Making Australia the American Base and Target in the region and have us pay for it.(ODT)
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wants us to join with the U.S. in tackling the problems which Donald Trump created with Iran and presumably to soften us up to host missiles to protect the U.S. marines and port facilities in Darwin, writes John Menadue.
“Even though UAP did not win a seat, it is clear the big spending had an important influence on the election outcome, and this is influence not by sheer force of ideas, or mobilisation in terms of people, but by money itself, and I think that undermines the fairness of the electoral contest”.
The Melbourne university professor, who is an advocate for caps on election spending for political actors and third parties, said the case study also pointed to the outsized influence of the fossil fuel industry on Australian elections.
He said it was self-evident that Palmer was a mining magnate, and electoral records show fossil fuel companies are among the largest contributors to the major parties.
“Kelly’s family furniture business went belly-up. Whilst this loud-mouth ignorant bully continues to exert influence via threats to colleagues and an inflated media presence, his appalling lack of judgement risks doing the same to the country.”
via Craig Kelly, the ultimate hypocritical NIMBY – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Hidden History of the cost lives LNP (ODT)
This has to be the biggest scam that Trump is running on America and without Fox he couldn’t possibly get away with it. FAKE NEWS BY TRUMP SURE IS!! (ODT)
Sadly, old habits die slowly!
Clearly, if people refuse to accept that knowledge of the world around us is always growing, as more and more discoveries are made, discoveries are made, then they will often, in ignorance, cause hurt to others. Once this has been pointed out to them, to fall back on their religious texts to support their argument is not an option.
I often wonder how much more peaceful the world might be if people did not follow any religion at all!
Australia’s Shame characterised by Alan Jones (ODT)
However New Zealand’s primary renewable energy sources are hydro and geothermal power. About 80 per cent of New Zealand’s electricity comes from renewable energy, compared to about 20 per cent of Australia’s.
The broadcaster previously attracted wide condemnation over his comments about former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, which he later apologised for. He said she should be “shoved in a chaff bag” and that her father had died “of shame”.
and
Posted
On the basis of the limited information provided to the public to date, the business and risk case for privatising visa processing appears highly questionable.
Is the government prepared to be open with the Australian public and Parliament about this high-risk initiative?
Will the Australian public be comfortable with these extraordinary risks being taken on our behalf with such a core government function?
And how long before taxpayers have to bail out the department because one or more of these risks materialises?
It really is a gamble that’s just not worth taking. (Abul Rizvi left the Australian Public Service in 2015 as a deputy secretary and is currently undertaking a PhD on Australia’s immigration policies. He was a senior official in the Department of Immigration from the early 1990s to 2007. )
https://www.themandarin.com.au/99686-privatising-visa-processing-the-alarm-bells-are-ringing/
via Mate Versus Mate: Inside ScoMo’s billion-dollar visa privatisation – Michael West
Australia’s Shame Our LNP Government ignores the Knowledge Data and Science and simply change the narrative. It did the same with Asylum Seekers and has redefined thos arriving by boat as”illegals” It has shamed this country as much as the White Australia Policy once did. Removing “climate change Crisis” from the Pacificislands draft declaration along with coal doesn’t change the data or facts but shows Australia is in the business of ideologically politicizing the document to conveniently denying the science and disregarding the lives of the people of the pacific. This government since 2013 has been increasingly distancing itself from our region even NZ and becoming a state of America. The LNP has significantly opened the door to China with their unconcerned approach on the Pacific. (ODT)
“Tuvalu’s prime minister, Enele Sopoaga, told Guardian Australia at a dawn fishing trip on Thursday in the lead-up to the leaders’ retreat that it looked as though Pacific leaders would not be successful in getting the language of “climate change crisis” in the communique, with the draft most likely to describe the current situation as a “climate change reality”.
Australia has succeeded in removing all but one reference to coal on the draft communique of the Pacific Islands Forum, and is expected to be able to get that removed on Thursday as Pacific leaders including Scott Morrison meet to debate the text.
Sources familiar with the negotiations on the communique, which is used for regional policy making, told Guardian Australia that Australia has been working hard during negotiations to soften the language on climate change and has succeeded in many mentions.
Whilst the government repeats slogans like “in a canter” and the Murdoch press continues its misinformation campaign, the rest of the world regards us as pusillanimous liars and cheats, more interested in keeping our advantage than in helping with the heavy lifting.
Much to my shame, they are right.
via Pusillanimous liars and cheats – » The Australian Independent Media Network
People with psychosis don’t realize that they’re in a psychological crisis. America has similarly lost touch with reality. Much of the country doesn’t even realize that there’s a problem.
The election of Donald Trump was a stark reminder of all that is going wrong in the United States. Perhaps his defeat in the 2020 election, if the majority can once again make its voice heard, will be the first step in acknowledging the problem and beginning a much-delayed recovery.
