There’s a recession coming America’s way
‘My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,’ writes General Mike Minahan, head of the United States Air Force’s (USAF) Air Mobility Command.
Source: U.S. prediction of war ‘in 2025’ with China imperils global security
A war between China and Taiwan will be extremely good for business at America’s Frontier Fund, a tech investment outfit whose co-founder and CEO sits on both the State Department Foreign Affairs Policy Board and President Joe Biden’s Intelligence Advisory Board, according to audio from a February 1 event.
Source: China War Is Good Business, Says White House-Linked Venture Capitalist
$7 for a loaf of bread that’s $2 in Cairns
The Torres Strait Islands are like a tropical paradise to outsiders but for many traditional owners it has more in common with a failed state as they struggle to survive amid the soaring cost of living.
Source: Struggle to survive in Torres Strait Island ‘paradise’ – Michael West
Anthony Albanese says he hopes Australians will see through a “culture war” that is being drummed up on social media against an Indigenous voice to parliament.
Source: PM: Opponents are ‘trying to star culture war’ on Indigenous voice
By Kirsten Tona Note: This article was written before George Pell’s passing. We have kept it in the tense it was written. There’s a moment in the recording of Cardinal George Pell debating Richard Dawkins on QandA that is one of the most revealing statements Pell has ever made; which says more about him and…
Leaving aside the blatant and ugly antisemitism of Pell here, the point I am talking about is the way Pell reveals his utter disdain for “the poor, little people” and his admiration for the “great powers”.
For a man like Pell, only other men of great power are of interest. The little people are just that, little. He reveals his identification with power and dismissal of those who lack it again, in his testimony to the child sexual abuse Royal Commission, when he justifies his reason for glossing over the dangerous sexual proclivities of certain priests, moving them from parish to parish when the complaints got too loud, rather than confining them away from children.
“It was a sad story,” he tells the Commission from his comfortable sinecure in Rome, “and of not much interest to me.
No. George Pell was not interested in those children. George Pell had no interest in the powerless. He was not interested in the abuse or wellbeing of those his church MADE powerless, such as women and children. Only men were of interest to George Pell and of them, only men with power.
Source: The Sins of the Georges – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The Culture and Gatekeepers of Australia’s cash flow
Alcohol and gambling companies and their lobby groups donated $2.165 million to Australia’s major political parties in 2021-22, representing a 40 per cent increase on the previous year, an analysis of disclosure returns published this week by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) shows. Callum Foote reports.
Source: Addicted to donations: alcohol, gambling, fossil fuels, property sectors stump up big – Michael West
What makes for a thieving culture? An overabundance of pickpockets? Tsunamis of burglary and shoplifting? Most definitely not.
To truly gauge a society’s larcenous leanings we need to look beyond the nimble-fingered and focus more on the smooth-talkers, the power-suited flimflammers who thrive in any society where significant numbers of people feel a driving need to get rich quick.
Source: What Makes a Thieving Culture
However, when global alliances are at stake, or global economies are deemed to be at risk, then sides are taken. A very good example is Yemen. The conflict here has absolutely nothing to do with Australia, or Europe, or the United States. Its antecedents are the Arab Spring of 2012. Disquiet about the leadership of President Saleh was the trigger. Continuing disquiet under the presidency of Hadi, the alignment of Saleh with Houthi rebels, all led finally to international intervention and side taking. Because the Houthi rebels are perceived to be aligned with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s enemy, the US and its allies which include Australia has provided Saudi Arabia with armaments. Unleashed from the air these have caused almost unprecedented misery on a people and nation that at one time was a jewel in the Arab world. A Yemeni civilian has nowhere to hide; prevention of humanitarian aid is a weapon of war.
Source: Australia: peacemaker or warmonger? – Pearls and Irritations
In what Austin journalist Christopher Hooks has called “one of the stupidest news cycles in living memory,” the entire American political/media class is having an existential meltdown over what the Pentagon claims is a Chinese spy balloon detected in U.S. airspace on Thursday.
