corporatisation

The corporate takeover of Ukrainian land from about 2011 up to and during the Ukraine war is extremely immoral, corrupt, cruel and disenfranchising. I understand it as a process of privatisation, corporatisation and debt, which means ultimately that Ukraine is no longer governed by its people, but by corporates and oligarchs.

Donald Horne, who wrote ironically about Australia as 'The Lucky Country,' thought that Australia was run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck but now, 60 years later, we don't even know who runs the country.

The problem is that once you entrust growth of the population and future direction to powerful individuals, whether in the government or in business, the ordinary people lose their right and ability to secure their own future. Having a system whereby a nation is subject to arbitrary population policy is a crime against that nation of people. Period. Policy which may influence birth rates through incentives or disincentives is different, as population in those cases is still determined by people’s individual reproductive choices. The future of a population of people is no longer in the hands of the people who share its future, but in those who may only see the people as a resource, or worse still, only see the state as a resource and people as merely human assets. People then become interchangeable and replaceable. A subtle, but very significant shift happens here. The identity of the people, the nation itself, the nation of people no longer exists in a political sense. The country has changed from being a tool of a people to organise themselves and to serve them, to a resource controlled by a few, whose make up is arbitrary and can be changed at will. All that matters now is numbers, and some will argue the population should be higher, others lower, but this is now all done from the perspective of the needs of the economy and the needs of the system. The people essentially hand themselves over and are now owned by state and government interests. Whether the state is a democracy or not, whether it has been popularly voted it or not doesn't matter. No individual should have the right to decide the fate of a people.

This has been happening for some time in the West and is so obvious, that no one sees it any more. But if, for example, you took control of Nepal and convinced them to have a population policy, and that the primary political endeavour would be to expand "Nepal" economically and structurally, then you would have essentially changed the nation to one which exists for its own sake because it is a nation of people, to one which is working for defined objectives (Growth, etc.). The people are now a means to an ends, rather than the ends in themselves. Now having established that, you can implement any legal population policy you like, even if it is one which results in rapid growth and in the original population becoming a minority or even being assimilated into the population you constructed and defined. You have also severely undermined the moral authority of the people to oppose you. You can even go further, and accuse those who object of undermining the country’s future.

This is an act of hostility against the nation, but by getting people to accept the premise that "Nepal" can and should be run as an enterprise, rather than be acknowledged as a nation of people, they've tacitly accepted this fate. If my goal was to engineer, modify the nation, or even completely change it demographically, I have targeted them, their way of life and identity for destruction. If one’s vision of 'progress' however involves destruction, destruction of suburbs, of parks, of heritage buildings and open spaces which people enjoy, why wouldn't it extend to include people? But there is a significant difference. One can own a building, and while it is a shame to allow people to destroy a building of beauty for gaudy apartment blocks, their ownership fits in with our morality.

But can one own a people? Does someone have the same right to engineer or change a population) the way they do their possessions? I argue they do not, and that being democratically elected does not grant one that right. Elected or not, no one has a right to decide for a people what their future is. Countries don't create nations. Nations of people create countries. Therefore the government which runs a country has no right to engineer a nation. Whether it is the Japanese nation, German or Kenyan, their respective government cannot assume the right to change the make up of the nations they are responsible for. The people of those nations must therefore call their governments out when they assume powers that aren't theirs.

We, however, are discouraged from looking at the issue in this manner. "Practicality" we are told, must trump all. But does economic benefit, growth or the housing industry justify this? Is it acceptable to reshape humanity, or sections of it for these purposes, or allow this to happen because of your policy?

We can see a more recent, clear example here.

This conference believes that the destiny of the natives of Aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end. Nobody who knows about these groups could deny that their members are socially and culturally deprived. We must improve their lot so that they can take their place economically and socially in the general community. Once this is done, the breakup of such groups will be rapid. [1] [2]

This was viewed by some as genocide, but not through killing or displacement, but by engineering the population. This was a deliberate attempt, but what if it was just promoted as an ideal? What if the government gave incentives for people to move to make this happen? What if the government marginalised Aboriginals who objected as being backward and intolerant of change? Are there any circumstances by which this goal could be achieved, and this be considered acceptable? I would argue not, and most people would likely agree.

We must be aware of the potential problems that can occur through poor 'population policy'. We should analyse it not just on economic and practical terms, but make those who promote policy accountable for the cultural and national impact that such policies have. If those policies pose threats to an identifiable group of people, then we must hold people who propose such policies morally accountable. This seems odd, as in the West we have been conditioned not to view ourselves this way. Populations always change over time, naturally, this is to be expected. But there is a smooth continuum from natural change, to forced change, from the migrations of people westwards into Europe prior to the establishment of civilisation, to forced assimilation to “breed out the black”. Between these two, there is a vast grey area, an area where it easy to move from acceptable to unacceptable. Where change can turn from natural to forced. Where demographic change can turn from natural evolution to forced engineering, as is happening in the West.

The idea of 'population policy', the tool that governments use to move masses of people can easily swing us from acceptable to unacceptable. It is this we must be wary of, and be willing to call our elected leaders out on.

NOTES

[1] http://www.stolengenerations.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=140&Itemid=109

[2] http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/52.pdf

The political left-of-center is losing the war; learn from Scandinavian states "We are losing the war. And by we, I mean the politically left-of-centre; I mean the Labor Party and other social democratic parties around the world, I mean the trade unions, and I mean the environmental movement. We sometimes win battles, but overall we are not winning. I repeat, we are losing the war. We sometimes win elections, but usually on the terms of our opposition. We are in office, but not in power. And at all times we are fighting defensive, rearguard actions to protect the things we have achieved and built up—the social welfare safety net; industrial relations and workplace rights and protections; environmental protections and national parks; publicly owned assets; rules against the abuse of market power. Our opponents are emboldened and enjoy unprecedented media power." From a speech by Kelvin Thomson in the Australian Federal Parliament on Monday 24 February 2014 [1]

When I was young and first getting involved in politics, it felt like the left was winning and we would be able to usher in a golden age of civilized politics and equal opportunity. But it did not happen. A report by Oxfam, a month ago, found that the richest 85 people in the world own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world's population—some three and a half billion people—combined. Half the world's wealth is owned by just one per cent of the world's population. And the situation is getting worse. In nearly every country they surveyed, economic inequality has increased since 1980.

The richest one per cent in the US more than doubled their share of national income. In Australia, the richest one per cent doubled their share. After the GFC, the wealthiest one per cent in the US captured 95 per cent of post-crisis growth, while the bottom 90 per cent became poorer! How did this happen? Where did we go wrong?

At the risk of oversimplification, capitalism was largely unfettered and successfully fighting off the workers and
their political representatives until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when they stuffed up big time and paid
for it in the form of the rise of the welfare state, government enterprises, workers' rights and protections, and
various restrictions on market excesses.

Wealth disparities, corporations crushing ordinary people, democracy and environment

But in the last few decades the rise of multinational corporations, globalisation, free trade and the ideas of the free
movement of goods and people has enabled capitalism to progressively break free from national governments.
We now see corporations that are too big to fail. We now see companies, some as large as the governments they
talk to, demanding the unwinding of rules and regulations they do not like, and threatening to take their bat and
ball and go elsewhere if they do not get their way. Environmental protections, workplace protections, foreign
ownership restrictions—pretty much anything governments might want to do in the public interest—are under
attack. Large corporations are expressly demanding in so-called trade agreements that they have the right to sue
any government that takes action which damages their financial bottom line, the so-called Investor State Dispute
Settlement mechanism.

Some welcome these changes; I do not. The picture I see is of a manufacturing sector in decline and of job
security, particularly for younger and older workers, becoming a thing of the past. The picture I see is of our
young people not being able to afford a home of their own as we could. The picture I see is of an environment on
the ropes, with many of our beautiful and priceless birds, plants and animals on the brink of extinction, and our
land ravaged by droughts, bushfires, floods and cyclones. The picture I see is of terrorist violence and regional
killings fuelled by conflict over access to scarce land, water, food and energy. The picture I see is of older people
struggling to pay the bills, of families under constant time pressure, mental-health problems and drugs like ice
and alcohol causing more hardship and misery among our young people than ever before:

Fight back by learning from Norway's successful model

So how does the left fight back? How do trade unions fight back? How do environment groups fight back? We
need to learn from successful models. We need to learn from Norway, for example. When it comes to long-term
policy vision, Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund, currently worth $900 billion, is what we should have done years
ago. Set up in 1990, the fund owns around one per cent of the world's stocks, as well as bonds and real estate
from London to Boston, making the Nordic nation an exception when others are struggling under a mountain
of debt. The fund, equivalent to 183 per cent of 2013 Gross Domestic Product, is expected to peak at 220 per
cent around 2030. As the chief economist at DNB Markets points out, 'The fund is a success in the sense that
parliament has managed to put aside money for the future,' which is something Australia should have done but
squandered the opportunity.

The comparison between Norway's management of their resources boom and Australia's management of ours
could not be more different. Norway has maintained a much larger manufacturing sector, currently just under 30
per cent, per working age of population, than Australia. Norway has an employment to working-age population
ratio that is five percentage points higher than Australia's and an unemployment rate of 3.3 per cent, compared
to ours of six per cent. Between 1980 and 2010 the cumulative current-account surplus for Norway was 200 per
cent of GDP, while for Australia the outcome was a cumulative current account deficit of 127 per cent of GDP.
Significantly, Norway has a population growth rate one-third of Australia's and little migration. What it has
instead is an aggressive industry policy to maximise pull-over effects to manufacturing from resource expansion.
This was done by local content targets during resource expansion and operation; and subsidies, investment
support and training to ensure manufacturing could meet local content targets at minimum cost to the resource
sector.

The sovereign wealth funds' investments offshore have minimised the appreciation of the Norwegian currency, in
contrast with Australia, where a high Australian dollar has put pressure on the competitiveness of manufacturing,
which in 2004 contributed 12.5 per cent to our economic output, but today just seven per cent.

The Dutch disease

There is absolutely no doubt that Australia has contracted 'Dutch disease'. Perhaps we should call ours
'Ozteoporosis'. Mining has grown but manufacturing has shrunk. We had a currency surging on the back of the
vast capital inflows required for new mine construction and expansion, as Ian Verrender recently pointed out in
an article on how we squandered the resources boom. In support of sovereign wealth funds, Ian Verrender said:
How could such a fund have helped us? By investing offshore, it could have helped stabilise the currency, partially
offsetting the dollar-boosting effect of the resources boom, thereby easing pressure on our manufacturing and
services industries.

