Exclusive: Oil giant also shared intelligence on environmentalists with British Museum and Warwick University in ‘shocking’ web of surveillance
Source: Oil Giant BP paid ex-MI6 spy firm to snoop on green campaigners
Category: Informed Comment
Oi. Michael Taylor, I know I haven’t written for a couple of years Mr Taylor and I wouldn’t have except many of your writers have gone to far and I mean the crome domed one who writes all that filth about a government that we should be all thanking God for. He is so popular that his name escapes me. Thank the Lord. John Lord thats hin. I mean there is just no limit to how far he will stoop, no gutter to low to slide into, no sewer to murky for him to loosen himself in
Source: A letter to the editor from Morrie Moneyweather – » The Australian Independent Media Network
For the Coalition LNP it’s a Sunday too Far Away prospect
Fully switching to electric vehicles within the next decade and a half could save Australians up to half a trillion dollars, new research suggests.
Source: New study tallies up the billion-dollar benefits of electrical vehicles
All Liberals are doing their part in ensuring Australia’s appetite for boom or bust risk but with none on their part.
Dominic Perrottet’s controversial hedge fund is lending to Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and Cayman Islands. What is the NSW Premier doing funding dictators with NSW taxpayers’ money? Michael West reports on the New Generations Fund.
Source: Perrottet invests in Putin not Parramatta – Michael West Media
That old saying “we get what we pay for ” certainly doesn’t apply to the caliber of our politicians any longer. We can put that old cherry to bed.
That was best distilled when Barnaby Joyce complained that the Nats couldn’t resolve the issue in their party room meeting this week because they didn’t have enough time. As though the government hasn’t had years to think about this. It was like watching someone start cramming the night before an exam, having not cracked open the textbook all year.
Source: COP26 Glasgow summit: On net zero, the Nats can’t go quietly
Like most things the Morrison Government implements, recent sweeping changes to Medicare rebates affect our most vulnerable citizens and have been rushed through under cover of night, with scarcely a murmur from the Government or its media cheer squad.
Source: Medicare cuts prove the Coalition is bad for our health
As Harry Truman once said, “Socialism is a scare word they’ve hurled at every advance the people have made. Socialism is what they called public power, social security, deposit insurance, and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for anything that helps all people.”
My thought for the day Power is a malevolent possession when you are prepared to forgo your principles and your country’s wellbeing for the sake of it. ( John Lord )
What role did Dutton have in “shafting” the French?
With some of the most prominent think tanks on defence and foreign policy receiving funds from companies that rely on war and threats of war, Australians are being fed vested interests masquerading as “independent” opinion, writes Dr Sue Wareham.
Congress is back this week, so you can expect more of the “we can’t afford it” bullsh*t from every Republican member of Congress and two Democratic senators (Manchin and Sinema) — aimed against Biden’s and the Democrats’ social investment bill. Behind the scenes, big corporations and Wall Street are paying huge bucks to feed this hokum to the public. And the mainstream media is doing their bidding. So it should be no surprise that Americans are utterly confused and many are misinformed about what’s at stake in this important legislation, which will come to a head in the next few weeks.
Source: Week Ahead: The “We Can’t Afford It” Bullshit | The Smirking Chimp
Weekend Wrap 17 Oct 21: COVID updates as Vic and NSW head out of lockdown, Whats Josh Frydenberg‘s problem? And Morrison is finally off to Glasgow
We voted for them and this is what they delivered NOTHING
In the last eight years of Coalition rule, there have been more than 20 different climate and energy policies, which have been announced with fanfare before fizzing into the background, or just being trashed altogether. Here’s a short rundown of what the last eight years has looked like.
“It’s not just a health crisis, it’s an economic crisis.” Dominic Francis Perrottet, a gangly colt by Gordon Gecko out of Margaret Thatcher in party apparatchik’s blue tie saddle-cloth, a heavily tipped favourite, but up in class, easily beats his lunchtime jogging pal, Planning Minister, pious Anglican and fellow anti-abortionist, Rob Stokes to the winning post in NSW’s forty-sixth premier stakes. It’s a rigged ballot, after much horse-trading, yet a novelty in a party which hasn’t voted for a leader since 2002. NSW prefers, like La Cosa Nostra, to keep its succession planning simple. Gladys is a no-show. Is she in witness protection already? Scuttlebutt from “senior Liberals” is that she’ll be parachuted into a safe federal Liberal seat. If ICAC doesn’t send her to jail.
