The fall of the East India Company was already the predictor that piracy is always bound for failure,
High Court Judge Jonathan Swift — who previously worked for a variety of British government agencies as a barrister and said his favorite clients are “security and intelligence agencies” — rejected two applications by Julian Assange’s lawyers to appeal his extradition last week.
Source: Chris Hedges: The Imminent Extradition of Julian Assange & the Death of Journalism
Jonathan Swift, the High Court judge who has rejected Julian Assange’s appeal against extradition to the U.S., has a long history of working for the government departments that are now persecuting the WikiLeaks founder.
Swift, who ruled against Assange on June 6, was formerly the government’s favourite barrister.
Source: Judge Worked for Same British Government Departments That Have Pursued Assange
June 23, 1971, when he appeared on CBS Evening News ten days after news broke about the Pentagon Papers that he’d provided to journalists. Ellsberg pointedly said that in the 7,000 pages of top-secret documents, “I don’t think there is a line in them that contains an estimate of the likely impact of our policy on the overall casualties among Vietnamese or the refugees to be caused, the effects of defoliation in an ecological sense. There’s neither an estimate nor a calculation of past effects, ever.
Daniel Ellsberg’s Last Message
The chilling repercussions of the highly controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism have been revealed in a recent report by the European Legal Support Centre (ELSC). Titled “Suppressing Palestinian Rights Advocacy through the IHRA Working Definition of Anti-Semitism”, the report by the independent Dutch-based organisation uncovered shocking examples of the IHRA’s weaponisation against critics of Israel and the suppression of free speech under the guise of combatting anti-Semitism.
Source: Europe Ignoring Israeli War Crimes under Guise of Combating anti-Semitism, New report Finds
He’s a comic as well as a clown
Former President Donald Trump suggested Monday that he just didn’t have time to comply with a federal subpoena for his White House documents, claiming he needed to “go through the boxes and get all my personal things out … and I was very busy.”
Source: Trump: I wanted to ‘get all my personal things out’ of classified doc boxes ‘and I was very busy’
When was the last time you got a pay increase? Was it anywhere near the rate of inflation?
If it feels as if your wage is shrinking and cost of living pressures are growing, you’re in good company. And it might just be harming productivity. Here’s why.
Source: Tired of shrinking pay? The real drain on Australians’ productivity is falling wages
Capitalism has no fundamental justification for its existence other than it’s better organized in keeping workers and families, individualized, locked out, and dependent. In many other countries workers and their unions have representation on corporate boards. However, not here. In Australia it’s war.
Slavery should have taught us the lack of long-term benefits of the Capitalist system years ago. The East India Company was the first corporate organization of workers who sold as products for profit, ” the slave trade”. It was a wholesale exploitation of labor the results of which we currently see in the housing crisis and the casual and precarious nature of work being offered to workers as a benefit, a blessing in expanded free choice and or leisure.
The solution, now being put forward to the current housing crisis is to “share” the space you once called home. Shrink it and share it with your unemployed kids and their families after all there’s a cost-benefit to the extended family. The catchphrase now is the benefit to be found in the extended family. A 180-degree turnaround is once again being peddled as better than the independence of the nuclear family but only if you’re poor, unemployed and there’s a shed out the back or bunk beds in your dining room. Capitalism will try to encourage you to socialize and invest and not the state in welfare or housing to save itself, without changing the system or taxing the rich. Anything to lower the cost of wages and maximize profits by making workers more desperate and become more like First Nation’s people to survive in this country. The gap at the bottom is closing
If circumstances change for some reason in the next 12 months, the person living in a tent under the bridge could be you or me next winter. In a developed and affluent society, a roof over a person’s head is a fundamental right – not a political plaything or a privilege. It’s time our politicians at all levels of government remembered that.
Source: Don’t give me a home amongst the park trees – » The Australian Independent Media Network
There is no “I” in Team and the ALP proves it.
IN HIS FIRST YEAR as Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese has increased the number of Australians in the paid workforce by 3.44% to an all-time high of 14 million plus a few. That gives Albo the best record of any prime minister from Malcolm Fraser onwards, when the current data series began.
Source: Albo’s team sets employment records, despite job categories disappearing
To ensure its longevity, the Albanese Government must pull recalcitrant public servants into line and take on the Murdoch media, writes Paul Begley.
Carl Sagan said that in order to understand the present, it’s necessary to know the past. Nowhere does this apply with greater force than to the Australian media and its place in the nation’s power structure.
