Coalition would be swept from office on the back of a devastating swing, opinion poll predicts.
When I decided to do a bit of research about the person…
WASHINGTON, D.C. – (CT&P) – Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards announced a price increase this morning on all fetal tissue being sold by their 700 retail health and dissection centers located in the United States.
Richards emphasized that the increase only affects centers within the borders of the U.S., and that Planned Parenthood “black sites” in foreign countries can continue to set their own prices.
According to Richards, the across the board price increase was made in response to the increased demand for organs, umbilical chords, stem cells, amniotic fluid, and a variety of other fetal tissues caused by an amateurish video made by a deranged young man named David Daleiden.
“Demand has skyrocketed since Daleiden’s video was made public, so a price increase was the natural thing to do,” said Richards.
The video, which was pounced upon by Fox News, conservative radio hosts, Christian websites, and other questionable news outlets provides unequivocal proof that Planned Parenthood is an organization made up of Devil worshipers who sell unborn babies and their parts to the highest bidders.
“We could not have hoped to get this kind of publicity; not in our wildest, fever induced, Satanic dreams,” said Richards.
According to Richards the fetal tissue and body parts that Planned Parenthood sells go to a wide variety of buyers including medical schools, drug companies, research universities, secretive private laboratories in South America, 4-H clubs, secondary schools for use in high school science projects, witch doctors, terrorists, and wealthy cannibals tired of eating adult humans.
“We have a very broad customer base that we strive to keep happy,” said Richards. “Thanks to Daleiden’s video and all the publicity it’s caused we can cut back on advertising and entertainment expenses and expand our abortion factories so we can do away with even more potential humans. It’s been a real godsend.”
Although Daleiden’s original purpose in making the video has apparently backfired, he is reported to be basking in his new-found fame.
“David is really enjoying all this,” said Daron Dimbulb, a close friend of Daleiden’s who is also obsessed with controlling women’s reproductive organs. “He never thought he would be the object of so much praise from our country’s apparently unlimited population of morons. He really looks forward to being salivated on by Sean Hannity when he goes on his show next week.”
Richards told CNN that although no more price increases are currently being considered, if demand continues to increase all bets are off.
“With the help of Our Lord and Savior Mephistopheles, we’ll be able to convince more poor young girls to get knocked up so we can rip more children out of uteruses all across the country,” said Richards. “Otherwise we’re just going to have to jack prices again. It’s a no lose situation for us.”
Bronwyn Bishop: other MPs in the parliamentary delegation to Europe took far less out of the public purse than the Speaker.
The Speaker of the House, Bronwyn Bishop, racked up more than $88,000 on a taxpayer-funded trip to Europe during a failed bid to become the president of the Inter-parliamentary Union (IPU), expenses documents have revealed.
Bishop travelled to Italy, Austria, Belgium and Switzerland as part of two-week long parliamentary delegation to the IPU, ahead of the leadership ballot in Geneva in October last year.
Expenses forms show that in that time she and the two staff members she travelled with spent $24,400 on meals and accommodation, nearly $42,500 on airfares and almost $14,000 on ground transport.
A further $6,300 was spent on travel advances and other related travel expenses, taking the grand total to $88,084.29.
A spokesman for the Speaker defended Bishop’s decision to take two staff members to Europe, saying a presiding officer – such as the Speaker – is entitled to travel with two staff if she or he is not accompanied by a spouse.
He added that it was the first time that Bishop had travelled with more than one staff member.
The spokesman denied Bishop was seeking out a new job, saying the position of president of the IPU must be filled by a serving MP.
Bishop threw her hat in the ring for the presidency in July 2014, but lost out to Bangladeshi candidate Saber Hossain Chowdhury, who was elected for a three-year term on October 16.
It is understood that Bishop’s hardline position that women who wear a facial covering such as a burqa or niqab should be separated from other visitors to Parliament House contributed to her loss. The ban was later overturned.
Other MPs in the parliamentary delegation to Europe took far less out of the public purse than Bishop for the trip.
Western Australian Liberal MP Nola Marino racked up just over $21,000, while her WA Labor Senate counterpart Glenn Sterle spent nearly $19,000. South Australian Labor MP Tony Zappia spent more than $13,000 on the trip, while Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi – who caught up with the others in Switzerland – spent over $10,000.
Bishop’s financial disclosures also revealed the Speaker spent $5,227 of public money on a return charter flight between Melbourne and Geelong.
Labor has formally written to the Speaker seeking an explanation on why she opted to fly for the 150km round trip.
