AIPAC, The Lobby, Billionaires & Money. But the flow of that money will have been laundered and not revealed until 2025
In numerous races across the country this year, Palestine is a key issue for voters. Popular opinion is on the side of a Gaza cease-fire, but pro-Israel billionaires are spending big to overcome that antiwar will.
The decline in the number of women elected to the House of Representatives, its reluctance to implement practical reforms such as quotas, ought to be a wake-up call for the Liberals, for whom History seems to have decided, “It’s Time.”
Of deeper concern, however, is the re-emergence of veneration for the strong man in politics, a fallacy once believed to have been consigned to the dustbin of history, is now enjoying a type of renaissance across the globe. George Santayana wrote,
This year’s election may be our last chance to push back against the oligarchy that the GOP has been constructing for the past forty-three years. President Biden and Democrats in Congress made a valiant try with the For The People Act that would have expanded voter rights, outlawed gerrymandering, and reversed Citizens United to strip dark money out of our electoral system, but were stabbed in the back by Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema.
And so, as we hurtle toward authoritarian aristocracy, we must normalize the idea of wealth redistribution. There is no good reason against it, not a single one. We can have either billionaires or democracy, not both.
Raising our kids with equal opportunity of being imprisoned
MUDDLE-MINDED politicians have built 17 children’s prisons (juvenile detention centres) across Australia, with five more slated for construction. More than one in two incarcerated children go on to adult incarceration. One in 50 living Australians have been to prison. Because of the intergenerational sins of this nation, one in six of the living descendants of this continent’s First Peoples has been to prison.
A man at the centre of an infamous alt-right push to take over the NSW Young Nationals in 2018 has been unceremoniously dumped from the office of the first ever independent MP for Wagga Wagga, after Michael West Media informed him he had unwittingly hired an extremist.
Craig Murray is the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, a whistleblower, journalist and one of the leading voices for the freedom of Julian Assange. In this wide-randing interview with The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal, Murray takes aim at the US and UK’s claims to uphold democracy while jailing dissidents – including Murray himself – for protesting and exposing their crimes.
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.
Imran Khan was challenged by the current Pakistan government and thrown out of government. He’s been arrested on count after count,53 in fact, and imprisoned just before the nation’s current election. There is no “equivalence” in these cases to Donald Trump who actually should be wearing an orange jumpsuit but isn’t and is claiming martyrdom. There is, in the case of Russia’s Alexei Navalny who just received an extra 19 years imprisonment for his opposition to Putin who tried to have him killed. Strange even Australia’s Julian Assange is more dangerous than Donald Trump who still is walking about scot-free having been charged and is issuing threats publicly.
We recently celebrated the Indian President Narendra Modi declaring we share the same Ideology and do the same with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu who’s Religious dictatorships are the antithesis of our idea of Democracy
“If you’re watching this video,” Khalid said, “it means that I’ve been arrested.”
The latest JFK disclosure is further proof the CIA has lied for decades about its relationship to Lee Harvey Oswald. No wonder it doesn’t want the last of the records to see the light of day.
There are any number of books providing a welter of information on constitutional recognition, but Davis’ essay is a generous, coherent and thorough summary. Available to anyone who honestly wants the information.”
Mainstream media and the Federal Opposition are spreading “The-Voice-is-divisive” rhetoric — a shameless attempt to sow unnecessary seeds of division in Australian society, writes Belinda Jones.
If that had occurred during the days of the East India Company’s global activities it would never have become the British East India Company. When over 40% of British MPs were investors, joint shareholders and it’s protectors.
When corporations use their vast wealth to distort or seize control of the political process, they have ceased to operate within the constraints established at their creation. They are in violation of their own corporate charters and should be shuttered or sold off.
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.
As Israel celebrates the 75th anniversary of its founding, and nearly a century and a half after the first Zionists came to Palestine from Europe, the core tension behind the country’s establishment – whether a Jewish state could be a democratic state, whether Zionism could accommodate pluralism – is more obvious than ever.
The Athenian citizens were the controllers and the engine room of their own democracy. They made laws, administered them and decided when they had been breached. No one, irrespective of wealth or power, had any more influence than anyone else.
The Murdochs’ local business model increasingly is that of its American Fox News organ, playing to a conservative audience and in the process pushing its political arm further to the right.
Since late January, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been loudly protesting an impending judicial overhaul by the nation’s new right-wing government. The most controversial part of the proposal gives the Knesset, Israeli’s parliament, the power to overrule supreme court decisions with a simple majority vote, which means the nation’s top court would be unable to strike down objectionable laws. It would effectively, as one Israeli news report put it, “neuter” the court.
