Comments

http://malverneastgroup.freehostia.com/vcat/MEG_VCAT_Exposed_presentation_final.pdf

Jane Stillwater wrote:

But no matter if Trump loses and ends up in the tar pits of Vegas or if the Deep State loses and ends up buried in the swamps of Washington DC, hopefully democracy will be the ultimate winner.

Your article has completely ignored Donald Trump's titanic struggle, since early 2014, against nearly all the corporate newsmedia (and much of the supposed 'alternate' newsmedia including RT, PressTV and Global Research), the Republican Party establishment, the Democratic Party and massive electoral fraud.

You concede that "Trump, like Kennedy before him, also seems to be calling out the Deep State's right to rule America (and the world) with an iron hand", but then go on to say that Trump is no better than the Deep State and all those mentioned before who opposed his Presidential campaign.

Given Hillary Clinton's many corrupt business dealings, her stated intention to start a war with Iran and that she had already helped cause the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine and Syria, the outbreak of World War 3 would have been inevitable had Donald Trump not won the election.

Whilst I also have concerns about Donald Trump, for example his unreasonable apparent hosility towards Iran, he has agreed to cooperate with Russia in Syria. This could well see the end of that terrible conflict which has lasted almost six years.

He has scrapped the appalling Trans-Pacific Partnership and acted to re-establish American sovereignty by enforcing laws against illegal immigration and protecting its industries against unfair foreign competition.

His victory has given encouragement to other anti-globalists around the world, including France's Marine Le Pen, who now stands a good chance of becoming France's next President.

If Donald Trump had done nothing other than prevent Clinton from becoming President, humanity owes to him an enormous debt of gratitude.

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has been stupidly, unfairly, and cynically criticised for her recent fact-finding and peace-making visit to Syria and meeting with Bashar al-Assad.

Here is a letter signed by Syrians and Syrian Americans thanking her for her efforts on behalf of peace.

We thank you, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, for your courageous trip to Syria

Jan 26, 2017
By Salah Zakkour, Press Release:

We, members of the Syrian American community, wholeheartedly support Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s courageous fact-finding trip to Syria in January. With this trip Rep. Gabbard demonstrated her strong commitment and determination to bringing about an end to all forms of support by the United States Government and its allies to the extremists and terrorists who have been destroying Syria and other countries of the Middle East during the past several years.
Rep. Gabbard’s trip to Syria was only a logical next step toward gathering the necessary first hand information in support of her similarly courageous bi-partisan bill, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act. We consider her trip a significant step toward ending the U.S. government’s illegal policy of forced regime change in other countries, including Syria, with the help of extremist and terrorist groups. We urge all other members of Congress to follow Rep. Gabbard’s steps in order to directly see for themselves what is really happening in Syria, instead of relying on dubious information and fake news that is being fabricated by all those who are bent on overthrowing the Syrian government. Those people are blatantly ignoring the wishes of the majority of the Syrian people and closing their eyes to the humanitarian catastrophe it has created.

As they have done so after every fact-finding trip to Syria by concerned citizens of a number of countries, including those from the U.S., Australia and Britain, the same pro-regime-change people in the U.S. are once again repeating the same worn out and baseless argument that such fact finding trips to Syria, especially the one made by a member of U.S. Congress, “legitimizes” Assad government. They further argue that Rep. Gabbard’s “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” will result in sacrificing the “moderate” opposition to Assad under the cover of fighting terrorism.

But neither of these arguments bears any relationship with reality.

As to the claim of “legitimization” of Assad government, it should be understood that the legitimacy of any government, Syrian government included, is derived from the support of its own citizens, not from a trip by a member of Congress of another country. Without taking sides about merits and demerits of the Assad government, we have to acknowledge that report after report by impartial observers has shown that the Assad government, and the Syrian Arab Army, has the support of the majority of Syrian people. These repeated reports were further confirmed by the last presidential election of June of 2014 in Syria, carried out in the presence of international observers, in which 73.4 percent of legitimate voters participated and 88 percent of them voted for President Assad. Moreover, the legitimacy of Assad government is officially recognized by the international community and the United Nations — a fact that nobody can deny. It is, therefore, upon the deniers of these facts to back up their claims to the contrary.

As to the claim of distinction between the so-called “moderate” opposition and the terrorist organizations, one does not have to look far to disprove it. First, it should be noted that these armed fighters are not the same people who were peacefully marching on the streets of Syria five years ago. In fact the peaceful opposition movement has been silenced and hijacked by the violent acts of extremist and terrorist groups like al-Nusra, Jebhat Fateh al-Sham, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood, and the like. The so-called “moderate” fighters have been fighting shoulder to shoulder in the past five years, and have refused to separate themselves from these terrorist groups, even when U.S. government asked them to for the sake of establishing a ceasefire. And their leaders have conceded that their members have joined these terrorist groups in droves and have turned the weapons they have received from the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Qatar, over to these terrorists. Even the U.S. government has conceded that a significant part of the arms delivered to these “moderate” groups has ended up in the hands of the terrorists. Moreover, the numerous testimonies of liberated citizens in Aleppo have clearly shown that the so-called “moderates” have been committing the same crimes against innocent people, as did the terrorists.