Learn from Sweden

We also need to learn from Sweden. As The Economist has reported:
Sweden has also donned the golden straitjacket of fiscal orthodoxy with its pledge to produce a fiscal surplus
over the economic cycle. Its public debt fell from 70% of GDP in 1993 to 37% in 2010, and its budget moved
from an 11% deficit to a surplus of 0.3% over the same period.

Sweden's public accounts, in contrast to the rest of Europe, have swung back into balance after the global financial
crisis, and Sweden remains one of the few countries in the OECD whose financial assets considerably exceed its
liabilities—to the tune of more than 20 per cent of GDP. Yet social expenditures remain high and the Swedish
welfare state remains strong. The Swedish state is still large—51 per cent of GDP last year—and spends much
more than Anglo-Saxon countries do on everything from early childhood education to job search and training.
More than 70 per cent of the children of the poorest fifth of Swedes are in state-financed childcare and education
schemes, compared with fewer than 30 per cent in America.

Wage disparities in Sweden are narrower than in Anglo-Saxon countries, thanks to centralised bargaining
between unions and employers that sets minimum wages in different sectors. More than 7 out of ten workers are
members of unions. Top CEO pay has not risen nearly as dramatically as in America.

Maintenance of social capital

Not surprisingly, Swedes' trust in government is over 60 per cent, amongst the highest in the Western world.
This is a vindication for a model based on relative equality and supportive welfare that can coexist alongside
a balanced budget, funded by high taxation in an economy that is performing well for all its citizens, not just
for vested interests.

Unlike Australia, the US, and other European countries, the Nordic countries have kept real control of their
borders. With one exception, they have kept their own currency. Norway has not even joined the European Union.
That is the sort of thing that gives you real independence and sovereignty, and control over your own destiny, as
opposed to entering into trade treaties that compromise and surrender the capacity of government to act in the
national interest and look after their own citizens.

Borders and population numbers

And finally, and critically, they have not run migration programs that artificially inflate their population. The
Nordic countries have a combined population of 25 million, with expected combined growth by 2050 of only
three million to 28 million. Australia by comparison is 23 million but is expected to grow by over 60 per cent
to 36 or even 40 million by 2050.

So I say to my friends in the trade union movement, I say to my friends in the environment movement, I say to
my friends in the Labor Party: if you are sick of losing, we need to learn from these examples and campaign in
favour of independence and self-reliance and against rapid population growth.

NOTES

SPEECH delivered in the Australian Federal Parliament on Monday 24 February 204

Date Monday, 24 February 2014 Source House
Page 158 Proof Yes
Questioner Responder
Speaker Thomson, Kelvin, MP (Wills) .

For readers who want to help defend The People and their Environment, consider getting involved in Kelvin Thomson's Victoria First.

Santa Claus is now in gear To punctuate our living year. He has a lot of jobs to do, including a trip to Humpty Doo. He was his own boss til 2002 It had been like that since toy trains were new. But Toyland Corporation wanted a share Of his global market reaching everywhere!

Santa acted on bad advice and sold the lot
He really didn’t care a jot
For monetary rewards
Which the boss could get with much lower awards,
As workers slaving all over the world
Earn much less than at the Pole we’re told
So many changes came to bear
Santa was nearly pulling out his hair!
His polar elves stood to get the sack
But he held fast to them as they had the knack
Of making toys beyond compare,
They truly had just so much flare.

So was it good or was it bad?
Or was Santa really "had"?
He works so hard with his staff of elves
He was told they would have much more for themselves,
But as they’re paid in toys, not money
The whole thing seems just terribly funny!

(Article by Sheila Newman and Tony Boys.) Burma, now known as Myanmar, nationalised its oil and gas industries after a long history of foreign exploitation. Now the new government seems to be making friends with globalists and, Australian-style, setting up to sell their resources for what looks like the final gasp of the growth/industrial economy. Comments from Tony Boys, regional specialist, on how the locals may fare.

Article by Sheila Newman and Tony Boys.

Burmah/Myanmar oil and gas exploration history

In the second world war the Japanese invaded Burma (now called Myanmar) in part to gain access to its oil reserves and remained there until 1944, when they were defeated.

Scotland originating Burmah Oil Company was the sole oil company to operate in Burma until 1901, with the entry of Standard Oil.

In 1963 Burmah nationalised its petroleum industry, creating the Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE). The company was the sole operator for oil and gas exploration, production and transmission, with a 1,900km onshore pipeline grid. A French energy group, Total S.A. partnered MOGE in the Yadana natural gas pipeline, along with Chevron Corporation, a US-based company and PTT, a Thai state-owned oil and gas company. (Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanma_Oil_and_Gas_Enterprise.)

Foreign exploration and development corporations are eyeing Myanmar's precious minerals with a view to moving in for the kill. Industry advocates are pressing for "more open investment rules" in line with other middle-income Asian nations. Myanmar is located close to China and India with their scarily boundless appetites for raw materials, so the corporate race is on to dig it all up as fast as possible to 'kickstart' China and the rest of the world from their real-time economic doldrums and put them back on some buried sunlight time.

The international mining industry, not too fond of paying its way, is portraying Myanmar as more attractive than Australia and Indonesia since those countries enacted new taxes on mining. In the mean time Australia and the United states recently modified economic sanctions against Myanmar perhaps because its new government looks somewhat more democratic, with Aung San Suu Kyi now in parliament or possibly because the new government is talking about opening up to foreign investment and human rights have never posed much of a problem there.

What ever is happening, it doesn't look like this 'democracy' will be much better for Myanmar than what has happened in the past, just corporate rather than national, and, really, capitalist rather than democratic perhaps.

GlobalData, a UK-based business research company, in a press release, "Myanmar - An emerging natural resources powerhouse," (8 October 2012) say that the government has

"expressed interest in joining the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a global standard for increasing transparency in the extractive sector. According to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the mining sector’s contribution to Myanmar’s GDP has increased from MMK15 billion ($2.3 billion) in 2000 to MMK367 billion ($56.2 billion) in 2010 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 37.6%. Myanmar holds minerals such as lead, zinc, silver, chromium, copper, gold, and precious gems.

The country also has several major oil and gas fields, but a lack of technology and low participation from foreign oil companies has left most of its hydrocarbon reserves unexploited. However, May 2012 saw the Ministry of Energy announce that foreign oil companies will be allowed to make upstream investments in 23 offshore oil and gas blocks in the country.

Myanmar holds proven oil and gas reserves of 2.1 billion barrels (bbl) and 25 trillion cubic feet (tcf) respectively as of April 2011. Additionally, the country’s energy ministry estimates its domestic shale oil reserves to be around 3.3 million barrels (MMbbl). FDI in Myanmar’s oil and gas industry stood at about $13.8 billion for 2011–2012, representing almost 31% of the country’s GDP. However, the country must become a more investor-friendly nation to attract bigger international investments, and develop its fossil fuel production."

To put this in perspective, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) ranks Myanmar at 70th in the world with estimated proven reserves of 0.05 billion (250,000,000) barrels of oil per day and 37th with estimated proven reserves of gas of 10 trillion cubic feet. World oil usage is currently around 25,000,000,000 barrels per year. There is no way of verifying the real accuracy of these estimates because the data is mostly commercially sourced and used to justify commercial exploration where it might not otherwise be undertaken. Press releases are notoriously prone to exaggerate for impact.

What does this really mean for Myanmar?

"Industrial growth in Myanmar could potentially benefit every strata of society, promoting employment opportunities and economic development ... states a new report by natural resources experts GlobalData."

Commercial press releases are also always inclined to make industrial growth and extraction sound great for the people in a country where it occurs. The reality is that corporate scale mining, agriculture and construction always take land out of traditional hands which are rarely compensated. Self-sufficient people thus displaced are expected to train and fit into a new extractive and contractual economy, which erases their place in the world and expects them to pay rent where once they owned productive land.

Japan-based Tony Boys has written extensively about local tribal people in this area of the world, where he has travelled with musicians and studied the languages. (Read more and see photos of agricultural cycle and hill people's rich lives here.) He comments:

"Clearly this is going to mean more disruption for the Karen and other nationality people - the Kachin are also mentioned - since they are the ones who live in the mountains, where most of the mining is going to take place (but not oil and gas, which seems to be offshore).

The GlobalData press release describes Myanmar's environment as requiring

"protection from policy makers, who must control excessive felling of trees, the proper treatment of mining waste and water systems, and illegal mining. Mining without using proper safeguards can also put miners’ safety at risk, and harmful mining practices have been observed at gold mines in the states of Kachin and Karen, and in copper mines in Northern Myanmar."

If there is renewed logging then there will most probably be a government push to get indigenous peoples (IPs) totally out of the forest, not to simply prevent them from carrying out swidden farming (this was the main story in Thailand, but the Karen and other IPs managed to prevent the worst from happening - physical relocation - though some villages were forcibly relocated in the 80s.) That sort of thing is very likely to happen in Maynmar. There are plenty of Karen in Myanmar living in the flatlands, so the government is likely to just shrug their shoulders and say 'better for them in the flatlands than in the hills, where life is tough and where the hill people are destroying the forests anyway...'.

Although tin is not mentioned, I have seen a few places where Karen villages are associated with tin resources in N. Thailand. When the mining company moves in to mine the resources (generally just stripping off the surface) I suppose they have permission from the (local) government to do so, but the villagers are told absolutely nothing. They are even told lies about what is being mined or being done - it's so bad that I had to figure out what had been mined in one village about 15 years after it happened because NO ONE in the village knew what it was!! It took me a while to realize it was tin (and I had seen similar situations in two other places). There did not seem to be any serious health effects and so on, and the area was small (might have been a failure, actually) so good for them, but if there is gold found near a village, that will really mean the end. Mountains of tailings and arsenic is used in the process, I believe, so no one wants to be living near that! (There's a gold-mining area I've visited in NZ, just on the southern end of the Coromandel Peninsula - the locals were very angry. There were also gold prospectors wandering the hills all over the peninsula - the locals were on the watch out for them and sometimes even threatened them at gunpoint if they were on anyone's land. You can imagine what the situation is likely to be in Myanmar...)

If it were Aung San Suu Kyi totally in charge, maybe not so bad. I think the IPs can trust her. But she is not in charge, and even if she were, mining is likely to take place. The country has to develop, doesn't it? Do we have any alternative development scenarios in Myanmar? Not to my knowledge. So they're stuck with selling their resources for what looks like the final gasp of the growth/industrial economy.

Unfortunately, not a few people (IPs) are going to have their lives very badly disrupted by this. It's very, very sad. So is Fukushima, so is Koodankulam and everywhere where big money is imposing it's dangerous and dirty technology on the ordinary, powerless people." (Tony Boys).