“This seems a curious decision which is not only prohibitively expensive, but also inefficient; the speaker likely clocked up more travel time by combining the 45-minute flight with road transfers to and from airports, than she would have driving for around an hour from Melbourne to the event in Geelong instead,” Labor’s spokesman on waste, Pat Conroy said. “I look forward to the Speaker’s response so these questions can be resolved.”
In a speech on 23 May 2013, Barack Obama seemed to suggest that George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror‘ was ending.
He quoted James Madison: ‘No nation [can] preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.‘ He claimed that ‘Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless “global war on terror,” but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.‘
But Western military operations worldwide continued. In 2013 the US conducted operations in Libya and Somalia and assisted the French in Mali. Since then it has intervened in Uganda and extensively in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Readers in Russia will be particularly aware of Western military interference in areas such as Ukraine and the Black Sea. The US has beefed up its weaponry around the world. It has freshly deployed hundreds of troops overseas.
In the United States, the Patriot Act has continued to allow the government to spy on its citizens. Elsewhere in the Western world, surveillance has reached new heights.
But now there is evidence that the West is starting to pursue a new, more sinister ‘boundless global war‘ against a broader enemy.
It is no longer just a war against terrorists. You don’t have to conduct or advocate violence to be targeted. You don’t even have to be a criminal. It is a war against ordinary people who are critical of the West and its neoliberal ideology. It is a war against ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalization’. Against ideas.
The new global War on Ideas is the brainchild of academics such as Alex Schmidt of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague. He believes that ‘In terms of counter-terrorism policies, preventing violent extremism is not enough; rather all extremism – Islamist and other – ought to be prevented, given the bloody track record of extremism in power in the twentieth century and beyond.’
Such thinking found a welcome reception in Britain’s ruling Conservative Party. In a menacing press release of 13 May 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron announced: ‘For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone . . . This government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach.’
His government has now announced a number of measures, first discussed at the 2014 Conservative Party Conference, aimed at targeting ‘extremists’ who are not violent and who have broken no laws.
‘Banning orders’ will make it easier for the British Home Secretary to ban groups that she considers ‘extremist’. ‘Extremism disruption orders’ will enable the police to prevent people from posting ‘extremist’ comments on the Internet – even where that behaviour breaks no laws. People ‘banned’ in this way will have to get permission before they can participate in protests or post certain material to the Internet. ‘Closure orders’ will enable the authorities to close premises used to ‘support extremism’. The broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, will vet broadcast programmes to prevent ‘extremist’ content. Employers will be able to check whether potential employees are ‘extremists’ and bar them from working with children.
Measures are already in place to ban ‘extremists’ from speaking at universities.
Schools in Britain must take steps to prevent the ‘radicalization’ of pupils and ‘protect’ pupils from ‘extremism’. This has already led to frightening levels of surveillance of children. Special software has been provided to schools to enable them to catch extremism in their pupils by alerting staff if a pupils uses a phrase used by ‘extremists’ or visits an ‘extremist’ web site on school computing equipment. Children younger than 10 are being told to fill in special counter-extremism questionnaires at school.
An Extremism Analysis Unit has been established to support these measures.
The British government’s definition of ‘extremism’, as outlined by the Home Secretary, Theresa May, is: ‘the vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.’ Such a vague definition will permit the government to silence anyone who argues for radical change or who campaigns to change the country’s political system.
It is easy to find yourself classified as an ‘extremist’ in Britain. For example, Mak Chishty, a senior officer with the Metropolitan Police, has suggested that anyone who suddenly stops shopping at Marks & Spencer (a major British store) should be considered a potential ‘extremist’ (he thinks that ‘extremists’ regard Marks & Spencer as ‘Jewish owned’). Christians have expressed fears that they could be considered ‘extremist’ if they criticize ‘gay marriage’. Atheists have voiced concern that they could be targeted if they criticize Christians or Muslims too strongly. Clearly, the fear of being targeted will have a chilling effect on debate. Even where the police do not become involved, there will be self-censorship.
Other European governments have shown signs of similar thinking, often using twentieth-century history to justify repression.
In Germany, in January 2015, Angela Merkel proclaimed ‘Hatred, racism and extremism have no place in this country.’ In the same month, the German government approved a plan to withdraw ID cards from individuals whom it considers to be ‘extremist’, replacing them with cards that state that the holder may not leave Germany. The German authorities are still pursuing their second attempt to ban the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD). Spreading nazism and xenophobia are illegal in Germany; the problem is that the NPD has not been proven to do either. In fact it has several seats in the state of Mecklenberg West Pomerania and one in the European Parliament.
