From the dodgy politician getting a mining license against the wishes of landowners, to the multimillion-dollar government IT contract awarded to a company belonging to a friend of a federal minister. Corruption is rarely visible but its impacts are felt by every Australian, Clancy Moore reports.
Source: The invisible hand of ‘legal’ corruption costs every Australian – Michael West
A good way to scare people is to suggest your chief security body has written something so frightening that you can’t possibly let anyone read anything about it.
According to Murdoch Media, these events are local and exceptional only in those areas in which they occur and maintain there’s nothing to worry about globally. Australia predicted to be the most threatened place by global climate change is being laughed at by News Corp and on a regular basis by hired media puppets like Andrew Bolt and Rowan Dean. Despite the increasing scientific data that’s been collected even when the government cut back on research.
These unprecedented flash floods were triggered by rainfall from the arrival of Storm Daniel on Monday September 4 which also affected Turkey and Bulgaria. The following day, in the village of Zagora, a record-breaking 754mm of rain fell in just 18 hours, leaving parts of the region of Thessaly in crisis and unable to respond.
Sportswashing, Mediawashing, Entertainmentwashing. What money can buy!
In June, six months after announcing a partnership deal with a Saudi Arabian government-owned media company, Vice uploaded but then quickly removed a documentary critical of the Persian Gulf monarchy’s notorious dictator, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS.
Source: Vice Pulled a Documentary Critical of Saudi Arabia. But Here It Is.
The moral here from the US military-industrial complex is: stay the course. The returns are worth it. And in such a calculus, concepts such as freedom and democracy can be commodified and budgeted. As for Ukrainian suffering? Well, let it continue.
The Florida Department of Education says it “reviewed PragerU Kids and determined the material aligns to Florida’s revised civics and government standards.”
According to Media Matters for America’s John Knefel, “PragerU Kids videos are a mix of animated and live-action shorts, broken up into different recurring series. Some are more overtly political than others, but the roughly 350 videos on the outlet’s YouTube channel seem largely intended to push a right-wing agenda to one extent or another. Now, any of them could be shown in public school classrooms throughout Florida.” (Knefel reviews some of the videos here.)
“The state of Florida just announced that we are now becoming an official vendor,” said PragerU CEO Marissa Streit in a video. She claimed that schools have “been hijacked by the left” and “used by union bosses” to pursue an agenda “not for our children. We are just getting started — additional states are signing up,” Streit added.
As part of a study titled “Searching for Alternative Facts: Analyzing Scriptural Inferences in Conservative News Practices,” the sociologist Francesca Tripodi wrote that Prager’s project creates “a dense network of extremist thinkers” that “allows for those who identify as mainline conservatives to gain easy access to white supremacist logic.”
PragerU has come a long way in a very short time.
MAGA is unapologetically white as not everyone in a Red, Blue, or even Purple State is racist. Trump however appeals to those that are with absolute bullshit promises and looking for $10 donations.
Donald Trump is a type of fascist political preacher and MAGA is his congregation. His sermons are of violence and destruction.
Source: Experts warn that “accountability” for Donald Trump could come at a cost to democracy | Salon.com
Former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been pushing propaganda promoting himself, via the ABC and others, in an attempt to help rebuild his shattered reputation so he can get a job and out of politics.
What the Prime Minister is doing and what the opposition leader says are newsworthy facts to write about but for Andrew Greene to turn the storey into what Scott Morrison says on the issue is pure propaganda to promote Morrison.
What makes Andrew Greene’s propaganda worse is that Scott Morrison did damage to Australia’s reputation with China and cost $billions in trade.
Morrison also did damage to Australia’s reputation with France, the US, News Zealand and most Pacific nations yet Greene still chose to write Morrison’s own leaked lies about his speech at the party room meeting and how “it was generally well received by Liberal and National party members.”
Are they the same “Liberal and National party members” who previously said how Scott Morrison destroyed the Liberal Party or have called for Morrison to resign?
When did the LNP broad church turn into a Cyclops”?
Liberal Party politicians who support an Indigenous Voice to Parliament are facing pressure to stay quiet or lose their preselection, according to the head of the group spearheading the “Yes” campaign among conservatives, Kate Carnell.