Now, Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of today’s Republican Party and the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and the president of the United States.
Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer, and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a sociopathic narcissist president.
The national debate over gun violence prevention is a divisive issue with many legitimate policy arguments. But the notion that Jews could have saved themselves from the Nazi onslaught but for gun regulations in Nazi Germany is not one of them. This argument is historically inaccurate and deeply offensive, especially to Holocaust survivors and their families. We have long asserted that it is absolutely wrong to bring the Holocaust into this debate where it simply does not belong.
via On Sinclair, Sebastian Gorka compared gun regulation to the Holocaust | Media Matters for America
fact remains: the tariffs are paid by American companies, who pass on some or all of the cost to their consumers.
US-China Trade war: Donald Trump may have saved Christmas but he lost a lot of face
Where the Americans have Military bases and the Chinese don’t (ODT)
Waldhauser seem to have the false perception that American foreign policy is loved and welcomed by Africans, but it’s really the Chinese who are winning there at the moment.”
via U.S. Worries About Russian and Chinese Influence in Africa
The LNP has done nothing for infrastructure since it won power in 2013. It held back funds from Victoris despite the Labor election win. Now the Victorian Liberals are politicizing the work that is in progress. LNP lack of management skills are revealing themselves daily. The reality they are looking extremely bad and increasingly worse for the coming 3 years. Australia why did you simply listen to private media scooping up $80 mill in election advertising? Australis was the 2nd best world economy in 2013 and the the LNP took over. (ODT)
The Morrison government will launch a powerful inquiry into Australia’s migration program, opening the door to further cuts in immigrant numbers and moves to push more migrants into the regions to take pressure off congested areas in Sydney and Melbourne.
The Abbott promise now the result. The LNP proves it’s management skills yet again Politisisation of everything and inability to deliver anything. Any wonder their drive for National Security and the death of the ABC has been accelerated.(ODT)
Some National Broadband Network customers will pay more for their internet or receive a lower-quality service as a result of the “multi-technology” model being used in the rollout, the government’s independent infrastructure adviser has warned.
The major Infrastructure Australia audit of the nation’s future transport, energy, water and telecommunications needs highlighted poor quality broadband connections, increased costs, and an “inherent tension” between NBN Co’s obligations to customers and taxpayers.
via NBN customers face higher prices or poorer internet connection, audit warns
Switch off the electronic images. Ignore the media burlesque. The endless political shows, which turn presidential campaigns into mind-numbing, two-year-long marathons, are entertainment. Do not trust anyone in power. We will save ourselves by building mass movements to overthrow corporate power. I am not certain we will succeed. But I am certain that if we fail, we are doomed.
The administration’s rollbacks, which sparked a torrent of public opposition, come just months after a dire United Nations report warned that human activity has pushed a million plant and animal species to the brink of extinction.
Such fear-mongering always omits a few relevant details. China has only one military base outside its own territory. The United States has more than 800. China has 290 nuclear warheads, the United States has 6,185. China has pledged no first use of nuclear weapons; the United States has not. China’s military buildup is concentrated near its own borders; America’s is worldwide.
China is far weaker than the United States militarily, and that’s not likely to change for decades. However, China does pose a threat to those in Washington’s ruling elite who seek to impose their economic and military might on the world.
via Could Trump’s Paranoia on China Bankrupt Us? His Staged Trade War is Failing
A growing movement of American Jews is mobilizing against U.S. immigration policy across the country. ‘We’re fighting for the soul of our country, for our very humanity.’
This time, Never Again Action were also joined by establishment American Jewish groups such as the Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center and the liberal, pro-Israel lobby J Street. Participants included not only experienced left-wing Jewish activists but also mainstream Jewish community leaders and politicians — a sign that the segment of the American Jewish community that feels compelled to protest the U.S. immigration regime is continuing to widen. The protesters also appeared to span divides of denomination — Reform, Conservative, Orthodox — as well as generation.
The undeniable emotional power of the Never Again Action protests – the resonances between the darkest moments of Jewish history and the darkness of the present moment – appear to be driving the movement’s growing appeal. What is already one of the most significant American Jewish protest movements in over a decade could very much become a longer and more intense struggle by American Jews against the U.S. government’s immigration policies.
via Thousands of Jews protest ICE raids across U.S., 44 arrested in NYC | +972 Magazine
P.S. On Sunday night, the ABC ran David Attenborough’s “Climate Change; The Facts”. I understand, that there has been some backlash because they didn’t balance this by presenting non-facts. Malcolm Roberts is said to be ropable and is planning to write to the ABC management just as soons as he learns his other lettters.
