poverty

France prints colonial money for Burkina Faso, which is one of the poorest nations in the world, although it has gold and uranium. In return France demands 50% of everything Burkina Faso exports.  Burkina Faso's uranium supplies 30% of French nuclear plant needs, but 80% of Burkina Fasoans have no electricity. Gold mined by child-labour mostly ends up in French state coffers.  The French government wants the deposed president reinstated. So, is this a coup or a revolution?

Workers in Australia took a 4.6% real term pay cut in 2022, losing on average AUD $4,163 and working almost 10 days effectively unpaid because wages did not keep up with inflation, reveals new analysis from Oxfam ahead of International Workers Day.  

The total losses for workers in Australia was AUD $58 billion, while the increase to the minimum wage was 1.3% below inflation. 

Just how effective is the power of prayer? For many of us who are poor and helpless, prayer is the only WMD that we can get our hands on.

Prayer is our AK-47, our Uzi, our nuclear missile, our Glock. It is the only defense that we have against the slings and arrows that are constantly aimed at our hearts by those more rich and powerful and brutal than we are.

In Mexico City, the Sacred Heart of Jesus has become our bunker, our NORAD, our Marine Corps and even our numbered bank account in the Caymans.

But are we -- the victims, the vulnerable, the unprotected, the powerless -- are we actually being armored and protected by prayer or is it just wistful thinking because we have nothing else? Who knows.

Are the poor and defenseless in places like Yemen, Ferguson, Honduras, Tibet, Syria, Ukraine, Standing Rock, Afghanistan, Gaza and Libya actually being protected by their prayers to Yahweh, Allah, God, Buddha, Shiva, the Great Spirit, etc.?

Will my own heartfelt and constant prayers for world peace ever be answered? Who the freak knows? They haven't been so far. However, realistically, do we who are the meek and wretched of the earth really have any other choice?

And here in Mexico City, like everywhere else, the defenses of we the defenseless are limited too -- and yet here in both the grand cathedrals and the humble churches by the side of the road, the defenseless grandmothers and beggars and disabled and working stiffs and vulnerable salt of the earth all continue to pray.

PS: Here's another thing that we clearly need to pray about: America's government!

According to The Saker, a trustworthy political blog site, there is currently a huge clash of Titans going on far above our heads -- as the neo-con Deep State struggles to discredit, impeach, assassinate and/or eliminate (wait for it!) Donald J. Trump. Any way that they can. Apparently those guys really really really hate The Donald -- even more than the Left in America hates him. And that's saying a lot.

With regard to the phony intelligence document recently leaked by John McCain, The Saker warns us that, "After several rather lame false starts, the Neocons have now taken a step which can only be called a declaration of war against Donald Trump... This is a political coup d’etat."

But. "If a coup is staged against Trump and some wannabe President à la Hillary or McCain gives the order to the National Guard or even the US Army to put down a local insurrection, we could see what we saw in Russia in 1991: a categorical refusal of the security services to shoot at their own people. That is the biggest and ultimate danger for the Neocons: the risk that if they give the order to crack down on the population, the police, security and military services might simply refuse to take action." http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46202.htm

PPS: Let us also pray that the police, security services and National Guard in North Dakota finally refuse to take action against the brave Standing Rock protesters too. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/standing-rock-police-militarized-emergency-management-assistance-compact-north-dakota

And also let us pray for the soggy and cold protesters on the much-raided "Poor Tour" in my hometown of Berkeley, CA. They are protesting the criminalization of being homeless in America and need all the help they can get. You don't have to go thousands of miles away to find something to pray for these days. https://www.facebook.com/firsttheycameforthehomeless/

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Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world.

And while you're at it, please buy my books! http://straitwellbooks.blogspot.com/2016/04/our-top-best-seller-right-now-is-bring.html

The Frankston Times and #wrapper">The Age have both this week published articles dealing with the problem of homelessness, and in particular the problem of "rough sleepers" - those sleeping on our streets and reserves.

There are rough sleepers in Frankston, and recently there have been anecdotal reports that these people are being preyed upon by small groups of thieves and sexual predators. This article discusses the problem of rough sleepers and a possible way we can help protect these people in Frankston.

This article was orginally published in the Independent Australia.

Imagine that you had a place to call home. A place to which you had an undeniable birth right. A place to which no matter where you roamed you could always return and be welcome. A place where familiar faces would always greet you with open arms.

Imagine then that this place also provided with a little effort all your food and other needs. Imagine also, that this place was a garden paradise, cultivated by your family for generations a cultivation to which you also could contribute.

Imagine that this is then suddenly all taken away. The friendly faces of loving and caring friends and family are replaced by the cold faces of a desperate, greedy and violent people. You, and your community, are forcibly removed. Abused and killed in the process.

Over the ensuing years you watch as, midst much ugly dispute, the garden paradise is divided up and transformed. In some places the transformation is slow; in others it is rapid and dramatic.  The landscape is dug up, aided by machines that belch filth and which leave enormous permanent scars.

The land that was once a mother to you and your people is changed forever. The society which nurtured you and your people permanently changed — if not extinguished.

Based on the accounts of Bill Gammage and available historical records, this is the crime European settlers have perpetrated on the Australian landscape and on its Indigenous people.

Gammage’s fundamental point was the ‘sophisticated, successful and sensitive farming regime integrated across the Australian landmass’ – described by him as ‘a majestic achievement’ – ended with European settlement. And it is this crime that is, perhaps, still denied by many. 

Not only was it a crime, but it hints at the errors of our society.

Australians now are not born with a home as an undeniable birth right.

They do not inherit the security and comfort of knowing that, come what may, there will always be a place where they are welcomed. Instead they are born dispossessed. Born into a country which has been neatly parcelled out to private owners.

A home for most Australians now is something insecure, something that takes many a lifetime to attain, and for some is never attained. Something that can coldly and callously be taken away when one is most vulnerable, due perhaps to the loss of a job or an inability to work due to personal injury or distress.

Banks can repossess if payments are not made — and even if this never happens, all those with a mortgage must live under the oppressive anxiety of this threat.

And even once a home is owned it is not safe. If one struggles to pay council rates, the home can be forfeited.

Again the essential trait of our society comes forth. Just when one is most vulnerable, our society allows them to be kicked while down. Once homeless, for tens of thousands of Australians, there is nowhere to go.

‘Authorities’ do not tolerate them on the streets, or in the parks. Even if they manage to live in these places they are subject to violence and sexual abuse.  

How Australia has changed since European settlement! How it has progressed!

And now we find it is not just Australia, but the same pattern is occurring across the world. The masses are dispossessed whilst a small elite gain wealth and power, in the end corrupting the very institutions intended to check their power.

The Ancien Régime, the aristocracy, is re-establishing itself. We return to an age whereby common people are serfs – people without rights, who live in constant insecurity, slaves to their masters who possess everything, if not the people themselves.  

Once again ‘commoners’ must begin the fight for basic human rights. These are the right to trial for protection against arbitrary imprisonment. These rights have been stripped back under the guise of anti-terrorist laws, along with mass surveillance. And it turns out really to be a means of protecting the privileges of the elite against even non-violent protest (even conservatives are worried about this).   

Then, if a people like the Crimeans find themselves as pawns caught between two covetous global  powers – both of which seek only to exploit both people and resources – and have to choose one side over the other in a legitimate referendum, propaganda machines are invoked, one power accusing the other.

This is the society we now live in.  This is modern Australia, as it is the modern world.

And it is not the first time we have been here. Writing during an earlier time of inequality (if it in fact is distinct from the processes active now) Rousseau declared:

 “The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Whilst many aspects of his 1754 Discourse on Inequality may be questioned, perhaps there is some truth to the statement above?

Is there a solution?

So what can be done? At very least we should allow the most dispossessed, the homeless, to be visible and to protect themselves as best they can.

This can be easily done by allowing homeless people legitimate access to public land to erect tents or swags, and communities of tents, should they so choose. Thus protected from discrimination by ‘authorities’ they may be able to establish protective relationships between themselves.

It is quite possible, likely even, that tent cities – perhaps even slums - may arise, but this itself is necessary if we are to make the problems of homelessness visible to people and government. Such visibility might be the first step towards better solutions.

Would such communities be an improvement? I believe they would be. The Occupy tent encampment in Melbourne was just such a ‘tent’ city. And it was occupied by at least some genuine homeless, and many marginalised in other ways.

Occupy's tent city, October 2011, Melbourne (courtesy Graham Miln)

The Occupy community was highly organised. It was kept clean and elections were held for organisers in the community so as to ensure pathways were kept clear.

Others participated in 24 hour ‘security’ patrols (in shifts) around the perimeter. This was necessary because the biggest problems arose not within the camp, but from everyday people passing by who would occasionally try and thump a few of the occupiers.

The response of occupiers to the one incident of internal violence I witnessed in the camp has led me to believe that evictions can be dealt with non-violently simply by a crowd of people standing around the perpetrator and shouting “shame” repeatedly until he or she leaves.

Coal seam gas protestors in Australia’s Northern Rivers region were recently living in a large tent camp (on a private property) quite happily and comfortably. Why cannot our poor be able to do this?

Bentley Blockade camp, NSW

It is entirely possible that living in a tent city may actually offer the homeless better and safer conditions than in built accommodation especially given accusations that the homeless are being exploited by unscrupulous landlords.

In any case, tent encampments are not unprecedented in Australia. They were certainly common during the 1929 Great Depression.  In fact, in early days, most Australian cities and towns were tent cities.

And apart from reducing vulnerability, legitimate homeless camps may also offer many other benefits in relation to delivering needed services and other assistance.

If allowed, homeless camps would not be unique to Australia as a developed nation.

As many early immigrants to Australia were haunted by the squalor of cramped London living, most Australian cities were designed with vast parkland areas. These offer more than enough space to accommodate our homeless whilst not excluding other uses.

The only barrier seems to be the sensibilities of the modern gentry and local authorities.

Nelson Mandela is dead and, despite his immense charisma, intellect, capability and courage, Africa remains poor, divided, overpopulated and spectacularly unhealthy. In her monumental book, The Shock Doctrine, Penguin, 2007, Naomi Klein told how economists got control of the details of the revolution during handover negotiations, blinded revolutionaries with their sophistry, and tied it up in red tape. They actually returned the management of the central bank to its apartheid boss. This article is an excerpt from pp200-204 of the chapter in The Shock Doctrine entitled, 'Democracy born in chains.' The greatest loss to the African Revolution was that by the time Mandela rose to power, his government no longer had the right to redistribute land - which is the essence of revolutionary government.

"[...] the de Klerk government had a twofold strategy. First, drawing on the ascendant Washington consensus that there was now only one way to run an economy, it portrayed key sectors of economic decision making - such as trade policy and the central bank - as 'technical' or 'administrative.' Then it used a wide range of new policy tools - international trade agreements, innovations in constitutional law and structural adjustment programs - to hand control of those power centers to supposedly impartial experts, economists and officials from the IMF, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the National Party - anyone except the liberation fighters from the ANC. It was a strategy of balkanization, not of the country's geography (as de Klerk had originally attempted) but of its economy.

This plan was successfully executed under the noses of ANC leaders, who were naturally preoccupied with winning the battle to control Parliament. In the process, the ANC failed to protect itself against a far more insidious strategy - in essence, an elaborate insurance plan against the economic clauses in the Freedom Charter every becoming law in South Africa. "The people shall govern!" would soon become a reality, but the sphere over which they would govern was shrinking fast.

While these tense negotiations between adversaries were unfolding, the ANC was also busily preparing within its own ranks for the day when it would take office. Teams of ANC economists and lawyers formed working groups charged with figuring out exactly how to turn the general promises of the Freedom Charter - for housing amenities and health care - into practical policies. The most ambitious of these plans was Make Democracy Work, an economic blueprint for South Africa's post apartheid future, written while the high-level negotiations were taking place. What the party loyalists didn't know at the time was that while they were hatching their ambitious plans, the negotiating team was accepting concessions at the bargaining table that would make their implementation a practical impossibility. "It was dead before it was even launched," the economist Vishnu Padayachee told me of Make Democracy Work. By the time the draft was complete, "there was a new ball game."

[...]

"We were caught completely off guard," recalled Padayachee, now in his early fifties. He had done his graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He knew that at the time, even among free-market economists in the U.S., central bank independence was considered a fringe idea, a pet policy of a handful of Chicago School ideologues who believed that central banks should be run as sovereign republics within states, out of reach of the meddling hands of elected lawmakers. For Padayachee and his colleagues, who strongly believed that monetary policy needed to serve the new government's 'big goals of growth, employment and redistribution,' the ANC's position was a no-brainer: "There was not going to be an independent central bank in South Africa."

Padayachee and a colleague stayed up all night writing a paper that gave the negotiating team the arguments it needed to resist this curveball from the national Party. If the central bank (in South Africa called the Reserve Bank) was run separately from the rest of the government, it could restrict the ANC's ability to keep the promises in the Freedom Charter. Besides, if the central bank was not accountable to the ANC government, to whom, exactly, would it be accountable? The IMF? The Johannesburg Stock Exchange? Obviously, the National Party was trying to find a backdoor way to hold on to power even after it lost the elections - a strategy that needed to be resisted at all costs. "They were locking in as much as possible," Padayachee recalled. "That was a clear part of the agenda."

Padayachee faxed the paper in the morning and didn't hear back for weeks. "Then, when we asked what happened, we were told, "Well, we gave that one up'." Not only would the central bank be run as an autonomous entity within the South African state, with its independence enshrined in the new constitution, but it would be headed by the same man who ran it under apartheid, Chris Stals. It wasn't just the central bank that the ANC had given up: in another major concession, Derek Keyes, the white finance minister under apartheid, would also remain in his post - much as the finance ministers and central bank heads from Argentina's dictatorship somehow managed to get their jobs back under democracy. The New York Times praised Keyes as "the country ranking apostle of low-spending business-friendly government."

Until that point, Padayachee said, "we were still buoyant, because, my God, this was a revolutionary struggle; at least there' be something to come out of it." When he learned that the central bank and the treasury would be run by their old apartheid bosses, it meant "everything would be lost in terms of economic transformation." When I asked him whether he thought the negotiators realised how much they had lost, after some hesitation, he replied, "Frankly, no." It was simple horse-trading: "In the negotiations, something had to be given, and our side gave those things - I’ll give you this, you give me that."

From Padayachee's point of view, none of this happened because of some grand betrayal on the part of ANC leaders but simply because they were out-maneuvered on a series of issues that seemed less than crucial at the time - but turned out to hold South Africa's lasting liberation in the balance.

What happened in those negotiations is that the ANC found itself caught in a new kind of web, one made of arcane rules and regulations, all designed to confine and constrain the power of elected leaders. As the web descended on the country, only a few people even noticed it was there, but when the new government came to power and tried to move freely, to give its voters the tangible benefits of liberation they expected and thought they had voted for, the strands of the web tightened and the administration discovered that its powers were tightly bound. Patrick Bond, who worked as an economic adviser in Mandela's office during the first years of ANC rule, recalls that the in-house quip was "Hey, we've got the state, where's the power?" As the new government attempted to make tangible the dreams of the Freedom Charter, it discovered that power was elsewhere.

Want to redistribute land? Impossible - at the last minute, the negotiators agreed to add a clause to the new constitution that protects all private property, making land reform virtually impossible. Want to create jobs for millions of unemployed workers? Can't - hundreds of factories were actually about to lose because the ANC had signed on to the GATT, the precursor to the World Trade Organisation, which made it illegal to subsidise the auto plants and textile factories. Want to get free AIDS drugs to the townships, where the disease is spreading with terrifying speed? That violates an intellectual property rights commitment under the WTO, which the ANC joined with no public debate as a continuation of the GATT. Need money to build more and larger houses for the poor and to bring free electricity to the townships? Sorry - the budget is being eaten up servicing the massive debt, passed on quietly by the apartheid government. Print more money? Tell that to the apartheid-era head of the central bank. Free water for all? Not likely. The World Bank, with its large in-country contingent of economists, researchers and trainers (a self-proclaimed "Knowledge Bank"), is making private-sector partnerships the service norm. Want to impose currency controls to guard against wild speculation? That would violate the $850 million IMF deal, signed, conveniently enough right before the elections. Raise the minimum wage to close the apartheid income gap? Nope. The IMF deal promises 'wage restraint.' And don't even think about ignoring these commitments - any change will be regarded as evidence of dangerous national untrustworthiness, a lack of commitment to 'reform' an absence of a 'rules-based system.' All of which will lead to currency crashes, aid cuts and capital flight. The bottom line was that South Africa was free but simultaneously captured; each one of these arcane acronyms represented a different thread in the web that pinned down the limbs of the new government.

