more years of him in the White House,” the DNC said ahead of the trip on Thursday.
Trump will hold another celebration for the July Fourth holiday on Saturday in Washington.
via Trump Visits Mount Rushmore Amid Controversy, Coronavirus Concerns | HuffPost
Tommy Fisher has received $1.7 billion in federal contracts for his Fisher Sand & Gravel construction company to build sections of wall along the U.S.-Mexico border by appealing directly to Trump in appearances on his favorite network, Fox News. But the privately funded “showcase piece” of wall that his firm constructed along the Rio Grande earlier this year is already at risk of falling down, according to a new report from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
The Government and its Covid Commission are pushing a $6 billion gas pipeline while new energy regulator, Clare Savage, calls into question the future of the gas networks. Meanwhile Australians still pay more for gas than customers overseas pay for Australian gas. Michael West reports on the momentous upheaval in energy.
It is one short sentence but a sentence with remarkable implications for the nation:
“If not, the economic life of the assets could be limited.”
The new chair of the Australian Energy Regulator, Clare Savage, is saying that if the gas transmission networks do not convert to hydrogen, these assets may be stranded; that’s many billions of dollars in gas pipelines stranded.
“She is calling time on a multi-billion dollar industry,” says energy analyst Bruce Robertson.
The candid assessment from Clare Savage is even more remarkable considering the Government, with the connivance of its Covid-19 Commission, is pushing plans to build a $6 billion gas pipeline from Western Australia to the East Coast.
via A Savage Call: energy tsar calls time on Australia’s gas cartel – Michael West
ACT remote weapons systems manufacturer, Electro Optic Systems Holdings, which has hitched its wagon to countries known to be engaged in gross violations of human rights and likely war crimes, wins big from the Coalition’s weapons announcement on eve of by-election, writes Michelle Fahy.
The Coalition Government’s announcement of the purchase of 251 more remote weapons systems manufactured by the Canberra and Queanbeyan-based Electro Optic Systems (EOS) Pty Ltd was a nice “announceable” on the eve of the crucial Eden-Monaro by-election and gave welcome media coverage to EOS.
EOS was in the headlines last year for a very different reason: it supplies the same weapon systems to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two countries that are waging war in Yemen, and in the process creating the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, including the mass starvation of children.
The company has justified its exports (it exports 90-95% of its weapons systems) saying,
“Foreign sales significantly reduce the cost of development, acquisition and support for Australia for defence technology. This is the principal reason why Australian industry participates in international sales.”
via Pork Missile: Government fires cash at weapons-maker EOS in Battle for Eden-Monaro – Michael West
Why isn’t this on the front pages of Australian MSM? (ODT)
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