Source: ‘Media monsters’ used journalism to cement their empires
Conspiracy Up Close and Political was seen to be applied by Abbott and Hockey when their Opposition Budgets were “verified” by “private audit” even before the 2013 election and it continued thereon after. It was a puzzling LNP challenge to our Democracy to cut the Treasury our Public Service out from being independent scrutineers of the political party budget numbers. Yet they got away with it.
Secrecy and the need to ensure natural justice for Peter Collins & other PWC Australia staff who received or used confidential information, prevents disclosure of the specific offences being investigated by the Australian Federal Police (AFP). But there will be no shortage of possible offences to investigate. They range from a breach of tax secrecy laws, making false or misleading statements, obtaining a financial advantage by deception, general dishonesty, to conspiracy to defraud the Commonwealth, and money laundering.
Source: Is PWC Australia a criminal organisation? – Pearls and Irritations
Conspiracies do exist and their organized generally at the top of societies economic ladder
PwC advised Lendlease on the billion-dollar tax scam which is now subject to Australian Tax Office audit. As Lendlease whistleblower Tony Watson fights the giant in court over his dismissal as a tax lawyer, documents obtained by MWM show Watson warned a PwC tax partner and group finance chief Tarun Gupta the tax scheme was a rort. Michael West reports.
Source: Anatomy of a Cover-Up: whistleblower warned PwC and Lendlease of $1b tax scam – Michael West
Dutton has brought the shame of American hate politics to Australia because the LNP have no politics or policies of their own to offer multicultural Australia. Their only approach to the economy has been the chant “We are better money managers”! No, they proved that was false from the very day Abbott became the PM in 2013. They have, however, been better, Yes, at breaking promises, the nation’s bank and cultural disrupters. They have been at the forefront in attacking Immigrants, Muslims, Africans, and Chinese but even worse, Asylum Seekers and Indigenous First Nation People and their children. They have campaigned against LBTGI’s, mythologized Education, denied the real history of this nation, and embarrassed us in the face of the rest of the world chanting “we are white and the best”. They are purposely trying to divide us with the same tactics as applied in America by the extreme right of the Republican party.
As a consequence, they were thrown out of office with only Dutton who once offered to resign after being caught out publicly with Abbott and Morrison for their “Boom Gate” racist humor. Dutton was once head of the LNP’s extreme right’s Monkey Pod Room and was the only one wanting to be the Opposition leader after their election debacle. As soon as appointed he raced to America.
When in April Peter Dutton first announced his party’s opposition to a Yes vote, he spoke repeatedly of a “Canberra Voice”, an echo of the anti-Washington rhetoric that has become standard fare on the American right – populist politics 101. When last month in parliament he outlined his opposition in more detail, he again maligned the “Canberra Voice”, the “Canberra-based Voice” and the “Canberra knows best” approach of Anthony Albanese. His speech was replete with other US-style allusions.
First he seemed to be trying to elevate “our forefathers” who drafted the Constitution into an Australian equivalent of America’s founding fathers: patriots acclaimed with blind reverence, and sometimes even vested with powers of clairvoyance. “They were methodical, they were meticulous and they used their minds,” he said of these Australian penmen, “and, to their eternal credit and foresight, they produced a document which has created the greatest country in the world.”
As well as evoking an Australian version of American exceptionalism, he seemed intent on consecrating the 1901 Constitution with the same biblical status as its US counterpart: “Our Constitution has given us laws, liberties, protections and privileges which have forged the modern nation which we love and cherish today.”
The opposition leader seems intent on consecrating Australia’s 1901 Constitution with the same biblical status as its US counterpart.
Source: Voice to parliament: Peter Dutton’s says ‘No’ with an American accent
“He will always put his own interests and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interests,” Barr explained. “He’s like, you know, he’s like a nine-year-old — defiant nine-year-old kid who’s always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table, defying his parents to stop him from doing it.”
“And he’s a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s his personal gratification of his, you know, of his ego,” he added. “But our country, our country can’t, you know, can’t be a therapy session for, you know, a troubled man like this.”
Source: Bill Barr On Trump: America ‘Can’t Be A Therapy Session’ For ‘Troubled Man’ | Crooks and Liars
America’s Terrible discombobulated Child wants the keys to the car again having wrecked every other one he’s driven
Former President Donald Trump made over 30,000 false or misleading statements during his four years in office, so it’s the least surprising news of the day that he’s been caught in yet another lie. This time, it’s a lie that involves his rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, in a story he told on his flailing Truth Social platform.
Source: Shocker! Serial Liar Caught Telling Another Big Fat Lie | Crooks and Liars
Last week, Trump said that if reelected, he’d appoint a “real special prosecutor” to “go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.”