In Ukraine it was the Communist Party that faced criminal prosecutions – for supporting the breakaway of Crimea from Ukraine and the independence movement in eastern Ukraine. It was eventually banned. Ukraine subsequently banned groups from openly supporting communism or nazism or displaying their symbols. Groups that the authorities claim support either can be closed down and information about their supporters can be made public. Singing the Internationale can lead to a 10-year prison sentence.
Similar repression has been taking place in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Moldova, Poland and Hungary.
In April 2015, French premier Hollande announced a €4 billion increase in defence spending over a four year period to combat the ‘threat’ from ‘extremism’. A further €250 million had earlier been announced on a variety of projects to instil ‘republican’ values in schoolchildren. A special web site has been set up to encourage French citizens to report anyone they suspect of being ‘extremist’ – possible grounds for suspicion including, among others, sudden changes in eating habits, stopping watching television, or spending a lot of time on the Internet. In May, the French parliament approved a Bill that will enable the authorities to spy on citizens to a greater extent than ever before, bugging rooms, reading emails and listening to telephone conversations.
So what’s new?
Western governments have been making it difficult for radicals of all kinds to advance politically for decades. Their two principal weapons, traditionally, have been a stranglehold on the media and electoral systems that favour pro-establishment political parties. More recently, countries have restricted freedom of speech by outlawing the expression of ‘offensive’ views or the questioning of the authorities’ versions of modern historical events. Dirty tricks by the security services are also well documented.
But now governments are openly stating that they will not allow non-violent ‘extremism’ and they are defining ‘extremism’ in vague and dangerous ways. They are using the threat of police and prisons to combat ideas. They openly threaten to target people who have broken no law with measures that restrict not only their ability to promote their political agenda but also their freedom to impart and receive information without interference from government authority. Some of these measures – allowing employers to check if applicants are ‘extremists’ in Britain and withdrawal of ID cards in Germany – will affect people’s ability to earn a living. Children are now being targeted openly for surveillance in their schools in several countries – so parents might now be afraid to discuss politics in front of their children in case their words are repeated to teachers.
In short, Western governments are now doing the sort of things that they used to criticize the Nazi and the Soviet regimes for doing.
There is something deeply hypocritical about the West’s campaign against ‘extremism’. After all, many of the actions of Western governments in recent years have hardly been ‘moderate’.
How ‘moderate’ was the decision to invade Iraq – a decision that has probably done more than anything else to encourage violent Islamism to spread throughout the world?
How ‘moderate’ was the decision to murder Libya’s Mohammar Gaddafi, ousting a stable regime that provided its citizens with excellent social benefits, replacing it with chaos and bloodshed and allowing Islamic terrorism to spread yet further?
The US government alone has, according to William Blum, attempted to assassinate more than 50 world leaders over the years.
It has attempted, sometimes successfully, to overthrow governments in at least 19 countries – probably far more. Is the West’s support for the coup in Ukraine an example of ‘moderation’?
These Western politicians are the ideological children of the men who dropped nuclear bombs on large Japanese cities – not ‘to end the Second World War’ but, as Alperovitz and others have shown, simply to show Stalin that they could do it.
Western governments are some of the most violent extremists on earth.
The ‘War on Terror’ targeted violent criminals. They posed a genuine security threat to the West and ordinary citizens and some kind of response seemed understandable, even if we might criticize the details.
The new ‘War on Ideas’, however, targets people who want to change the world, even by peaceful means.
But doesn’t the world need to be changed by peaceful, lawful, nonviolent means?
Don’t we need people who engage in ‘the vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values’ without resorting to violence? Especially when those ‘British values’ seem to include spreading murder and mayhem worldwide . . .
Some 3500 people die of hunger worldwide every day. According to UNICEF, nearly half of all deaths in children under 5 worldwide (3 million a year) are attributable to malnutrition. The World Food Programme tells us that 13.5% of people in underdeveloped countries are malnourished. Meanwhile, the Watson Institute estimated the cost of the American war in Iraq at US$ 4 trillion. There’s more than enough food for everyone – but the money to pay for it is badly distributed. The moderates who rule us have not built a very fair world. Isn’t there a place for non-violent radicals in the campaign to build a better one?