“Privatize everything. Abolish help for the weak, the solitary, the sick and the unemployed. Abolish all aid for everyone except the banks. Don’t look after the poor; let the elderly die. Reduce the wages of the poor but reduce the taxes of the rich. Make everyone work until they are ninety. Only teach mathematics to traders, reading to big property-owners and history to on-duty ideologues.” And the execution of these commands will in fact ruin the life of millions of people,” writes Alain Badiou in Capitalism Today, (2012, 13).
“It could be a page from Dom’s secret diary. It certainly fits federal Coalition “policy”.
Source: Hey, hey, it’s Perrottet. Can Morrison survive? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
It was not for everybody, but the shock advertising tactics of the Australian comedian Dan Ilic made an appropriate point. Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a famed coal hugger, has vacillated about whether to even go to the climate conference in Glasgow. Having himself turned the country’s prime ministerial office into an extended advertising agency, Ilic was speaking his language. The language was promoted through sponsored imagery in Times Square, New York, with advertising space purchased by a crowdfunding campaign of considerable success. Billboards featured the prime minister as a “Coal-o-phile Dundee,” mercilessly mocked Australia’s climate policies and responses to the murderously scorching bushfires of 2020.
Source: Cheap Grace and Climate Change: Australia and COP26 – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Don’t sleepwalk into a fascist Australia
We need to be vigilant, active and politically switched-on if we are to avoid scenes like those in Rome recently where fascist mobs ransacked a union headquarters and terrorised working-class and diverse communities. We had a taste in Melbourne with the attack on the CMFEU headquarters and violent rampages around the city. Now the mobs are planning another street rally in late November. We have to fight back, or they will overrun our city.
Source: Pro-vax, pro-union, anti-fascist: Three things to be proud of
My thought for the day Lying in the media is wrong at any time however when they do it by deliberate omission it is even more so. Murdoch’s papers seem to do it with impunity. ( John Lord )
Many people fear carbon credits will be used to avoid reductions in the production of fossil fuels. And when you hear Energy Minister Angus Taylor assuring people in the coal, oil and gas industries that they “have a great future”, it makes you think such fears are warranted.
Source: COP26 Glasgow summit: How Australia’s ‘net’ in net zero emissions offers a huge opportunity to cheat
something else you can do: If you happen to be a constituent of one of these four Democrats, don’t vote for them when they’re up for reelection. Make sure they’re primaried, and then vote in the Democratic primaries for true public servants — who care more about advancing the public good than protecting private profits.
Source: Why the Hell Are Democrats Keeping Your Drug Prices High? | The Smirking Chimp
The financial records of the gun club at the centre of an ICAC investigation reveal “significant costs” involved with obtaining its $5.5 million government grant. Anthony Klan reports.
Source: EXCLUSIVE: Gun club financial report shows mystery costs to obtain grant
But here’s the crucial takeaway, the last phrase of which is omitted by CNBC: “What I would love to do is communicate as much as possible the jeopardy, the moment you see how vuln– the vulnerability of everything. It so small. This air which is keeping us alive is thinner than your skin. It’s a sliver. It’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe. It’s negligible, this air. Mars doesn’t have it. It’s so thin. And to dirty it…” “The jeopardy . . . And to dirty it!” To fill this precious atmosphere, unique in our solar system, with clouds of burned coal dust and with greenhouse gases, Shatner says, is . . . what? Despicable. Unthinkable.
From the debacle in Afghanistan to the ongoing devastation of COVID-19 to the unhinged cruelty of the Republican Party, Noam Chomsky notes, there is plenty of room for despair in America right now. But he insists that, despite it all, we have ample reason for hope.
Source: Noam Chomsky: The GOP Is a “Group of Radical Sadists”
Australia faces an intensifying risk of global investors divesting bonds or equity if we don’t join other nations in making a net zero emissions commitment for 2050, the Reserve Bank has warned.