Israel calls its latest military campaign Operation Break the Wave, a lyrical description of a brutal reality. This year, 2023, will be the 75th year after the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948 when Israeli troops illegally removed Palestinians from their homes and tried to erase Palestine from the map. Since then, Palestinians have resisted against all odds, despite Israel’s formidable backing by the most powerful countries in the world, led by the United States.
Source: Zionism’s ‘Three State Solution’
Republicans Define Americans to be 10% of the Nation
House Republicans voted to remove Omar because she’s a dark-skinned Muslim, and a naturalized citizen who survived civil war and refugee camps in Somalia as a child. On the House Floor, she eloquently argued that House Republicans are now trying to dictate, “Who gets to be an American,” and whose ideas are sufficiently “American” to be protected and promoted.
“Know your place” is a phrase used in the past by members of the Liberal Party when they observed, in their view, members of the Labor Party acting above their station.
The lessons of the last election should have left an indelible scar on those involved in the Luddite politics of the past decade. Have they not understood that the people, in their judgement, said they had had enough of their rancid unempathetic behaviour? Yet they go on unmoved as if nothing transpired while trying to give the Leader with a public image of a racist bigot a personality transplant. Queensland excepted.
But the attacks led by the Opposition leader Peter Dutton could have a fatal effect on the proposal. He knows that history tells us that without the support of the opposition, the referendum won’t pass. That is unless the people vote as they did in the election and decide to confirm their thoughts of May 21 2022, with a resounding yes vote that shatters conservative negativity for decades to come.
Source: Know your place – » The Australian Independent Media Network
His grandstanding about the Voice to Parliament is grating, because it seems to be playing a non-existent tune. The Voice has been explained, ad nauseum, as an advisory body, only.
It will not be a third chamber to the Parliament; it will not legislate. It will advise the mostly non-indigenous parliamentarians about purported effects of legislation affecting indigenous Australians. It will not advise on national security, nor will it advise on defence matters.
And yet, ignoring his seeming irrelevance in modern Australian political life, Dutton continues to be treated as if his concerns are real. As the Prime Minister bends further backward to appease Dutton, the rest of us are forced to watch, and listen, as he inches towards understanding.
The remaining two Liberal premiers today joined the Federal Government, and the other state premiers, in supporting the Voice to Parliament.
The list of Dutton’s shortcomings is long, and the electorate is not necessarily patient. I would advise the Opposition Leader to stop playing politics, to wake up to himself, and get on board. Good government needs good opposition.
Source: Is Peter Dutton on a mission? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
PwC was commissioned to do a report on Robodebt in 2017 but but can’t recall if it was finalised, or not, or why. What’s the scam?
PwC is the scam. PwC was effectively paid *not* to deliver the Robodebt report; to never “finalise” it, to keep it in draft form so nobody ever had to be accountable.
This was the Big4 consultancy the government used to attack poor people with its big “welfare report” a year earlier now deployed in the cover it up. Highlights from the testimony of PwC partner Shane West at the Royal Commission this week:
“No … I can’t recall.” “I don’t know.” “I’m not sure”. “I don’t recall”. “I’m not sure I can say whether or not it is”. “Sorry, I can’t think of one” “This is getting beyond my area of knowledge”. The series of short videos on this Twitter feed is worth watching for sheer obfusca
Source: PwC and the Robodebt Royal Commission. What’s the scam? – Michael West
She said PwC’s approach to fulfilling its near-$1 million contract was “very laissez faire”.
Tudge knows full well he’s “out of reach”
The party that calls itself Liberal and describes itself as conservative is neither liberal nor conservative.
This isn’t new The Government of Bhutan’s central “economic policy” focus has been the ” Economy of Well-Being” Social Democracies around the world have been practising it to some extent far more than Australia has. Some like Cuba are not even given a remote chance to practice what they preach by America. The people’s choices are always deemed ignorant by the conservatives of Western Democracies.
Bernie Sanders in America has spent his life advocating “another form of economics” always losing out, not to the Republicans but rather to the non-progressives in the Democratic Party who remain blinded to any other form of privatised economics than is currently practised. They simply hold the power and the megaphone not the logic or commonsense thought that exists outside of the current matrix we have constructed.