A long time antiapartheid activist, Rassool Snyman, described the trap to me in stark terms. "They never freed us. They only took the chain from around our neck and put it on our ankles." Yasmin Sooka, a prominent South African human rights activist, told me that the transition 'was business saying, 'We'll keep everything and you [the ANC] will rule in name ... You can have political power, you can have the facade of governing, but the real governance will take place somewhere else. It was a process of infantilization that is common to so-called transitional countries - new governments are, in effect, given keys to the house but not the combination to the safe."

Governments are creating a great fear of an "ageing population" and population decline.  While asylum seekers are shunted off to PNG, there are over 1000 people legally imported into Australia each day - as skilled migrants or under the family reunion scheme – to alleviate our “ageing population”.

Our cities and infrastructure are buckling under the heavy weight of population growth, to alleviate our "ageing population"! We have constant "shortages", cut backs and austerity measures due to population pressures.  Young people are at risk from being lost to unemployment, and debt, as our economy lags behind population growth.
Mug shot of Charles Ponzi (March 3, 1882 – January 18, 1949). Charles Ponzi was born in Italy and became known as a swindler for his money scheme.

Increasing spending on welfare

With total government spending at $485 billion, spending on the welfare state accounted for a majority share—or 65% of the total. It is astounding that of the $316 billion that the government spent on welfare, approximately half, or $158 billion, was due to tax-welfare churn (The process of levying taxes on people and then returning those taxes to the same people in the form of income support payments and welfare services simultaneously or over the course of an individual’s lifetime).

When combined with the fiscal pressures of an ageing population and expected lower tax revenue growth, it is clear the Australian welfare state is unsustainable on current trends.

Australia is facing a welfare state-driven financial crisis like that which exists in Europe today. (CIS report: Target 30)

Target30 propose that superannuation be used to buy annuities, pension assets tests should include the family home, and aged pension and preservation ages be raised and aligned.

Social security and welfare spending accounted for A$138 billion in the latest budget, a rise of nearly 14% per year over the past decade. Assistance to the aged has risen to almost A$55 billion, a rise of 22% per year since 2003-04. In 2003-04 A$26 billion were payments to the aged, while families with children received A$21 billion.

Health expenditure expected to nearly double as a proportion of GDP over the next 40 years and aged-care spending projected to increase as a proportion of GDP from 0.8 per cent in 2010 to about 1.8 per cent in 2050.

The aged pension is predicted to cost $37 billion this year rising rapidly to $45 billion by 2015-16. It is estimated another 220,000 older Australians will start drawing down an aged pension in the coming four years.The greatest risk to prosperity come from sustained increases in spending, especially in health. Over the past decade health expenditure rose by over $40 billion in real terms. According to a Grattan Report the ageing population was not the prime cause. Rather, people of any age saw doctors more often, had more tests and operations and took more prescription drugs.

After welfare, the second biggest chunk of the federal budget is healthcare. This is "burdened" by the ageing population. The health budget is set to escalate to $71 billion by 2015-16.

In third place in the budget comes education spending at almost $30 billion a year, including funding for universities, non-government schools and some funding for public schools (although states still pick up most of the tab for public schools).

News.com: Where does all the money go

No doubt the best solution would be to ensure that older people were eliminated, by voluntary euthanasia, after they finished contributing economically to our society.

Ageing migrants

Despite many older people living long and healthy lives, and being financially self-sufficient, they are are being exaggerated as a threat. Migrants are ageing too. Professor Graeme Hugo AO, Director of the Australian Population and Migration Research Centre at the University of Adelaide, says the issue of ageing migrants is important to a range of policy areas in Australia. The last Census showed that 32,000 aged pensions are being paid every year direct to Greece and Italy to migrants who formerly came to Australia over the decades in the 20th century, and have now retired.

It's assumed that young migrants are the "silver bullet" to our ageing workforce, but migrants age too!

We need to end the stigma and discrimination of the aged in the work force and tap into their wisdom and experience. Japan has an ageing population, and still their economy is strong and growing - due to production and skills.

Importing young migrants only temporarily keeps our population "young" anyway, as everyone ages at the same rate. Rather than a constant flow of foreigners, many of whom are now facing higher rates of unemployment than Australian born, employers need to be flexible to allow part-time work, and tap into the experience and abilities of older workers.

Immigration only temporarily relieves ageing population

NSW Treasury Long-Term Fiscal Pressures Report answer to the fiscal ‘challenge’ of Australia’s ageing population is to increase immigration, restrain public sector pay, and – the quote here is direct – through “lowering community expectations” of services. There’s no Get Up! outrage over humdrum issues like 10 year-long queues for public housing, or ballooning hospital waiting times, or the fact that only 2% of rents in Sydney-Illawara are affordable for very low income workers. Deniers avert our attention to asylum seekers and gay marriage,"McMansions", big cars and over-consumption.

Population growth is also the lazy way to grow GDP (as opposed to GDP per capita) and make Treasurers look good. If this wasn’t enough, big business also has enormous influence on our major political parties through donations.

Young people remain longer in education before they take on full-time jobs in an economy increasingly based on knowledge and skills, and older people may often experience difficulty in finding employment. In 2011, 36% of Australia's older people were not born in Australia, a substantially higher proportion than the 24% of people under 65 years who were overseas-born.

It's not just "baby boomers" who are ageing!

In the Productivity Commission 2010 report titled Population and Migration: Understanding the Numbers, the Commission concluded that "Realistic changes in migration levels also make little difference to the age structure of the population in the future, with any effect being temporary, since immigrants themselves age."

Where does population growth end? We might be able to temporarily dilute, by a fraction, the proportion of people aged over 65, but in the long term the next generation will inherit a bigger "ageing population" to compensate for - but how?

“Realistic changes in fertility can have little impact on the age structure of the population in the short to medium term. While they have a greater effect in the longer term, they cannot stem the ageing of Australia’s population. Realistic changes to fertility could have some effect in the long term, but the proportion of older Australians will still grow from current levels. ”

End to the Age of Entitlements

The nation's peak welfare body has backed Joe Hockey's call for an end to the age of entitlement, arguing that people have "learned to expect new things from government" and tax reform is needed to transform the system. Australian Council of Social Service senior policy officer on tax and economics Peter Davidson said slowing growth and an ageing population meant the tax and welfare system was unsustainable.

The Australian: Joe Hockey call for an end to the age of Entitlement

Baby Bonus, Schoolkids Bonus and a Seniors Bonus are all "wasteful". Acoss says that taxes should be as simple, transparent and predictable as possible.

The Age of Entitlement is over. We should not take this as cause for despair. It is our market based economies which have forced this change on unwilling participants. Government spending on a range of social programs including education, health, housing, subsidised transport, social safety nets and retirement benefits has reached extraordinary levels as a percentage of GDP, and in an age of slowing growth and ageing population, are simply unsustainable.
It's an admission that our "growth" will inevitably lower our standards of living, and we will be less for our taxes. It's pure Ponzi economics!

Two decades of economic growth and we are being strangled economically.

“The reality is that despite more than two decades of strong economic growth, fault lines are emerging in our economic and social foundations that we simply cannot continue to ignore.

“There are major holes in our social safety net that the next government will have to address – in affordable housing, education, disability, mental and dental health, and community controlled services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples..." In reality, 22 years of "economic growth" has left us worse off, and poverty is increasing with 2.2 million people living below the poverty line.

ACOSS outlines proposals for first 100 days of new government (They never suggest limiting growth!)

Australia has long been one of the countries which has most enthusiastically pursued growth through immigration. But as the fertility rate fell – it has been below replacement rate for more than 30 years – that Big Australia goal became ever more reliant on imported people.

With no policies on slowing immigration levels, the flow of migrants to the western suburbs will hardly slow at all.

Lower fertility rates mean older, less innovative and productive workforces. More importantly to the Ponzi economic order, older, stable or declining populations consume less. So growth requires either importing people, or exporting stuff, or a combination of the two. Orthodox economics simply can’t cope otherwise.

“Economic growth” Ponzi economics

The Economy is meant to serve us, not “grow” to detrimental levels and deny its very purpose – to care for our health, education, children and seniors, and be a safety-net when emergencies strike.

“We’re certainly operating a Ponzi scheme in Australia,” says Dr Bob Birrell, an economist and migration expert from Monash University.

“Our growth is predicated on extra numbers… [and] more of our activity is going into city building and people servicing, which do not directly produce many goods that can be traded in overseas markets".

There are limits to growth, and Ponzi pyramid growth schemes always collapse and leave the participants worse off - except for the capital owners at the summit. What we need is a circuit-breaker to the growth/ageing population/"economic growth" mentality that is destroying our environment, vilifying older people, and causing hardship and increasing budgetary austerity.

We applaud the initiatives of the Gillard Federal Government today in refunding Aged Care. PM unveils $3.7bn overhaul of aged care, Friday April 20, 2012. We are particularly impressed to read that: "The [Gillard] government rejected a Productivity Commission recommendation that proposed allowing the use of reverse mortgage facilities to help fund care costs." Good on the Gillard government! Reverse mortgages steal inheritances, impoverish youth and render them homeless, and amount to double charges for old age care provision (on top of taxes). We republish a relevant and well-researched article on this matter. See also "Ageism" and ABC article on reverse mortgages.

Article by Sheila Newman with Jill Quirk. First published June 16, 2011. Republished for news relevance on April 20, 2012. Title changed at this time to include 'Reverse mortgage and other'.

Original 'teaser' for 2011 publication

This article applies to all Australians, including men. Women live longer, however, so age discrimination is actually also a feminist issue. The Australian system builds in a bias of financial vulnerability for women. Any property women may have accumulated despite this bias is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care. If you have assets worth more than $39,000 you may be levied up to $30.55 per day. Unless the people who live in the house you occupied are your partner or relatives who qualify for some kind of income supplement, which is similarly assessed. There is a “financial hardship” provision but it is assessed on a case by case basis, which amounts to secretly, and, given the income criteria above, one would expect it to be Dickensian. And population pressure makes it all worse.

Main points

Women live longer so age discrimination is also a feminist issue

Any property ordinary people may have accumulated is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care

• If you have assets worth more than $39,000 you may be levied up to $30.55 per day
• Unless the people who live in the house you occupied are your partner or qualify for income support, but then only if they qualify for some kind of income supplement, which is similarly assessed.
• There is a “financial hardship” provision but it is assessed on a case by case basis and, given the income criteria above, one would expect it to be Dickensian.

Aged Care robs the poor of their Land and Inheritance

• This algorithm obviously doesn’t take property inflation into account, either as a cost or as a so-called “asset” and it doesn’t ensure that your children and grandchildren will be protected and sheltered after you have gone. It makes it even easier for the banks to own everything and for everything you have worked for to go into the hands of private business interests.

How the government is making the elderly pay again for their health care

Nursing home care: The residential care facility becomes the chronically ill person's home. It counts as medical care for income tax purposes, but is not counted as medical care for other purposes. Arguably this is a breach of citizens' rights to free public medical care in Australia, denied them on the basis of age.

High land costs erode affordability of nursing homes and shrink profit margins

What else is really wrong with the health care system: why so many elderly people occupy ?80% of beds

• Ambulances misused
• Lack of visiting nurses
• Lack of visiting GPs
• Lack of trained Personal Care Assistants
• Rental and Land costs erode funds for wages, so we cannot pay these people properly
• Many of the 80% elderly in hospital beds could be dealt with better and more cheaply at home

Some fixes for the Oz Health Care system within the limitations of the current [insufficient] paradigm

Recommendation: Close beds and divert the funds to community-based care.

Conclusion: Why the costs of aged health care are not the taxpayer or the elderly person’s responsibility, but the government’s. (Land costs and failure to provide services in the community)

Women live longer so Age-Discrimination is a Feminist issue:

Although this article definitely concerns elderly men, age discrimination affects more women than it does men and they are materially more vulnerable to its effects. Why does age-discrimination affect more women? Simply because more women live longer, by a substantial margin.

We choose here to attract the attention of elderly women to this matter because it tends to take them unawares. We want men to read this article as well though because it directly concerns them as well. It also concerns peoples' children because it affects their inheritance rights to shelter in a country where most people can no longer guarantee indefinitely against homelessness.

The Australian System builds in a bias of financial vulnerability for women

Why are women more materially vulnerable to the effects of age-discrimination?

By materially vulnerable, we are referring to the average earnings, savings, shares, superannuation and property held by women. It is well-known that women earn less overall than men because women’s work is less well-paid. For elderly women this was actually true in legislation until 1972 when women were awarded equal pay for equal work, however 40% of women did not do work which was considered equal to men’s work, and this situation is still not entirely remedied. Many women also work fewer hours due to caring for children. Women are also less likely to be promoted into high management with higher pay in any workforce situation due to positive discrimination towards men in the work-force.

Any property Women accumulate is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care

Some of the positive discrimination in the work force towards men is partly rectified by the tendency for wives to inherit from their deceased husbands. This however works against women whose husbands remarry, for it is likely to be the last wife who inherits what the husband has accumulated. Divorce also tends to leave women worse off than it leaves men if they have children, particularly if the married couple’s income relied on the man as the sole wage-earner. Although divorced couples are obliged to split up their property, they are not obliged to split up the wage ongoing. The man (or the woman’s wage) is their own. Courts will award payments to the children, but these tend to be rather inadequate. That means that if the woman is caring for the children and cannot work, she must rely on subsistence allowances from Social Security. If she is a mother then her chances of having a history of equal wages, education and training are less than a man’s, as are her future chances of getting these.

Historically British territories and colonies have tended to have inheritance laws favouring males, notably in Britain where, until 1922, only the first born male could inherit land. Although parents may now leave their estates to whomever they please, the tendency is still to leave more to boys than to girls. This situation puts women at an immediate disadvantage in life and is one of the reasons that women are intrinsically more dependent on marriage to raise children in our society than in France, for instance, where equal inheritance by children is the law.

Where a person marries more than once, the tendency of the law is to award all the estate to the latest spouse. This usually leaves any earlier wives, including de facto wives, in the cold, along with their children, who are very poorly protected under Australian law. These situations increase the bias against female property accumulation and mean that when women are old they have lesser means to enjoy their retirement and to pay for health care.

[There are exceptions which you can read about in a good 2010 transcript and interview on the ABC Law Report http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2010/3016770.htm] Note however, that few ordinary women can afford to pay a lawyer, let alone go to court.

Women and Age Discrimination in our Medical Care System

There is a lot, a lot wrong with the way that our medical system treats the elderly - male and female. Women however bear the brunt of this medical system age discrimination.

We are born in a women'’s hospital, a general hospital or at home. At this point in our lives all efforts are made to give us the best start in life. New babies are screened for medical and sensory defects and early intervention is commenced where any needs are detected. Whilst maternal care is probably not as luxurious as it was a few decades ago when mothers were relieved of normal responsibilities and full care of their babies for about 10 days after the birth, they are still at least cared for in hospital for a day or two, funded through the medical system.

During childhood, serious illnesses and accidents are dealt with through the medical system and children’s' hospitals. Of course where long term care is needed for a disability, the system is seriously inadequate. Institutions and processes caring for the seriously disabled are universally underfunded and under-resourced.

Treatment of other accidents or injuries are paid for through Medicare national medical insurance –(up to a point) in the public hospital system or the private hospital system where, ironically, if you carry private insurance, you end up paying far more in out of pocket expense than you would if you carried no insurance and were treated in the public system. Still - one has a choice – if one has the money!

How the situation changes when you are elderly

When you are classified as elderly, the situation changes. You go into hospital as a normal adult, with, for example, a leg break from a fall at home. When hospital treatment has gone as far as it can you are then assessed by a team of medical and social work professionals in conjunction with your family (if you have one). If, following this, you are unable to go home again you will need to go into long term care.

At this point your whole accumulated wealth over a lifetime and income will be assessed in determining how much you now pay for essential medical care.

If you have no wealth apart from your house, this may need to be sold or remortgaged to pay a deposit on a place in an aged care facility. Medicare does not care for your next hospitalization - the nursing home. The Act that provides for this is The Aged Care Act 1997. The exceptions for low-income earners are truly Dickensian:

According to Elderly Rights Advocacy (www.era.asn.au):

“The following people are not required to pay an accommodation charge:
• residents whose assets are worth less than 2.25 times the annual single age pension ($39,000 as at 20/3/11);
• users of respite care;
• anyone who is suffering financial hardship (this is decided by the Department of Health and Ageing);
• residents entering low level care or an extra service facility to receive either low or high level care (these residents may be asked to pay an accommodation bond instead): and
• “concessional” residents.”