This article identifies a tendency internationally to desensitize the public to the mass-murder by Western-supported governments of whole peoples whom they find inconvenient. Australia has a history of cultivating 'wilful blindness' to these events in our neighborhood, under the leadership of powerful government figures. Geoffrey Taylor here draws our attention to an example of such a complex attitude in an interview with Paul Keating last year. [This article started out as a response to Tigerquoll's comment, "Willful Blindness in East Timor, Sri Lanka, and now West Papua".]

This article identifies a tendency internationally to desensitize the public to the mass-murder by Western-supported governments of whole peoples whom they find inconvenient. Often the victims of this persecution are described as or even call themselves 'communists'. Usually they would more correctly be called nationalist peasant movements against Western supported governments that are privatising and corporatising [colonising] the common and traditional land of these people and depriving them of their right to self-government. Such genocides are later 'economically' justified by an averaged rise in living standards with increased GDP that comes with the overtaking of small subsistence holdings and their adaptation to commercial agriculture and other industries. That these agricultural and industrial changes could only come about by mass dispossession and slaughter of the original land-holders is almost never acknowledged in any manner that might be meaningfully pinned on the political, private and corporate entities which ultimately profit from these despicable colonial events. Australia has a history of cultivating 'wilful blindness' to these events in our neighborhood, under the leadership of powerful government figures.

Geoffrey Taylor here draws our attention to an example of such a complex attitude in an interview with Paul Keating last year. Keating stands out as a prime minister who, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, cultivated Australia's supportive relationship with the brutal and oppressive Suharto Government in Indonesia. Candobetter Ed.

In a recent interview (24 Mb MP3 file here) on 2 November last year with the ABC's Richard Fidler, former 'Labor' Prime Minister Keating dismissed concerns for human rights and democracy in Indonesia. He claimed that figures given by economists proved that ordinary Indonesians had been lifted from poverty to prosperity by the policies of former dictator Suharto, who came to power in the coup of 1965 in which more than half a million members and supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) were murdered.[1]

Keating's apologies for the Suharto dictatorship have to be read to be believed. I have not yet fully transcribed all that is of interest from the above-mentioned MP3 file, but below is some:

Richard Fidler (RF): One of the things I get from your book is that you, kind of, seem indifferent toward -- you shrug at the idea of democracy in Asia. ...

Paul Keating (PK): No, no ..

RF: You treat it like an over-rated virtue like chastity before marriage or something like that. You're going to go: Ahh!, ... We make too much fuss about the idea of ...

PK: Yeah, A lot of this came from our debate about Indonesia. Here is our largest neighbour, about two hundred and thirty million people. -- the largest, you know, five or six flying hours across the archipelago, ... -- because of what happened at Balibo in Timor, the Fairfax newspapers, especially the Sydney Morning Herald, ran this brutal campaign against Indonesia for nearly 30 years. In fact the Sydney Morning Herald editorialised in favour of a military attack by Australia on Indonesia. You can imagine it. ... And this is all because they don't share our democratic values. The fact that Suharto's New Order Government pulled two hundred and thirty million people from abject poverty and brought them to a reasonable standard of living --- In fact, the year before the economic collapse of '97/'98 the World Bank said that the declines in infant mortality and the rise in education standards, the general improvements in health and the distribution of income are greater in Indonesia than any country under study. ...

RF: But do you ...

PK: This cuts no ice, of course, with the donkeys at the Sydney Morning Herald

RF: That's, that's true, but you know, then, that Suharto was pretty much a gangster in many ways ...

PK: No, he wasn't. No, no!

RF: His whole family were into that economy in a big way ...

PK: No, no!

RF: The cars, tobacco ..

PK: No, no! You don't know that ...

RF: Clothes. They were all in on that

PK: They were

RF: I think what you're saying is that, like you have got to watch your terms. This guy down the road -- the gangster down the road isn't such a bad bloke, because he keeps the streets quiet.

PK: No, no. You've ... Let's get the argument set right right here. In the country which has got no wealth, he local people, the ..? boomies as they call them ...

The demonisation of Communism, which has increased in recent years, allows the large scale killing of Communists in countries such as Vietnam, Korea and Indonesia to be glossed over in the way Keating did or else depicted as other than the gross crimes against humanity that they in fact are.

In truth, most Communist Party members in those countries listed above had little in common with Stalin, whose terrible record had been used to so darken the name of Communism. Most would have been much more at home in the Australian Labor Party (ALP) than running Stalin's gulags. The murder of half a million PKI members would have had affected Indonesia in a fashion similar to what the murder of around 20,000-30,000 member of the ALP would have done to Australia at the same time.

The destruction of the PKI served to strategically protect the rear of the United States military as they commenced to obliterate Vietnam Laos and Cambodia with more bombs than were dropped in the Second World War, resulting in the loss of more than 3 million dead in Vietnam alone.

The scale of the crime against humanity, made possible or directly committed by the Indonesian dictators so applauded by Keating, is chilling - and this man was Prime Minister of Australia from 1991 to 1996!

FOOTNOTES

[1] That and other estimates of 300,000 and 1,0000,000 are given on page 25 of Pretext for Mass murder (2006) by John Roosa. As so much of the mass murder was covered up by Suharto's police state, it was not possible to properly investigate the mass murder until after Suharto's resignation in 1998.

Feed the world with Genetically Modified foods? The French Minister for Agriculture is preparing a new law to prevent GM crops in France as the European Court of Justice has questioned the health-risk basis of current French laws against GM. It probably suits GM patenters to keep the battle on this footing as a decoy because the major danger lies elsewhere - in loss of productive land tenure. In the US, meanwhile, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) has filed suit against Monsanto Company to challenge the chemical giant’s patents on genetically modified seed. The organic plaintiffs were forced to sue preemptively to protect themselves from being accused of patent infringement should they ever become contaminated by Monsanto’s genetically modified seed, something Monsanto has done to others in the past.

"http://www.thefutureoffood.com/onlinevideo.html"

French Law on GM 28 November 2011

Yesterday (28 November 2011) the French Conseil d'Etat took European Court of Justice advice that France's laws against OGM have no basis because France has not provided evidence that OGM presents any especially high risk to human or environmental health.

If France want to continue to outlaw GM then it will have to make a new law. The Minister for Agriculture, Bruno Le Maire has stated that he is preparing one.

"We do not want to cultivate Monsanto 810 on our territory because the environmental doubts are too great," he said.

About 30 countries in the world produce OGM crops. At the moment four countries are major producers of OGMs, the United States, Brazil, India and Argentina. Lesser producers are Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Germany (representing about 2% of world production) and Poland, the Tchec Republic and Slovakia.

OGMs have been studied as if they were medications - with reviews to see if they are toxic or produce allergies. These results have shown no danger of medical toxicity or allergy. The problems lie in other directions.

Turbo-industrialised agriculture a threat to democracy

The major legal and social problem is contamination of non-OGM by OGM because it carries the risk of widespread loss of land and crop tenure and self-government. This is a simply enormous problem, because these seeds are privately owned. If OGM seeds are found on your property you can be forced to pay for them and there have been many instances of this where farmers have been bankrupted. (Cases cited at 11.47 minutes into the on-line film.)OGM in private hands causes dispossession and alienation from traditional food-sources, with starvation and enslavement to corporate producers in non-industrialised and industrialised countries alike. The French Revolution was all about winning the right to own land for all citizens from feudal regimes where only a small proportion of people owned the land and the means of production. The OGM Revolution is shaping up as a means to segregate land and food production again from most people, although its proponents present it as a means to 'feed the world'.

March 29, 2011 Organic Farmers and Seed Sellers sue Monsanto to protect themselves from patents on genetically modified seed:

You can purchase a dvd of the new film: "The Future of Food". Below we have republished a statement about a new class action against Monsanto's industrial patents on OGM genes.

"Preemptive Action Seeks Ruling That Would Prohibit Monsanto From Suing Organic Farmers and Seed Growers If Contaminated By Roundup Ready Seed
(Originally posted here.)

NEW YORK – March 29, 2011 – On behalf of 60 family farmers, seed businesses and organic agricultural organizations, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) filed suit today (http://www.pubpat.org/assets/files/seed/OSGATA-v-Monsanto-Complaint.pdf) against Monsanto Company to challenge the chemical giant’s patents on genetically modified seed. The organic plaintiffs were forced to sue preemptively to protect themselves from being accused of patent infringement should they ever become contaminated by Monsanto’s genetically modified seed, something Monsanto has done to others in the past.

The case, Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, et al. v. Monsanto, was filed in federal district court in Manhattan and assigned to Judge Naomi Buchwald. Plaintiffs in the suit represent a broad array of family farmers, small businesses and organizations from within the organic agriculture community who are increasingly threatened by genetically modified seed contamination despite using their best efforts to avoid it. The plaintiff organizations have over 270,000 members, including thousands of certified organic family farmers.

“This case asks whether Monsanto has the right to sue organic farmers for patent infringement if Monsanto’s transgenic seed should land on their property,” said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT’s Executive Director and Lecturer of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. “It seems quite perverse that an organic farmer contaminated by transgenic seed could be accused of patent infringement, but Monsanto has made such accusations before and is notorious for having sued hundreds of farmers for patent infringement, so we had to act to protect the interests of our clients.”

Once released into the environment, genetically modified seed contaminates and destroys organic seed for the same crop. For example, soon after Monsanto introduced genetically modified seed for canola, organic canola became virtually extinct as a result of contamination.

Organic corn, soybeans, cotton, sugar beets and alfalfa now face the same fate, as Monsanto has released genetically modified seed for each of those crops, too. Monsanto is developing genetically modified seed for many other crops, thus putting the future of all food, and indeed all agriculture, at stake.

In the case, PUBPAT is asking Judge Buchwald to declare that if organic farmers are ever contaminated by Monsanto’s genetically modified seed, they need not fear also being accused of patent infringement. One reason justifying this result is that Monsanto’s patents on genetically modified seed are invalid because they don’t meet the “usefulness” requirement of patent law, according to PUBPAT’s Ravicher, plaintiffs’ lead attorney in the case. Evidence cited by PUBPAT in its opening filing today proves that genetically modified seed has negative economic and health effects, while the promised benefits of genetically modified seed – increased production and decreased herbicide use – are false.

“Some say transgenic seed can coexist with organic seed, but history tells us that’s not possible, and it’s actually in Monsanto’s financial interest to eliminate organic seed so that they can have a total monopoly over our food supply,” said Ravicher. “Monsanto is the same chemical company that previously brought us Agent Orange, DDT, PCB’s and other toxins, which they said were safe, but we know are not. Now Monsanto says transgenic seed is safe, but evidence clearly shows it is not.”