via Nigel Farrage Or What’s A Conservative Anyway? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Like moths to a flame, the Liberal Party is drawn to picking fights over industrial relations. According to The Australian Financial Review’s Phillip Coorey, a group of backbenchers is champing [$] at the bit after a briefing last week from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and a rev-up at the weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference by Queensland LNP senator Amanda Stoker, who attacked unfair dismissal laws and blamed the complexity of awards for wage theft
.there are already signs of an ideologically driven agenda in the union-busting Ensuring Integrity Bill, which is being pitched as an answer to the militancy of the CFMMEU and its rogue Victorian secretary, John Setka. The Saturday Paper’s Mike Seccombe suggested recently that, given expert opinion that existing laws could provide a path to deregistration of the CFMMEU, Setka is “not the reason for the proposed legislation, but the excuse”.
The announcement by Suncorp that it will no longer insure new thermal coal projects, along with a similar announcement by QBE Insurance a few months earlier, brings Australia into line with Europe where most major insurers have broken with coal.
US firms have been a little slower to move, but Chubb announced a divestment policy in July, and Liberty has confirmed it will not insure Australia’s Adani project.
Other big firms such as America’s AIG are coming under increasing pressure.
Even more than divestment of coal shares by banks and managed funds, the withdrawal of insurance has the potential to make coal mining and coal-fired power generation businesses unsustainable.
via Adani beware: coal is on the road to becoming completely uninsurable
Your NEUTERED your a PUBLIC SERVANT you can’t join a UNION? (ODT)
Having a public service where employees are denied a platform for expressing political opinions makes for a poorer public service and distinctly poorer policy. To regard public servants as apolitical is tantamount to seeing them as amoral, executing the policies of the day with blind obedience. Precedents of history demonstrate how dangerous that path can be.
via Freedom of speech: The powerful chill of the Banerji High Court decision
Basically renewables challenge the centralised control of the nations energy and put it in the hands of every household. Solar, batteries and EV take consumers off the grid. (ODT)
The answer is simple. As Taylor revealed in an interview on ABC’s AM program, he simply doesn’t accept that renewables can power the electricity grid. A view that is loudly shared by many of his Coalition colleagues, the Murdoch media and of course the coal industry.
And as we have noted before, the same Coalition MPs that have been pushing for nuclear are the very same Coalition MPs pushing for new coal generation; and the very same Coalition MPs who reject the science of climate change, or make a mockery of the urgings of young people that they should take it seriously.
Christians fighting Christians American ICE raids don’t charge the Cororations for employing undocumented Labor. Trump is releasing Americans from Private Prisons to imprison Mexicans and leaving their children orphoned (ODT)
Asylum-seekers aren’t only fleeing danger, traveling sometimes thousands of miles, and struggling against an administration determined to restrict their access to protection. They are also struggling against front-line agents rewriting their stories.
One asylum-seeker interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that the CBP agent who interviewed her never asked her about fearing return. “He just looked me up and down and said, ‘You’re here to work, I’m writing that you’re here to work. I don’t want to hear anything about you saying you’re afraid.’” In any context, the rewriting of another person’s story is a violation. For asylum-seekers, their story may be their only key to survival.
Wait! Before you go on about your day, ask yourself: How likely is it that the story you just read would have been produced by a different news outlet if The Intercept hadn’t done it?
Key points:
Mr O’Rourke accused Mr Trump of trying to shift the public’s focus away from recent mass shootings
The FBI and the Department of Justice’s inspector general have opened investigations into Mr Epstein’s death
Mr Trump has a history of promoting conspiracy theories about political rivalsAfter Saturday’s death of Mr Epstein, a millionaire charged with sex trafficking who once counted Mr Trump and former president Bill Clinton as friends, Mr Trump retweeted a claim from a conservative comedian that Mr Clinton was involved in the death.
Mr Trump retweeted Terrence K Williams, who said Mr Epstein “had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead”.
Doug Collins, a Republican lawmaker, has proposed a bill that conflates opposition to Israel’s racist policies with anti-Semitism. Stefani Reynolds SIPA
The misleadingly-named Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2019 has been introduced to the US House of Representatives shortly before its summer recess.
The so-called Anti-Semitism Awareness Act is a dangerous attempt by Congress to retroactively provide Marcus with the legal authority to justify his use of this controversial definition to further muzzle campus criticism of Israel.
via Republican lawmaker seeks to muzzle students critical of Israel | The Electronic Intifada
Conspiracy theorists are angry that recommendations for Fox News segments are appearing on their YouTube videos.
QAnon and other conspiracy theories are a “domestic terrorism threat” that may drive people to violence and crime, the FBI declared in a recently released intelligence bulletin.