Source: Trump’s plan to turn the Justice Department into his personal vendetta machine
Peter Dutton started lying as soon as he banned Senator David Van from the Liberal Party room in parliament on Thursday (15/6/23) which points to some sort of cover-up. To make matters worse Dutton went on 3AW radio on Friday morning (16/6/23), as per the below audio, and victim shamed Lidia Thorp who is one of the three women complainants.
Yunupingu saw a succession of prime ministers visit his Country over the course of his life. When young, he helped draft the Yirrkala bark petitions, which were presented to federal parliament in 1963. They were a response to the government excising land from the Arnhem Land reserve for bauxite mining. The Yolngu were not consulted.
The petition states that when government officials “came to inform them of decisions taken without them and against them”, the officials “did not undertake to convey to the government in Canberra the views and feelings of the Yirrkala Aboriginal people”.
Source: Voice to parliament: How Yunupingu’s fishing trip with Malcolm Fraser says so much about ‘Yes’
I am a private person. I don’t have a cat or a dog, and dog parks are a foreign territory to me. Yet, last week, I put on my YES t-shirt, picked up my corflutes and flyers, and headed off to a popular local dog park to talk to strangers about the Voice Referendum.
So, I have stepped up to be one of the faces of the YES campaign in my local community. A visible presence is a great encouragement to YES voters and gets people talking.
We’ll be brave and talk to strangers to encourage them to vote YES.
If things get a bit gnarly, I’ll remember the advice from the dog park, “bend your knees”, and I’ll lean into it.
Source: Voice Referendum Campaign Goes Local – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Key points:
- Russian President Vladimir Putin to the African delegation that Ukraine and the West had started the conflict long before this war
- Mr Putin said Russia had never refused talks with the Ukrainian side
- The African leaders are seeking agreement on a series of “confidence-building measures” for Russia and Ukraine to enter negotiations
Russian President Vladimir Putin interrupts opening remarks by African leaders seeking to mediate in the Ukraine conflict to deliver a list of reasons he believed many of their proposals were misguided.
Source: Vladimir Putin lectures African leaders seeking to mediate Russia-Ukraine war – ABC News
Israeli Soldiers Won’t Face Prosecution for Death of 80-Year-Old Palestinian-American The Israeli military announced the soldiers involved in the death of Palestinian American Omar Asaad would not face criminal charges. Less than 1% of Israeli army probes result in the prosecution of soldiers.
Few have contributed as much to resisting the horrors of war and the accompanying undemocratic regime of secrecy as Daniel Ellsberg, who died today at age 92.
Source: Daniel Ellsberg, American Hero
In conclusion, it must be acknowledged that the high moral stature that the US adopts is unfounded in recent years. More to the point Australia does not know which version of the United States it will be dealing with. Even, the better versions are not attractive.
Source: The United States of America: The great satan or beacon of democracy? – Pearls and Irritations
America’s Shame is our Shame The British East India Company was one of the largest if not the largest Colonial Corporate Slave Trader at the time
“This day, the 24th instant, and the day following, at the North Side of the Custom-House, at 11 o’clock, will be sold, a very valuable GANG OF NEGROES, accustomed to the culture of rice; consisting of SIX HUNDRED.”
Borrowing from the cultural theorist Umberto Eco, the historians Emilio Gentile and Ian Kershaw, the political scientist Roger Griffin, and the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, I offer five elements that distinguish fascism from authoritarianism.
In the past two decades, a succession of crises has led to the rise of authoritarian states, acutely showing how capitalism and democracy were never compatible to begin with.
Propaganda aims to make you feel good about the wrongs being perpetrated on you.
Source: We cannot let racism decide – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Amanda Cash is up in arms
In a fiery interview this morning, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton says it is incumbent on the Labor Party to explain why Liberal Party Senator David Van allegedly squeezed the bottom of his Liberal Party colleague Amanda Stoker at a Liberal Party social event in 2020.
Source: Dutton Demands Labor Explain Why David Van Allegedly Assaulted Amanda Stoker — The Shovel
Australia’s war memorial was so desperate for their hero, they turned him into a two-metre high altar so the masses could worship in their theme-park temple of war. All of them needed a hero. They needed a righteous man, a man who looked death in the eye, and when he wanted, could kill the cunts without remorse.
Australia needed something brave and yes even ugly, from such a fetid, unavailing war. Australians demanded a hero, whatever the price.
And for our sins – they gave us one.