The plaintiffs in the suit represented by PUBPAT are: Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association; Organic Crop Improvement Association International, Inc.; OCIA Research and Education Inc.; The Cornucopia Institute; Demeter Association, Inc.; Navdanya International; Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association; Northeast Organic Farming Association/Massachusetts Chapter, Inc.; Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont; Rural Vermont; Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Association; Southeast Iowa Organic Association; Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Society; Mendocino Organic Network; Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance; Canadian Organic Growers; Family Farmer Seed Cooperative; Sustainable Living Systems; Global Organic Alliance; Food Democracy Now!; Family Farm Defenders Inc.; Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund; FEDCO Seeds Inc.; Adaptive Seeds, LLC; Sow True Seed; Southern Exposure Seed Exchange; Mumm’s Sprouting Seeds; Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co., LLC; Comstock, Ferre & Co., LLC; Seedkeepers, LLC; Siskiyou Seeds; Countryside Organics; Cuatro Puertas; Interlake Forage Seeds Ltd.; Alba Ranch; Wild Plum Farm; Gratitude Gardens; Richard Everett Farm, LLC; Philadelphia Community Farm, Inc; Genesis Farm; Chispas Farms LLC; Kirschenmann Family Farms Inc.; Midheaven Farms; Koskan Farms; California Cloverleaf Farms; North Outback Farm; Taylor Farms, Inc.; Jardin del Alma; Ron Gargasz Organic Farms; Abundant Acres; T & D Willey Farms; Quinella Ranch; Nature’s Way Farm Ltd.; Levke and Peter Eggers Farm; Frey Vineyards, Ltd.; Bryce Stephens; Chuck Noble; LaRhea Pepper; Paul Romero; and, Donald Wright Patterson, Jr.

Many of the plaintiffs made statements upon filing of the suit today.

Jim Gerritsen, a family farmer in Maine who raises organic seed and is President of lead plaintiff Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association ased in Montrose, Colorado, said, “Today is Independence Day fo America. Today we are seeking protection from the Court and putting Monsanto on notice. Monsanto’s threats and abuse of family farmers stops here. Monsanto’s genetic contamination of organic seed and organic crops ends now. Americans have the right to choice in the marketplace – to decide what kind of food they will feed their families - and we are taking this action on their behalf to protect that right to choose. Organic farmers have the right to raise our organic crops fo our families and our customers on our farms without the threat of invasion by Monsanto’s genetic contamination and without harassment by a eckless polluter. Beginning today, America asserts her right to justice and pure food.”

Dr. Carol Goland, Ph.D., Executive Director of plaintiff Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Association (OEFFA) said, “Consumers indicate, overwhelmingly, that they prefer foods made without genetically modified organisms. Organic farms, by regulation, may not use GMOs, while other farmers forego using them for other reasons. Yet the truth is that we are rapidly approaching the tipping point when we will be unable to avoid GMOs in our fields and on our plates. That is the inevitable consequence of releasing genetically engineered materials into the environment. To add injury to injury, Monsanto has a history of suing farmers whose fields have been contaminated by Monsanto’s GMOs. On ehalf of farmers who must live under this cloud of uncertainty and isk, we are compelled to ask the Court to put an end to this unconscionable business practice.”

Rose Marie Burroughs of plaintiff California Cloverleaf Farms said, “The devastation caused by GMO contamination is an ecological catastrophe to our world equal to the fall out of nuclear radiation. Nature, farming and health are all being affected by GMO contamination. We must protect our world by protecting our most precious, sacred resource of seed sovereignty. People must have the right to the resources of the earth for our sustenance. We must have the freedom to farm that causes no harm to the environment or to other people. We must protect the environment, farmers livelihood, public health and people’s right to non GMO food contamination.”

Ed Maltby, Executive Director of plaintiff Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance (NODPA) said, “It’s outrageous that we find ourselves in a situation where the financial burden of GE contamination will fall on family farmers who have not asked for or contributed to the growth of GE crops. Family farmers will face contamination of their crops by GE seed which will threaten their ability to sell crops as organically certified or into the rapidly growing ‘Buy Local’ market where consumers have overwhelmingly declared they do not want any GE crops, and then family farmers may be faced by a lawsuit by Monsanto for patent infringement. We take this action to protect family farms who once again have to bear the consequences of irresponsible actions by Monsanto.”

David L. Rogers, Policy Advisor for plaintiff NOFA Vermont said, “Vermont’s farmers have worked hard to meet consumers’ growing demand for certified organic and non-GE food. It is of great concern to them that Monsanto’s continuing and irresponsible marketing of GE crops that contaminate non-GE plantings will increasingly place their local and egional markets at risk and threaten their livelihoods.”

Dewane Morgan of plaintiff Midheaven Farms in Park Rapids, Minnesota, said, “For organic certification, farmers are required to have a buffer zone around their perimeter fields. Crops harvested from this buffer zone are not eligible for certification due to potential drift from herbicide and fungicide drift. Buffer zones are useless against pollen drift. Organic, biodynamic, and conventional farmers who grow identity-preserved soybeans, wheat and open-pollinated corn often save seed for replanting the next year. It is illogical that these farmers are liable for cross-pollination contamination.”

Jill Davies, Director of plaintiff Sustainable Living Systems in Victor, Montana, said, “The building blocks of life are sacred and should be in the public domain. If scientists want to study and manipulate them fo some supposed common good, fine. Then we must remove the profit motive.

The private profit motive corrupts pure science and increasingly precludes democratic participation.”

David Murphy, founder and Executive Director of plaintiff Food Democracy Now! said, “None of Monsanto’s original promises regarding genetically modified seeds have come true after 15 years of wide adoption by commodity farmers. Rather than increased yields or less chemical usage, farmers are facing more crop diseases, an onslaught of herbicide-resistant superweeds, and increased costs from additional herbicide application. Even more appalling is the fact that Monsanto’s patented genes can blow onto another farmer’s fields and that farmer not only loses significant revenue in the market but is frequently exposed to legal action against them by Monsanto’s team of belligerent lawyers.
Crop biotechnology has been a miserable failure economically and iologically and now threatens to undermine the basic freedoms that farmers and consumers have enjoyed in our constitutional democracy.”

Mark Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst for plaintiff The Cornucopia Institute said, “Family-scale farmers desperately need the judiciary anch of our government to balance the power Monsanto is able to wield in the marketplace and in the courts. Monsanto, and the biotechnology industry, have made great investments in our executive and legislative branches through campaign contributions and powerful lobbyists in Washington. We need to court system to offset this power and protect individual farmers from corporate tyranny. Farmers have saved seeds since the beginning of agriculture by our species. It is outrageous that one corporate entity, through the trespass of what they refer to as their ‘technology,’ can intimidate and run roughshod over family farmers in this country. It should be the responsibility of Monsanto, and farmers licensing their technology, to ensure that genetically engineered DNA does not trespass onto neighboring farmland. It is outrageous, that through no fault of their own, farmers are being intimidated into not saving seed for fear that they will be doggedly pursued through the court system and potentially bankrupted.”

About PUBPAT

The Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) is a not-for-profit legal services organization affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.
PUBPAT protects freedom in the patent system by representing the public interest against undeserved patents and unsound patent policy. More information about PUBPAT is available from www.pubpat.org."

Republished from http://www.colorofchange.org/opennet/

Dear friends,

The Internet has made amazing things possible, like freeing the Jena 6 and electing President Obama. None of it could have happened without an "open" Internet: one where Internet service providers are not allowed to interfere with what is seen and by whom.

Comcast, AT&T, Verizon - powerful broadband providers

Now, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon -- the most powerful broadband providers -- are trying to fundamentally change the way the Internet works. They're seeking to make even bigger profits by acting as gatekeepers over what we see and do online. If they succeed, the Internet would be more like radio and television: a few major corporations would control which voices are heard most easily, and it would be much harder for grassroots groups, individuals, and small businesses to compete with large corporations and well-funded special interests.

Big Money affecting democracy

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to do the right thing and keep the Internet open, but the big providers have been attacking their efforts, with help from Black leaders who have financial ties to the industry. And a recent court ruling just made the FCC's job even tougher.[1] If the FCC is to preserve an open Internet, they will have to boldly assert their authority and press even harder. It's why they need to hear directly from everyday people about the importance of an open Internet, now.

Send them a message

Will you join me in sending a message to the Federal Communications Commission supporting their effort to preserve an open Internet? It takes only a moment:

http://www.colorofchange.org/opennet/?id=2432-1205225

Net neutrality

The FCC is working to create rules that would protect "net neutrality," the principle that protects an open and free Internet and which has guided the Internet's operation since it began. It guarantees that information you put online is treated the same as anyone else's information in terms of its basic ability to travel across the Internet. Your own personal website or blog can compete on equal footing with the biggest companies. It's the reason the Internet is so diverse -- and so powerful. Anyone with a good idea can find their audience online, whether or not there's money to promote the idea or money to be made from it.

Big providers working on controlling internet information stream

AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are spending millions of dollars lobbying to create a new system where they can charge large fees to speed up some data while leaving those who can't afford to pay in the slow lane.[2] Such a system could end the Internet as we know it -- giving wealthier voices on the Internet a much bigger megaphone than poorer voices, and stunting the Internet's amazing equalizing potential.

Front groups posing as your friend

Buying the support of Black organizations?

President Obama strongly supports net neutrality, and so do most members of the FCC. With so much at stake for Black communities, you would expect Black leaders and civic organizations to line up in support of an open Internet.

But instead, a group of Black civic organizations is challenging the adoption of net neutrality rules. Some of the groups are nothing more than front groups for the phone and cable companies. Others, however, are major civil rights groups -- and all of them have significant financial ties to the nation's biggest Internet service providers. For example, AT&T donated half a million dollars last year to the NAACP, and led a drive to raise $5 million more[3], and boasts of donating nearly $3 million over the last ten years to a number of Black-led organizations.[4] Verizon, meanwhile, recently gave The National Urban League and the National Council of La Raza a $2.2 million grant.[5] Comcast is one of the National Urban League's "national partners" (Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen now sits on the NUL's Board of Trustees)[6], and the NUL's 2008 annual report notes that Comcast donated over $1 million that year.[7] Many of these groups have now filed letters with the FCC opposing or cautioning against net neutrality,[8,9,10,11] and the Internet service providers are using the groups' support to promote their agenda in Washington.[12,13]

Wannabe gate-keepers false 'trickle-down' argument

The main argument put forth by these groups is that net neutrality rules would widen the digital divide. They say that unless we allow Internet service providers to make bigger profits by acting as gatekeepers online, they won't expand Internet access in under-served communities. It's a bogus, trickle-down argument that has been thoroughly debunked.[14, 15] Expanding access to high speed Internet is an extremely important goal. But Internet service providers are already making huge profits,[16, 17] and if they believed that investing in low-income communities made good business sense, they would already be doing it. Allowing them to make more money by acting as toll-takers on the Internet won't change that. When these civil rights groups have been asked to back up their arguments, none have been able to do so without appealing to discredited, industry-funded studies.[18] Nevertheless, the FCC has taken notice of what these civil rights groups are saying about net neutrality, and is wary of going against them for fear of being perceived as insensitive to minority concerns.[19]

Now it's up to you

Now it's up to you

The FCC wants to do the right thing and implement net neutrality rules. FCC commissioners know, as we do, that the anti-net neutrality arguments coming from civil rights groups are bogus. But they don't want to appear to be on the wrong side of Black interests.[20]

We need to demonstrate that there's support among Black folks and everyone else for protecting an open Internet. Please join me in telling the FCC that we support net neutrality.