Yet Australia’s Conservatives and the LNP regard what Chalmers has been echoing as some radical change of life and in their kindest moments writing it off as pure fantasy. It’s not but it’s rarely spoken of out loud in Australia.
Jim Chalmers Essay
This is not to suggest that Chalmers is predicting the end of the capitalist order. Far from it. But the capitalism Chalmers envisages is one where markets must work to advance well-being. So too must governments. That’s hardly a radical view, but it has to be asserted, because governments have lost sight of that objective. Hence the importance attached to the wellbeing budget.
Source: Bear weekly roundup
Over the past several days Fox networks have aired numerous segments insinuating that the recent deaths of whales across New York and New Jersey beaches are due to the development of offshore wind turbines.
There is no evidence to back up these claims.
Source: Fox News is rapidly escalating its anti-offshore wind campaign | Media Matters for America
“SETTLERS” ARE ISRAEL-SUPPORTED “ILLEGAL OCCUPIERS”. THAT REMAINS UNSTATED.
AP is reporting that what it calls the Israeli “settler” population in the Palestinian West Bank has now exceeded 500,000, quoting an Israeli squatter organization. Later in the article AP admits that about 200,000 Israelis also live in East Jerusalem, but does not specify that their presence there is illegal, just as is that of the 500,000 in the rest of the Palestinian West Bank.
Source: No, Militant Israeli Squatters haven’t Exceeded 500K in Occupied Palestine: It is more Like 733,000
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Mr Trump said during the January 2, 2021, call, which was recorded by Mr Raffensperger’s office.
But it could be his efforts to change the outcome of the election in Georgia, the swing state that flipped for President Joe Biden, that may prove the more pressing legal risk to his campaign.
Source: How the US state of Georgia became ground zero for Donald Trump’s legal woes – ABC News
I requested an FOI review by the Information Commissioner and her office to expedite it. In December last year an OAIC assistant commissioner responded to me as follows:
“The OAIC is currently focusing on the case management and finalisation of aged matters, particularly the 305 IC review applications on hand received in 2018 and 2019. The OAIC received your IC review application on 19 July 2022 and I understand that there are approximately 1558 IC reviews on hand that were received prior to your application.”
Source: A Royal Dud: Queen’s death FOI debacle shows Australia’s transparency system is bust – Michael West
LNP POLITICS BEFORE FACTS
But what evidence is there that Labor’s decision to abolish the card has played a role in rising crime in Alice Springs?
Official crime data compiled by the Northern Territory government, meanwhile, shows that almost all types of criminal offences were on the rise before Labor’s cashless debit card changes.
The verdict Mr Joyce is ill-informed.
When Julia Gillard was Prime Minister, after every government announcement, action, or inaction the first line of most mainstream media articles on the subject – with predictable and monotonous regularity – began with; “Tony Abbott says …” or “The Leader of the Opposition says…”.
We haven’t been subjected to the same tedious announcements as much since the last federal election, but fear not, it is making its anticipated return.
Source: The Leader of the Opposition says … – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Will Tudge go down as Australia’s worst ever appointed Minister beating Peter Dutton who was voted worst ever Health, Immigration, and Homeland Security?
And at this point, with the discussion of the onus, it is worth reflecting that a pernicious feature of the scheme is that it simply externalised the department’s work to make the government of the day – and numbers in its budget – look better and to garner favourable media coverage. Of course, the stress, heartache and effort borne by welfare recipients targeted by the program well and truly eclipsed any savings in the Government’s budget.
There was not much point in the program at all if it both failed and didn’t win the Government favourable media coverage.
Source: Alan Tudge’s Robodebt RC performance akin to pulling teeth
55 journalists have been killed and hundreds more injured or detained by Israel since 2000. Yet for many Palestinian, the physical harm they face pales in comparison to the constant delegitimization of their work by in the media.