The Western media reacts with revulsion whenever someone is killed by a group such as Islamic State. Those who are killed by American bombs – and there have been far more of them – elicit no such outrage. Don’t we need non-violent radicals to expose such hypocrisy?The Western press often complains of the security threat posed by large immigrant populations in European cities. Ironically, had European governments listened to nationalist ‘radicals’ who warned about the possible consequences of large-scale immigration – instead of demonizing them as ‘neo-nazi extremists’ – such immigrant populations would not now exist in their midst.
Radical viewpoints of different kinds can contain valuable insights and offer real, albeit politically difficult, solutions to problems. Those voices may soon have to fall silent throughout Europe.
D. Michael
This painting “United Journey” was painted in 2007 for a national art competition in which it was one of the major winners.. It shows the journey from the past to the present (starting at bottom left) from pristine times before Europeans came to these shores, to the taking the land under the guise of Terra Nullius, the incarceration and the murdering of our warriors, the taking the children away, then in 1967 the referendum for Aboriginal people to be counted in the census as human beings, to land rights, sorry day marches, then at the end the hope for us to all to walk together as one people in true equality through such things as sovereignty and a treaty with us First Nation mobs.. The children in the centre riding the bike are symbolic of the journey we can all take together united in the truth, in which we are one heart one people one mob..
The last thing the prime minister wanted to talk about on the first day of the new financial year was the economy. Firmly on his agenda is the existential threat to Australia posed by a “death cult”, and boat people. Both politically more fertile ground than the ballooning debt and deficit he promised to fix but now doesn’t talk about much, if at all.
There in the Great Hall of the parliament, Tony Abbott called on a higher being to safeguard the nation. Sounding more like an American president, or even a preacher man, this was his parting salutation to the members of the shiny new Australian Border Force (ABF): “May God bless you. May God bless your work. May God bless the country you are helping to protect and prosper.” Believers may have been impressed. Australians, however, are sceptical of anything that smacks of Bible bashing. Especially if it has a whiff of opportunism about it.
One of the country’s respected economic commentators, Ross Gittins, is not impressed. Security scare intended to hide economic failure Writing in the Fairfax papers, he sees the national security scare campaign as an attempt to hide an inconvenient truth: Abbott and his treasurer are making a hash of the economy. The evidence is compelling. Sure there are people in our midst who would do us harm, who despise who and what we are, but the threat they pose, statistically, is far less than any of us being involved in a road accident.
Asylum seekers must always be seen as threats, queue jumpers and illegals, and never as desperate human beings, men, women and children.
Abbott’s hyperbole reached a low point – or high point, depending on the view – in his response to last weekend’s three terror attacks overseas. Po-faced, he warned, “As far as the Daesh death cult is concerned, it is coming after us.” “Daesh” is the derogatory Arabic acronym given to Islamic State’s various iterations, IS, ISIL, ISIS. Instead of urging us to be alert but not alarmed, he was giving credibility to the outfit’s delusional claim it was winning everywhere. According to the author of the best-selling book, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, Michael Weiss, this rhetoric is counterproductive. Counterproductive if you actually want to defeat the extremists – but not if you want to appeal to that rawest of voters’ emotions, prejudice and fear.
The newly appointed border force supremo, Roman Quaedvlieg, stuck to the script. Resplendent in his new uniform, he gave resonance to the prime minister’s spiel: “Our utopia, our country, is under constant threat.” A more hysterical warning would not have been out of place as German bombs rained down on London during the Blitz. Nor would the draconian new powers vested in the ABF. Like our spy agencies, its operations will be shrouded in secrecy. Transparency and accountability are always casualties in war, sometimes justifiably. But this federal government is taking it to extremes, and we’re not even at war.
The Border Force Act is targeting doctors, nurses, teachers and aid workers employed in our detention centres. They face a two-year jail term if they disclose what is happening in these places. That prompted a passionate letter of defiance from more than 40 current and former workers on Manus Island and Nauru. One government adviser explained the need for the information blackout on “context”. The suggestion was that no matter how bad these Pacific gulags are, they are still much better than the conditions suffered by the Rohingyas in people smugglers’ camps.
Such speciousness only gives weight to suspicions that the secrecy is really to hide cruelty lest it swings public opinion. Asylum seekers must always be seen as threats, queue jumpers and illegals, and never as desperate human beings, men, women and children.
The protesting signatories see it very differently:
“We have advocated, and will continue to advocate, for the health of those for whom we have a duty of care, despite the threats of imprisonment, because standing by and watching substandard and harmful care, child abuse and gross violations of human rights is not ethically justifiable.”