You can add your voice here

You can add your voice here:

http://www.colorofchange.org/opennet/?id=2432-1205225

Thanks.

References:

1. http://bit.ly/drWbQ3
2. http://www.savetheinternet.com/threats-open-internet
3. http://bit.ly/akyXZS
4. http://bit.ly/aGOz89
5. http://www.nclr.org/content/news/detail/54262/
6. http://bit.ly/93zDr6
7. http://bit.ly/dnqyq4
8. http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=7020141807
9. http://mmtconline.org/lp-pdf/NatlOrgs%20NN%20Comments%20011410.pdf
10. http://colorofchange.org/opennet/jan-letter.pdf
11. http://colorofchange.org/opennet/naacp-letters.pdf
12. http://colorofchange.org/opennet/usindustry-letter.pdf
13. http://bit.ly/d8GdOu
14. http://www.freepress.net/files/nn_fact_v_fiction_final.pdf
15. http://bit.ly/ay0dx7
16. http://bit.ly/9JQSDk
17. http://nyti.ms/cZaGq8
18. http://bit.ly/cpPA51
19. http://huff.to/awKtvk
20. http://huff.to/awKtvk

Click here to see an excellent film interview with Christopher Cook, who wrote, Diet for a Dead Planet about the industrialised world's grossly inefficient industrialised food processing and distribution system (notably the US branch.) A quite rivetting book that goes into the destruction of small farms and the evolution of today's system, with full documentation.

The film-link below takes you to the same film (The Official Meatrix) as the link in the teaser to this article.

This is a very informative wrap up of the problems - political, economic, production and environmental - of the desalination plant that the Victorian Government is forcing on Victorians.

We hear the history of Labor Party promises about how they would deal with water scarcity and of how they have 'backflipped' on their promises.
We hear how the local protesters took the matter to court, lost, and how the government pursued them for costs.
We hear how the cost of water has already doubled and will keep rising.
We hear how the government has denied that the area where the desal plant is to go is a whale habitat, when it clearly is.
The government preference for poorly costed, big-scale corporate engineering 'solutions' versus multi-objective sustainable local or individual ways of getting water is discussed.

And so on.

Very educational, excellent program.

File Download (28:58 min / 13 MB)

This article comes from the background research for the Freewaves Feminist Magazine Show on 3RPP Radio Port Phillip, Victoria, Thursday, 20 August 2009. On the show with me was Catherine Manning, who wrote “Would you like porn with that?” for Candobetter, who has started up an internet site focused on removing porn from children’s eye level in stores.

Before we did the show together, I did a bit of research into the nature of pornography and why it might be good, or bad. I had difficulty coming to grips with the subject at all for some strange reason. I think that, like a lot of people, I have learned to tune out from the skin-marketing all around me, so focusing on the subject and related issues required an effort. I found a lot of very interesting writing and some very funny blogs.

This is what I came up with.

What is pornography anyhow?

Pornography is not just about getting naked, or having sex, or even recording, depicting or describing it.

The word pornography is made up of the Greek word for ‘prostitute’or ‘sex slave’ – porne- and the word for ‘writing’ graphein. The word pornographos designated a person who writes about prostitutes. Women in Ancient Greek society did not have the status of citizens and slaves had no status at all.

Pornography as we know it today still contains the ingredients of body sale and slavery. Slavery, in many instances these days, is commuted to objectification rather than frank chattel status.

‘Commuted’ in the sense of being paid for. Now you are not owned as a performing slave, but you rent yourself out. The person giving their body to pornography is assumed to be doing so from freedom of choice in order to make money.

Initially the pay for pornography, as in prostitution, may be higher than for other jobs available. Or the pornography may carry, falsely or really, some acting or modelling component and may be seen as an opportunity to get into something more skilled.

Pornography offers the vendors profits where none might otherwise exist. The ability to turn the girl next door, the schoolgirls on the bus-stop, your wife, daughter or girlfriend into cash may be very hard to knock back.

In the absence of women taking more control of their own incomes, including ownership of land and assets, the only thing stopping third parties from making a living this way would be a moral code to resist assisting the exploitation of women and their public exhibition of their bodies, which is generally deemed to be demeaning and damaging, unless it is artistic, which is to say, not titillating.

Some women would say that pornographic work is only damaging because women are seen to be objects owned by men and renting their bodies out for any purpose lowers the value of the object.

Can a woman enjoy displaying her body in a provocative pose to an unknown range of anonymous magazine browsers? The associated notoriety has become more and more apparently acceptable in public mores, possibly due to the expansion of visual media and the associated expansion of profit opportunities.

Who makes the money out of pornography?

So, why don’t men do it with their bodies too? Or is their main role as agents, salesmen and owners?

Who makes the most money out of pornography – the women who pose or the men who sell it? Obviously the employer has to stand to make more than the subject of the picture or there would be no profit in it.

It is said that one of the richest men in the world, Rupert Murdoch, made a lot of his money out of his famous ‘Page 3’ girlie photos at a time when the print media were constantly expanding.

The divisions and oppositions by gender in our species are political and economic

Steve Biddulpf writes that:

“Boys have many positive impulses around sexuality. Deep down most teenage boys are deeply romantic, capable of quite spiritual feelings towards women and girls.” (Steve Biddupf, “How we turn boys into creeps.”)

But the domination driven culture of capitalism undoes them.

A man with a big car and a couple of semi-naked young women sitting on it looks rich and successful to other men, according to Ape and marketing logic.

A woman surrounded by young naked men would also look rich and successful, as if accompanied by slaves, but we don’t see this so much. This is probably because our society is dominated by men who reject the popularization of women with male slaves. Why? Because we are against male slavery and its portrayal. But not that of women.

Catherine Manning’s concern that young girls will early identify as inevitable the public sexualisation of their gender as objects has deeper significance than ‘mere’ psychological trauma. With the huge expansion in volume and exposure of pornography, the risk is of the perpetuation and exacerbation of the attitudes that underlay the slave societies of Ancient Greece and England and her colonies before the 20th century, where women had no rights to property or citizenship and could not even have custody of their children in the event of a divorce.

Does it seem too way out to imagine our society being prepared for such a future? Think of how Russia has become a source of prostitution for the world with the simultaneous arrival of the capitalist press and economic decline. And South East Asia.

Mr Murdoch as a porn hustler; more than just an industry

Consider the influence that Mr Murdoch, the man who designed the Page 3 girls to become our social norm, now has on the production of political parties and leaders in Australia and throughout the English-speaking world, and even, more and more, in Europe.

Consider his influence on our dogma of economic and population growth, commodification and privatization, his impact on food habits and acquired cultures and values.

Could this kindly old man, solid patriarch and deliverer of Boyer Lectures really be the same man who brought the English-speaking world the Page 3 soft porn? Well, if that’s the worst he can do, is it any big deal?

I wonder if, however, in his vast network empire, Murdoch ever thought about investing in something a little more sophisticated?
Well, as it happens, Newshounds Are Us at www.newshounds.us/ (an online news-site which arose with the original researchers for the film Outfoxed about Fox TV) report in 2009 that Rupert Murdoch,

“… the born-again Christian who chairs media giant News Corporation, has been secretly building a stable of wholly-owned pornographic channels for his BSkyB subsidiary. The Business has learnt that BSkyB now owns and operates its own pornographic channels – the 18+ Movies selection – after years of hosting third-party content only. The company has also been entering into partnerships with companies that broadcast pornographic television channels on BSkyB, such as Sport XXX Babes, XXX Housewive and Playboy. BSkYB has agreed retail distribution agreements with these companies. With Playboy, for instance, BSkyB now not only hosts the channel but sells its service, and collects and shares in the revenues from Playboy customers.”

They further inform us of another old man who owns newspapers and made a fortune from pornography, saying that,

“For years the Murdoch press has labelled rival newspaper baron Richard Desmond a pornographer in articles charting his business which has included pornographic magazines and TV channels.” http://www.newshounds.us/2006/02/12/rupert_murdochs_pornography_profiteering.php

Desmond owns the Daily Express and OK magazine.
Silvio Berlusconi’s personal control over Italy’s ideas is even more direct. He is the Prime Minister of Italy, in the first place, but has been estimated to have personally

[…]The hallmarks of Mediaset television are blizzards of commercials, interspersed with AC Milan soccer matches – Berlusconi is the team's owner – game shows, "reality TV" serials and vaudeville extravaganzas featuring leggy troupes of scantily-clad young women.”

Berlusconi also

“controls more than a third of all book and magazine publishing and a leading national newspaper.”
Source: Frank Viviano, CBS5, “The Resurrection Of Silvio Berlusconi.”

But wait, there’s more: A report called, “The Porn Standard, Children and Pornography on the internet”, found that the “large and lucrative internet pornography industry is flooding the Web and seeking mainstream acceptance.”

It also found that

“The online pornography industry generates $12 billion in annual revenue roughly equal to the annual revenue of ABC, NBC, and CBS combined”[…], and, that “The two largest purchasers of [internet] bandwidth [space] are companies in the adult entertainment industry.

Household names in manufacturing own these global investments in Porn:

“The report found that, already in the year 2000, “General Motors Corporation (through its subsidiary DirecTV®) was selling more pornographic films each year than Larry Flynt of Hustler®. EchoStar Communications, which is heavily backed by Rupert Murdoch, now generates more revenue from pornography than Playboy®.

Other major players in the pornography business today include AT&T®, Hilton®, Marriott International. [Source: Sean Barney, “The Porn Standard: Children and pornography on the internet,” http://www.thirdway.org/products/14]

Maybe we looking at a porn-led international economic recovery?

So is this where the banks and big corporations are investing our funds now? Are they aiming for a porn-led global financial recovery?

If this phenomenon is so pervasive, so irrestistible, and it relies so much on women’s bodies, how come we are still letting a bunch of old men run our show?

If there is so much money in pornography, shouldn’t the women and children who wear the costs at least get control of the profits – not to mention the industry? Go here for the Celebrity Bestiality report on making money out of porn. That report concludes that only the big investors get anything out of the business.