Such arguments are aimed at putting obstacles on the path of a peaceful, diplomatic resolution of the Syrian crisis. They are aimed at making a forced regime change in Syria a precondition for achieving a political resolution. And this can only be achieved through continued arming of terrorists in order to bring the Syrian government down before any negotiations can start.
It is in light of these facts that we consider Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s fact-finding trip and her Stop Arming Terrorists Act as a courageous move toward bringing a just peace to Syria. The Syrian people will be able to freely exercise their political and national rights only when these external terrorist attacks on their country have stopped.

We will be more than happy to do everything we can to help Congresswoman Gabbard in her courageous efforts to bring a just peace to Syria and the whole Middle East by putting an end to all forms of support for terrorists, especially by the United States and its allies.

Salah Zakkour

Co-signed by fellow Syrians and Syrian Americans: Rami Muamar • Micheile Muamar • Immanuel Kaplo • Hannah Youssef • Nabil Kaplo • Bairt Alkass • Malk Kouki • Ghazoah Hanna • Zane Alabdine Zakkour • Fahed Zakkour • Nahla Zakkour • Saleh Zakkour • Khaled Baram • Afif Ghalwanji • Nadeem Habbal • Simon Khoury • Shawqia Adboudan •Mamoun Alabbassi • Amen Tomeh • Rana Kouki • Mario Tomeh • Georgio Tomeh • Emanuel Wasouf • Tigram Hanonick • Lena Obied • Jamil Ibrahim • Talal Bitar • Mike Matook • Basal Rahal • Silva Barsoum

What about Gadaffi's gold? What was it, $53b? Where did that go? Got to be the biggest single recent financial mystery on the planet, and should fuel novels similar to King Solomon's mines. I'll race you to write one. You will probably win because I have so much else to write. And the Vatican, of course.

By the way, Henry VIII got a lot of cash from the new bourgeois traders who brought back the gold from the Americas when he sold off the monasteries in exchange for bourgeois cash in the 16th century. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I went into industry stimulation, importing skilled immigrants and big business. That tradition stood the Brtish royals (and their many cousins) in good stead as coal smelting technology was developed and mining towns evolved into corporate structures. Oliver Cromwell came from bourgeois stock who bought into british farms with their slave and gold money and he used a rump formed largely of his relatives to rig parliament to convict Charles I.

You can read about all these things (except Gaddafi and the Vatican) in my book, (cheapest at Lulu) DEMOGRAPHY TERRITORY LAW 2: LAND-TENURE & THE ORIGINS OF CAPITALISM IN BRITAIN By S.M. Newman

On Rupert Murdoch's The Australian, republished from The Wall Street Journal where it was published at 12:00AM -5:00 Friday 16 Dec 2016 is the story US vows to strike ISIS if Syria, Russia fail to avenge Palmyra. (I was able to view the article without having to subscribe to The Australian after having removed the window which advised me that the artcle was 'premium content', presumably for Oz subscribers only).

The article commences:

The US will strike ­Islamic State in Palmyra if Russian and Syrian regime forces fail to push back and retake the Syrian city, says the top US commander in charge of the coalition targeting the extremist group.

Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend claimed that he was concerned that "the extremist group" may have acquired weapons including including armoured vehicles and air defence systems. Could General Townsend possibly have not been aware that his commander-in-chief, the still serving President Barack Obama had announced that he was waiving the ban on the supply of sophisticated weaponry to the terrorist groups in Syria.

The article continued:

"If the Russians and the regime don't strike it, we will," Lieutenant General Townsend continued.

General Townsend apparently expects the Syrians, Russians, Iranians and Heezbollah, at his behest, to drop whatever else they are doing in Aleppo, Idlib, Homs and elsewhere in Syria, and rush to throw ISIS out of Aleppo. If they don't then US-led coalition will, itself intervene in Syria, supposedly to fight ISIS.

The United States' claimed war against ISIS and not the 'moderate' terrorists and Townsend's supposed concern for the Palmyra world heritage site is clearly Townsend's cover story for his plans for the coalition to directly intervene and finally complete its war for 'regime-change'. That war started out nearly six years ago by the coalition's terrorist proxies.

The war has, so far, by one estimate, cost the lives for 400,000 Syrians including 80,000 members of the Syrian armed forces. The military death toll alone far exceeds Australia's horrific death toll of the First World War. In that war 60,000 Australians, almost all of them military, died.

Buried at the end of the article are some of the real reasons why Palmyra fell to ISIS.

[President Bashar al-]Assad, in an interview yesterday with Russian state television network RT, accused the US of helping Islamic State retake Palmyra, reiterating his longstanding accusations that the US is backing rather than fighting Islamic State to undermine his regime.

He said Islamic State’s attack on Palmyra marked an attempt to undercut the Syrian government’s offensive to retake Aleppo.

To watch the video of the full interview with President Bashar al-Assad and read the full transcript, see
Syrian President on: How Obama helps ISIS and The Trump presidency by Sheila Newman, here on on candobetter.