Source: Labor True Believers, Political Analysis and Satire | Facebook
The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) has been accused of trying to indoctrinate school children by distributing a classroom lesson plan that teaches students how to mount arguments against the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
The World Meteorological Organization reports the results of a study by the European Union-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which found that the past three months were the hottest 90-day period in recorded history.
Source: Past three Months Hottest on Record, as UN SecGen Warns “Climate Breakdown has begun.”
The Qantas Code of Conduct and Ethics is perhaps the most ignored and hypocritical document in corporate Australia. Michael Sainsbury checks out the myriad breaches.
Source: The Qantas Code of Conduct and Ethics … yes it’s real – Michael West
If you’re trying to understand what it means “to go to hell in a handbasket” simply take a glance at recent history and government ruled by the LNP, particularly in the past decade. Then listen to Peter Dutton try to tell you that a deficit of a trillion dollars is really nothing when it was 3rd of that under the ALP. Who saved the country from the GFC. Listen to Peter Dutton tell you the ‘working poor” are better off today because unemployment is down and casualized labor up. That the “pink bats” scandal was the worst and bigger than any ever seen under the LNP. How many more fingers do you need to count the 5 deaths than those because of offshore detention, Covid, and Robocop? Listen to him Ley and Cash tell you the ALP was never as united as the LNP are today and why Fraser, Hewson, and Turnbull all jumped ship and left the party. Then evaluate what it means to go “to hell in a handbasket” with a media-driven Trump-like PM called Scomo who is still sitting on the back bench smelling like rotting fish
The Voice may not be perfect, it may not answer all the questions but it’s a start and just like most other changes we have seen in our lifetimes, won’t lead us to hell in a hand basket.
Source: To Hell in a Hand Basket – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Remember when the ALP saved us from the GFC and Wayne Swan was voted globally “the world’s best treasurer”. Tony Abbott and the Murdoch media were screaming “recession” and that the sky was falling in. Remember their first budget and what happened to ” wanna be PM” Joe Hockey, all those broken promises and their ‘fix’. The rich got richer and the poor poorer, and now we have the working poor. People with jobs need their wages supplemented with welfare while more luxury vehicles than ever are seen on our roads. The wealth and income gaps are expanding, while the middle classes and the hopes of Australia’s children shrinking. Small business has vacated our shopping strips and malls and it didn’t happen because the ALP are now in government Mr Dutton
ABS Data reflects yesterday’s efforts, not today’s, and aint that the truth
Estimated GDP data released by the Bureau of Statistics has resulted in the mainstream media pouncing on warnings of a ‘per capita recession’, writes Dr Abul Rizvi.
The political system Australians take for granted to be a democracy capable of safeguarding their interests is hardly a democracy at all.
Most Australians are not familiar with our Constitution. In fact a recent survey has shown that 50% of us don’t even think we have one. We do, of course, but it is not one that enables the making of laws capable of safely securing the social and ecological systems we depend on for continuance of humans as a sustainable species or as peaceful societies.
In the main, Australia’s Constitution does little more than say which level of government can make what types of laws. It defines the matters that each level of government may make laws for but provides no guidance on what would constitute a good or bad law for a democratic society. In effect this means that as long as each level of government uses its power to make laws for things it may rightly make laws for, it doesn’t matter whether those laws are in the public interest. And it doesn’t matter if those laws are abusive of universal human rights or destructive of a liveable planet.
Are we searching for the 60s again the era of “flower power” and hippies when “tune-in, turn on, and drop out” was almost considered a terrorist action?
California lawmakers sent a bill to Gov. Gavin Newsom that would make it legal to possess or grow some plant-based psychedelics.
This is an edited extract from Mark Curtis’ book, Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, which includes full sources.
Imagine this scenario. On Sept. 11, 1973, the reactionary sections of the Chilean army, led by General Augusto Pinochet and given a green light by the U.S. government, did not leave their barracks.
The Voice Referendum gives Australians a chance to right the decades of injustice towards the First Peoples and a Constitution tarnished by bigotry, writes Gerry Georgatos.
Moving from Enlightenment 1 to Enlightenment 2 with only a soft glow of understanding will take courage. Do we have it? In terms of change, the new Enlightenment of artificial intelligence will make the old seem placid by comparison.