Source: Ben Roberts-Smith – the beautiful things he’s seen – The Shot
Active during last year’s devastating Northern Rivers floods, conspiracist influencer David Oneeglio has been found guilty by the Office of Fair Trading of requesting donations without approval, writes Tom Tanuki.
Source: Far-Right grifter found guilty of running fake charity
Consulting firm PwC pulled off a remarkable feat as Adani pushed to open its Carmichael Coal Mine — it got paid by both the miner and its government overseer. Rod Campbell reports on the maestros of conflicts of interest.
Source: PwC and the Adani mine triple dip. A conflict of interest? Surely not – Michael West
In Australia, AGL is about to double it’s profit. The mega electricity and gas supplier delivered its upgraded full-year profit targets on Friday. AGL shares jumped more than 14 percent higher in early trade and closed at $10.60. Meanwhile, they continued to announce again and again their “plans” to replace their antiquated coal plants. These “announcements” have now spanned years of no action on the part of this giant Australian emitter of CO2. Gunna AGL is what it is all talk and no action.
The ocean holds 60 times more carbon than the atmosphere and absorbs almost 30% of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from human activities. This means the ocean is key to understanding the global carbon cycle and thus our future climate.
Source: Oceans absorb 30% of our CO2 Emissions; Phytoplankton are Central to its Climate Impacts
Institutions can’t stop Donald Trump — but democratic politics can why? Because there’s no separation of powers in the US. Every institution is politicized.
Source: There’s No Institutional Quick Fix to the Problem of Donald Trump
Donald Trump will do anything for free publicity
Trump announced “Food for everyone!” to a round of applause. Many started singing “Happy birthday” to him, as the former president’s birthday was the following day, and Trump remarked that they were “a great group of people.”
However, the former president is being accused of skipping out on his promise of free lunch. According to an anonymous source, via Miami New Times, Trump left the Miami establishment without buying everyone’s food. In fact, Trump barely stayed at the restaurant more than a few minutes.
Source: Trump Promised Free Food For Everyone At A Restaurant, Then Skipped The Bill
At the heart of the nation’s housing crisis is a tax rort that sees thousands of liveable homes left unoccupied, Tim Evans reports.
Source: Here’s a fix for the housing crisis – end the great Airbnb tax rort – Michael West
Here’s looking at you Jeff Kennet. Lidia Thorpe wasn’t abusing her privilege
Liberal Senator David Van faces a second allegation he sexually harassed a fellow senator.
Apparently, it was Amanda Stoker who came forward and followed through with her threat about David Van… Nothing more because I don’t want a letter from his lawyer because I have enough to read and won’t get round to that reading it until another testament of the Bible is written…
Suffice to say, if Katy Gallagher needs to resign over Brittany Higgins’ sexual assault allegations or “misleading the parliament” over this issue, she would need to take a number and join the queue.
Source: The Katy Gallagher Higgins witch-hunt: Australian media’s cognitive dissonance
This is due to my concerns that the absence of media diversity and the resulting concentration of power are leading to a lack of accountability and eroding public trust in the fourth estate.
Source: Time to right wrongs with much-needed media reform – Pearls and Irritations
Last week, the Greens introduced a Bill to the Senate to establish a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the Murdoch media empire. While many people will want to support such a move, Dr Martin Hirst says he’s not convinced — yet.
Source: Two chances inquiry into Murdoch media will float: Fat and slim
Since a United Nations General Assembly Resolution vote in November 2012, Palestine has had the status of a state within the UN system. It is not a full member state but, like the Holy See, a non-member observer state. Australia – after a heady debate within the Gillard cabinet – abstained on that vote.
Source: The case for recognising Palestine – Pearls and Irritations
Murdochs laundering themselves won’t rid them of the indelible stain they created.
Since disgraced former President Donald Trump was indicted for federal criminal charges related to his possession of classified documents, his supporters at outlets owned by right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch have claimed that the Presidential Records Act exonerates him from the charges. But a recent news article published by Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal debunked these claims about the law, which designates all official papers from a presidency as property of the American people rather than the former president.
Donald Trump’s penchant for taking advice from the shills and charlatans he sees on his television may be the thing that finally does him in, if last week’s federal criminal indictment over his handling of government documents results in legal accountability.
Source: Trump’s obsession with cable news pundits could be his downfall | Media Matters for America
Americans are singing
… Clowns to the left of meJokers to the rightHere I am stuck in the middle with you
Voices of America in recent times. First there was Trump then Giuliani and along came George Santos
Source: Giuliani Now Claims Witness With Evidence On Biden Has Died | Crooks and Liars
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