All indications are that Trump is going to cast the midterm elections as a referendum on himself rather than on Biden. That’s hardly surprising, given Trump’s sociopathic ego. He cast his entire presidency as a referendum on himself.
Source: How Trump Might Save the Democrats | The Smirking Chimp
My thought for the day
My thought for the day If we are to save our democracy, we might begin by asking that at the very least our politicians should tell the truth. That would be a good beginning. ( John Lord )
I have categorised the list as follows.
Source: Your top issues going into the next election – » The Australian Independent Media Network
If concessions are made to develop ‘green energy’ industries using our natural advantages of plenty of open space and sunshine/wind rather than subsidising the coal industry, the entire planet will be better off. If the government has to spend a little extra initially to resettle refugees rather than keeping them in prison, or supporting the homeless, the unemployed or those with a disability get a helping hand when they need it, we should be proud that we are doing something that is beneficial to the majority of our community. Most of those that get support when they need it end up repaying the contribution in spades. As Hewson says, Nobody expects Morrison to hold a hose or draw up a syringe, just to lead on important issues, the resolution of which would clearly be to the greater good of our nation. ( John Hewson once leader of the LNP )
Source: Looking after your mates – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Andrews’ Government leads the world No other nation or state copped more than 700 COVID deaths in 2020 and then got that tally down to below 70 in 2021. Andrews’ Government alone has managed that. These eight states have comparable populations, demographics and health care systems — all highly advanced. All of them had surges in COVID deaths in mid-2020. Lives lost in the four months from June to September 2020 were: Ireland: 161 Switzerland: 112 Bulgaria: 685 British Columbia (Canada): 70 Massachusetts (USA): 2,610 Indiana (USA): 1,720 Tennessee (USA): 1,948 Victoria (Australia): 778 Scott Morrison to blame for latest Victorian lockdown Scott Morrison to blame for latest Victorian lockdown Victoria is entering yet another lockdown, but Victorians shouldn’t be blaming contact tracers or the State Government. All of them implemented recovery programs, with quite different outcomes. Their COVID deaths over the twelve months from October 2020 to September 2021 were: Ireland: 3,448 Switzerland: 9,199 Bulgaria: 20,057 British Columbia: 1,719 Massachusetts: 9,171 Indiana: 11,488 Tennessee: 12,737 Victoria: 63
Source: Mainstream media ignore mental health data to denigrate Dan Andrews
The common thread is the growing influence of these three power centers over our lives, even as they’re becoming less accountable to us. As such, they present a fundamental challenge to democracy.
Source: The Three Biggest and Least-Accountable Power Centers in America | The Smirking Chimp
At a rally in Iowa on Saturday, Trump proclaimed that he was trying to “keep America great,” but that America isn’t great right now. “Well, he really is kind of babbling and incoherent, but that’s what people show up for,” he explained. “So, when he says make America great again, again, you have to ask, well, if he did it the first time, it really wasn’t a very good job. Eight months later, it needs to be redone. It didn’t quite stick, this greatness that he gave us.” “It was over nine months. The shelf life on the greatness wasn’t very long, I guess,” said Acosta.
But the number of job openings is at a record high, and many employers report having a hard time filling positions. Why? Some workers have retired early or found other ways to make ends meet. Others simply don’t want to return to backbreaking, low-wage shit jobs. Note that the share of people who were working or looking for work last month (the labor force participation rate) dipped to 61.6 percent, down slightly from the prior month. Participation for people in their prime working years, defined as 25 to 54 years old, also ticked down. In other words, many American workers are now engaged in the equivalent of a general strike.
As a result, employers are raising wages and offering other inducements to lure applicants. Average earnings rose 19 cents an hour in September and are up more than $1 an hour over the last year, after a series of strong monthly gains. Average hourly earnings have jumped by 4.6 percent over the last year. Corporate America wants to frame all this as a “labor shortage.” But that’s not what’s really going on. In reality, there’s a living wage shortage, a hazard pay shortage, a childcare shortage, a paid sick leave shortage, and a health care shortage – and American workers are demanding an end to all these shortages. Or they won’t return to work.