If free speech’s only purpose is to denigrate, insult and humiliate, then we need to reappraise its purpose. Some say it identifies those perpetrating wrongdoing, but if it creates more evil than good, it’s a strange freedom for a so-called enlightened society to bequeath its citizens.
The ALP is sounding more like a Tobacco Company saying that they are the leading investors in Quit Smoking campaigns.
The Albanese government has approved or extended eight fossil fuel projects and two carbon capture projects since taking office in May last year. Callum Foote with the (hard to figure out) list.
Source: Ten and rising: Albanese government new fossil fuel approvals unveiled – Michael West
Why manage cats?
Unless we control the impact of cats, many native wildlife populations will continue to decline. Some will be driven to extinction, a sad and irreversible outcome for future generations and the ecosystems these species are part of.
Source: 10-year feral cat plan brings us a step closer to properly protecting endangered wildlife
In March of 2016 the renowned Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger published an article titled “A world war has begun. Break the silence.” which urgently warned of the U.S. empire’s aggressive escalations against Russia and China. Re-reading parts of it in 2023 is like watching someone placing flags next to recently planted seeds that would eventually grow into the towering problems our world now faces.
Why we have billionaires and trillionaires and a shrinking middle class,
Overall, notes the economist Thomas Piketty, America’s wealthiest faced an average 81 percent top tax rate between the years 1932 and 1980, one key reason why our richest 0.1 percenters — over the course of the 20th century’s middle decades — sawtheir share of the nation’s wealth sink from 25 to just 7 percent.
The rich — on both sides of the Atlantic — would spend plenty of time stewing about that shocking sink throughout those middle decades. But these deep pockets would eventually regain their political mojo, first in the UK with Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 political ascent and then a year later with Ronald Reagan’s election. By 1988, the UK’s top rate had sunk by over half, and America’s richest faced just a 28 percent top-bracket bite.
Source: Which Nation Has Taxed the Rich the Most? – CounterPunch.org
American interference in Democracies
The paper trail is a stunning insight into how NED operates behind the scenes, from which obvious inferences can be drawn about its activities elsewhere, past and present. By the organization’s own reckoning, it operates in over 100 countries and disperses in excess of 2,000 grants every year. In Indonesia, these sums have helped extend the Endowment’s tendrils into various NGOs, civil society groups, and, most crucially, political parties and candidates across the ideological spectrum.
Source: LEAKED: CIA Front Preparing Color Revolution In Indonesia – scheerpost.com
JH: Can you say more on Investor Rights. For instance, Australia owns the second largest lithium supplier in the world. This just in time for the EV revolution. China would love that opportunity. But I’ve read recently that the US has just offered to “buy out” a major supplier in Perth. Could Australia get caught up on a slippery banana and fall prey to foreign predators, like Chile did?
CF: On lithium and other critical minerals: in 2013, Geoscience Australia conducted a study of ‘Critical commodities for a high-tech world’. It found that Australia was rich in antimony, beryllium, bismuth, chromium, cobalt, copper, graphite, helium, indium, lithium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, niobium, platinum-group elements, rare-earth elements, tantalum, thorium, tin, titanium, tungsten and zirconium. We could establish a nationally owned company that exercised ownership and control of strategically important minerals. We would then be in a position to increase domestic innovation and support higher value-added sectors, such as high-technology research and development, advanced manufacturing, and energy efficiency.
Instead, Australia has established a Critical Minerals Facilitation Office, which involves creating a benign environment for private investors to carve up our critical minerals.
Source: Chile: The Aussie Connection, An Interview with Clinton Fernandes – CounterPunch.org
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Tia Goldenberg at AP got the scoop. She landed an interview with the former head of Israeli intelligence, the Mossad, in which he unloaded on the Israeli system of Apartheid. She quotes him as saying, “There is an apartheid state here. In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.” Tamir Pardo, roughly 69, served as the head of Mossad from 2011 to 2016. He is no leftist or bleeding heart liberal, but an exemplar of the tough, pragmatic and somewhat ruthless Israeli tradition of security officials.
But whatever it says it aims to be, No Labels will help Trump.
But if a third-party candidate takes even a small part of the anti-Trump vote away from Biden, Trump is likely to be returned to the White House.