Aged Care robs the poor of their Land and Inheritance

Whatever the thresholds and grab-back clauses, an important consideration that is never canvassed is the effect on peoples’ inheritance. Land and housing go out of the family and into private business. In a context of rising housing prices family homes and other assets which might have compensated children for the harsh economic conditions they have been born into, are not available to them.

What do people pay taxes for? Most people pay somewhere around one third of their income in income tax. On top of this there are rates and charges for services, and on top of these, the Goods and Service Tax (GST).

What do we get in return?

Before the second world war the rate of income tax was a great deal less – perhaps around 10%. Income tax was introduced to Australian states between 1880 and 1907. In 1849 in NSW income tax was introduced at the rate of 6 pence in the pound. (A pound contained 240 pence]

Overall we work harder for many less basics and we need more costly items, such as cars for travel. The major cost which has risen is the cost of land, which underpins all other costs and cuts profits.

The care of elderly people and of disabled people used to be provided mainly by the state, using crown land, for which no rent was charged. The state did not need to make a profit and costs were paid for by income tax. The state has since sold off most of the land where buildings with suitable services were provided to private developers. Most of those developers have turned this land over to private housing. So the services it once provided have disappeared. As population has increased in this country (due to government policies to increase it through immigration) the price of land for any building or business, including agriculture, has greatly increased – to levels among the highest in the world.

Nursing care and special accommodation is now provided by private business, which needs to make a profit.

Now old age care providers complain that they not only cannot make sufficient profits, but they cannot even make ends meet. All sorts of adjustments have been made to the supply and remuneration of labour in order to mitigate this problem. For instance doctors and nurses have been imported from other countries and these people are taxed at a much higher rate than Australian nationals. In this way the government actually cuts the cost of wages in some government facilities. Another instance is where registered nurses and state enrolled nurses have been replaced by Personal Service Attendants, with no professional health delivery training, who are placed in charge of frail and elderly persons with medical problems and who need their medication supervised.

The one adjustment that needs to be made is the reduction in the cost of land and rent.

This discriminatory treatment of a whole class of citizens has far-reaching undesirable consequences for most of our population, but it advantages the property development and conveyancing industry. Probably due to their enormous influence over Australian governments, this economically and socially unsustainable situation continues to consolidate.

Ageist growth-spruikers normalise dispossession and unfair imposts

For instance Bernard Salt, of KPMG, and Andrew MacLeod, of The Committee for Melbourne, with the help of Murdoch's Herald Sun, recently tried to market the idea of older people selling their low density properties to make way for higher density ones for younger people.

"If they are an empty-nester living near a school they are actually taking a role that from a society's perspective would be better taken by a family." (Andrew MacLeod)

See the article, "Should Jeannie Pratt and Elisabeth Murdoch downsize to high rises in Activity Centers to give young people more room?" There was no acknowledgement that, in the normal course of life, old peoples' properties go to their children or other relatives who survive them. For the property industry, this traditional legacy is undesirable because it cuts down on their potential opportunities to make money on property transactions. It does this by avoiding a commercial transaction in the transmission of property. The state still makes a quid, through death duties, but the State and the property development hanger-ons (conveyancers/lawyers, subdividers, builders, agents etc) get few or no bites at the property of the deceased.

“Now Australia's "Productivity Commission," is advocating so-called "reforms" for the $10.1 billion sector, which would force people to pay between 5% and 25% of their incomes towards old-age care, and which would include their actual homes as part of their incomes. This proposal has been called "HECS for the elderly."” (April 22, 2011, Herald Sun

In fact this proposal does not seem much different from what is already happening. Basically no person with any assets above $39,000 can keep ownership of their home and get aged care unless those who live in their house are pensioners of some kind with similarly small asset bases.

Such measures entail mortgages being taken on the family home, to be paid after the death of the home-owner. This makes the bank the owner of the home and capable of dispossessing any future inheritors or that they simply inherit colossal debts.

Serfdom for Australians

This is a form of serfdom.

It is all part of a trend toward dispossession of a larger and larger class of people. Ask yourself what will happen when - as in feudal times - only a very few people in society own all the property, all the assets and all the means of production. Everyone else will have only their labour and skills to sell in an employers' market.

Why would any free people allow such a thing to happen? If Australia were really a democracy, how could any government auspiced commission dare to propose such abrogation of basic rights through enslavement and theft? The excuse is always 'economic efficiency', but this is really only an excuse. It does not stand up to examination because economic efficiency in Australia is constantly undermined by huge land and housing prices which erode profit margins. The only give in the system involves legislating for undemocratic wealth transfer - robbing the poor to give to the rich. Since the property moguls are constantly making laws and policies to push property prices up, that only leaves wages that can be pushed down and privately owned homes that can be acquired through debt induced by such government policies as mortgaging elderly peoples' homes by threatening to leave them with no services as they near death.

Under European law, the State not only has the duty of providing health care for people of all ages, but it also has the duty to provide shelter. And, when a person dies, if their property does not go to their nearest kin, taxes penalise those who acquire it. We need such laws in Australia.

What happens to elderly peoples' property when they go into homes? What happens to their children's inheritance? How much does it contribute to homelessness?
What can we do about it?

Can we demand back our rights to property?

Some fixes for the Oz Health Care system within the limitations of the current [insufficient] paradigm

80% of public hospital beds are taken up with people over 65 years old, of which a good proportion are over 75 years old. Private hospitals are different because people are admitted for elective surgery and discretionary treatments. Private hospitals can also pick and choose who they take.

Most hospitalisation for any person is in the last two years of life. Medically the most expensive time of anyone's life is in the last two years, regardless of age.

The aim of the nursing home care is to keep the person as independent as possible. Often the services they are paying for would cost less if they were delivered in their real homes.

Unfortunately, health cover - public and private - doesn't cover home care, except where it is provided by medical practitioners. Some private insurers do cover some post-hospitalisation care, such as rehabilitation.

Most chronic conditions could be treated preventatively and conservatively in the community. Take, for instance, the need of many diabetics for frequent continuing podiatry. With medicare you can get five visits per year, but this is often insufficient. Because podiatry access is insufficient, complications become more serious and require expensive and extensive hospitalisations for problems like ulcers, resistive infections and amputations. Those complications affect blood sugar and increase the risks of blindness, cardiac complications and muscle wastage.

People with chronic or end of life illnesses, like respiratory problems and heart failure, can live in the community for years with occasional medical crises and readjustments. When they have these crises in the community, their options boil down to General Practitioners, ambulances, hospitals and nursing homes. GPs are flat out and almost never make home visits any more. In many cases outside of big Australian cities, you just cannot get a G.P. if you don't already have one. You also cannot change to another if you don't like the first.

Ambulance services spend a lot of their very expensive time and taxpayer funds attending to crises caused by simple handicaps of age or disability - such as falls which interrupt the person's capacity to care for themselves only because the person is unable to get up unaided, even though they are not injured. These do not require specialist attention, but simple mechanical help. Just imagine if you could call 000 or another number and ask for prompt and necessary assistance from a non-specialist person employed by the council for residents. This could solve a lot of problems.

Respiratory problems and heart failure need good oversight in partnership with the patient in the home, as well as crisis plans. The person with such a slowly deteriorating condition should be able to ring their GPs if necessary. Because GPs are so busy, however, they ring 000, end up in a public emergency department, in an acute system, and the hospital goes into overdrive with admission, treatment, and tests.

Allied health professionals, such as physiotherapists, can be very useful for keeping people mobile. There are not enough allied health providers working in the community. For example, one large regional center might have only one physiotherapist for 10,000 people which is not sufficient, compared to three physiotherapists for six thousand, in an inner Melbourne suburb.

Personal Carers are skilled to help in all kinds of non-medical situations that can cause problems for people with medical conditions like frailty or poor balance. They can help with gardening, cooking, cleaning, tidying, posting letters, etc. Local government provides Personal Carers, but they are in high demand, badly distributed, and low-paid (of course). Wealthy people have greater access to them through private agencies, but it is very hard for ordinary people to get enough of these services. For this reason many people finish up in hospital with avoidable problems like malnutrition, falls, severe depression from isolation and helplessness.

In most states of Australia Community Care is very fragmented. You might get someone something through one scheme and someone else something through another scheme, but you need to know the ropes intimately. The knowledge and skills to source and find funding for scarce services is not available to everyone, which means that people often don't get access to things that are available and which they need, although often enough those things are not even available.

There is a crisis of insufficiency. It's not just a matter of coordination. Coordinating nothing does not lead to something. There is a catch-cry of "Stop Duplication," but why not have duplication if that is what is needed? Multiply services by four or five and you might begin to provide what is needed

Recommendation: Close beds and divert the funds to community-based care.

20 per cent of the population are admitted to Australian hospitals in any one year. This is much higher than in other countries.

It is obviously very costly to have lots of elderly people with mild problems taking up acute hospital beds. If we diverted the funds from a proportion of those beds to the training and deployment of usefully skilled non-medical staff in the community, so much more could be achieved, saving elderly Australians and their children from losing their homes to pay for unnecessarily expensive residential care.

So, why should Australians pay, not just with their taxes, but with their homes and inheritances, for aged care when the high costs of hospital care are ridiculous, avoidable, and not very effective?

Article by Sheila Newman with Jill Quirk, based on their presentation on 3RPP's Freewaves Feminist program, on 16 June 2011.

Save the tiger and save man's self-respect. I mean, if we can't save the tiger we aren't much good for anything are we? Cronulla Beach to Barrenjoey Lighthouse Tiger Trek starts Saturday 10th March. The Trekking Tiger is a man in a tiger mask - his identity is unimportant. His main purpose is to draw attention to this vital campaign which recognizes the tiger, a flagship species in the biodiversity crisis. The trekker will be barefoot or wearing thongs in sympathy with the poverty that accompanies human populations that encroach on tiger territory.

Trek itinerary

Early on Saturday 10 March 2012 The Trekking Tiger (also known as T3) will leave Cronulla Beach on the coastal south of Sydney, Australia on a trek of close to 90 kilometres finishing at the Barrenjoey Lighthouse, the coastal northern tip of the city.

The trek will be attempted in one long push (with some possible beach power naps!) to draw attention to the BAN TIGER TRADE petition which is part of the global TigerTime campaign run by the UK based David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation.

“TigerTime, the global campaign from the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation is currently gaining thousands of signatures on its petition to put an end to the tiger trade www.bantigertrade.com. 100,000 signatures are needed for the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in United Kingdom to accept it on the 13th March. Please help us by signing the petition and spreading the word. For more information, please see our website #10;<h3>About The Trekking Tiger (T3): </h3>&#10;<p>The Trekking Tiger is a man in a tiger mask - his identity is unimportant. His main purpose is to draw attention to this vital campaign which recognizes the tiger, a flagship species in the biodiversity crisis. The Trekking Tiger is also known as T3, a reference to the three extinct sub-species of tiger; the Caspian Tiger, the Java Tiger and the Bali Tiger.</p>&#10;<p>T3 is an experienced mountain and jungle endurance trekker. And this challenge will hurt! The T3 concept has been brought forward several months (there will be another trek announcement soon) to link in the petition to be presented to the Chinese Embassy in London in March to ban the tiger trade. Despite the reduced preparation time, T3 will undergo the trek in bare feet on beach sections and thongs (flip flops) on rock and road sections. This is in dedication to the porters of Nepal and other Himalayan areas where very basic footwear is often used while carrying huge loads. This is a poverty driven situation and poverty is a big factor in people turning to poaching, threatening the tiger and much other wildlife. </p>&#10;<p>With this in mind T3 requests that so as not to dilute the purpose of the trek, the emphasis in any media contact remains on the campaign and not on the man behind the mask.<br />&#10;<img src=" vspace="3" hspace="3" align="left">
T3 is an entity of WildTiger. More information can be found at www.wildtiger.org and www.facebook.com/TheTrekkingTiger

Contact: [email protected]

About TigerTime:

See www.tigertime.info for full details of the campaign.

In light of the riots in Britain, we are publishing an article based on some correspondence from the "Trotskyist", "socialist" and "revolutionary" UK group, Workers' Liberty[1], first published in 1995 at http://www.workersliberty.org/node/4900 on 30 September, 2005. The correspondence calls into question, especially now, different attitudes on the likely consequences of high immigration and population growth in Australia and Britain among other countries mentioned. Describing himself as still a socialist internationalist at heart, James Sinnamon writes that, however, "today the ideal of unconditional internationalism is an unachievable pipe dream, and, in fact, dangerous [because] that ideal has been subverted to suit the needs of globalised capitalism."

The correspondence below began as a private exchange in 2005 between James Sinnamon and Martin Thomas, and so its appearance on the Workers' Liberty site came as something of a surprise to James at the time, as he was not asked permission or told it would be used to construct an article. The correspondence actually originated after James spent an evening with Martin Thomas at Thomas's invitation. During that evening they put their respective views about politics which, as the article below, shows, differed quite markedly. This experience caused James to compose and send an e-mail to Martin Thomas to explain more precisely and in greater detail, his differences with Martin Thomas and, among other things, why he felt that continuing high immigration served the needs of capital and was against the democratic and human rights of the receiving countries and international socialism. The published correspondence includes a letter from candobetter site contributor James Sinnamon, who agrees that he had indeed posted that letter to Martin Thomas in 2005. It was published on the Workers' Liberty site during a past stay in Australia by Martin Thomas. Thomas was a qualified teacher and able to teach both in Australia and the UK. During one of those stays in Australia in 2005, Martin Thomas contacted James in order to re-establish his previous contact when from 1984 and 1985 when James had been an active supporter of the Australian group affiliated to Workers' Liberty, then known as "Socialist Fight."

Sinnamon expressed his opinion that open door immigration policies would give rise to dangerously high immigration and population growth. He warned that, whilst benefiting rich globalists, for everyone else, rapid population growth carried high risks of poverty, linked to fuel shortages and the socially unsustainable inflation of housing prices and basic natural resources, like water and land. He argued that this outcome would be environmentally dangerous to survival. Martin Thomas expressed the view that unlimited immigration was an overall good and that if receiving countries did not embrace it, they would be invaded forcibly, under threat of nuclear war, by sending countries like India and China.

A number of other writers responded to the views of James and Martin, and we also include their correspondence below. It all makes interesting reading.

The correspondence below talks about the rights of sovereign nations to defend themselves generally against the ravages of global capitalism, which also deploys high immigration (in open-door policies) as a weapon against democracy. Whilst thus utterly failing to support the right of peoples to self-government and self-determination, phony socialist organisations continue actively to waste the energy of their many young, enthusiastic and trusting supporters by diverting their attention to phony progressive causes.

The correspondence published below throws some light on the attitudes associated with undemocratically high levels of immigration and population growth and the problems it creates for self-government and self-determination, resource depletion and inflation.

For more about the publication, Workers' Liberty, see footnote [2]

A letter from James Sinnamon and a reply from Workers' Liberty Australia.

Hi comrades,

Further to last night's conversation. Towards the end I frankly expressed my thoughts on what have been taboo subjects within socialist circles, that is, population levels and immigration.

These issues are an aspect of a question which, as I have said, has been avoided by almost the whole socialist movement, that is the finiteness of this planet, and how we can hope to create a stable basis for a sustainable society within the constraints of the physical limits of our planet, given the unprecedented population levels of well over 6 billion.

If we can't achieve this, our future may be too awful to contemplate.

As I said in less than two hundred years, less than a blink of an eye in human history, we have dug up and burnt off energy stored in carbon, which took tens or hundreds of millions of years for the earth to accumulate thorough biological and geological process (I wrote this in a letter which was printed in March this year in The Canberra Times and The Australian)

This, to me, is an astonishing and frightening fact.

We have increased global populations because we have squandered what should have been treated as a priceless resource for this and future generations.

In our discussion, it didn't strike me that you fully appreciated this fact and all the implications of all of this.

In Australia, we are close to exceeding the carrying capacity of this country if we have not already. As just one example, planners don't know how either NSW or South East Queensland can establish sufficient supplies of water to satisfy the needs of the current population, let alone the additional 1,000,000 (that will be allowed to move here by 2025 in order to satisfy the needs of the property speculation 'industry').

Many informed people believe that the current population levels are already well in excess of this country's carrying capacity, especially if you take into account that our economy largely depends on non renewable petroleum. Coal may be a possible alternative, but an expensive and dirty one, which is also finite. In any case it may increase CO2 levels in our atmosphere to unacceptable levels. Even if Peter Beattie's recent claim that we have 300 years worth of coal left in Australia is true, that is still a blink of an eyelid in terms of overall human history.

No socialist current has ever given a clear answer as to what it thinks the population levels of this country should be and hence what the levels of immigration should be. Your response last night is that firstly you still supported open door immigration and that you didn't believe that that many people would want to come here anyway, so it is not really an issue.