Far from being dissuaded by these concerns, the government is looking forward to the Labor Party tearing itself apart over them at its national conference later this month. It keeps the headlines where Abbott wants them, and well away from his abandonment of real and promised economic reform. “It’s politics, stupid,” seems to be the new ruling principle.
Nowhere was this more obvious than the revelation that the Expenditure Review Committee (ERC) of cabinet, chaired by the prime minister, actively considered changes to superannuation tax arrangements before this year’s budget. Labor’s Chris Bowen, a former treasurer, says the department would not have sent four briefings to the ERC unless this was the case. At the time, Joe Hockey was signalling a disposition for changes. He was being urged to it by his own Commission of Audit, his own Financial System Inquiry, and the superannuation industry itself.
Abbott killed it stone dead after Labor announced it would concessionally tax interest earnings above $75,000. Hardly a sock-the-rich move, it would begin to address the huge cost to the budget of these concessions. Never mind the advice, for Abbott it was politics. The prime minister has now gone one step further. His promise not to look for equitable savings in this area is a “never ever”. Repeating the precedent of his election eve undertakings not to do something, he told reporters, “We have made a very clear decision that we aren’t ever going to increase the taxes on super.”
A government serious about repairing the budget would be looking for more than bracket creep to do the job – that is, inflation pushing wage and salary earners into higher tax brackets. In the meantime the budget deficit has doubled, unemployment is rising, productivity is falling and investment is patchy. Gittins has called out Abbott’s bluster in opposition, his claim the Liberals had good management in their DNA. “I thought he had a point,” Gittins writes, “but what we didn’t discover until too late was that he and his chosen treasurer just didn’t have that gene in their bodies.”
Abbott’s reform shyness is born of political weakness, a legacy of last year’s budget disaster and February’s leadership scare. He has been clawing his way back but his government is still languishing in the polls. Wrapping himself in a flag or 10, depending on the occasion, is only working to a point. This week’s consolidation of the past quarter’s Newspolls dramatically shows it would lose government in an election held now. A lot of the media focus is on Bill Shorten’s looming challenges in the unions royal commission and the ALP national conference. But the warrior prime minister is facing two big moments of truth in coming months.
The United States Supreme Court’s recognition of same-sex marriage as a human right has given new impetus to the push for recognition here. A Liberal backbench bill, seconded by Labor and supported by independents, will go into the parliament in August. That will trigger a debate in the Liberal and Nationals party rooms on a conscience vote. Abbott hasn’t changed his views, he says, although this week he refused three times to restate them. He is under pressure from his conservative allies not to allow a free vote, a position that is looking increasingly out of step with the broader community and as such could be politically damaging.
Not making our climate-change sceptic PM’s life any easier is a new alliance calling itself the Australian Climate Roundtable. What must have surprised, if not shocked, the naysayers in the Coalition was the membership of the group. Besides the usual environmentalist suspects, business is throwing its weight behind the need for real action to achieve the stated goal of avoiding a two-degrees Celsius rise in the earth’s atmosphere. The aluminium industry, one of the biggest users of electricity, says it’s time to set climate policy on a path that will efficiently reduce emissions while also enhancing economic prosperity and maintaining industry competitiveness.
The roundtable includes as a policy tool trade in emissions entitlements and the removal of carbon from the atmosphere – something Abbott has categorically ruled out. Anything that smacks of a carbon tax is anathema to him. It would show his “scrap the tax” as a pyrrhic victory. But when you have the Business Council of Australia, electricity generators, manufacturers and unions all signing up to policies that look beyond the next khaki election, it’s serious.
Adding to the pressure is the announcement from China, one of the world’s biggest emitters, that it is intent on cleaning up its act. Beijing has announced ambitious initial emission reduction targets for after 2020. Apart from praising coal as “good for humanity”, Abbott has had precious little to say on the subject. He’s been too busy scaring the nation with an overblown terror threat to spend any time addressing one the world’s scientists warn is real and increasingly urgent. Urgent, in the sense that a transition to a less carbon-intensive economy takes decades and has to begin now. In case Abbott hadn’t noticed, our future depends on it.
![It seems that if you give previously disengaged people something to believe in, the connection with politics is instant and inspiring, writes Shabi [AP]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdresplarge/mritems/Images/2015/8/3/0b74123be398446f9ef8c4106c0b627b_18.jpg "Anti-austerity: A political revolution")
![Australia has launched a crackdown on terrorism, writes McAuliffe [EPA]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2015/7/2/c27f48eadde64279a2595bd8baf81615_18.jpg "Fear, loathing and Australian politics")
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