Source: No Labels, No Fables, No Third-Party Betrayals | The Smirking Chimp
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.
Source: Indigenous disadvantage tells us much about our history – » The Australian Independent Media Network
LNP Politics amounts to “servicing the majority of Australians” while “providing a service” for a minority That’s been their business model during my lifetime and I’m 77. That’s a far cry from being the providers of services we as Australians expect and pay for yet haven’t been the beneficiaries of today. Their CV and example of service history has been lower than a limbo bar on the ground and shows why and where we are today. Yes is necessary as an increasing number of Australians are on a slippery slope of economic disadvantage experienced by Aboriginal Australians.The LNP doesn’t want that to change.
Infuriatingly, the Coalition doesn’t even try to hide its ideological inconsistency. Sunrise host Natalie Barr grilled Dutton this morning, demanding to know why he would spend millions on another referendum for something First Nations peoples aren’t even asking for. “I think it’s the right thing and the respectful thing to do to simply acknowledge our history,” Dutton said. He claimed it was “the wrong thing” to enshrine a Voice in the Constitution, but offered no further explanation.
Source: “Dutton’s… – The Fiberal Party of Australia – Lies & Misdemeanours | Facebook
Given Lachlan Murdoch’s track record the odds of him failing would be pretty high.
The Voice “No Campaign” is driven by the lies of spineless News Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch and his puppets Senator Jacinta Price and wannabe Liberal Senator and Murdoch employee Warren Mundine.
That the political thuggery has become quite overt is well illustrated by another article in the Australian today (also behind the paywall), in which the top corporate contributors to the ‘Yes’ campaign are listed as if they are guilty of war crimes. The article invites the reader to deride the corporations and their leaders, which are all named and shamed individually. The inescapable inference being that it would be a dandy idea if all of the readers of the newspaper boycotted these companies. Which, I would suggest, are just the sort of transparent mafia tactics that we can all live without.
We are all accustomed to being fed nonsense by the right-wing. Sky News after dark is largely untouched by common-sense, decency, or journalistic balance. When reading the Australian, or the Telegraph, we all share an expectation that we will likely need to wade through a swamp of ideological claptrap. But it does not have to be this way.
Source: The Great Australian Gaslighting – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Missing elements of mutual respect and vigilance seem to have been removed from our Democracy
Once an early experiment in democracy, Australia has declined into a quagmire of unrepresentative governments at state and federal levels. Power games are played obsessively by most members of a narrowly recruited and self-serving political class whose only interest seems to be staying in power. Politics is not a vocation for these leeches on the Australian body politic, it has become their business.
Source: Nail in the coffin: Australia has run out of luck – Pearls and Irritations
Their primary aim is to keep mining and burning carbon
According to data reviewed by a new climate group in California, the same fossil fuel lobbyists trying to sink climate legislation are also representing the state’s cities and counties being pummeled hardest by the climate crisis.
Source: Fossil Fuel Lobbyists in California Are Playing Both Sides of the Climate Crisis
The Right fosters statements but they’re not from the heart
The Right is obsessed with gender. This deep paranoia comes out of America and international far right movements. It harms straight people and LGBTQIA+ people differently, and we need to fight it before our copycat Right entrenches it here too.
Source: Channel 7 fostering fascist politics – Pearls and Irritations
America’s Worst Nightmare Project 2025. Paving the path to a Corporate State. Democracy never said vigilance and respect weren’t necessary.
Organized by the Heritage Foundation, the sweeping new initiative called Project 2025, offers a policy agenda, transition plan, a playbook for the first 180 days and a personnel database for the next GOP president to access from the very beginning to take control, reform, and eliminate what Republicans criticize as the “deep state” bureaucracy. Their plan includes the possibility of firing as many as 50,000 federal employees.
This is the definition of what’s known as a PUSH POLL that Murdoch and Trump employ in a Quid pro Quo arrangement that mutually advantages and benefits them. Push polls are designed to manipulate their target audiences.
The Wall Street Journal poll that is being reported in quite a few media outlets, did not add a caveat to note that former President Donald Trump’s Super PAC paid one of the pollsters. Trump and President Biden are only three years apart in age. However, 73 percent of registered voters think the statement that Biden “is too old to run for president” describes him “very” or “somewhat well.” Only 22 percent said the statement described him as “not too well” or “not at all well.” But it was different when they asked the same question about Trump.