With one billion on the planet in dire poverty living in shanty towns on the outskirts of cities (see New Left Review Article, "Planet of Slums") I would suggest that the potential for Australia's current population to be easily overwhelmed many times over if an open door policy were to be adopted is beyond doubt.

Which one of these one billion people, do you believe would not come to a county like Australia if given an opportunity?

And let's not forget 100,000 largely wealthy business migrants who are already coming here every year. The surest way to gain resident status these days is to have money to buy a house and thereby to add to the already obscene levels of housing hyper-inflation.

Of course I am not being judgmental about these people. They are only doing what I would do, if I were in their shoes#fn_1" id="text_1">[3], and I dare say if they were in my shoes they would in all probability adopt the same attitude that I have adopted.

Already the increased levels of population have clearly had detrimental effects for the existing population : housing costs gone through the roof (property speculators are open about this, if your read their literature), the quality of life largely destroyed in cities like Sydney, water supply crises as I mentioned earlier. These are just not even broached in any socialist literature that I have read.

In my heart I am still a socialist internationalist, but today the ideal of unconditional internationalism is an unachievable pipe dream, and, in fact, dangerous. As a friend put it so well a few months ago, that ideal has been subverted to suite the needs of globalised capitalism.

For the past generation, the whole of the left has had no answer to the developments that have not only harmed the interests of ordinary Australians, but have threatened our sustainability: off-shoring of jobs to countries like China and India, privatisation, deregulation, lifting of limitations on foreign investment, allowing foreigners to buy and speculate in Australian property, with disastrous consequences for ordinary home buyers. To have raised objections to these developments would incur accusations of nationalism and sometimes, even racism.

We need a serious answer to this and that answer must be a pragmatic compromise between socialist internationalism and the recognition of our own collective interests as a national community.

I hope that you all will all come to understand the sense of what I am saying, and quickly ditch the cornucopian baggage carried by the socialist movement up to now. If you do so, then I think there is a hope that you will be able to contribute positively to the future political development of this country, and even the rest of the world, if not, I believe that you will continue to be regarded as irrelevant by all but a small minority of our population.

If you cannot do so right away, please at least start to acknowledge these questions in your newspaper and try to refute what I have said.

Reply from Martin Thomas

Dear James,

You raise two issues: the threat to human life on the planet Earth from the exhaustion of fossil fuels, and the threat to conditions in Australia from increased openness to the world, including immigration. You draw two conclusions: global reshaping of human society to reduce the use of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels; and immigration controls (tighter than the present ones, if I have understood you right) for Australia.

I think your two lines of thought contradict each other. On an ultra-optimistic scenario such as some neo-liberals project, it would make some macabre sense to support tight immigration controls. They could serve as a way to avoid disruption and "jumping the gun" - to keep order in a queue from which everyone will eventually reach a Californian middle-class lifestyle.

If rural China, Bangladesh, and Nigeria will all in the due course of industrial development reach that Californian level, then their people, or at least enough of them, may be willing to wait.

But if humanity faces ecological catastrophe, then it makes no sense to argue that the people of the regions which will "go under" first will lie down to die quietly while the people of global "gated communities"
continue to live in plenty.

China and India, after all, have nuclear weapons. If in a few decades' time, they face mass starvation, while Australians continue to live comfortably behind a big wall inscribed "Yellow and brown-skinned people, keep out!", then why would any conceivable Chinese or Indian government not use those nuclear weapons to break down that wall?

Presumably your support for barriers to protect relatively advantaged countries applies generally, not just to Australia. It would apply, for example, in countries with land borders. It would apply in South Africa, for example, where hostility to Nigerian and Mozambican immigrants as a supposed threat to conditions is already widespread among black as well as white South Africans.

But if the prospect is not just for Nigeria and Mozambique lagging behind South Africa, but of human society collapsing - and for sure it would collapse in Mozambique and Nigeria a long while before it collapsed in relatively well-off South Africa - then how would any restrictions imposed by any South African government hold the desperate human tide?

Global catastrophe would not happen through peoples quietly dying off one by one, each dutifully taking its turn. If, in the run-up, the richer countries had been trying to seal themselves off as "gated communities", the first step towards extinction would be world war in which the peoples of the poorer countries sought, quite literally, space to live in.

The greater the risk of global ecological catastrophe, the greater the need for human solidarity and cooperation in dealing with that risk - and the more disastrous a policy of "looking after number one" will be.

I agree that there are grave ecological dangers. More urgent than the threat of fossil fuels being completely exhausted is the threat of disruption through global warming arising from their use; but both threats are real. It is not possible, even if it were desirable, for the whole world population to live in big air-conditioned houses, eat highly processed and packaged food, use clothes dryers and dishwashers, go round in four-wheel drives, take frequent trips by air, etc. - any more than in the 19th century socialists could think that in the future everyone could live in houses with teams of domestic servants.

It is even arguable (I'm not sure about this) that ecological sustainability requires converting more of the population to a vegetarian diet.

But we know that capitalist consumerism is not an unavoidable part of human nature. There have been societies where out-consuming your neighbour is considered foul, not a cause for pride. Many studies have shown that people get happier with increasing material wealth up to a definable point - but that beyond that point, already passed by the Californian middle class, they do not.

In a society of solidarity, people could live in "abundance", on a rule of "to each according to their needs", with comfort and some luxuries - while accepting that some sorts of consumption must be restrained for ecological reasons. But only in a society of solidarity! In a capitalist society, both capital's drive for profit and the consumerist drives instilled in the mass of the population by the workings of commodity fetishism make impossible the development of any such collective responsibility for the sustainability of our society.

You agree in general, I think. You write that some form of socialism is the only sustainable future. But if the ecological problems are global, then, more than ever, this socialism must be global - based on a recognition of a common humanity, and a common human interest in sustaining the Earth's environment - not a socialism of "gated communities".

And, in any case, how can we possibly hope that working classes preoccupied with keeping up the barriers around their relatively favoured patches of the Earth's surface, or wondering how they can possibly jump those barriers to escape their earlier-doomed patches, will ever achieve any form of socialism? If the working classes of the world are turned towards that way of thinking, then there will be no socialism.

I think I have a less catastrophist view of future energy supplies than you do, if only because I have no objection to the development of nuclear power with safeguards of democratic and working-class control. Its risks are far less than those of continued escalating use of fossil fuels, or of leaving a large part of humanity without electricity.

Nuclear fission draws on finite resources, but with a much longer span of availability than fossil fuels. Nuclear fusion - if it can be developed workably, and a prototype nuclear fusion power station is already under construction - can draw on practically infinite resources.

Of course I am also in favour of the development of renewable energy sources - hydroelectric, wind power, tidal power, solar power, etc. At present none of these sources has the portability and the capacity to produce energy round the clock which fossil fuels and nuclear power do.

But I agree that there are real ecological threats. Only, I conclude that to tackle them we need a global working-class solidarity, and moves to raise higher barriers between countries run directly counter to that.

But, you say, open borders are unworkable, even if they might be desirable. Open the borders of Australia and tens or hundreds of millions of paupers would flood here the next day, creating social disaster.

In the first place, such immigration as has been allowed to come to Australia has clearly benefited the people of this country. An argument could be made against that immigration, that it consists of robbing many poorer countries of some of their most educated and energetic people, but for Australia the immigration has plainly been beneficial.

Working as a high school teacher, I can see this every day: the higher proportion of immigrant kids in a school, the better the education, the lower the level of social despondency.

Even where immigration is less selective than in Australia - in Britain, for example - the benefits, both in bringing new productive person-power and in cultural enrichment, are clear.

If there is a level at which immigration becomes unworkably disruptive, we are certainly nowhere near it now.

Would "open borders" bring us there? Well, the USA had open borders up until 1921. A transatlantic boat trip, or a journey across the Rio Grande, was more expensive and difficult than analogous journeys today, but not prohibitive even for very poor people in Europe and Central and South America. Millions of people migrated to the USA, many of them fleeing starvation or extreme poverty in countries like Ireland and Italy. The result was the richest and most dynamic country in the world.

Argentina and Brazil, which also received mass transatlantic migration, also developed - as capitalist economies, to be sure, with all the cruelties and inequalities that implies, but they developed.
They did not collapse.

Today there are "open borders" within the European Union, a population of 460 million. There are still some restrictions on the movement of people from the poorest EU countries in Eastern Europe, but some richer countries, the UK for example, do not apply those restrictions, and in those that do apply them, like Germany, the restrictions are easily evaded.

National income per head in Luxemburg is six times what it is in Latvia, or five and a half times what it is in Poland. Will opening the borders of Luxemburg to all those Latvians and Poles lead to catastrophe? On all the evidence, no. In the UK, we have a lot more Poles in London since Poland joined the EU, but no catastrophe at all.

The USA does not have open borders, but geography makes it practically impossible for it to police its southern border. The US government estimates that the USA has at least seven million illegal immigrants living it. That they are illegal creates a heap of problems. As workers, they have no usable legal rights. But on the evidence, the fact of having seven million more people, doing jobs otherwise hard to fill, benefits their fellow-citizens rather than harming them. If the border were made legally open, rather than just practically hard to police, things would be better.

Israel has had an "open border" for Jews since 1948, and as a consequence its society - a mere 650,000 Jews in 1948 - has received large and unpredictable inflows of Jews from the Arab world in the 1950s and after 1967, and from Russia and Eastern Europe after 1989. On a tiny patch of land with few energy resources and scanty water supplies, its population has been increased to 6.5 million. Israel has had to build desalination plants to extract fresh water from the sea (a technology used more extensively by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states), but it continues to develop.

It would develop much better, to be sure, if it would cease its oppression of the Palestinians, withdraw from the Occupied Territories, and recognise the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own. But its policy of unlimited immigration has not wrecked it.

Germany has "open borders" for anyone who can claim German origins.
In 1945 west Germany had to deal with some 13 million Germans forcibly expelled from Eastern Europe. After 1990 it received a new flood of immigrants from the East. Again, no catastrophe.

According to Nigel Harris, author of a recent book arguing against immigration controls, "Thinking the Unthinkable": "There were up to two hundred econometric studies done in the United States in different localities at different times in order to try to detect whether there was a decline in wages or an increase in unemployment of native workers as a result of a significant inflow of immigrants and in general they could find no trace whatsoever. And that is because the immigrants are moving into the jobs that the native workers won't do..."

In Britain, according to Kenan Malik, "a Home Office study published last year concluded that 'the perception that immigrants take away jobs from the existing population, or that immigrants depress wages of existing workers, do not find confirmation in the analysis of the data'."

Teresa Hayter, in her pamphlet "The Case Against Immigration Controls", pursues the argument:

"There are many who say that the abolition of immigration controls is a desirable goal, one they themselves would like to see achieved, but that it is politically impossible in a world in which there are severe international inequalities. But the argument that, without controls, there would be 'floods' of migrants who would overwhelm the rich countries some of them go to is little more than scaremongering.

"The fact that there are huge international inequalities in material wealth does not mean that, as neo-classical economists might predict, there would be mass movements of people throughout the world until material conditions and wages equalised. It is true that if there were no controls there would probably be more migration, since the dangers and cost of migrating would be less; how much more is impossible to estimate...

"[But] most people require powerful reasons to migrate; in normal circumstances they are reluctant to leave their countries, families and cultures. When free movement was allowed in the European Union, some feared there would be mass migration from the poorer to the richer areas; the migration did not happen, to the chagrin of the proponents of flexible labour markets. The great desire of many who do migrate is to return to their own countries, when they have saved enough money, or if conditions there improve. Immigration controls mean that they are less likely to do so, because they cannot contemplate the struggle of crossing borders again if they find they need to".

History backs up Harris's and Hayter's arguments. And the urgency of global solidarity also means that it is urgent to fight against immigration restrictions.

Best wishes,

Martin

Comments

Land, labour & population

Submitted by Anonymous on 11 December, 2005 - 16:03.

Martin's argument seems to be that the third world will invade the first world unless there are open borders. He also implies that high rates of immigration in the US and in Germany are overall beneficial and manageable. His opinion is also that Australia's schooling system benefits from a stream of immigrants to that country, which he implies would be depressing without that stream.

He gives no evidence for this opinion. It is merely his opinion apparently that no stable polity can be a happy place and that all communities must be in constant turmoil to be cheerful.

He relies on worker solidarity to engineer a future low consumption economy. He does not mention how workers have been consistently seduced to consume and endebt themselves in the process, thus contributing to the upkeep of their opressors and the upkeep of our tragic gobbling up of fossil fuels and cooking of the planet.

My conclusion is that the benefits from the current situation outweigh the negatives for Martin, and that he has decided that what is true for him must be true for others.

James discloses a quite different point of view, which he came round to after living for a while a Martin perspective.

My view is that human population has only been able to outgrow its dependency on trees and dung for fuel since coal and oil. This overgrowth and outgrowth that we call the Industrial Revolution started in England around 1750 and was the first time that human populations began to grow unsustainably on a very large scale. So far those countries which were able to gain power over fossil fuel resources have been able to feed their vast populations, but most indicators of quality of life and standard of living, industrial rights etc, and rate of endebtedness, have been falling.

The poor have been the losers in the West as in the third world. I do not see any prospect of the third world rising to meet the first world. All I see is an international clique of rich people organising the poor to serve them. In Australia this movement is very pronounced.

I think that the socialist movement, to restore credibility, must support the rights of the poor in Australia, by refusing to support immigration until such time as industrial law protects all workers equally - imported and locally born.

This is not the current outlook.

Martin seems to be suggesting that we should let things get worse and worse and then that the workers will rise up. In the mean-time the capitalists are reconquering the land, purchasing water and power. The workers have less and less access to land, which is the only thing that can ever make them independent of capital.

I don't see business as usual, i.e. economic growth, an employer/employee society with no protection for workers, and high immigration as sustainable or fair. I don't think the revolution will bring about justice either. I think it is too late.

I would like to see the natural world protected as much as possible and permaculture to be taught along with self-sufficiency. The capitalist/labour paradigm seems to be nearly dead in the water. We have the corporate/slave paradigm waiting in the wings.

Let the peasants have their land back.

Sam

Excellent Discussion

Submitted by Arthur Bough on 11 December, 2005 - 17:46.

I thought this was an excellent discussion to which I would like to make just a few points. The first point is in relation to earlier emigrations say to the US. I remember asking Sir keith Joseph when he made a visit to my old University how he reconciled his belief in the free market, including the free movement of labour with his support for Immigration Controls. He had no good response to make. However, in response to this point when I have debated with US Libertarians they do have a response which is we have no objection to open borders as a means of free movement of labour, if it is combined with the abolition of welfare payments so that the influx of labour reduces wages to absorb the increased supply of labour, and so that this influx does not just consume more benefits leading to increased taxes etc.

The US, Brazil etc. at the time of the large emigrations not only had a lot of land that could be settled, but also had no welfare payments.

The argument is not really comparable with the situation today where welfare payments, minimum wage agreements etc. are in place.

Consequently, where immigrant workers do come in to do jobs that indigenous workers will not do there is a base put underneath the level to which the wages can fall. To a certain extent this reduces the attraction of bringing in foreign labour for anything other than the most unpopular jobs, or leads to the kind of abuses of illegal immmigration and slavery whereby those employed never appear on the official statistics, and can therefore be employed at whatever wages the gangmasters see fit. The other area where immigration arises, for example with Poles coming to Britain, is where the worker has a specific skill, for example as plumbers, which either is in short supply and normal wages would be significantly higher than the minimum wage, or where the worker can become self employed in which case minimum wage regulations do not apply.

I can envisage conditions in which a socialist society might wish to have immigration controls, just as it would want to have a monopoly of foreign trade. But the aim of such a society would be to work with workers in other countries to raise their standard of living and to try to plan co-operatively the movement of labour along with the planning of other aspects of economic activity. But that is no reason for promoting immigration controls under capitalism. For one thing, it sends out the message that economic problems (or environemntal problems) are caused by immigration rather than capitalism.

As far as global environmental problems are concerned as martin argues the best means of solving this problem (if we are not already too late) is by international workers co-operation and solidarity to develop means by which the living standards of everyone on the planet can be raised to a decent standard by means which do not threaten its very existence. I'm not sure I agree with Martin about nuclear power because every economic study shows that its cost is greater than its benefit, but I do believe that a socialist society would be far less wasteful than capitalism and so energy and resource use would be lower in relation to the quantity of use values produced. Moreover, the use of technology to produce bio mass or other renewable energy close to its point of use (30% of electricity is lost in transmission), the use of individual power generators such as windmills on every home, heat exchangers etc. could vastly reduce energy production requirements, along with the use f fuel cells, clean coal technology etc. mean that energy requirements should be capable of being met. The individual electric cars which run on a track being introduced at Heathrow Airport also seem to me an excellent means of combining the requiremnt for meeting the individual need for flexibility with the public need to reduce resource usage, energy production, and congestion.