Only Palestinian voices can convey the emotions of highly charged stories about Palestine, stories that never make it to mainstream media coverage. When they do, these stories are often missing context, prioritize Israeli views – if not outright lies – and sometimes omit Palestinians altogether. But as the work of Abu Akleh, al-Samoudi, Alnaouq and Shalash, and hundreds more, continues to demonstrate, Palestinians are qualified to produce high-quality journalism with integrity and professionalism.
Source: Palestinians Are Not Liars: Confronting the Violence of Media Delegitimization – scheerpost.com
There are currently only two Jewish heads of state in the world. The first, not surprisingly, leads Israel. The second is Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.
So much for conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world.
We can’t even get together to control the outcome of the war in Ukraine. They don’t get along.
Source: Why Isn’t Israel Helping the only other Jewish Head of State, in Ukraine?
The bootstraps narrative is near and dear to Americans’ hearts. But it’s a fiction, one that obscures complex relationships of interdependence and generates a culture of self-blame. It’s time to bust the myth for good.
Trump Speak has no Logic it merely requires control of the Megaphone.
Let’s follow Trump’s odd logic for a minute: If life under Biden is like April Fools’ Day every day, then the things that Trump is worrying over aren’t real.
Some of the idiot balls in Australia are made local. Kmart is in trouble for deciding that Australia Day merchandise doesn’t sell well enough to justify stocking it, a version of the American “woke companies” gambit. The “threat” of the anodyne Voice to Parliament is created out of thin air by the Murdoch Dog Line. This furphy is manufactured as part of the illusory anglosphere “Critical Race Theory” threat. Any effort to teach a more balanced history of our colonial nations is met with stonewalling rage. So fragile are the white bastions of our greatness that stories of the pain inflicted in their creation would apparently destroy everything.
The damage that will be done to Australia’s First Nations people over the course of this referendum by the drastic mischaracterisations in the Murdoch media is substantial. The marriage equality “debate” was brutal for LGBTQI+ Australians, beset by slander. As Noel Pearson pointed out, Australia likes Aboriginal people much less than we like the gay people we know in our families, social and work spaces.
The exception to that calculus is trans people. There are so few that many older Australians have never met someone who is gender diverse. This has made them a very useful target of disinformation and dehumanisation.
Source: When culture war games trend lethal – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Meanwhile Netanyahu will continue to take like Kim Jong-Un in the knowledge that America will do nothing
Blinken did not, however, offer any practical steps for changing the shrinking horizon of Palestinian hope. Nothing any U.S. administration has done since 1967 has halted the Israeli colonization of Palestinian privately owned land for Israeli squatters who are illegally sent over the border and now are being heavily armed by the Netanyahu government.
Democracy in Action or wedging Dutton? ” Speak Up Peter” When Indigenous Australians ask Dutton for support they don’t and wont get it. As what they ask for isn’t Conservative policy,
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has also extended an olive branch to the Liberal leader, offering to come up with a constructive deal for constitutional reform in a private letter.
The letter, details of which were published in Nine newspapers, asked Mr Dutton for any “practical suggestions” he wished to contribute to the voice proposal.
The question might well be asked are we witnessing another Vietnam and a fight for Independence?
Students, activists; rather, the especially educated — are hand in hand with the true aggressors. This is not an aberration, but the norm.
Matthieu Buge writes on Russia Today: “Coppola had, in the ‘70’s, understood something that former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara only came to understand in the ‘90’s when he met with Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. With astonishment, he suddenly realised that the Vietnamese were fighting a war of independence, not an ideological war. The 20-year conflict in Vietnam had never been about the spread of communism in the world.”
This has already been the case again for the people in the Luhansk and Donetsk Republics, who want to stop being bombed after the past 8-9 years, and want their independence recognised — at present it has been recognised only by Russia. But Westerners have truly bought into the idea of this being an ideological war between democracy and autocracy, despite the US clearly not caring about democracy in Ukraine at all — in 2014 it backed a coup against a democratically-elected government, in elections certified by the OSCE.
Source: White man’s brutality and the educated middle-class – Pearls and Irritations
Prisoners in Massachusetts may soon be forced to choose between their organs and their freedom: Democratic legislators in the state are proposing a law that would allow prisoners to donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for up to a year off their sentence.