Source: Trump Helped Pay For Big Poll Showing Biden Is ‘Too Old To Run’ | Crooks and Liars
Should we be surprised that mainstream media are searching for payola, the cash flow as influencers and not informers yet able to label their product as “news”? That Cash flow comes from a diverse but very specific minority holding the concentration of money in our market whose interests don’t even align with their audience. Why did The Age and SMH spend their time tarnishing John Farnham with “fake news” while polishing “Poor Alan Joyce’s brilliant career “? They had Michael Dwyer deflect the criticism directed at Lisa Visentin who started the suggestion Farnham hadn’t gifted his rights to his song. While whitewashing any negative facts directed at QUANTAS’s Alan Joyce. Poor Alan was being “forced out” of his job not that he was “running for cover”
Much of the Voice Referendum ‘No’ campaign is based on lies and misinformation, spread by a complicit mainstream media, writes Col Jennings.
Source: Mainstream media helping to spread Voice ‘No’ campaign lies
I mean, the slogan “Don’t Know, Vote No” has a subtext that if you’re ignorant, come and join Pauline and Andrew Bolt and Tony Abbott because you’re our sort of person…
It took two ‘effen’ long years for this toothless tiger the APC to come to this conclusion about Murdoch’s methodology. Murdoch Press is singularly the most complained about publisher in Australia whose staff dominates the APC membership. News Corp is more an insider trader in an a really independent press council. The Australian may not have specifically named Milligan but sure as hell handballed her, and allowed Sky After Dark’s Andrew Bolt and others to do that job of running off their mouths and constantly naming her as a fake journalist for the past two years. Bolt knew he was promoting bullshit and it’s why Justice Mordecai Bromberg found him ‘guilty’ of “bad, lazy, deceitful journalism” against a group of 5 Indigenous Australians he claimed weren’t.
The Murdoch broadsheet breached three of the general principles of the regulator when it accused Milligan, a former employee of the newspaper, of “bad, lazy, deceitful journalism” in the 2021 article headlined “Greatest enemy of truth is those who conspire to lie”.
Source: National Times – Editorial in the Australian that targeted ABC’s… | Facebook
Unintended consequences
Paul Keating envisaged a superannuation system which funded the aged in retirement. It has turned into a giant tax shelter where wealth is captured and passed on to descendants, and where falling home ownership was not factored in. Harry Chemay reports.
Source: Falling home ownership: the elephant in the superannuation retirement room – Michael West
The US to date have simply disregarded Australia.
Six members of the Australian parliament will land in Washington D.C. on Sept. 20 armed with a bi-partisan agenda and the backing of an entire nation as they try to convince Congressmen and State and Justice Department officials that the American pursuit of Australian publisher Julian Assange is wrong and must be stopped.
Source: Aussie MPs Headed to Washington to Lobby For Assange
Woodside drive politics and the law in the West
This brutal reaction from O’Neill and company says everything about Woodside and its place in Australian society. It advertises itself as “a global energy company, founded in Australia with a spirit of innovation and determination.” And, just in case you forget, the company provides “energy the world needs to heat and cool homes, keep lights on and enable industry.” To that, can be added another jotting: it will seek to prevent, and even criminalise free speech and protest on the environment if permitted. The legal authorities in Western Australia, at least pending appeal, agree.
A Billionaire Case Study of Inheritance Influence, Power and Democracy
Howard Buffett, son of multibillionaire Warren Buffett, has long dominated the social and political life of the central Illinois town of Decatur. It’s a case study in how extreme wealth hollows out democracy.
Source: Howard Buffet’s Oligarchic Playground in Small-Town America
In asking for a lighter sentence, Tarrio’s lawyers pointed out that he has a history of working undercover with law enforcement.
Source: Proud Boys Leader Enrique Tarrio Sentenced In Jan. 6 Attack | HuffPost Latest News
We, Westerners, impose our sense of individualism onto a society that has a sense of communalism. We are bothered by it. But this is not something the Chinese people need “rescuing from”. China is not your enemy, the people telling you China is your enemy, are you enemy.
Source: Everything you know about China being a threat is untrue – Pearls and Irritations
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