Corporations and governments in the old-fashioned role of pimps

This is where we came in: Female gender slavery and prostitution make money for the masters, not for the individuals who perform the work.

Pimps tend to be men who are able to attract a few women by fair or foul means, but who are not too fussed about renting them out for sex. Perhaps this is one of the ways in which capitalism began.

Did the case ever happen where women were able to attract men and then were not too fussed about renting them out for sex? To whom? In capitalist societies women generally did not own anything, whereas men were able to own them. It therefore seems that the tendency for many more women to be prostitutes than men probably resulted from women’s marginalization and then further marginalized them.

But are women’s bodies the only ones objectified like this? No, pornographic objectification happens to men and to children of both sexes, although in the latter case it is not yet deemed acceptable.

Male gender slavery and objectification in war

And there is another way in which men are objectified by the same kinds of commercially organized forces which is just as demeaning and destructive – and that is in war. In war young men are convinced or forced to risk their bodies, minds and lives for the sake of profits, yet told that what they are doing is honorable.

And women and children suffer in war of course as well, often in pornographic ways that are beyond ordinary imagination.

Porn and war seem to be human issues of economic and political disenfranchisement in contexts of removal of power to distant locations and persons who do not have to face the people who wear the consequences.

Another argument in favour of relocalisation.
.

That’s not the end of it, but here’s a good song to pause on – “JPEG Baby”. It's sung by the writer of the Celebrity Bestiality report.

Send us your thoughts in a comment.
And maybe take a look at http://www.sayno4kids.com/blog/ - Catherine Manning’s page proposing simply moving pornographic magazine displays to above children’s eye-level.

The message coming from Fair Water Use Australia is that the Federal and State Governments are not handling Australia's water properly, transparently or effectively. The mishandling is causing a dangerous crisis. The public should be very concerned and NGOs should support Fair Water Use and the UN in their call for a state of emergency and a Royal Commission. Australia, this is really serious.

Higher rainfall should mean more water - so where is it going?

Higher rainfall should mean more water in public and environmental reserves, but it is going to private holdings instead and the public is not aware

Private sector increases its strangle-hold on the Murray-Darling

Data obtained by Fair Water Use from the Bureau of Meteorology and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority provides confirmation of the effect of the rapid increase in privately-held water in the Darling Basin on the volumes of water available for essential public and environmental use, refuting claims that the crisis in the Darling is predominantly drought-related.

image from Fair Water Use site http://www.fairwateruse.com.au/

Despite average-to-above average rainfall in the Darling Basin over the last two years, the amount of water flowing down the Darling has reduced dramatically.

image from Fair Water Use site http://www.fairwateruse.com.au/

Public H20 store 80% less than it should be

Storage in the Menindee Lakes is currently around 80% less than would be expected under average rainfall conditions. As there has been no similar increase in volumes released from the Lakes, the water-hoarding activities of the private sector stand clearly incriminated.

There can be little doubt that, although compounded by drought, rampant water-privatisation is also a major contributor to the current devastation of the Murray catchment. However calculations are impeded by the apparent unwillingness of State Governments to provide required data.

UN Senior Water Advisor supports State of Emergency and Royal Commission on MDB Water

Fair Water Use is encouraged by the recent support of the senior water advisor to the United Nations for its call for declaration of a State of Emergency and the establishment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the management of the water of the Murray-Darling Basin. Such actions offer the only means whereby Australians can regain control of this vital and acutely-threatened resource.

Listen to interview.

Source: Fair Water Use Australia. Fair Water Use Australia strives for a revived Murray-Darling basin by supporting environmentally sustainable water-use.

Distilled is the monthly newsletter produced by the National Water Commission, the government-appointed national body ostensibly responsible for "driving progress towards the sustainable management and use of Australia's water resources" - a gloriously vacuous aspiration, even by institutional standards. An extract from the current issue is revealing:

"Stakeholders urge more action on water reform:

Water industry stakeholders have urged the Commission to continue to fearlessly identify areas where further and faster reforms are needed to get water reform "back on track". The Commission's stakeholder forum has underscored the importance of collaboration as part of a renewed commitment to national water reform by all governments, industry partners and private sector stakeholders."

Water privatisation agenda dominates 'commission'

Cursory inspection of the membership of the National Water Commission's 2009 Stakeholder Forum reveals a clear predominance of groups, governmental and private, which, behind the scenes, are passionately pushing the water-privatisation agenda.

Australian citizens excluded from representation on Commission

Moreover, notable by their absence in the extensive list of entities considered to be worthy of forum membership are groups representing Australian citizens, or customers - the term most of the members would no doubt prefer to use.

Thankfully however, in the cities and on the land, communities Australia-wide are increasingly aware that the definition of "reform" has been corrupted by those advocating removal of water from public control and by the accompanying flotilla of large-scale investors who view our water as a tradeable commodity rather than a vital national resource.

Fair Water Use demands that, collectively and individually, the current membership of the NWC Stakeholder Forum ceases hiding behind the banner of "water reform", states their position on water privatisation and explains to all Australians precisely what “track” they would like to “get back on”.

MEDIA RELEASE: 6th June 2009 from Fair Water Use Australia [email protected]

(Skyhooks photo adapted from www.abc.net.au/rage/guest/2001/skyhooks.htm)

Article by Tony Ryan

Peak Oz music

There was a time when a thousand rock bands had four million young Aussies swaying and singing in pubs across the nation. We knew only good things and the gods smiled fully on this the sunburned country.

This was a time when mankind’s top twenty found redemption in inspirational Australian talent… AC/DC, Men at Work, Cold Chisel, 10cc, Australian Crawl, Inxs, John Farnham, Skyhooks, Icehouse, Gerry Rafferty, Hunters and Collectors, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs. The world wobbled on its axis, and some believed the Second Coming had arrived, but happy youth had lost count.

The creative momentum of Australian music was engulfing the known universe; when suddenly… someone turned the volume down; not just to Country Rock, or to Folk; or even to the profanity of Dead People’s Music; but to funeral ante-silence.

Then The Horror emerged. Intimidated publicans across the nation were visited by an army of faceless figures draped in sinister red tape, brandishing unstamped liquor licences, and who delivered the chilling edict that henceforth rock music shall be Noise Pollution, and forever banned. No drums. No amplifiers.

Without live gigs, nature’s roaring powerhouse of Australian talent shrieked down the scale to a barely audible whine, with a lucky handful of bands struggling to hold the holy OzRok banner to a visible height. Today, music is in crisis, with bands restricted to CBDs. A malignant and terrible darkness has visited our once happy land.

Overflowing clubs have become the profitable killing fields for alien drug lords; and are now the meeting houses for devotees of late night street violence. Private transport becomes essential survival gear but, every year, hundreds of young people complete a wonderful night out amongst the more harsh glitter and colour of broken glass and twisted metal.

Meanwhile, the yob brigades, alien to nightclub ambiance, and deprived of pub rock outlets for their wild energy, gatecrash youth home parties. When police arrive, there is the now-traditional rock and bottle throwing ceremony. When police fail to arrive, violence escalates to beatings and stabbings.

How did this happen? Why did Paradise end?

The End began with hard-eyed men in lumpy dark suits. We have no idea what transpired in certain conversations, but evidently unrefusable offers were made and politicians flew into power on election campaign budgets that would have strained the seams of Montgomery’s money bin.

We are sure these are but silly rumours but, it is whispered by fearful warehouse shift-workers that, one darkest midnight, certain politicians were seen dancing in the midst of a circle of gliding poker machines which were chanting metallically in unison exterminate, exterminate, while 666 whirred orgasmically on their barely focussed screens. What could this mean?

We asked the publicans and they finally agreed to talk to us secretly, in the sacristy of a disused Brisbane cathedral. It transpired that with the casting out of OzRok, the income derived from joyous free-spending rock fans was gone, and bankruptcy loomed like a black end-of-times tempest. As if acting on a signal, armies of Pokie Enforcers came visiting that very night, and installed their gambling machines, until there was only room for the rattling and singing, ringing and grinning monoliths; and their weeping and degraded victims.

But the Australian ANZAC spirit could not be crushed forever and rebel musos and their freedom-loving fans huddled and whispered in groups wherever the Pokie Enforcers dared not patrol.

Eventually, the brave OzRok Resistance was born and an intelligence network spread throughout the now-degraded land. Finally, the Pokie Enforcer’s darkest secret was exposed and revealed; that revenues had fallen calamitously; their pokie-addicts reduced to poverty, and upper-age Aussie income’s bled white by the corporate and banker barons.

Word has spread and the prophets are calling. The time has come for youth and its allies to gloriously rise up and, exerting the infinite power of profligate spending, as only youth is so congenitally entitled, repopulate the pubs; cast out the pokie idols, and replace OzRok to its rightful place of worship… the Suburban Aussie Pub (or beach or park).

Aussie politicians, harken wisely to our call. Purge your secret sanctums of conscientious liquor licence inspectors and replace these with hearing-impaired age pensioners; for this is their time-honoured vocation. And prove yourselves worthy as Guardians of the Great Aussie Destiny; that of realising the higher purpose of Human Evolution; which is, of course, to create the Perfect Riff.

So, dear reader, every time you pass a politician’s office, drop in and explain that Youth Music; always the people’s most popular music, can never be noise pollution.

And Queenslanders, the Chosen People, know that this great epiphany had its genesis on our own Sunshine Coast. Come ye all as pilgrims and open up this sacred Gympie tablet to Gig Guide. If, due to forces of darkness, it is revealed you can’t dance to driving music in the local xxxx temple, then the path to musical redemption leads to your nearest publican. I say unto you, as a vast multitude, get down on your knees and pray to him to cast out the pokie idols and bring back the bands. Amen.

See also: The truth about live export of 20 Jun 11 also by Tony Ryan

On September 5, 2008, Victorian newspaper, The Age, ran an article by Cameron Houston and Royce Millar, under the screaming headline, 'City of 8 million 'unlivable'.

On September 5, 2008, Victorian newspaper, The Age, ran an article by Cameron Houston and Royce Millar, under the screaming headline, 'City of 8 million 'unlivable'.

The article reported the latest population projections from the Australia Bureau of Statistics. These frightening projections were reported as if they were actual predictions. The article should have generated a number of printable letters to The Age almost immediately.

Surprisingly, on September 7, no reader responses had been published questioning the rapid size and rate of immigration fuelled population growth.

This is disappointing and it is hard to believe that The Age did not receive any critical letters worthy of being published on this issue. On a number of occasions The Age has exhorted the federal government of the day to implement a 'population policy'. People who follow the Age closely in such matters know that the Age always wants higher population. And, what the Age means when it calls for a 'population policy' is higher immigration.