Source: A Gruesome Bill Asks Prisoners to Give Up Organs to Get Out a Few Months Early
Free for Trump but paid by Fox Kellyanne Conway renewed no pay role is all payday
Fox News contributor Kellyanne Conway delivered a salvo of on-air political attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris just hours after news broke of her joining former President Donald Trump’s nascent reelection effort as an unpaid adviser. Conway’s dual role as a political strategist for Trump and a commentator for Fox highlights the seamlessly symbiotic relationship between Fox and the Republican Party, and further exposes the network’s purported “news side” as being just another component of Fox’s political machine.
Does the Constitution need changing is The referendum
What comes after Parliament determines and is elected. Is “a Voice TO not IN parliament a reasonable request?
Their demand for information on “what the Voice will be” is not entirely a red herring. The Labor Government’s statement that it’ll be decided by Parliament after the referendum succeeds, is not satisfying what a large number of people think they should know, before voting “Yes”. It is an added risk, that as soon as you give some plan, oppositionists will start debating the plan — attacking the main idea by attacking the example. But that might have to be the cost of shutting them up about providing “details”.
My thought for the day
The real enemy of neo-conservative politics in Australia is not Labor or democratic socialism. It is simply what Australians affectionally call “a fair go.” (John Lord )
Source: The year ahead – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Wealthy and privileged public servants and politicians all collaborated to demonise the poor and destroy people’s lives with the Robodebt scheme, writes Dr Jennifer Wilson.
Source: Robodebt’s privileged perpetrators shamefully punished the poor
The Big 4 are too big, too powerful, too secretive, and corrupt. The PwC scandal is merely the tip of the iceberg. The answer is to break them up and force them to incorporate. They thrive in secrecy. Michael West reports.
Source: PwC scandal: who’s guarding the guards? Nobody – Michael West
Analysis of the Australian Electoral Commission’s 2022 donations data dump has revealed ‘dark money’ comprised up to 40% of major political party revenue. Liberals were the worst offenders. Callum Foote reports.
Democracy has a dream-like character. It sweeps into the world, carried forward by an immense desire by humans to overcome the barriers of indignity and social suffering.
When confronted by hunger or the death of their children, earlier communities might have reflexively blamed nature or divinity, and indeed those explanations remain with us today. But the ability of human beings to generate massive surpluses through social production, alongside the cruelty of the capitalist class to deny the vast majority of humankind access to that surplus, generates new kinds of ideas and new frustrations.
Source: Workers and Democracy
Not only is the story false, but it leaves out the bigger and more important story behind today’s federal debt: the switch by America’s wealthy over the last half century from paying taxes to the government to lending the government money.
This back story needs to be told if Americans are to understand what’s really happened and what needs to be done about it. Republicans won’t tell it, so Democrats (starting with Joe Biden) must.
Source: The Biggest Story You’ve Never Heard About Today’s Federal Debt | The Smirking Chimp
why on earth has the world’s only Jewish state failed to support the only other country with a Jewish leader? So much for conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world. We can’t even get together to control the outcome of the war in Ukraine.
When Israel refused to provide Ukraine with its Iron Dome air defense system, in the face of Russia’s brutal aerial assault on Ukrainian infrastructure, Zelensky couldn’t contain his frustration in an interview with French TV: “You know there are many people in Ukraine of Jewish origin, and there are a lot of Ukrainians in Israel. How is it possible to have this attitude? I was shocked.”
Zelensky and Netanyahu may share the distinction of being Jewish leaders. But the Ukrainian should not expect much in the way of military help from Israel. Frankly, the latter is too busy heading in the direction of fascism to be much help in defending a democratic state from Putinism.
Source: Israel’s Strange Ambivalence on Ukraine – CounterPunch.org
On January 27, Israeli forces kill 10 Palestinians in Jenin, including two youths and an elderly woman. The following day a lone Palestinian gunman shoots dead seven Israelis as they leave a synagogue in a settlement in East Jerusalem.
Source: Explaining Israel’s oppression: cruelty, evil, apartheid and colonisation – Pearls and Irritations
olddogthoughts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.