I think we have the basis for resolving all the problems of humanity in the 21st century, but capitalism will only employ them if it is profitable to do so. Only a socialist society based on co-operation can begin to introduce the changes necessary, and the basis of that has to be international working class action, not allowing the ruling class to divide us by artifical boundaries.

Arthur Bough

Interesting Thoughts on Protein

Submitted by Arthur Bough on 14 December, 2005 - 10:01.

In reference to Martin's points about vegetarian diets, and the possibility of needing to convert people to them for sustainability I read the following today in the Daily Reckoning e-letter, by Dan Denning.

"- "Ninety-five percent of the nitrogenous fertilizers used in America are made out of natural gas," observes
Jim Kunstler in his book, The Long Emergency, "and so it has become indispensable to US agriculture."

- What happens to global agricultural production,
therefore, when natural gas soars to an all-time high, like it did yet again last week? Let's query the experts...

- "A world of 6.4 billion people, on the way to 9
billion or more, needs more protein than the planet's croplands can generate from biologically provided nitrogen. Our species has become as physically dependent on industrially produced nitrogen fertilizer as it is on soil, sunshine, and water," writes Stan Cox, a scientist
at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.

- "Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor at the
University of Manitoba...has demonstrated the global food system's startling degree of dependence in nitrogen
fertilization. Using simple math[s] - the kind you can do in your head if there's no calculator handy — Smil showed that 40 percent of the protein in human bodies, planet-wide, would not exist without the application of
synthetic nitrogen to crops during most of the 20th century."

- "That means that without the use of industrially produced nitrogen fertilizer," he concludes, "about 2.5 billion people out of today's world population of 6.2 billion simply could never have existed."

- Simply stated, therefore, no cheap natural gas, no cheap fertiliser, less food. Or to put it another way,

- For some background, let's talk about protein. "Proteins are made up of smaller units called amino acids," the Vegetarian Society explains. "There are about 20 different amino acids, eight of which must be present in the diet. These are the essential amino acids. Unlike animal proteins, plant proteins may not
contain all the essential amino acids in the necessary proportions."

- "Protein quality is usually defined according to the amino acid pattern of egg protein, which is regarded as the ideal," the vegetarians continue. "As such, it is not surprising that animal proteins, such as meat, milk and cheese tend to be of a higher protein quality than plant proteins. This is why plant proteins are sometimes referred to as low quality proteins. Many plant proteins are low in one of the essential amino acids. For instance, grains tend to be short of lysine whilst pulses are short of methionine."

- It's clear human beings need protein. We can get it from plants or we can get in from animals. Most of us get it from both. And China, lately, has been getting an awful lot of protein from soybeans, many of which are grown in North and South America. You might say, as Jim Kunstler implies, that China's rise would not have been possible without the oil boom of the 20th century. No natural gas, no soybeans. No soybeans, no extra protein boost for factory workers working longer hours.

- China's soybean imports for the first 9 months of 2004/2005 (October-June) have jumped more than 8%. Obviously, this is good news for soybean producers and exporters, the biggest of whom are in the United States and Latin America. Chinese demand, by itself, provides very solid support for a soybean bull market, even before one considers the supply-limiting impact of rising natural gas prices.

- Following a similar line of thinking, Steve Belmont, Senior Market Strategist for the Rutsen Meier Belmont
Group in Chicago, also suggests a bullish position in the soy market, specifically soy meal. "Asian affluence, bullish seasonal patterns and low prices mean it's time to take a look at the long side of soybean meal," Belmont suggests.

- "Livestock and poultry operations the world over depend heavily on soybean meal as a key source of feed, especially since the threat of bovine spongiform encephalopathy [Mad Cow Disease] has sharply curtailed the feeding of rendered parts [ground up offal]. Not surprisingly, Chinese consumption of soybean meal has been rising rapidly."

- Soybean production is dependent upon copious amounts of nitrogen fertiliser. Nitrogen fertiliser is made from natural gas - which as we write this, is trading at roughly 3 times the price fifteen months ago.

- "Cheap nitrogen fertilizer fuels the big yields that
have made soybeans and by extension, soybean meal, cheap. Remove the nitrogen fertilizer or make it prohibitively expensive for farmers and soy meal supply could be negatively-affected."

- "Soy meal's portion of protein feed demand has increased markedly since the early 1990s, rising from less than half of global demand in the 1993/1994 growing season to well over two-thirds today. We expect solid demand from the growing nations of Asia and the potential for lower soybean yields due to expensive nitrogen fertilizer to provide soybean meal with long-term support."

- "But that's not the only reason to like soy meal...Similar to soybeans and corn, soybean meal has a seasonal tendency to make important lows in the winter and rally during spring and early summer. Soybean meal is unloved and oversold. Therefore, we believe it may be a good time to pick up some call options."

- The world needs protein as much as it needs oil...and with oil over $60 per barrel, protein is about to become much more expensive."

Further details of Daily Reckoning articles at

Daily Reckoning

Arthur Bough

Not sure what this means

Submitted by seanysean on 14 December, 2005 - 20:06.

My diet is vegetarian + fish. I choose this diet because I believe its unfeasable for the world's population to consume large quantities of beaf, pork, lamb, etc. and people are going hungry in the third world so the west can gorge itself on meat. I also don't trust the meat industry to put food safety before profit. Lastly, I couldn't bring myself to slaughter an animal so I'm not comfortable with the idea of eating one.

I'm not sure what is the point of the above post. Is it saying people should be vegetarians? Or is it saying being vegetarian will get more expensive? Furthermore, soya is not the be all and end all of vegetarianism. Guess what! There were vegetarians long before people started eating soya protein.

Explanation

Submitted by Arthur Bough on 15 December, 2005 - 14:44.

What it is saying in short is that all food is going to get much, much more expensive as a result of diminishing supplies of oil and natural gas, and consequently of nitrogenous fertiliser. As the article argues a considerable amount of agriculture is now dependent upon such fertiliser in order to produce the quantities required. Without that fertiliser, or with the cost of that fertiliser increasing dramatically the cost of agricultural products will rise considerably.

Firstly, plant sources of food will increase in price. Secondly, because animal production is dependent on the production of plant feedstocks the cost of animal protein will rise considerably. Finally, because China has increased its consumption considerably and relies on Soybean production as animal feedstock the cost for the type of animal protein most frequently consumed in China, poultry, will rise considerably. Given China's position as workshop of the world, increasing food costs for China will also have considerable knock on effects for the rest of the world economy.

Arthur Bough

Thanks for the explanation, but....

Submitted by seanysean on 16 December, 2005 - 17:18.

...does this mean people should consider converting to vegetarian/low meat diets? Or has it got nothing to do with that?

I am asking because you say at the start of it you say "In reference to Martin's points about vegetarian diets, and the possibility of needing to convert people to them for sustainability..."

Yes

Submitted by Arthur Bough on 16 December, 2005 - 23:33.

Yes, it does mean that. Although as the article says meat protein tends to be of a different type to plant protein, the nutrition obtained from a certain quantity of plant food is greater than that obtained from animals which have had to be fed on plant food in the firt place. To make that clearer a loss of nutrition occurs as a result of feeding plnts to animals and then eating those animals compared to consumin the plants or their equivalents that were fed to the animals.

If everyone had a vegetarian diet, therefore, more nutrrition could be obtained for the same amount of cost, and resource inputs. However, what the article is also pointing out is that whether such a switch occurs or not the cost of food is likely to rise substantially, both in terms of meat, and of plant food for the simple reason that one of the primary input costs - nitrogenous fertiliser - is going to become much more scarce, and its cost is going to rise.

My personal view is that the world could produce a vast quanity of food in excess of what it produces now, if the world's resources were used rationally, even without massive use of fertiliser, or GM plants.
Vast swathes of potential agricultural land are not used in underdeveloped countries, because of the structure of world trade, and the impossibility of small farmers and peasants in these reas epanding production. That is not even taking into consideration the fact that a number of studies has shown that the biggest increases in agricultural output result from simple capital invetsment such as better drainage etc.

But it is not in capitalism's interest to do that. World Trade remains dominated by the interests of the most powerful capitalist nations, and agribusiness is now a powerful force within those countries. High prices go with relatively stable longer term business plans that these businesses need in order to plan investment. They also form the basis of high profits for these businesses. It is not in their interests to introduce competition into this process from potentially lower cost producers in underdeveloped countries, who can utilise extensive rather than intensive farming methods.

Ironically, it is probably not in the interests of consumers in the Wrest either. There is an economic theorem called the cobweb theorem.
It shows that for products such as agricultural products where supply can only respond to price with considerable lags i.e. if the price of potatoes is high now, it will encourage farmers to plant potatoes but those potatoes will only become supply next year, then instead of the price mechanism acting to bring about equilibrium it actually acts to create greater and greater disequilibrium. Prices rise farmers plant that product in great quantities at the expense of other products. Next year the result is a glut of this particular product and shortage of other products. Prices of that product collapse because of the glut, and rise for other products now in hsort supply. The collpase in the price and increase in price of other goods causes farmers to abandon growing the product and switch to others. The following year there is no supply and prices rocket, and so on creating greater and greater disequilibrium.

It is the reason most countries intervened in agriculture, and the reason for the CAP.

Arthur Bough

Footnotes

NOTES

[1] The included article was originally published on 30 September 2005 on the web-site of the UK group Workers' Liberty

[2] More about the publication, Workers' Liberty: Although the organisation which produces that publication describes itself as a socialist organisation, and says it is against the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), which is an expanding military alliance of capitalist governments, it has nonetheless supported NATO's current war against Libya. This amounts to Workers' Liberty supporting the furthering of the interests of capitalism in British and US private profit military industrial complexes. (See "Left-wing" groups and "social movements" support US war against Libya?! of 9 July.) This support for an illegal war against the sovereign nation of Libya, whilst surprising for an organisation that purportedly champions the rights of poor nations against capitalist domination, is only the latest in a line of confusing alliances with global capitalist causes for Workers' Liberty . These include failure to question the false flag terrorist attack of 9/11 in New York which continues to be used to justify the NATO occupation of Afghanistan and indirectly, by sleight-of-hand, the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. Workers' Liberty has also fallen in with the mainstream line which dismisses the achievements of US President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, which include his prevention of global nuclear war on at least three occasions. Workers' Liberty also has consistently failed to seriously discuss important evidence of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy in 1963.

Their overt stance in support for the war against Libya formally distinguishes Workers' Liberty from most other 'socialist' organisations. Informally, however, the silence of other 'socialist' groups on the rights of Libyans, must have an equally devastating effect on the people of Libya. Such a stance utterly fails to support the right of sovereign nations to defend themselves against the war.

#fn_1" id="fn_1">3 [#text_1">back] Having given some more thought to this some years later, I don't necessarily agree that I would necessarily only do what intending immigrants would do if I were in their shoes. Whilst, obviously, I now, in many ways, prefer the more materially affluent (if wasteful and ecologically damaging) lifestyle of the country I live in to the lifestyle of most third world countries in which many intending immigrants live, I would also want to do what I could to help solve the world's ecological, social and economic problems. That would almost certainly be far better served if I were to remain in the third world country in which I lived and do my best to solve the political and ecological problmes of my country and bring about population stability than if I were to migrate to an industrialised nation.

In 2001, the UK had the second highest child poverty rates in the European Union. Ten years on they have grown into angry disaffected youths
.
The police brutality issue and the case of the police killing of Duggan is a legal issue and likely a police cultural problem associated with the UK riots last week.
But Duggan's killing belies broader and deeper social problems across English urban societies. The rioting thus far has been in England (London's underprivileged Tottenham, Hackney, Croydon, and working-class English cities of Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham, Liverpool and Wolverhampton). It has not spread to Scotland, Wales, Ireland, or Northern Ireland yet - why?
Rioting though has also copycatted to the more rural privileged English towns of Cambridge, Gloucester, Bristol and around County Kent - why? What is the common denominator? All riots involved youths and Y-Gens committing break and enter and burglary of retail shops and communicating with social media mobile devices, notably Blackberry's.

It is convenient knee-jerk ignorant simplism by the English government and the media attributing blame to just 'criminals', poor-parented youth, opportunistic hooligans, and gangs.
Poor understanding of social problems by any government will not enable its social problems to be addressed. Inept media analysis also confuses the situation.

Prime Minister Cameron, with his elite background is distant and aloof to England's urban social problems. His ideological mindset as a Conservative is centred upon national economic prosperity, which presumes social good flows from economic growth and prosperity. He seems incapable of recognising the disconnect between the parallel economy of the 'haves' and the 'have nots'.

Cameron is narrow-minded in his reading of the situation. He has said in Parliament last week that what the nation had witnessed was criminality "pure and simple". He said his government would do "whatever it takes to restore law and order". How easy and simplistic it is for Cameron to blame criminals? He sees it as a matter of parental discipline and a lack of responsibility in society. Cameron rejects the suggested underlying causes of underclass and poverty in Britain. He says: "This is not about poverty, it's about culture...a culture that says everything about rights, but nothing about responsibility." Impressive words, but when the leader of country is in denial about the causes of widespread urban riots being more than criminal opportunists, the root causes are ignored and the problems risk getting worse.

Cameron clearly has inherited a depressed and debt-ridden economy from Labor and the GFC. He came to office with an economic mandate to restore sound economic management and this has necessitated severe austerity measures reducing government public service delivery. But by simplistically focusing on addressing the economic ills will not auto-address social ills. Economic and economic policy is a subset of sociology and social policy. Societies don't magically become healthy by delivering on economic policy. Did Blair's Labor window of opportunity for social reform deliver to British have-nots? If not, how could British 'have-nots' have appealed to opposition Conservatives for recognition through the Blair years? What political party was listening to the plight of British underclass who probably voted informally anyway?

David Cameron, like his counterparts in Greece and Italy, are "flat-footed, reactive, trapped in double-talk, these are second-rate political creatures unprepared to deal with those responsible for the crisis". Even Barack Obama has been spineless. Hence the blunt words of Jacques Delors, three times president of the European Commission: "We don't just need firefighters; we need architects too."

A British blogger responding to the riots in Britain agreed: "WTF is going on with this government? Are they deliberately trying to rub our noses in it, or do they just have a tin ear? What a frightening bunch of amateurs."

With injustice now the blighted face of democracy, cynicism and fatalism gain ground. "What's the best way to deal with this crisis?", runs a popular Japanese joke. The answer: "Let the system collapse." The panacea looks more plausible by the day.' [Professor John Keane, 12th August 2011].

Cameron needs to get out more and listen to the ordinary citizens of urban England. He is sending an arrogant classist message by taking foreign holidays in Tuscany, while England's poor and unemployed are suffering abject downtrodden hopelessness. The public's perception that the government has let the banks and financial gamblers get away with rampant insolvency and handballing the corporate debt to the State is not helping matters.

England's and Britain's demographic been allowed to radically alter as a consequence of open door immigration. Whilst the country side may be relatively similar, Britain's urban demographic has little similarity to that of the 1960s or even the 1980s. Immigrants are a dominant characteristic of British urban society. What was the population policy plan and intended outcome? Where was the social investment in making multiculturalism work? There has been none. Since Thatcher economics has been rather liberal and laissez faire. Problem is the same approach has been taken of changing urban society. Economic theory is inappropriate for social re-engineering. Much of urban England and Britain is characterised by inter-generational unemployment, truancy, child poverty, broken homes, domestic violence and street crime.

What causes thousands of people in multiple urban centres to riot, commit violence, arson and loot shops? Recognise no single one cause. Many are clearly opportunists. Not all are disaffected underclass. But as to the underlying causes, start where people see injustice. Examine the social problems in England urban centres over the past twenty years. Who sent the messages inciting the riots? Controlling street violence is essential in the short term, and I am sure we will see the water canon armoured vehicles in London reminiscent of their use in the Northern Ireland riots of the 1970s. But water canons can't prevent riots and can't address the causes.

In 2001, the UK had the second highest child poverty rates in the European Union. [Read More]
Well those children are now adolescents and many have nowhere to go and no hope for the future. And dangled in front of them and in the media constantly is the government's Olympic decadence.

Cameron's Olympics do not have a happy outlook. English urban society has a far bleaker outlook.

London 2012 Olympics logo - it may well become a legacy of English society divided

Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia

Back on May 17th, 2010 I wrote an article on CanDoBetter entitled 'Australia's growing underclass'.