Opponents say the changes, if allowed, will “endanger the entire legal system” and cement the power grip of the ruling coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces a corruption charge. (The Knesset already has approved another rule stating that a prime minister may only be removed from office for physical or mental unfitness.) Since the changes were proposed, Israelis have taken to the streets en masse to register their displeasure.
Let me ask you, though, in like an alternate universe where they would go out there and say, we knew, we’ve always known. I mean, you cannot undo the damage that has been done, Angelo, to our democracy.
Fox’s actions are not only an egregious violation of FEC law and regulations “but also a nefarious attempt by people in power to operate a press entity as a political organization, in blatant disregard of the rules that govern our elections and democracy.” Media Matters concludes, “As such, we respectfully request that the Commission immediately investigate these violations, fine Respondents the maximum amount permitted by law, and take appropriate remedial action.”
In the United States government has been privatized by the Citizens United ruling of the SCOTUS. Government is now really up for sale and auctioned off to the highest campaign contributors.
Generational Wealth is Murdoch’s Immortality, His great, great, grandkids will never have to work to live or even live to work.
On both sides of the Atlantic, Rupert Murdoch’s news empire is built on a hate-for-profit business model — engaging in migrant bashing, election denial, and anti-LGBTQ hysteria to drive ratings and make him and his hosts rich.
People across the world have watched the thousands of Israelis demonstrating against their government with at least some bemusement. After 75 years of Israel denying its own agency in the terrible catastrophe it has inflicted on the Palestinians, its new government is now blamed for doing something most Israeli governments have never done – openly discussing the aim of controlling the whole of Palestine through an exclusive Jewish apartheid state.
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.
According to Peter Dutton she should count herself lucky she’s not in a country where she could have been shot
If you are seeing this campaign, then I have been sentenced to prison for peaceful environmental protest. On April 14, I stopped a truck on the Harbour Bridge with my firefighter friend to draw attention to the climate and ecological emergency, and to the fact our firefighters do not have the tools they need to protect us.
We are after all Constitutionally a Secular Democracy
Trioli’s conclusion,
And then I realised I had been wondering a similar thing all week – something that had been bothering me really ever since the marriage equality debate: why do churches like Thorburn’s City on the Hill care so much about what’s going on in the bedrooms and GP consulting rooms of people they have absolutely nothing to do with?
Why do some people – overzealous ex-students and overanxious parishioners – have such a powerful need to control others?
Private Education divides a Nation Systemically and Culturally. Secularism promotes Unity and accepts Diversity
The US education system is being desecularized as public money floods into private religious schools. This mix of religious conservatism and free-market fundamentalism threatens to unravel public education.
The United States and Russia are powers with self-serving ambitions, but their covert actions have produced more failures than successes. Even so-called short-term “successes” such as the coup in Iran have become long-term failures or liabilities. Clandestine Soviet activities in East Europe in the Cold War have created an East European membership for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation that is passionately anti-Russian. U.S. covert action in Central America merely increased the violence in that region, bringing great embarrassment and substantial emigration to the United States.
“Whatsoever a man sowed, that shall he also reap.”
The minute Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison brought their Christian beliefs to their roles as Australia’s PM they began diminishing Australia’s Democracy.
Conservative Christianity was once able to discriminate against LGBTQ people, but now it isn’t. As more people realize the rights that are due them by virtue of being human, the sphere of religious imposition shrinks, and the crusade is seeking to reclaim that lost ground. Really, when you get down to it, this is about a dominant caste that is waning in cultural status and is desperately trying to cling to that privilege and supremacy.
Our American democracy, even when we were happy with it and thought it was doing really well, it already had a whole series of undemocratic natures that no other healthy liberal democracy has.
Our electoral college, nobody has that. That was a compromise to rural states. We have the fact that our elections are run by partisan agents. No other healthy liberal democracy has that. Canada, this enormous country, has an independent electoral commission that runs all of the elections. Every ballot is the same no matter if you vote in Prince Edward Island or the Yukon. Or that we allow so much money to be injected into our system. Nobody else has this.
The British monarchy is a vestige of tyranny, a grand monument to hierarchy and plunder. As Irish socialist James Connolly wrote in 1911, the royals are for the other despots of society, the capitalists and landlords — not for the working class.