NOW YouTube has made FOX/ Trump News the Primary Conspiracy Channel
Previously, users who watched videos about hoaxes such as QAnon or Pizzagate could easily be pulled into an echo chamber of disinformation by YouTube’s autoplay function, which queued up one conspiracy theory video after another. But now, those who seek out such content will often find a lineup of Fox News videos in lieu of more conspiracies.
via YouTube’s Conspiracy Theory Crackdown Has One Big Winner: Fox News | HuffPost Australia
It appears that the white nationalist shooter may have killed a female relative at home before heading to the mosque. Such nice people.
The massacre by a white nationalist terrorist of mostly Mexican-Americans at El Paso was also accompanied by an online rant citing the New Zealand monster.
Donald Trump’s hateful rhetoric and tweets are part of this stochastic white terrorism phenomenon.
All terrorist acts in the United States in 2018 were carried out by white nationalists. All.
So what would happen if we took Trump’s bigoted and unfair statements on Muslims and just plugged in white nationalist instead? Those of us who are privileged in various ways might get a sense of how invidious and discriminatory Trump really has been.
What would happen if we ask why so few of the 53 GOP senators have come out to denounce white nationalism? What about prominent white nationalist media figures? Did Tucker Carlson denounce the El Paso massacre? Why is he denying that white nationalism even exists? Why don’t we hear from the white leaders when a white nationalist stages an attack such as Oslo?
Nor do we need to kid ourselves that CPAC speakers are interested in debate. All we’ve seen and heard is personal abuse and an eagerness to win converts to conspiracies.
There is a world of difference between freedom of speech and being granted a licence to spread hate-speech. And the last thing our politicians need is to court the far-right or let themselves be used to legitimise your fear-mongering and your lies.
Forget the idea of a “multi-year, forever, project”. Once is way more than enough.
Coalition response
According to Treasurer Josh Frydenberg,
“What we’re doing to ensure the economy continues to grow is providing the biggest tax cuts that this country has seen in more than two decades and we did that against the will of the Labor Party …”
That is precisely the wrong response. Tax cuts going mostly to the rich simply send income and wealth straight offshore. Hence the current retail crisis, slower growth and, now, the currency crumbling.
Comparisons with the recent pastIt should not be like this. When the global financial crisis whacked the world in late 2008, Australia’s economic management was seen as innovative, courageous and successful. Evidence that Australia’s economy was the world’s best-performed from 2009 to 2013 included the dollar’s strong appreciation.
Over the full term of the Rudd/Gillard Labor Governments, the dollar rose 4.5% against the Hong Kong dollar, 4.8% against the US dollar, 10.3% against the Canadian dollar, 19.4% against the Euro, 24.2% against the Korean won, and a thumping 38.1% against the British pound.There is no sign the Morrison Government is heeding this message from the watching world. It seems determined to continue governing primarily for foreign corporations. So Australians should plan to take their next holiday at the nearest caravan park.
A Tale of two States
Paid for your crime and did your time yet? Not if you’re Indigenous, Working Class or belong to any other minority but Middle Class, White and Christian. Andrew Bolt with a history of guilty charges against him will tell the world that you can’t be trusted if you speak out on Q&A or protest on any other platform reinforcing this cultural bias in our justice system yet maintains he’s an exceptional victim.(ODT)
Victoria is the only state or territory in Australia that does not have a spent convictions scheme, which allows for minor convictions to be wiped from someone’s record after a period of time with no offending.
Old convictions holding back Aboriginal Victorians, inquiry told
That CPAC love fest is here in Australia
Why has Carlson gone on holiday? To avoid the flack his bullshit caused and the number of advertisers lost.Even Andrew Bolt has dumbed down a little claiming he’s the victim. You shouldn’t be surprised to see them or simalr Murdoch men at CPAC Sydney (ODT)
The Fox New host’s nightly diatribes are making the US an ever more terrifying place for immigrants and people of color
Carlson’s rhetoric about non-white people has long been virtually identical to that of white supremacist terrorists in New Zealand and El Paso. Here, for example, is a passage from Carlson’s most recent book, on the topic of why “diversity” makes us weaker:
When confronted or pressed for details, [proponents of diversity] retreat into a familiar platitude, which they repeat like a zen koan: diversity is our strength. But is diversity our strength? The less we have in common, the stronger we are? Is that true of families? Is it true in neighborhoods or businesses? Of course not. Then why is it true of America? Nobody knows. Nobody’s even allowed to ask the question.
And here is an excerpt from the manifesto issued by the man who killed 51 people in a New Zealand mosque:
Why is diversity said to be our greatest strength? Does anyone even ask why? It is spoken like a mantra and repeated ad infinitum … But no one ever seems to give a reason why. What gives a nation strength? And how does diversity increase that strength? What part of diversity causes this increase in strength? No one can give an answer.
Guess who said it: Tucker Carlson or a far-right shooter | Nathan Robinson | Opinion | The Guardian
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