The article came out of my personal exposure to months of abject unemployment forcing me, out of respect for my family, to humbly walk into CentreLink. To my disgust, since I was not in absolute starvation-poverty, CentreLink rejected my claim for temporary unemployment benefits. Only thanks to my broader family, we didn't come close to losing our house.

That article read as follows:

Australia's Growing Underclass

I can attest to the inadequacy of the Australian Government's treatment of unemployed people via Centrelink. The forms are longer and more invasive than a tax return. The processing took eight weeks after which I was rejected because my partner was working part-time.

Eventually I got back into work off my own bat, but the experience was humiliating, a waste of time, and has turned me vehemently against government.

So many Australians are vulnerable to losing their job and don't have sufficient financial reserves to get back on their feet, let alone meet bill payments when there is no income. When this happens it comes as a shock to find that the safety net one assumed existed, does not in fact exist. One must be in abject poverty to be eligible for government support. For men in particular, the loss of esteem as a failed breadwinner can tip many to depression and worse. A substantial number in rural Australia and on the land are isolated and particularly vulnerable.

Both Labor and Liberal argue that important numbers of people rort the system and so each of these political parties have respectively made the claim hurdles so high that the majority of applicants' claims are eliminated as they go through the Centrelink system. The unemployment benefit of $220 a week, if it is paid, is so low as to be less than most weekly rents. People with a mortgage are forced down a path of bank repossession. It is a steep, slippery slope for many families.

A large proportion of workers now work on contract terms, like me, without leave entitlements, without unions, without rights. When the contract ends there is nothing and sometimes those contracts end at a whim with a tap on the shoulder at 5pm on a Friday.

And it is not just unemployment that has many Australians placed in dire circumstances. People with a disability, widows, veterans, and older people, have been thrown on the scrap heap. So have people with mental health issues, the homeless and those who simply find themselves in poverty and in broken homes.

Many Australians do not realise how close they are to joining the growing underclass.

Labor and Liberal have lost touch with those ordinary Australians who fall from the position of being able to fend for themselves. The Greens as the main alternative seem to be stuck in some ideological utopia pressing for 'green' issues that prioritise environment and climate change over basic human needs.

Meanwhile Australia's growing underclass is undermining the health and cohesiveness of our society. It wouldn't take much for a new alternative party focusing on life's fundamentals to get up.

==================================================

Later that day I added a further comment:

'I have decided to join Australia First'
I shall give them a go since I have read and support their values.
I see no reason to support Labor, Liberals, Greens or Nationals, based on their lack of performance. Over the years, I have voted for all of them at one time or another, kidding myself they will bring change. I have had a gut full.
If another party presents itself with fresh ideas I will consider that too.
JM

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Since my post, slur and innuendo followed and then CanDoBetter went off air for about two months (Nov-Dec 2010). But it was only yesterday I learned that I had been granted release from purgatory and that I now have access to CanDoBetter (hence why I have not contributed since).

And so, now at the first opportunity I herein post the reply offered by chairman of the Australia First Party, Dr Jim Saleam, to the accusations raised against him all those months ago that were denied a free hearing. I have since started my own website against injustice entitled malleebull.org, although I shall continue to support CanDoBetter since they gave me an opportunity to speak freely.

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Reply by #JimSaleam" id="JimSaleam">Dr Jim Saleam, Australia First Party, 25th Nov 2010:

[This is a reply to "Can the Australia First Party help fix the plight of ordinary Australians" and other comments on candobetter - which I have not yet been able to locate. Ed.]

======================================================

Freedom of speech is vital in Australia and I am pleased that this website respects this right.
JM

As the first anniversary of Haiti's devastating earthquake approaches, the questions that I asked then (below) remain unasked and unanswered by the Canadian media today. Apparently, as Garrett Hardin famously observed, no one ever dies from over-population. And no one ever dies from Canada's criminally irresponsible foreign aid and immigration policies, which are serving as birth stimulants to those nations--- like Haiti---which are given little incentive to address the root cause of their misery.

Why is Haiti's population explosion not identified as a key to their misery?

The CBC said that perhaps as many as 100,000 people died from the earthquake in Haiti. An earthquake of 7 on the Richter scale would cause casualties anywhere in the world. But how many deaths came because of shoddily constructed structures hastily built to accommodate a population that doubles every generation? Many were made of cinder blocks. The fact is, Haiti is too poor to adhere to safe building codes. But what causes their poverty? Overpopulation is surely a major factor. Rapid population growth overburdens already stretched financial and natural resources, impeding any ability to raise income and reduce food shortages. Some 25% of Haiti's population can't afford the caloric minimum of 2,240 calories recommended by the World Health Organization and 42% of Haiti's children under five are stunted in growth. With so many underfed and malnourished, it cannot be surprising that schools, hospitals and even the best homes cannot be constructed to a standard that will cope with earthquakes of this duration and magnitude. There is not so much a food shortage as a people 'longage'. The country's population grew by 36% in the two decades after 1982 to become the most densely populated nation in the Western Hemisphere, with an urban growth rate today of 3.4% that will, at that pace, double the size of Haiti cities most hard hit by this latest disaster. But alas, as the saying goes, nobody ever died from overpopulation. Yet overpopulation is the greatest emergency going, one which never excites media attention or public concern. Haiti's population of 8.5 million is projected to leap to 13 million by 2050, or 53%. But will the CBC or its commercial rivals mention that? Will they stress that Haitian women still give birth to an average of four children each because they have little access to contraceptive supplies? Or that the Catholic Church is a key blockade to that access? Not in your life. Government and non-government agencies will fall over themselves to rush to the scene, and anti-poverty Christian aid organizations like World Vision will re-double their efforts to provide medical care, food, clean water and nutrition. But they will do nothing to arrest an explosive process which consumes vital resources and diminishes the per capita wealth of each Haitian.

2. Is unconditional foreign aid and open-door immigration to Canada the best way to help Haiti?

Two years ago Stephen Harper handed over $300 million aid to the Haitian government in a photo op at Port au Prince. Not one penny went for birth control. Haitians see Canada's open door immigration policy as a chance to hit the jackpot by having a child become a Canadian citizen. This citizen can then sponsor relatives, and in the meantime send remittance money. No wonder almost one Haitian in a thousand emigrates. It is not surprising then, that two studies have linked high birth rates in poor countries or regions to the open immigration policies of destination countries (A.W Brittain, Social Biology 38 (1-2): 94-112, 1991 and D. Friedlander, Demography 20: 249-272, 1983). Open borders and global overpopulation go together like cigarettes and booze.

If we are determined to "help" Haiti, is this the best way to help them? Sending aid which in effect acts as a birth incentive? Then compounding that incentive by allowing the Haitian government and the Church to use us an escape hatch for their surplus population? How many Haitian tax cab drivers does Montreal need, anyway? How many Haitian votes does the Liberal Party need? Liberal leader Michael Ignatief is now calling for issuing more visas to Haitians, fast tracking the family reunification process---and are you ready--- ending deportations. Dishonesty pays if you wait for a disaster. Why doesn't the CBC raise these issues?

3. How does Haitian immigration help Canada?

It is interesting that CBC and Ottawa's political class love to trumpet the appointment of a Haitian Governor General or a Vietnamese refugee to lead Canada's Catholic church as example of how wonderfully "tolerant" we are. How long will we perpetuate this self-image of Canada as a land of opportunity, a place that needs buckets of newcomers to inject a vitality and drive that native born Canadians allegedly don't have? Isn't this immigrant-makes-good mythology wearing a little thin in 2010? The family farm is dead. Killed by agribusiness and the development and subdivision of prime farmland by immigration-driven population growth. We don't need waves of immigrants to homestead anymore. Our secondary industry is dead. Killed by trade agreements and globalization. The smokestack era is over. We don't need more people from any source to "build" the country, to create a reserve army of cheap surplus labour to drive down wages and displace jobs.

Canada is already over-built. Our best arable land is under threat from development, with nearly 20% of our Class 1 farmland already lost. Ontario, which has been lost 600,000 acres of prime farmland in the decade preceding 2006, is slated to add another 6 million people to the Golden Horseshoe in two more decades. Dr. Michael Healy also warned, in a federally-commissioned study of the Fraser Eco-Basin, that Metro-Vancouver and the Fraser Valley was already overpopulated in 1997 by factor of three, and that immigration-fuelled urban growth in other major Canadian localities would wreak the same havoc if not unchecked. He cited immigration as a major force in that growth, and not bad land-use planning, which is under the control of developer-controlled town councils.

So why do we celebrate immigrant success stories? Why does CBC icon Peter Mansbridge presume to speak for all Canadians when he declares that the appointment of Father Vincent Nguyen as the new Roman Catholic bishop is a story that "will lift our hearts.?" We need new folklore. The old formula is not appropriate to our present predicament. We need stories about Canadians who got the job done, not more CBC portraits of immigrants who turned their lives around by turning ours upside down. I wonder if there is a program on Saudi Arabian or Libyan TV entitled "Little Church on the Desert"? I wonder if Haitians would celebrate the appointment of a guy called Smith from Saskatoon as their new head of state? Or if they would import educated Canadians to drive their taxis and then have a pity party about how their credentials aren't recognized? I rather doubt that they would be that stupid.

I for one am sick of CBC puppeteers pulling our heartstrings while neglecting the hardships suffered by people right here. I am sick of their deification of the immigrant and their denigration of the Canadian-born. I am sick of the kind of journalism that focuses on the struggles of a downtrodden illegal refugee to put food on the table at the expense of Canada's working poor who are squeezed out by this competition. I am sick of a taxpayer-funded corporation that consistently reports the frustration of a foreign born engineer in not finding employment in his field when Canadian engineering graduates, burdened by a mountain of student debt, must rely on minimum wage jobs or the patronage of parents to see them through. In short, I am sick of PC bias. I am sick to death of the CBC. (Canadian Bleeding-heart Crap). By all means let’s help Haiti, but let’s do it right this time.

Tim Murray

January 14, 2010

Madeline Weld wrote,

"The population was 60 M when I was there in the 1960s (my dad was a diplomat), 180 M now and headed for 335 M by 2050. Two-thirds of the country is less than 30 years old, fewer than 30 million of 70 million kids between 5 and 19 in school, and a female illiteracy rate of 60% (male 32%), desired family size 4.1, 22% of married women use birth control and only half of the non-users would like to use it in the future."

Would you give money to a drunken panhandler or a drug addict? Would you continue to feed a man who has sired 6 kids despite having no means to support them? Is open-ended charity a virtue---or a vice?

If your object is to actually solve the problem of poverty, then you must focus on the consequences of your charity. But if your object is to perpetuate and worsen the problem and inflict misery and hunger upon the next generation in even greater proportions, then by all means, wear a blindfold and keep on giving. Keep giving to Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Phillipines, Haiti and Central Africa. Follow Sir Bob Geldoff's example and feed a young generation of potential people-breeders in the mid 1980s and then see Ethiopia double its population in 25 years with three times as many people stalked by hunger now as then. After all, this is really about White Guilt and salving a Christian conscience, isn't it? It is not about addressing root causes but feeling good about yourself. If you may not get a knighthood out of it, but maybe you'll collect enough brownie points with the Big Guy in the Sky. That way, you can sit back into your 4 bedroom home with its two car garage and feel that you have paid your dues. Congratulations, you are a Good Person. You are off the hook.

Moral of the story? I can live a middle class lifestyle with all of its entitlements- the two kids, the Mexican vacations, the cottage in the country--as long as I have paid my indulgence and been granted dispensation for my charitable donations and cosmetic green living habits, habits that don't represent any real sacrifice or challenge to my middle class station. Lenin said it more than a century ago. Philanthropy is just a cheap ticket to heavenly bliss for the bourgeoisie, a class that will never threaten to undermine its privilege with fundamental structural change to society. Bill Gates has challenged the world's billioniares to match his ambition and donate half their wealth to charity. A bold and magnaminous gesture to be sure. Now, let's see him challenge billionaires to give up the system of economic growth that allowed them to generate that wealth at the cost of our life support system and the well-being of so many who cling to it. Don't hold your breath. Charity is a small premium to pay to keep us in the cockpit. So let's keep our guilt-trip alive. Ready? Now repeat after me:

" We're white and we're guilty. We're the irresponsible consumers on a oil-fueled binge who have imposed climate change on the hapless billions who must survive on $2 a day.We're the junior partners of global corporations who have fattened our portfolios with the dividends and profits made from their despoilation of the developing world. One quarter of the world's natural capital has been liquidated with little recompense to those who live at the scene of the crime. Most of the wealth has flowed north. Yep, we're guilty as hell." Alternatively, "Here in Canada, where charity is bred in our bone, we must set those optics aside, give as best we can, and therefore provide the Taliban and al-Qaida no room to take credit."

But throwing money at the symptoms of overpopulation---mass starvation and displacement---will not cure it but promote it. And neither will opening our borders to what can only be a fraction of those affected. There is not a shortage of food, water and housing but as Garrett Hardin would say, a longage of people. Few ever ask, "Why have so many people chosen to live on a flood plain?" And even fewer people ask, "Why is there no room to live elsewhere?". If making foreign aid conditional on family planning is playing God, is not growing misery by unconditional aid not also playing God---but on a much more grandiose and egregious scale?

Overpopulation is one problem that where, ultimately, the ball is their court as well as ours. There is enough guilt and irresponisbility to go around, and it is high time that those who are breeding themselves into an even deeper hole shared a slice of it. Habitat destruction, deforestation, poaching, pollution from cook-stoves and the reckless fecundity that drives much of it--- is not all down to us and our corporate proxies. In its quest for a subsistence, humanity's bottom billion has accounted for much environmental damage, even enough perhaps to offset our sins of emission. If they are to free themselves of this vicious downward cycle, it is imperative that they take charge of their numbers----and it is imperative that they not be encouraged to avoid doing so.

As they say in the Self-Help business, to be helped, you must first be willing to help yourself. Birth control begins at home. Need help in that? Then my wallet's open.

Tim Murray

Two weeks out from a federal election and the range and depth and vision on the two major parties - the LibLabs is woefully simplistic and shortsighted.

Both Lib Lab economic rationalist factions are selfishly limited to an 'ends justifies the means' approach purely to get elected. Both are indulging in election-term economics, lobbying marginal seats, pork barreling the swinging voter and trying to differentiate themselves from each other. Neither are relevant to the future governance of Australia.
They are not about the many departmental portfolios they take responsibility for. They are simplistically about two personalities - Tony and Julia.

Tony thinks it is simply about 'ending the waste, repaying the debt, stopping the big new taxes and stopping the boats'. [Tony Abbott website, 28th July 2010].

Julia thinks it is simply about 'moving Australia forward', and motherhood statements like 'securing our future with responsible economic management', 'delivering fairness for working families', an education revolution, and 'tackling climate change' (somehow). [Labor Platform].

It's dumbing down the issues as if the Australian electorate is a crowd watching a football match.

Have a read:

Australian Liberal Party policies

Australian Labor Party 'agenda'

These policies are on the fly, tokenistic pork-barrelling for media sound grabs. They lack robust research and are reactionary. They are outputs of overpaid consultants advising the major parties to focus only on the key 'push-button' re-election issues. They are only about getting re-elected and getting the pollsters to push them a few percentage points ahead of the other.

The offerings are hollow. The LibLabs are short-sighted simpletons. They reveal the lack of ideological vision once characteristic an inspiring of politics over 30 years ago. One has to return to the Whitlam era to recall ideological vision in Australian politics. These days the LibLabs have created a political vacuum in Australia.

No wonder many Australians just tune out. We've heard it all before. We've seen the promises become conveniently forgotten and dishonoured. We've seen successive LibLabs grow on the nose four years down the track.

Where are the long term strategic visions, direction and investment plans for this great nation?

Where's the badly needed long term investment into the big picture issues?

Here are some of Australia's big picture issues that demand longterm political vision:

* TRANSPORT: Public transport infrastructure - a national fast rail network for both freight and passengers;

* ENERGY: Transition strategy into clean and renewable energy;

* POLLUTION: Carrot and stick strategies to reduce pollution particularly in industry and private transport. (climate change and greenhouse gas emissions pare just fancy words or 'pollution');

* DOMESTIC INDUSTRY: Strengthen Australia's domestic industries to restore international competitiveness, stem the flow of industrial entrepreneurship and investment offshore and to curb the unfair market controls by big business over small business;

* EDUCATION: Vocational education (TAFE) aligned to industry needs for the next 20 years, where industry is made to financial contribute and play a key role, to realign the local skills shortage epidemic;

* Public schools to bring the educational standards up to private school standards so as to address the Dickensian class inequity across Australian schools;

* University funding so Australian universities are not beholded to international student fees for their financial survival;

* HEALTH: New major hospitals to fill the chronic bed shortages in all capital cities, and nationalise health with training and infrastructure to stay one step ahead of demand, and to address the inequity of rural health.

* INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS: Fair financial compensation for the stolen generations and the stolen wages to redress the 20th Century government treatment of Aborigines as slaves;

* Strategies and resources to address the indigenous inequity of access to essential public services and to address the shortcomings in life expectancy and living standards

* Constitutional recognition of the prior occupation and sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their rights and obligations as owners and custodians
and to self determination, political representation and equity in developing and implementing public policies, programs and services that affect them. (Refer The Greens policy)

* SUSTAINABLE AND ACCOUNTABLE IMMIGRATION: Not a population policy, but a sustainable immigration policy - one that is accountable to the full social costs (costs of living, public infrastructure supply, homelessness and unemployment), one that is aligned to our Australian value system, one that is accountable to the full environmental costs, and one that is accountable to the complete immigration lifecycle - where new arrivals become self-sufficient and integrated into the broader community;

* ENVIRONMENT: Strategies for sustainable crop selection, sustainable agricultural practices (irrigation, fertilizer, land clearing, salinity, runoff), Murray-Darling irrigation buy back and local community transition support, new national parks, sustainable forestry that makes the AFS certification a national minimal standard, sustainable fishing initiatives.

* THE ARTS: Arts and culture policy to provide opportunities and encouragement of Australian home-grown talent

* DEFENCE: A defence policy that is wholly about defence of Australia aligned to the interests of our immediate regional security and peace in the Oceania region, not the current offence policy that is wrongly aligned to the militarist interests of the United States - Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan.

* EMERGENCY SERVICES: Overhaul underfunded volunteer emergency services national-wide (ambulance, fire and those dealing with bushfire emergencies, storm emergencies, and other natural disaster emergencies) to give Australians a 21st Century chance of survival and recovery

* POVERTY: Addressing the causes of Australia's growing underclass - homelessness, unemployment, record incarceration and recidivism, those affected by mental health issues and substance abuse, family breakdown and domestic violence;

* ELECTORAL CONTRACT: An electoral contract to make electoral promises accountable to the people

I am sure there are others.

At least the Greens offer alternatives, but they have many shortcomings with their policies too, such as where is the economic case to show that The Greens could run the economy?
This uncertainty is why the Greens don't get a leg in.

A vote for any other party offers the hope of change.
A vote for Lib or Lab, promises more of the same crap.

'A people who are sheep get a government of wolves.'

Australians are a tolerant mix of people, perhaps no more so than indigenous Australians who have put up with wave after wave of immigrants.

The term 'racist' is an ugly slur readily being used by anyone who seeks to put down criticism for the negatives of successive government immigration policy.

To be racist is to be prejudiced against a specific racial group or multiple racial groups. Australia is such a mix of races that it would be illogical to use the term without attracting criticism of one's self.

But Australia's immigration problem is not one of racism or xenophobia. It is local natural response to the sheer numbers of people arriving over a short period of time, to the point where the society, economy and environment are not coping and are where locals are witnessing serious negative impacts. It matters not from where they come, but their impact on local society.

The governments inviting them in care not for their adjustment to society, their impact on society or the gross shortfall of infrastructure investment to support them. Laissez Faire immigration policy is failing all concerned.

It is also a problem of some immigrants rejecting Australian societal values and unjustly seeking to impose their own values on Australians. This is exacerbating the social tensions.

These problems are collectively creating the immigration injustice faced by local Australians. Of course the local reactions vary from tolerance to intolerance and there are some racists out there like in every society, but they are in the minority.

The real problem being created by successive LibLab governments and their encouraged excessive waves of mass immigration, is that immigration is being imposed on local society at an unsustainable rate, and the vital importance of assimilation and society cohesion has been tragically abandonned by government. This has created local resentment and antagonism. It has also meant many immigrants are unjustly left to fend for themselves. It is regrettably fueling racism.

The perpetuating problem is shortsighted government economic-centric policy and abandonment of social responsibility.

Multiculturalism is a euphemism for governments saving money by abandoning new immigrants to fend for themselves. Naturally, anyone left to fend for themselves will turn to their own kind and become insular in their own ethic group.
Hence, government abandonment has created ethnic enclaves. Immigrants are not encouraged to assimilate as 'new Australians' into Australian society, but to perpetuate satellite enclaves of their old countries.

It takes generations to assimilate. Look at the Mediterranean immigrants post WWII! It took Australian mainstream up until the 1980s, some 30 odd years later the third generation of Mediterranean immigrants (mainly Greeks and Italians) to be embraced as an non-distinguishable integrated component of the mainstream Australian community. We went from the TV culture of 'Kingswood Country' in the 1970s to 'Acropolis Now' in the late 1980s.

Social change simple takes time. It is a human condition that cannot be forced and fast tracked.

Further Reading

Economic Migrant (defined)

'The term economic migrant refers to someone who has emigrated from one region to another region for the purposes of seeking employment or improved financial position. An economic migrant is distinct from someone who is a refugee fleeing persecution. An economic migrant can be someone from the United States immigrating to the UK or vice versa.

Many countries have immigration and visa restrictions that prohibit a person entering the country for the purposes of gaining work without a valid work visa. Persons who are declared an economic migrant can be refused entry into a country.'
Source: Wikipedia, UNHCR

1. Immigration and its Social and Economic Impact with Respect to Class and Poverty by Lee H. Walker, published in 'News & Views', 1st December 2006

2. ABC TV News covers Overloading Australia, Mark O'connor [6th January 2010]

3. 730 Report (refer to programme this evening [5th August 2010) specific to Kerry O'Brien's interview with Mark O'Connor & BIS Shrapnel, when available as a podcast.

4. Cultural and economic adaptation of Sudanese refugee migrants in Melbourne: a Dandenong case study, by Dunja Licina and A. Dharmalingam,School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University.

5. 'Population' feature on this website.

[Unemployment queues in the 1930s Depression in Australia, Source: AP]

Australia's immigration problem is the hundreds of thousands of economic migrants arriving at Sydney and Melbourne airports, not the few thousand asylum seekers arriving by boat.

If you want to know where the jobs, houses, hospital beds and education places have gone, look to the migrants taking them. This is the Immigration Stress created by too many foreigners granted the generosity of Australians. And look what has happened. Foreigners have got the benefits. 'Spot the Aussie' is now a rarity in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Australians have been displaced. Urban property prices have forced many to leave the suburbs they have grown up and flee to the Central Coast (NSW), Mornington Peninsula (VIC) and Sunshine Coast (QLD). Economic migrants are not paying their way. They are sapping our limited public resources to the detriment of indigenous, ancestral and birth Australians. Australia's tax revenue is insufficient to pay for all extra demands imposed by millions of new economic migrants.

Yet Australia could generously triple its asylum seeker intake with hardly any noticeable impact on Australia's quality of life or standards of living. However, the Australian Government needs to start realising that accepting asylum seekers remains with each asylum case until people are assimilated into Australian society and have achieved a financial level of self-reliance. Immigration does not end when the bureaucrat stamps the residency visa. It is inhumane for the Australia Government to abandon vulnerable asylum seekers to let them fend for themselves. Full integration into Australian society can take years and cost hundreds of thousands in public infrastructure.

But while Australia has 600,000 homeless people and more in housing stress and unemployment, all the economic migrants can damn well wait. In Australian and indeed in any country, indigenous and locals have a birth and ancestral right to come first in the poverty safety net. The million or so economic migrants that successive Australian LibLab governments have allowed in over the past decade need to be integrated into Australian society. The socio-economic cost must be in the billions.

But Australia's social priority is Australia's own. The hundreds of thousands of under-privileged Australians should come before exacerbating the social cost problems with more from overseas. Australians deserve an adequate public safety net, before any more economic migrants should be allowed entry. Else Australia will continue to see its downgrading in social living standards and worsening local poverty.

If it's skilled workers Australian industry clamours for, where's industry's investment in local skills training? Where the so-called 'education revolution aligned to industry needs? Skilled immigration is a shortsighted stop gap. Skilled immigration causes social stress. It is a form of social displacement and invasion.

Here is a quiz. What do the following blockbuster books have in common?

"The Trouble with Africa--why foreign aid isn't working" by Robert Calderisi
"The White Man's Burden---Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good" by William Easterly
"The Bottom Billion---Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It" by Paul Collier
"Dead Aid---Why Aid Is Not Working And How There Is A Better Way For Africa" by Dambisa Moyo

The answer can be found merely by looking at their respective indices. Only in Collier's book is the word "population" or "populations" mentioned, and then only four times. And more incredibly, Collier treats it only in a positive light, by stating that a larger population is one of those factors which is a precondition for a poor country effecting a "turnaround". Nowhere in any of these books does the word "overpopulation" appear. There you have it. To Garrett Hardin's sarcastic statement that no one ever died from overpopulation, one is tempted to add the corollary that no desperately poor and famished country ever needed birth control to climb out of its misery.

Calderisi offers "Ten Ways to Change Africa". Guess what? Family planning ain't one of them. Instead we have these remedies:
1. Introduce Mechanisms For Tracing and Recovering Public Mechanisms.
2. Require all heads of state, ministers and senior officials to open their bank accounts to public scrutiny.
3. Cut aid to individual countries in half.
4. Focus direct aid on four to five countries that are serious about reducing poverty.
5. Require all countries to hold internationally-supervised elections.
6. Promote other aspects of democracy, including a free press and an independent judiciary.
7. Supervise the running of Africa's schools and HIV/Aids Programs.
8. Establish citizen review groups to oversee government policy and aid agreements.
9. Put more emphasis on infrastructure and regional links.
10. Merge the World Bank, IMF and United Nations Development Programme.

All good suggestions worthy of consideration no doubt. But hasn't the thought that too many people chasing too few resources may have something to with war, famine, wildlife poaching, deforestation, soil exhaustion and erosion, disease, and a myriad of other ills that plague these failed African states---- even crossed his mind? Hello?

Then along comes William Easterly with his six suggestions for those who want to "aid the poor".
1. Have aid agents individually accountable for individual, feasible areas for action that help poor people lift themselves up.
2. Let those agents search for what works, based on past experience.
3. Experiment, based on results of the search.
4. Evaluate, based on feedback from the intended beneficiaries and scientific testing.
5. Reward success and penalize failure. Get more money to interventions that are working, and take money away from interventions that are not working. Each aid agent should explore and specialize further in the direction of what they prove good at doing.
6. Make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to do more of what works, then repeat step (4). If action fails, make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to send the agent back to step (1). If the agent keeps failing, get a new one.

Once again, some pragmatic, hard-boiled advice from someone frustrated at the fact the aid most often get to those who need it. But once again, nothing about addressing poverty by preventing births rather than simply trying to keep people alive. And Paul Collier has his solutions. He notes that "since around half of all civil wars are post-conflict relapses', a charter for post-conflict governance would be in order, as well as a charter for the wealth obtained from natural resource extraction, including a transparency initiative. And since the army "catches the scent" of large infows of aid money, external military guarantees against coups could not only reinforce incentives for good governance but also leverage effective scrutiny from an empowered citizenry. Collier is a not an unabashed free marketeer. He argues that the bottom billion cannot break into new export markets without temporary and strong protection against "the Asian giants". But he insists that for the majority of the developing world, capitalism is working, and that the goal should be to help the basket cases build market economies by attracting private investment. He argues that the left needs to learn to love growth, because while "growth is not a cure-all, lack of growth is a kill-all". Like other critics, he maintains that aid is spread too thin. The development problem is about the bottom billion who are stuck in poverty who are not here to be guinea-pigs for failed socialist experiments.

What is surreal about Collier's gospel of comparative advantage, developing export markets and growth promotion is his failure to acknowledge the impact of economic activity on biodiversity services and climate change. If economic growth is to be the goal of African reform, then aggressive "de-growth" in developed countries must be pursued as a global offset. If capitalism is working, it certainly isn't working for the environment, which after all is our life support system. Someone needs to remind these critics that human extinction is bad for the bottom line. Dambisa Moyo is also a growth booster and a champion of trade. Kicking the aid -dependency cycle is necessary for good governance, which for her, "trumps all". Corrupt and incompetent governments effectively raise the cost of doing business or investing. And despite donor conditionalities, aid is easily stolen or redirected. All sound points But add Moyo to the list of analysts for whom overpopulation is an utterly inconspicuous agent of scarcity.

In some ways the predicament of failing states mired in poverty can be likened to a cancer patient surrounded by a team of oncologists who inform him to rest, take vitamins and avoid sugar, but make no mention of his chain-smoking. Population myopia is a strange affliction. It is as if the growth virus is equipped with a cloaking device that makes it unseen by the timid and the politically correct. No wonder the media and state broadcasters in particular, are loath to confront it, and instead offer us mock debates between what in reality, are false polarities trapped in their own cycle of denial.

Tim Murray,
July 1, 2010

Make Poverty History aims to halving global poverty by 2015 and achieving the Millennium Development Goals by:

Sub-Saharan Africa is headed for a "population emergency" according to a new French NGO analysis of demographic trends.

Africa takes up more than 12 percent of the world's population, while its Gross Domestic Products (GDP) accounts for a mere 2 percent. With a population growth of 3 percent annually and an agriculture growth of 2.5 percent, the continent can hardly feed its increasing population. The words ‘population explosion’ are hardly ever heard nowadays, even though Africa’s population is still doubling every twenty-odd years.

The population of the continent south of the Sahara, decimated by the slave trade and colonization, stood at 100 million in 1900. It had grown more than seven-fold to 770 million by 2005. By 2050, it will grow by as much as 2.6 times above that level, to 2 billion. Abnormal climate and natural disasters have resulted in the emergence of a new kind of "eco-refugees."

Campaigns promoting the balanced family such as those successfully run in other developing countries (Bangladesh, Jamaica for instance) have never really been implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Today, two out of three inhabitants of this large region of Africa are under 25 years of age (twice the number prevailing in Europe) and, with 32 inhabitants per km2, Sub-Saharan Africa is more densely populated on average than Latin America (28 inhabitants/km2).

Band Aid was a supergroup founded in 1984 by Bob Geldof and to raise money for "Famine relief" in Ethiopia. In 1950 the population of Ethiopia was just 16 million. According to the nation's only census, conducted in 1984, Ethiopia's population was about 42 million. By 2005 it had increased to nearly 78 million and is forecast to increase a further 80 million over the next 25 years.

The UN has admitted that it won’t meet its Millennium Development Goals in Africa but fails to explain the underlying causes for pessimism. Africa has had more than ten times the Marshall Aid given to Europe since the Second World War - a trillion dollars, or $5,000 for every African alive today. Yet many African countries are poorer now than in the 1980s.

According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world faces the challenge of producing 70 per cent more food for another 2.3 billion people by 2050. Meat production will need to increase by more than 200 million tonnes on the current 270 million tonnes by 2050. Unrealistic Western livestock-based diets means that grains fed to livestock could be distributed more equitably throughout the world to avoid some of the starvation.

In Australia, Make Poverty History is a coalition of more than 60 aid agencies, community groups and religious organisations. Make Poverty History has some lofty aims, but ignores the impact of Western diets, makes no mention of family planning or contraception schemes, or even population growth. Unless the people of Africa take some ownership of their own destiny we could be trying to fill a bottomless bucket! Neither will the campaign be achievable until we recognise the threat to our planet and humanity due to runaway global population growth. World poverty (like climate change) is unavoidable whilst governments, including ours, willfully encourage unsustainable population growth. Growing our own population will do nothing to alleviate the portion of the world's population that is already starving, and violence will escalate as resources diminish. Immigration globalises overpopulation.

Increasing population might seem to be a way of growing the economy in the short term, but in the third world it is only likely to lead to even greater poverty.

Low birth rate, its dangers and remedies

My last article didn’t even attempt to expand on this: it was just a satirical gibe on a serious subject. And it mentioned immigration only as one of the solutions envisaged by demographers and urged by economists, to remedy the European reluctance to produce more babies. Meanwhile couples are cajoled and enticed with prizes, bonuses, Christmas boxes, allowances, trinkets, anything, that could lure them to do their duty for their Country.

Italians are doomed to extinction, indicated by the low rate of birth (1,34 babies in 2007)? The Maternity and Fertility Centre Studies confirmed that we are behind the European optimum ideal of 2,1 children per woman, (suggested by a Lisbon document of 2000) in order to avoid the Old Continent disappearing in this century. In this demographic Olympic race Italy is sadly behind every other European nation, of which the Champions are France, with Great Britain and Finland close behind. So, the country of “Amore e Bambini” is being paradoxically defeated by countries with a higher rate of divorce, contraception use, and women at work.