Where are the US billionaires, the Wall Streeters, the Big Four tax firms Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC? Michael West explores the mystery of the Pandora Papers in this first of a two-part series.
Source: Pandora Papers: is the world’s biggest leak the world’s biggest cover-up? – Michael West Media
While Morrison ducks and weaves about Climate Change and renewables for a minority of corporate interests. Anthony Albanese speaks for over 80% of Australians , Businesses and Corporations included.
Elvis Presley once noted that the truth is like the sun. “You can shut it out for a time,’’ Elvis said. “But it ain’t goin’ away.’’ Just as the sun isn’t going away, neither is the potential for cheap solar energy to underpin a wave of jobs growth and prosperity across Australia in coming years. Our nation is blessed with abundant solar and wind resources. If we tap them efficiently, we can use cheap renewable energy to cut power bills and drive job growth across the economy. We can also develop new renewable energy industries in areas like battery production and solar technology. But this won’t happen under the Morrison-Joyce Government. For nearly a decade in power, the Coalition has ridiculed solar and wind power.
Source: Anthony Albanese on renewables: Ask Elvis, the truth always triumphs
The ambitious social and climate legislation now working its way through Congress will be enacted in some form. But its agonizing journey to date reveals the rotten job done by the media that’s supposed to inform Americans about our democracy. Last week, the New York Times described the delay in House Democrats’ approval of the infrastructure bill as caused by a “liberal revolt.” On Saturday it reported that Biden had “thrown in” with his party’s “left” rather than its “center,” thereby “leaving his agenda in doubt.”
Source: The Media’s Rotten Reporting on Biden’s Social and Climate Bill | The Smirking Chimp
My thought for the day When a political party deliberately withholds information that the voter needs to make an informed, balanced and reasoned assessment of how it is being governed. It is lying by omission. It is also tantamount to the manipulation of our democracy. ( John Lord )
PINI-ng the question, rightly and directly, on our MSM’s reporting. Along with amplifying Morrison’s, and a host of other opportunistic conservative’s, crowing florid bullshit about the seeming injustice done to the good LNP pollies of NSW by unelected vigilantes, and kangaroo courts like ICAC. Critical political theory has been unethically used against conservatives. That spells a replacement ideology that will not be tolerated by SloMo, his government, or the supporting Mainstream media. Unless of course it’s flipped and applied, without considered weight of evidence, just thunderous noise against Dan Andrews. Yes the idiot dirt brigade is out in force, and in our face.
The resignations of the Premier and Deputy Premier of New South Wales, blaming ICAC and Friendlyjordies, respectively, signal the worst time of mourning for establishment media writes managing editor Michelle Pini. WHY DID both Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Deputy Premier John Barilaro choose to resign within days of each other? Did the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption (NSW ICAC) bring about the sudden resignations of either or both of these politicians? If so, does the NSW ICAC require further scrutiny, because it makes MP’s”terrified to do their job”, as the Deputy Prime Minister suggested?
Call me old-fashioned, but I think people in public life need to be accountable for whatever damage they’re doing to public life. So from time to time I’m going to call out the person I consider to be the worst influential person in American public life.
Source: This Week’s Worst Influential American | The Smirking Chimp
A five-day course of molnupiravir, the new medicine being hailed as a “huge advance” in the treatment of Covid-19, costs $17.74 to produce, according to a report issued last week by drug pricing experts at the Harvard School of Public Health and King’s College Hospital in London. Merck is charging the U.S. government $712 for the same amount of medicine, or 40 times the price.
Source: Merck Sells Covid Pill for 40 Times What It Costs to Make
For all such righteous splutters, Dershowitz and Trump have a point in pointing out a symptom of the US body politic that has become cripplingly apparent: business and the interests of capitalism have come to control speech, its circulation, its distribution. For decades, they had already come to guide politicians and political parties, exercising influence through campaign donations. Why run for elected office when you can buy it? In 2010, the US Supreme Court decision of Citizens United v Federal Election Commission found that limits upon “independent political spending” from corporations and private interest groups violated the First Amendment. Those with deep purses could only deem this the natural order of things: if you have cash, spend it to influence opinion in the name of free speech. Put rather simply, such speech was a shield big capitalism could well employ if it needed to. (Rep. Lieu, take note.)