Now that there are almost daily reports of social and environmental symptoms of overpopulation in Victoria, and consternation about rising population, The Age is silent on calling for public debate on population policy. With its false alarm about 8 million for Melbourne (more than twice the current population of Victoria), The Age looks as if it is intentionally attempting to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, at great risk to the quality and safety of the lives of the people of Victoria and future generations.

It is no secret that Fairfax digital owns www.domain.com.au and thereby benefits from the overheated housing industry, in addition to the benefits it derives from kilos of pulped forests weekly in Age newspaper ads for real-estate.

The population-growth-dependent international real-estate market for Australian land and housing has become big business and Fairfax press are big business.

On 11th June this year, John Sutton from the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), stated that it was 'Time for a Genuine Migration Debate'. After all, 56% of Australia's net annual population is derived from overseas migration at the discretion of the federal government . In the course of his statement John Sutton said '... the Rudd Government should take the steering wheel off the big business lobby and ensure Australia's environment,community and worker's interests are all taken into account' . While the economic and demographic benefits of Australia's current net annual migration intake are equivocal, the adverse environmental and social impacts are unequivocal. The fact that the ABS projections are not predictions, particularly on migrant intakes - needs to be emphasised and repeated. The settings can and should be changed.

(Additional comment: Candobetter Editors note that on 8-8-08 a letter criticising the article's failure to differentiate between statistical trends and predictions was published in the Age, in simplified form.)

Arthur Bassett

(Original source: http://problemsoftheworld.com/archives/tag/painted-girls/; uploaded by bgn59)

Wall Street money talks while the Lips of Barrack Obama and Jack Layton move in sync.

It all makes sense now. Why a socialist. Oh, I’m sorry. Why a “social democrat” from the frozen north, Canada, would come down to the Denver convention of US Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama to roll over on his stomach and bark at his feet. They both stand for the same things. But not quite in the way Canada’s Jack Layton, leader of the leftist NDP, says they do.

He said, “Democrats here are talking about the same kind of change we’re talking about in Canada.” Layton’s correct there. Democrats are talking about turning a blind eye to runaway population generated by both illegal and legal immigration. He continued, “Whether it’s real action on climate change, forging trade policies that work for working families or standing up for jobs and better health care, there is a real desire here to put the concern of the kitchen table head of the board room table.”

That must be news to Wall Street, Jack. They bought and paid for Obama, and now this socialist from the north has come down to Colorado and told everybody that their nominee is concerned about ordinary people. But, hey wait. Democrats have been doing that for decades. They talk like Robespierre and govern like Louis XIV.

In assessing a politician it is best to cast rhetoric aside and look at who is bank-rolling his campaign. Follow the money trail. The true alignment of the Democratic Party with corporate interests can be vividly illustrated by referring to The Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP). http://www.opensecrets.org Bluntly put, the big banks, financial firms, corporate law firms and private equity companies on Wall Street pay the pipers of both parties. But Jack Layton’s comrade Democrats are their clear favourites as the figures will show. Let’s cite some examples of the more prominent corporate contributors.

The Financial/Insurance/Real Estate Industry gave 51% of their $51 million in 2008 to Jack’s friends, the Democrats.

The Information Technology sector gave 67% of its $27 million in contributions to the Democrats in 2008.

This year the Democrats have received almost $24 million from Agribusiness, representing 41% of their influence-peddling.

This is interesting. Wall Street law firms have sent 75% of their over $140 million in political contributions to the two-faced Democrats.

Listen to this. The Defense Industry gave 52% of its 8 million in donations to Jack Layton’s allies, the Democrats, in 2008. As Canadians know, Layton is a fierce opponent of the war in Iraq. I suppose if the Defense Industry had given its money to the Republicans it would have been referred to as “the Military Industrial Complex” once more. The electronics sector of the Defense Industry gave 55% to the Democrats.
Wall Street promotes the candidates who serve its interests and the Democrats have delivered for them since their November 2006 victory. Democratic leaders buried a proposal to tax the massive incomes of hedge fund operators at normal rates, allowing billionaires to claim most of their income as capital gains taxed at a far lower rate. Obama also refused action on the subprime meltdown that would have threatened big financial interests.

Barack Obama took in $102.1 million for all of 2007 and by February 22, 2008 had raised $138 million, including a million from private equity firms and $9 million from corporate law firms. And hold on to your seat belt. By the August 28/08 Barrack Obama had raised $389,423,102. Friends, that money most assuredly did not come from cab drivers, hairdressers, carpenters, supermarket clerks, gardeners or the working families sitting at the kitchen table that Jack Layton’s rhetoric conjures up. It came from ordinary, down-to-earth corporate goliaths like AT+T who gave $168,613 to Obama. And City Group who gave him $389,989. And Microsoft who gave him $274,375.

Now why would Microsoft give a candidate like Obama a political donation? Their donation is explicable by an Obama policy statement that maintains support for “improvements in our visa programs, including the H-1B programs, to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America.” But the most talented people in the world are already in abundant supply in America. The only problem is, Obama’s corporate IT benefactors don’t want to pay them the salaries they command. Better to flood the market with Asian visa workers who can be paid at 60% of that rate. Buying a pliable President and congress for even $1 billion in campaign contributions would be bargain for the IT industry.

Upon reviewing their take, one must say that for a progressive party of the downtrodden, the Democratic Party of the United States of America has done pretty well for itself, as did Mr. Obama, holding out a tin cup on Wall Street and doing their panhandler act.

I just loved their spiel too. “Please Mister, could you spare me a million, when I am elected I’ll open up the floodgates to more cheap labour, destroy another five million middle class jobs, expand the visa programs, displace jobs, depress wages, replace Canada as the country with highest population growth rate in the G8 and accelerate green house gas emissions, ruin the environment. Please Mister. Please. I won’t let you down sir..’

Now, it’s true. Organized labour has deployed 91% of its donations toward the Democrats and this has offset the corporate influence. But the scale is so pitifully small as to be compared to a peashooter firing back at a cannon. But then, if Big Labour did have the same financial clout, how would they wield it? The answer is not encouraging.

Until 1993 it was understood by trade union leaders that a tight labour market was a workers best friend. As the Democratic Socialist leader of Vermont, Bernie Sanders put it, “If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don’t know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are now.’

Obviously Bernie Sanders is not Jack Layton’s kind of socialist. Nor was J. S.

Woodsworth, the founder of the CCF, the precursor to Mr. Layton’s New Democratic Party, since Woodsworth favoured restrictive immigration policies during his tenure as leader before the war. Layton is intent upon “jacking” up Canada’s immigration intake another 70-80,000 people immediately to achieve his arbitary goal of an annual quota equivalent to one percent of whatever of the country’s population level is. He maintains a steadfast ignorance of any study that undermines his rationale for growth. Studies like the C.D. Howe report that revealed that pensions could not be indefinitely supported by increasing immigration unless immigration was multiplied 28 times its existing level. Is Mr. Layton prepared to process over 7 million immigrants a year just to support pensioners? It would be interesting how his “Green Agenda” held up after a population hike like that after five years. Not to mention his plans to cut GHG emissions. And then there is that inconvenient Statistics Canada report of May 2007. The one that showed that immigration has depressed Canadian wages. That’s good news for the people who sit at the board room table. Bad news for the people who sit at the kitchen table that Jack claims to speak for.

In America, the voice of organized labour, the AFL-CIO, is singing in harmony with Obama’s Democrats. But the song is not “Solidarity forever”, its “Money, Money, Money”. In 1993 the AFL-CIO made a shocking break with its past by attacking the critics of illegal immigration. Three years later it joined a coalition of business, agribusiness and Christian conservatives to kill provisions of bill to limit refugee admissions and verify social security numbers of newly-hired workers to discourage illegal workers. But the landmark moment came in February of 2000 when it was announced that the AFL-CIO would “support expanded immigration, lenient enforcement of immigration law and the legislative agenda of immigrant advocacy groups.” Translation: The AFL-CIO was abandoning American workers to champion legal and illegal immigrant workers in their greed to recruit and harvest a larger dues-paying base.

Organized labour in Canada, as represented by the CLC, and its parliamentary wing, Jack Layton’s NDP, has precisely the same attitude. Xenophiliacs who love strangers within our gates more than the workers born right here. Some would call this a Christian attitude. Perhaps they should refer to 1st Timothy 5:8. There are many translations. But essentially, charity begins at home, and if you don’t begin at home, you aren’t practicing Christianity. I would prefer to call it an attitude of selfish condescension, one easy to accommodate if you are a trade union bureaucrat with a degree in Labour studies or economics sitting in an office insulated from layoffs and passing judgment upon “ignorant” blue collar workers who are obviously guilty of “false conciousness” because they don’t see the world as you do. Tougher though if you are on the front lines of competition, mopping a hospital floor for a subsistence wage and you’re in danger of losing your job because it might be contracted out to a cut-throat company that uses illegal immigrant workers. The ones the CLC says enrich our culture.

The reality is that although Jack Layton and Barack Obama may be talking about the same things, the populist script they are reading from is carefully crafted to decoy our notice from their corporate obligations. We may hear their rousing speeches, but it is money that is doing the talking, and it has an agenda. Its agenda is not American or Canadian. It is globalist. And it will do anything to have its way. It plays dirty. It doesn’t care about equality, but if it needs to, it will play the race card. It doesn’t care about migrant workers, but if it needs to, it will pretend to care. It doesn’t care about cultural diversity, but if needs to build up a constituency among Hispanics to gain support for amnesty and a bigger labour pool, it will. And it doesn’t care about the environment, but when there was a danger that the Sierra Club was going to return to its former policy of favouring restrictive immigration policies to stabilize the country’s runaway growth, a billionaire stepped in with $100 million to ensure that it didn’t happen.

Wall Street money talks. And if it keeps talking, in four decades, thanks to corporate mandated manic immigration, one half billion North Americans may be alive, or dying, to hear, the sound of a silent spring and a dead continent.

Thanks, Jack, for your role in making it happen.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
August 29/08

The Business Council of Australia says that the current design of the Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will force closure of at least three major business, cause four to "fundamentally review their operations", and force others to find ways to cut expenses. It claims to have surveyed 14 businesses over sectors including minerals processing, manufacturing, oil refining, coal mining and sugar milling.

Whilst the problem is real, there is really no avoiding it.

Whilst the problem is real, there is really no avoiding it. The fact is that the kinds of industries and clients that the BCA and similar groups represent cannot expect to survive in their current form. Neither can the tertiary industries that rely on them, such as expensive law firms, frenzied global stock-exchanges, advertising corporations, high-flying consultants and millionaire-salary CEOs.