At the moment ,an oppressive pro-natalist propaganda sweeps Italy, fuelled by demographers and the fear of economic stagnation.

Take the well-known Massimo Livi Bacci, who is a robust and insistent pusher for economic incentives for newborns.
Livi Bacci began by defining migrations as the most important means to combat poverty, based on studies that forecast a 20% decline in the labor force in rich countries and a 60% increase in the poor countries by the year 2025.

On examining the consequences of Italian low fertility rate, he admits that:
“In a few years the new entries in the labour market will be substantially fewer than they are today …with very beneficial effects on the high unemployment of the young; the fewer entries, if more productive (as they must be), will also earn more. …”

Well? This is a philosophical issue as to what should be the basis for society decisions as to the type of future we prefer.
Livi Bacci , the demographer, is only worried because the current fertility rate implies the halving of the Italian population every forty years.

The issue of promoting an increase in natality has become the leit-motif of every Italian electoral programme, and, under the last Prodi government, was one of the most important objectives of his government.

Illegal Immigration and Criminality, twin issues

But Prodi may have disregarded the real preoccupation of the electorate, which was understood by Berlusconi, his successor, whose recent third ascent to power, by an overwhelming majority, was due to his recognition that the “people” wanted Security (Sicurezza). According to the figures of ISTAT, criminality is the major source of preoccupation ( 58,7 % ) especially in Puglia, Campanla and Sicily, and is often connected with massive waves of illegal immigration that regularly sweeps the Southern coasts facing North Africa.

TV and newspaper propose the same menu day after day:

Tons of rubbish left to rot in the streets of Naples, road pirates that kill pedestrians and run away, Roma or Roms (gypsies) that force their children to steal, honest citizens revolting against the numerous nomad camps, citizen’s patrols against mounting crime, illegal immigrants, more immigrants for whom, let’s face it, we don’t have jobs.

Here we have contrasting points of view, someone is telling lies and it is not clear why:
“Unemployment rises!( Corriere della Sera, June 2008). No joke, so why do we need more workingwomen + more babies and what are we going to do with the immigrants who reach our chores almost daily?

Why, one should ask, have Italian governments, of every shade, closed their eyes for years when faced with such ever-growing disorder?

It is not a mystery that criminality is more diffuse today in our world than when I was a child. England, for example, has the deplorable record of teenage gang’s and knife-related murder. Sociologists, historians, psychologists have been studying for years the reasons why. No consensus has prevailed.

Italy boasts an endemic ancient type of criminality that is family- and clan- related.: the Mafia and the Camorra. There is of course a relation between this home-grown criminality and an international business base that exploits vulnerable people by a heinous illegal traffic across the Mediterranean Sea.

Our frontiers have become porous

Thousands of “carrette del mare” ( sea-carts), hopelessly overloaded with immigrants are continually leaving Libya for Italy. Many of them end up on the bottom of the sea, tombs for lives and hopes. Reports of clandestine immigrants that reach the island of Lampedusa (a favourite spot for such adventurous passage from North Africa) are so common that it needs a shipwreck or some other tragedy to overcome the lethargy of a public overfed by the media. In the jargon borrowed from the unfortunate destiny of whales and dolphins, these cargoes are called “ beached”. According to figures released by the local Welcome Centre, more than 5,900 clandestine immigrants have reached Lampedusa this year alone.

In the national newspaper coloured ads declare: “LAMPEDUSA, the Pearl of the Mediterranean, From 490 €. Children gratis.”

The island is a tourist destination and in summer a vagrant crowd repeats the transhumance ritual.

With the high decibel of clubs, nobody seems to notice the presence of the new hungry arrivals. We think of them as wretched, they think of themselves lucky. Points of view change as the view from the shores points south or north.

What is the answer to these massive movements of people to this southern Italian outpost? Being Italians, can only be a… Work of Art! Which means: Escapism. You won’t believe this: to commemorate the deaths of thousands of victims at sea due to an ignoble trade with the connivance of General Gheddafi of Libya, the local Major commissioned a monument by a certain Mimmo Paladino, an artist in need of exposure with a politically correct cause. It is a door, which looks out to the sea and should symbolize “ a secular sanctuary”. It will be called “Door of Lampedusa, Door to Europe”.

EU closes the stable doors after the horse has bolted, but…

The wishful thinking by a foolish administrator clashes with the Parliament of the European Union’s decision to harmonize throughout the EU the rules of return to their homeland of these sans papiers (undocumented people). The new stricter law has became necessary- and came far too late – because the sages of the EU have suddenly realized that illegal immigration was choking their welfare system and feeding an already florid criminality.

But nothing is simple in Italy,the land of contradictions, where the old divisions between Right and Left, Secularism and Catholicism, dominate every aspect of life. The European religious bodies are up in arms: the Conference of European Churches, Caritas Europe, and the Commission for Migrants protest against the idea of forced return. “To migrate is not a crime, the real crime is an economic-financial system which allows 11% of world population to consume 88% of resources while the rest live in poverty.”

There you are: the social mission of the Church meets Communist internationalism, both denying the idea of borders.

But the Church’s criticism has a point, although we cannot force poor Italians (they exist) to pay for an unjust economic-financial system of which they too are victims.

We are at a stage where we cannot ignore the “other” “inconvenient truth”: the unmentionable reason of this irrepressible migration: overpopulation.

The flow of migrants comes mainly from Sub-Saharan Africa, which includes the 40 poorest countries in the world. To migrate is a necessity. The median age of population varies from 15 (Niger) and 19 (Gambia) and the demographic growth is the highest in the world. The Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mauritania and Nigeria registered a rate of growth greater than 3% per year, which means a doubling of the population every 23 years. Fertility is high and every woman gives birth to 5,5 children, against 3 per woman in other developing countries. The record belongs to Niger (7,9), Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad, Liberia (6), greater than the birth-rates of European countries in the 18th and 19th centuries.

According to previsions by the UN , the entire region will grow from 309 million to 730 million in 2050, resulting in a scarcity of resources and need for cultivable land which the very density of a young population will not be able to satisfy and will lead to an enormous migration pressure. (Source: Neodemos, Dove emigrare è una necessità, by Letizia Mencarini)

This is the obvious sign that Europe should - before anything else- for the good of the poor and its own good, encourage birth control in these wretched countries by every appropriate means: education, economic incentives, media propaganda, but especially the diffusion of family planning clinics.

Failing this, the future scenario will be more famine, more wars, more suffering, more expensive but ineffectual Western aid. We will not halt the biblical invasion. Italy, its demographers and economists point out, needs young blood to do the jobs that the new generation doesn’t want to do . Or is there something else at work?

Who profits?

What is the role of the Mafia or the Camorra, the two main criminal organizations ? And what is the Berlusconi government prepared to do ?

All Italian society is indirectly involved in the consequences of human traffic, not just criminal organizations.

Take the “caporalato”, a new term to indicate the ringleader of a pool of immigrants, who supplies the industry large and small scale, with labourers at knockdown prices. These pools are formed as cooperatives that have an inbuilt existential volatility: they are born, prosper, die and then spring up again with a different identity. Some of them are manned by immigrants themselves and, for every worker they find, they will receive a financial cut. The immigrants who are victims and accomplices of such illegal transactions do not complain, even if the salary is so low that it doesn’t permit them to rent a habitable accommodation, but forces them to live heaped up sub-human misery.

Most of the illegal labour is used by:

1)the construction industry;
2) agriculture.

We shouldn’t build too many houses. Once the sans papiers get their papiers – which they will finally get – they finally can occupy the very houses that they have built, this time at subsidised rent. A friend of mine who works for the Assisi City Council, providing accommodation for poor families, explains that the more children in a family, the more likely they are to jump the queue for subsidised housing. Italian families, which have one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, do not have right to accommodation, even considering that the statistical reality (1,35 child per woman) is a numerical fiction, as families have more than one child. Moreover, the median dimension of a family nucleus is 2,5 persons per family, including other, often elderly, relatives.

But what will happen, when, according to last international news, the housing bust reaches us, as it already has in Spain and Denmark, where the construction industry has over-built ? "What will happen when the construction industry realizes that a shrinking and aging population won't need new houses?" asks Joseph Chamie director of the UN Population Division. Yes, what will happen ? What will we do with the excessive uneducated workforce of immigrants ?

The South of Italy is full of illegal immigrants from Morocco and other parts of Africa, who never heard of a contract and if they see one, they wouldn’t be able to read it. Some of the most celebrated Sicilian wines are the fruit of their labour. The tomatoes, the olive oil and wines that we eat and drink, and that are exported to markets in far away countries like Canada or England, are grown by seasonal and illegal immigrants, who have been paid next to nothing to enrich some producers and middle-men, of whom even Scrooge would be ashamed.

But the ones who work full time, even in horrible conditions, are the lucky ones: a substantial number roams from town to town, sleeping in stations, parks, a “via crucis” of day jobs, sometimes not paid by a landowner who acts more like a criminal himself. ( Source “Una stagione all’inferno” by Medecin sans frontiers, www.terrelibere.org/?x=completa&riga=260 )

Sometimes hope but more often shame impedes these young men from returning home, where prospects are not much better anyway.

The Mafia has a role in this human trafficking. Its formidable power is embedded in the territory where it has social acceptance and cooperation. It is a compound of families and “cosche” or clans, which operate as legal enterprises, with above-ground businesses that hide more sinister underworld activities.

Ultimately the Mafia has diversified by forming pacts with various criminal groups from East Europe and North Africa, which handle the most profitable, meanest tasks, such as drug trafficking, prostitution and illegal immigration. The foreign Mafia controls 50% of the prostitutes in Sicily while cocaine and marijuana are in the hands of Albanian clans. Immigrants sell their lives to the Mafia to pay for the trip to Italy.

One hears every single day of scandals involving either inhuman treatment of immigrants by Italian criminals, or crimes committed by immigrants, especially Roms, who have become the latest Italian obsession:

Another unresolved problem: nomads

The Roms are one of the manifold tribes of nomads who came originally from India and have taken up mobile residence in the heart of Europe, always refusing integration and assimilation. Once silversmiths, bear-trainers. fortune tellers, horse traders and other itinerant casual labour, they cannot cope with the changes of a modern world that has no need of their skills. However, their shabby settlements have all the modern tokens of consumption: mainly satellite TV cables, Nike shoes, Mercedes and other luxury cars. Italians fear the vicinity of their 700 camps, scattered among the peripheries of Italian cities. Famous for instructing their children in Dickensian-style pick pocketing, their mores are more brutal than anything old Fagin ever dreamed of. Wire tapping from the police has revealed their cruel lives: parents threaten small children with sexual abuse and beatings if they didn’t follow the orders given through a cellular phone, to rob apartments. Popular reaction was swift and unusually violent:

In May 2008 Roma camps around Naples were attacked and set on fire by local residents.

Journalists were accused of fomenting the xenophobic ire of the Italian populace, by daring to report the criminal acts committed by “foreigners”…So much for freedom of the press.

The Berlusconi government responded immediately by threatening controversial measures. They wanted to fingerprint all the Roma children, to protect them from mistreatment and a life of delinquency and lack of education. In Italy, there are about 35,000 Roma children between 6 and 14 years of age, but only 1,200 are actually enrolled in school.

The Lega Nord (Northern League), a party that represents the richer more industrious North and lobbies for fiscal independence applauded. The left claimed, “discrimination!” The Catholic hierarchy bled for the little children....

But a recent survey has established that 67% of Italians approve the idea of fingerprinting, as nobody has offered an alternative way to avoid the children’s scandalous exploitation by their own parents. The proposed measures have been criticised as racist by foreign observers. On the other hand, apparently, in France, children from 13 years onwards are registered by the police even in the absence of any punishable offence, but thought to be a nuisance for public order…

Is Italian society disintegrating ?

Journalistic ethos and the polite fiction of hopeful environmentalism require that, after describing disturbing scenarios, one should end with a note of optimism.

Unfortunately, I cannot see things getting better. The hopes which Berlusconi has aroused, the changes that his Cabinet of mediocre and inexperienced ministers have been instructed to carry out, are not going to produce a revolutionary reversal of national decline.

Italy is now more than ever divided by the forces of single-issue pressure groups. The leftist mantra is multiculturalism; the right is sticking to nationalism. Italians won’t suddenly metamorphose into law-abiding citizens. National character doesn’t change in a day. The proposed laws to stop illegal immigration are half-hearted attempts to satisfy a momentary anger, but the reality is that the country as a whole uses immigrants to carry out the growth that law-makers and citizens aspire to. Everybody lives on the back of immigrants, legal or illegal. Antonio Golini, professor of demography at the University La Sapienza in Rome, said that immigration is necessary, especially for countries like Italy, to meet the exigencies of the labour market. "But it cannot be massive," he said, "because of the presence in Europe of old minorities."

An aura of hypocrisy permeates the whole thing.

Through a recent survey we find out that 73% of the participants declared that migratory phenomena is dangerous for public order, while at the same time they employed illegal immigrants themselves, as black-market labour.

In the moral vacuum that is the hallmark of our decadent Western societies, the only voice that has any position on social and ethical issues is unfortunately the Catholic Church. And its position is, as to be expected, the defence of the meek, the poor and the slave. In its universalism, it has no voice to defend the national interest. Because it believes that man is made in image of God, it neglects and sometimes despises nature, if nature doesn’t serve unknown “higher” interest of mankind.

In a funny way, the Churchmen have become the defenders of an old vision of economic interests, and their language is laced with market jargon. Thus, the all-out defence of immigration, to replenish the empty pension trunks of the State and be called upon to fill the empty cradles. “Replacement Migration” (Is it a Solution to Declining and Aging Population?“ a subtitle title of a 2000 draft report by the UN Population Division) has been called a buzzword for Italian growth economy.

In a report by the Catholic Foundation, Migrantes (http://www.migrantes.com), with the theme of “Young Migrants: a resource and a provocation,” we may glimpse a Catholic vision of our future as a nation. The schools of tomorrow, let’s say by 2050, will have more foreign students than Italians. They will be sons and daughters of immigrants, and obviously the teaching profession welcomes this possibility, otherwise what will we do with all our teachers ?

According to a priest, the outcome will be positive, because Italian education has already chosen an intercultural approach, where differences are an enriching element.

Pupils from 192 nations are already present with a multiplicity of languages, customs and even traditions, including food, in the Italian schools. According to the Report, the school MUST recognise this reality and renounce the selfishness of mono culturalism.

Some teachers, swamped by the extra work included in an colossal influx of children in big cities, without the minimum knowledge of the Italian language, are starting to rebel, led by a determined group of parents. No need to wait till 2050: In Milano’s suburbs there are nursery classes with only one Italian bambino! The audacious proposal is to institute a maximum limit to the admission of children of other ethnic groups, let’s say, no more than three per class.

We know that the deterioration of Italian civilisation is not just the fault of immigration. But illegal immigration has added to the existent chaos and to the aggravated population pressures. It is suffered passively with a mixture of incompetence and resignation.

The Sicilian author Lampedusa in his book “The Leopard” expounds this revealing political truth: “ We will make changes so that nothing will change.”

Is this the destiny of our democracies?

Some Italian political commentators have risked their reputation by affirming that Italy is governed by thieves, by self-important idiots, by wind-bags or by ineffectual turn-coats. It may be that most political power attracts the wrong sort of personality. The difference lies in an incurable, seemingly invisible sickness, afflicting Italian society. This sickness manifests in the impossibility of indicting and calling to account whoever is responsible for unlawfulness or foul play. An impenetrable smoke screen covers the truth and offers impunity. Whoever knows something, won’t divulge it, or the accused ping-pong the responsibility to each other. Nobody ever can know the truth. Omertà is an Italian word for the conspiracy of silence concerning crimes, usually practised by Mafia members.

And so it goes: thefts, abuses, embezzlement, fraud, negligence of duty, go unpunished and the malpractice lasts forever and ever.

The battle so far seems lost.

We can no longer preserve our neglected cultural heritage, and alas, our quickly fading natural beauty, which, who has grown in this much-loved country, should appreciate and defend. But the greed of the few is spoiling and transforming our age-old landscape. Who will inherit all this ?

ECONOMIC GROWTH FAILS TO ELIMINATE CHILD POVERTY
Are You Surprised?   November 28/07
 
Once again, the report card is in, and our Great God, Moloch, aka Economic Growth, has failed to deliver on its promise of eliminating poverty. Child poverty that is. Despite a pledge made two decades ago to see that it would come to an end, Statistics Canada recently revealed that 17% of Canadian children live in impoverished conditions, along with just under 10% of adults.