Clearer is that the Murdoch’s were always front and center of this globally. They fled to America where the laws and market were much more lax after Rupert’s almost jailing in the UK.
It’s clear the misinformation tactics so readily employed by conservatives for the last decade or so are found to be wanting when held up to scrutiny. Over the years, numerous trends in the USA make their way over to this side of the Pacific relatively quickly – let’s hope holding peddlers of misinformation to account ‘flies across the Pacific’ quickly.
It has been almost two years since Kevin Rudd uploaded a video to his social media channels calling Rupert Murdoch an “arrogant cancer on our democracy” and invited Australians to sign his petition for a royal commission into media dive
rsity.It gathered half a million signatures, including that of former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, and triggered a year-long Senate committee inquiry that concentrated its focus on the influence of Murdoch’s News Corp empire.
People like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones, who write and comment outrageously based on payment for controversy, will eventually pass on as Gough Whitlam did. They will be quickly forgotten, but he will go down in the annals of Australian history as a decent, optimistic, passionate and sagacious Prime Minister who made an enormous contribution to Australian society. Something they could never aspire to do.(John Lord)
Never in the history of this nation have the rich and the privileged been so openly brazen.The rise of narcissism and inequality and the demise of compassion illustrate the state of the world.( John Lord )
there is a grotesque orange cloud hovering over the GOP in the person of Donald J. Trump who is planning to announce his candidacy any time now and remind everyone in the country that the Republican Party has been remade in his image and still dances to his tune. When asked what he thought about Trump entering the 2024 race, Joe Biden said he welcomes it. No doubt. Biden may be unpopular but in head-to-head polls, he still beats Trump.
If this didn’t tell you what Morrison and the Pentecostalists were intent on doing then nothing will. They wanted the end to the separation of powers, go the way of Israel and turn Australia into an Apartheid White Christian State. More so they were intent on doing it by stealth. It’s why the religious discrimination bill was their priority if they had won the election.
With all that’s going on in the world – a pointless war, a global pandemic, rampant global heating leading to increasingly severe and compounding natural disasters, superpowers competing over our region, soaring cost of living, rising inflation, unaffordable housing, poverty, social unrest – the last government spent its dying days fighting for a religious discrimination bill we didn’t need and arguing over trans women playing sport.
My thought for the day You cannot possibly believe in democracy if at the same time you think your party is the only one that should ever win. ( John Lord )
Newscorp ( Murdoch) wants Australian Media Americanised. It’s how it made it’s profit. It wants the UK media well done burnt to the ground and the BBC gone like the ABC too.
What does a democracy do when a dominant news media organisation goes rogue during an election campaign?
In 2022, News Corporation is confronting Australia with this question once again, as it did in 2019, 2016 and 2013, and as it did in the United States in 2016 and 2020.
“Going rogue” here means abandoning any attempt at fulfilling one of the media’s primary obligations to a democratic society — the provision of truthful news coverage — and instead becoming a truth-distorting propagandist for one side.
The evidence that News Corp has gone rogue during the current federal election is plentiful. It can be seen every morning in its newspapers across the country, and every evening on Sky News after dark.
A sample of its election coverage over the period April 27 to May 2 makes the case.
With over 82 million followers, Musk has been a prolific Twitter user and a sharp critic of its use of content moderation, saying that he favors temporary suspensions over permanent bans. It remains unclear what changes, technical or philosophical, Musk’s stewardship will bring to the platform. In interviews, he’s floated a series of potential ideas, including installing an edit button, allowing for longer tweets, culling bots, and making Twitter’s algorithm open source.
“Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill, a member of the Select Committee, characterized the January 6 attack on our democracy as a “dry run” – implying it could happen again – perhaps successfully. It will happen again – unless we put mechanisms in place to constrain a corrupt president from exploiting the absolute power presently conveyed by the Insurrection Act. That change needs to happen now – before yet another authoritarian – or even the same one – tries another Jan. 6 and succeeds,” he argued.
The very notion of Democracy and the Separation of Powers lead to a Godless State. However, Scott Morrison believes he was chosen to correct that. He believes he’s more than a member of an elected government but a member of God’s “elect” born to rule and that’s why he’s neither a liar nor a bully. He’s simply right!!
For much of the twentieth century, communism was a global movement, with branches in almost every nation, that sought to do away with the present state of things. It demanded and inspired unswerving loyalty from its members, who built a counterculture embracing almost every aspect of their lives. In this way, communist parties were unlike typical bourgeois parties, who extend politics only to elections and stakeholder management.
olddogthoughts 
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