Source: Trump, Twitter and the Digital Town Hall – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Are all these revelations actually helpful? There’s certainly a danger of media saturation, in which the public knows about these kinds of activities and may be less interested by now. But we need to emphasise that the consequences are not going away: to run a modern state, it’s very expensive. To pay for a good education system, a good health system, properly functioning infrastructure and so forth, somebody has to pay for it. If the rich are avoiding paying their share, somebody else is picking up the tab, and that’s either the poor or the squeezed middle classes. So if the public are tired of all this scandal, it doesn’t change the fact that they are suffering because of it.
In many ways, Biden’s plan will improve the lives of the bottom 90 percent of Americans – people who don’t have much wealth and own almost no shares of stock. This is something the corporate backers of Republicans and conservative Democrats don’t seem to care about, but they should. What do you think?
Source: The Week Ahead: Everything Hangs in the Balance | The Smirking Chimp
Andrew Forrest steps up and calls Morrison and Taylor’s LNP “dithering, and gutless twats with no plan or science to guide where they are going.
Mr Forrest praised countries that are “firmly committed” to green hydrogen including Chile, France, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain, but said “most countries, including my own, are dithering – unsure whether to back green hydrogen or blindly commit to yet more fossil fuels, this time disguised as blue hydrogen”.
Historians suggest that such reports simply confirmed prejudices based on doctrines of evolutionary and intellectual difference. These reports were to lend support to the European scientific discourse of the Great Chain of Being, which arranged all living things in a hierarchy, beginning with the simplest creatures, ascending through the primates and to humans. It was also practice to distinguish between different types of humans. Through the hierarchical chain the various human types could be ranked in order of intellect and active powers. The Europeans – being ‘intelligent and God-fearing’ – were invariably placed on the top, whilst the Aborigines – as perceived savages – occupied the lowest scale of humanity, slightly above the position held by the ape. Such ideas were carried to and widely circulated in the Australian colonies and helped shape attitudes towards the Aborigines. So dominant was the concept that it helped … “develop pre-conceived attitudes towards – and arguably the fate of – the Aborigines even before the colonisation” (Henry Reynolds, 1987:108). Reynolds argues that the image of the Aborigine simply confirmed prejudices based on doctrines of evolutionary difference and intellectual inferiority. These prejudices, he endeavours to suggest, were based on a construction of Aborigines where the Europeans were more credited with knowing more about the Aborigines than the Aborigines knew about themselves.
Source: Nationhood and the ‘Pure’ Race (part 2) – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The sudden commitment of the Australian Government to build nuclear-powered submarines is a tale of some skulduggery and a game of high risk/high return. The so-called AUKUS deal has the pudgy dabs of one Boris Johnson, British Prime Minister, on it if you choose to think of business first — a matter of who gets the next submarine contract.
Well, I could be wrong, but I suspect that any day now there’ll be media articles about what a mistake it would be to have a Federal Integrity Commission when ICAC is responsible for such a great Premier as Gladys having to stand down when she’s done nothing more than have loyalty to her partner and if we’d had a similar one at federal level then who knows how many of the great performers like Stuart Robert or Richard Colbeck would have lost their portfolios over some minor issue like forgetting where they left it.
Freedom of Information has been met with a full suite of disabling tactics – defunding, excuses about national security and commercial in confidence, too time-consuming for staff, increasing delays in responding, appealing decisions, stacking the AAT, court action, redactions, and distractions. Scott doesn’t hold the hose and Gladys has always acted with integrity – and if anything went wrong it wasn’t their fault.
Source: Freedom from responsibility – » The Australian Independent Media Network
So why are you blowing it up, Joe? Is it because you own stock valued at between $1 million and $5 million in Enersystems, a coal brokerage firm you founded in 1988? Last year you made half a million dollars in Enersystems dividends (roughly three times the $174,000 salary you made last year as a senator). Is it because you collect more campaign money from coal, oil, and gas companies than any other senator? (In June, Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy told the Greenpeace investigative unit that Manchin participated in weekly meetings with company operatives.) Say it ain’t so, Joe — but how do you spell “corruption?”
olddogthoughts 
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