"Propaganda about a ‘dematerialised economy’ makes it hard to establish the reality that material industrial productivity is not actually less reliant on burning fossil fuels than it was in the 1970s, and that drawdown on fossil fuels has in fact been multiplied by the needs of much greater populations. Similarly the obvious still needs to be pointed out that increasing productivity means burning more fuel and outputting more pollution, accelerating petroleum depletion and adding more greenhouse gases."[1]

We have to face reality. Business and economic structure and expectations have to change.

The Business Council of Australia writes in its recent news release of "The ‘truly dreadful
problem’ of the emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries." It says, "Professor Ross Garnaut, in his review of emissions trading, accurately describes what he calls the ‘truly dreadful problem’ of EITE industries: so-called ‘carbon leakage’. If we price emissions fully in Australia, emissions-intensive activity might simply relocate overseas. Rather than eliminating emissions, Australia’s regime would move the source of the emissions offshore, most likely to jurisdictions with less stringent environmental standards. Thus a well-intentioned Australian regime could produce the truly perverse effect of actually increasing the level of global emissions."

It is all very well threatening to go overseas, but this will be a very temporary measure; as these industries try to continue to process and sell massive amounts of industrial product, they are going to run into the long-anticipated problem of not having any customers left in the industrialised 'richworld' to sell to, since the people in those 'first world countries', unburdened of corporate accelerated profit-making, will simply slow down and relocalise their activities. Big business will finish up mired in the poverty which it has sought to exploit in its offshore victims.

It adds that, "This problem affects a substantial slice of Australian economic life. The EITE industries contribute 16 per cent of Australian business investment, 51 per cent of exports, 15 per cent of gross value add and employ nearly one in 10 working Australians."

What to do about mass unemployment with the decline of mass production?

Val Yule often says, that it isn't that there isn't any work. It is that the work that needs to be done isn't done because of all the work we do that doesn't need to be done in paid employment which uses up our time and energy.

If we stop working to feed the profit machines, which only expend most of the profits we make for them on more growth, creating more needs for more growth, and less time for everyone, we could, instead, work according to our needs and desires, rather than the hypertrophied needs and desires of a small sector of global power-freaks.

Political commentator and climate activist, Clive Hamilton, writes in Growth Fetish,[1]

Reduction in working hours is the core demand for the transition to post-growth society. Overwork not only propels overconsumption but is the cause of severe social dysfunction, with ramifications for physical and psychological health as well as family and community life. The natural solution to this is the redistribution of work, a process that could benefit both the unemployed and the overworked.

He remarks that

“Moves to limit overwork … directly confront the obsession with growth at all costs,” and talks about the liberation of workers “from the compulsion to earn more than they need.”

Because growth is sustained by a constant ‘barrage of marketing and advertising’ Hamilton wants advertising taxed and removed from the public domain, and television broadcast hours limited so as to

“allow people to cultivate their relationships, especially with children.”

The era of big profits, big business and big government is in terminal decline

The problem is that, with rising fuel costs, the margins for profit are declining. Add this to costs for carbon emissions, and you are looking at a profound challenge for the growthist economy of profit.

We industrialised humans have to change the way we do business and the pace of business.
We are facing global climate change; futures of very unpredictable wind-speeds, temperatures, crop productivity and water availability. We are facing continuous declines in agribusiness productivity because of the decline in availability of fossil fuels. Permaculture will be better able to provide than agribusiness as fossil fuels decline and it will provide better socially as well. See Antony Boy's delightful "Photo essay of a rural Japanese city," for an excellent and entertaining discussion of the problems and solutions.

It is normal for the Business Council and for the Government to be worried, because the necessary changes threaten their systemic hegemony and the whole notion of profit.

If we attempt to go on as we are, Australia faces monolithic power production and government systems, in the effort of the current elite to retain a profit-oriented society, from which the elite themselves are the overwhelming social and financial beneficiaries, at the cost of the greater population. There will be continuous attempts to find finance for huge nuclear power plants to keep up ever less viable industries and giant cities.

The Nuclear route (...) implies total electrification, synthesising, using complex technology, the pattern of settlement and transport which arose from exploitation of the natural endowment of petroleum. It requires massive investment, and in Australia’s case, the investment sought is likely to be private. This implies ongoing loss by citizens of control over the country’s energy systems and all that flows from that – the future of work, the state of the environment, natural amenity. It implies the reshaping of Australian society by corporations with profit alone in mind, for the benefit of a small dominant asset-rich class, with the electorate a mere captive market.[2]

This is a truly unsustainable battle; it will just bring us into feudalism and a much deeper economic depression than a relocalising of all our systems will.

Not only do we not need all the goods we produce for consumption at home or abroad, we do not need the income they bring, and their acquisition is a poor compensation for lives given to industry. Wonderful jobs are few and far between. No-one wants to give those up. Some people also derive much of their social life from work but they would derive similar benefits, and perhaps more status and satisfaction, from other community activities. And plenty of people reach a stage of maturity where childlike obedience to workplace regimes in the cause of producing more and more widgets in different colours, or processing more and more customers a day, with unflinching subservience, challenges every natural instinct.

Instead of those complicated international agreements about percentile reductions in emissions over the years to come, which are hardly enforceable or even measurable, remaining mostly in the control of the corporate emitters, the solution lies much closer at hand, and could ultimately be controlled at grass-roots levels by the masses themselves. Relocalisation is obviously the best way to develop the solidarity and self-sufficiency to reorganize work.

It should be obvious that the slower we work, the more fuel will remain, the less greenhouse gas will be emitted. If the populations which have ballooned to unimaginable proportions since the 1950s were allowed to return (through natural attrition) to more natural sizes by 2050, and the economy permitted to slow, it would take the heat off the planet and us as well. With so much less effort we could make such a positive difference to the planet and to our personal effectiveness.

ENDNOTES

[1] Hamilton, Clive, Growth Fetish, Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2003 and Pluto Press UK, 2005, last chapter, especially, pp.218-220

This article contains extracts from :"101 Views from Hubbert's Peak" in Sheila Newman (Ed.) and from "France and Australia after oil," in Sheila Newman (Ed.) The Final Energy Crisis, Second Edition Pluto Press, UK, 2008 (Available in Australia in late August)

Naomi Klein was interviewed on 16 July 2008 on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) TV show "The Hour", for 15 minutes, about her book, The Shock Doctrine, Penguin 2007. Her biography and her family background show a deep concern for social justice and human rights. Unfortunately there seems to be an environmental naivety which could cancel out many of her efforts and her family's on these issues.

Klein was born in 1970, two years after Ehrlich's book, The Population Bomb, Ballantine Books, 1968, was published. Her husband is Avi Lewis, son of Stephen Lewis, former NDP leader of Ontario and the man devoted to feeding Africa and preventing death in Africa. Lewis seems, however, to have failed to look at African land-rights and rights to family planning in a continent where Western interference with long-term settlement patterns and local economies, has caused appalling overpopulation, hunger, environmental devastation and species loss, in a country which for centuries had the richest biodiversity and no major population, hunger, or environmental problems.

Klein's brother Seth is a member of the left wing Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Vancouver. This is a think tank dedicated to economic and social issues. It challenges free market solutions, school vouchers, privatisation and what it considers "right wing" immigration ideas. Unfortunately, it considers 'right wing' any opposition to open borders.

It is clear that Naomi Klein has been very careful on the issue of immigration and open borders in her book, The Shock Doctrine. Nonetheless, throughout her book, she criticises policies of invasive development and their accompaniment by the importation of foreign workers - for instance in Iraq and in Sri Lanka. She recognises the problem of the alienation of public and village land by multinationals, and through international gentrification in the service of rich tourists, although she does not overtly link this to immigration, but to class and exclusive exploitation. There is therefore a danger that some readers may miss the connection between the buying up of real-estate by foreign individuals and corporations and the migration to those sites by large quantities of first world immigrants. Closer to home, her book flags opposition to immigration in the 'developed world', but she is obviously uneasy with the legitimacy of this. For some reason she fails to identify as strongly with the lower classes in the US, Canada and the UK, as she does with those further from her own home range. So she, or her staff of writers in these chapters, talk about how the people of the first world should be criticising the corporate take-over of land and government everywhere, and they warn against people displaced in the developed world targeting incoming immigrants with their resentment. It seems to me that she thus does a disservice to the disempowered of the West, who exist alongside its fabled and rightly deplored affluent upper classes. If the people of Iraq, Sri Lanka, South America etc., have her blessing to resent the stealing and repopulating of their regions by footloose multinationals and the importing of foreign workers to service the projects of those multinationals, then why shouldn't those dispossessed in the 'developed' world, not have the freedom of expressing their right to control over what happens locally and to their countries, including control over borders?

Psychologically, Klein is firmly ranged against the evil corporations who are waiting for the next disaster to impose their free market agenda on the next helpless victims. On the ground, however, she is strangely reluctant to sheet home the way the evil corporations benefit financially from the open borders policies they lobby for whilst they prone a committment to human rights. What is stopping Klein from seeing - or if she sees it, what is stopping her from expressing - that the impact on the poor in North America, Canada, the UK, Australia etc of the transfer of cheap labour from desperately poor developing countries, is just as damaging and unjust when it happens in the West as it is when applied to developing countries? In the West, wholesale import of labour destroys hard-won working class conditions. In the West, the sale of property overseas and the importing of cashed up immigrants to stoke up demand for US, UK, Canadian, Australian, etc real estate, puts basic shelter out of the reach of people on low wages. It also pushes infrastructure further out into the fragile ecosystems bordering the intensive conglomerations in those countries, trashing the environment and accelerating climate change in the process.

Is there, I wonder, some way to get Naomi and her staff and publishers to see that the disempowerment of the modest middle classes and the poor in the industrialised world, is only extending the third world into the Richworld, and shoring up the exploiting classes and their corporate servants - the banks, property developers, international tourism, the military, the mass-media - the whole globalisation machine?

In the interview, Klein was exercised by the fact that Hurricane Katrina allowed the rich an opportunity to finally gentrify a devastated housing project long denied the poor. The poor who might have benefited from that housing project had been wiped out by the cyclone.

The bigger issue of climate change and what was behind it - the intensity and huge scale of our activities and populations - was not considered. Economic growth and the population growth it markets as inevitable and necessary, were never questioned.

Klein rightly highlights the growing inequities of the already starkly imbalanced distribution of wealth across the regions and classes of the world, except in the worlds of the readers she is writing for. She minutely documents crying injustices in a manner more effective than has hitherto been achieved. But why does she not stand back for just a moment to see the role that overpopulation and mass movements of people has in disorganising communities and networks, the better to be exploited by those who push for this and benefit from it?

And why does she not stand back and see that, if the great writers of the world fail to also dramatise the terrible conflicts between human population growth and the environment and food production and human rights, then all her work is for nothing?

By Sheila Newman, from an idea and notes by Tim Murray