As the above article shows, the United States and its allies, and not the Syrian government or rte Russians, allowed ISIS terrorists to cross the desert from Deir ez Zor in Syria and Raqq in Iraq to suddenly overwhelm the smaller garrison that was defending Palmyra and its historic ruins. That article was previously published as Australia Clears Itself of Blame in Deir ez-Zor Bombing, Watches on as Palmyra Falls to ISIS (12/12/16) by Davbid Macilwain on Russia Insider. See also from Russia Insider: Moscow Doesn't Mince Words: Lavrov Suggests US 'Orchestrated' ISIS Seizure of Palmyra (13/12/16). From the Russian RT news service see 'Decamped from Mosul ISIS fighters in Syria perfect for US narrative' (12/12/16), ISIS attack on Palmyra directly linked to US waiver on rebel arms supplies – Assad to RT (EXCLUSIVE) (14/12/16).

Thank you for your thoughtful article.

In fact there is a formal theory that causes our courts to assign right to the biggest profiteer, and the primacy of economic profit over environment and social rights is also enshrined in state parliamentary policy for interpreting laws. The formal theory is Coasian economics and pareto superiority. This was beautifully (or horribly, really) demonstrated in "Supreme Court today for the Orrong Towers and the Relevance of Residents' Objections in VCAT." I quote from my coverage of that case, below:

Economic theory behind our predicament

It takes being caught up in the undignified, expensive and painful reality of turbo development for people to begin to grasp just how mad our laws are and how weak our democracy. You can spend a lot of time trying to argue sensibly, writing submissions and getting nowhere. Meanwhile some corporation is making a lot of money out of your misery.

The economic theory behind this goes back to the 18th century in Britain, the time of the Restoration, where a particularly predacious kind of land-tenure law replaced an earlier kind that gave people more rights. Although enclosures had happened since the time of the Normans, the 18th century was particularly fierce.

“In the eighteenth century, when the British economy entered an unparalleled era of expansion, Britain’s Parliament began operating according to Coasian principles and reorganized property rights en masse. In the nineteenth century, when most common-law doctrines reached their modern form, doctrines of equity (enforced through the Chancery Court) dominated the conveyance of land. These doctrines were designed to protect beneficial interests, not to maximize productivity. Efficiency became a dominant doctrine in the English legal system only after Parliamentary intervention.”(Source: Bogart, Daniel E. and Richardson, Gary, 2008, June. "Making Property Productive: Reorganizing Rights to Real and Equitable Estates in Britain, 1660 to 1830."NBER Working Paper No. W14107, p.7)

Coasian economic theory was originated by Ronald H. Coase in “The Problem of Social Cost”, Journal of Law and Economics, 3: 144, 1960. The theory assigns value arbitrarily, according to the highest dollar profit probability. It takes no heed of non-monetary values and therefore is unresponsive to social cost or individual equity. [Extracts from Sheila Newman: Demography, Territory, Law 2: Land Tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press.]

And that is the key:

Coasian economics takes no heed of non-monetary values and therefore is unresponsive to social cost or individual equity

This works out to mean that big business can almost always claim to be benefiting the community because of large financial through-puts, and that residential or small business objectors are NIMBYs, with much lesser financial sums at stake. This method of appraisal of a situation almost completely ignores every non-monetary interest affected and lesser monetary interests of small businesses. Residents cannot claim financial costs that might be incurred, for instance through loss of sunlight rendering solar panels useless or vegetable gardens unproductive.

According to this article in The Age, Land to the north of Melbourne is being sold off in Singapore for investment properties with a guaranteed 5% p.a. income stream.http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/public-land-spruiked-in-singapore-20161124-gsx10f.html

Update, 01:14AM+10 22/11/2016: (see below)

This is a contribution to a discussion about Donald Trump on johnQuiggin.com:

zoot wrote:

But in an April interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News, Trump said, "It's not like, gee whiz, nobody has them. So, North Korea has nukes. Japan has a problem with that. I mean, they have a big problem with that. Maybe they would in fact be better off if they defend themselves from North Korea."

Wallace asked, "With nukes?"

"Including with nukes, yes, including with nukes," Trump responded.
At a town hall with CNN's Anderson Cooper in March, Trump suggested that it was time to reconsider the United States' decades-old policy of not allowing Japan to arm itself with nuclear weapons

That's from CNN, easily found with Google.
Then there's this (link) from CBS.

...

(My response:) Having searched the Internet, I can now see that Donald Trump has, on several occasions, suggested that it was time reconsider the United States' decades-old policy of not allowing Japan to arm itself with nuclear weapons and he has also said that South Korea should be armed with nuclear weapons because North Korea is armed with nuclear weapons.

As Warren Fisk wrote, in Mark Warner exaggerates in saying Donald Trump is 'OK' with nuclear proliferation (11/10/2016), which is considerably more balanced than the rest of the minstream media:

So Trump certainly has said he's open to proliferation by certain allies but isn't sold on it. We rate [U.S. Senator Mark] Warner's claim Half True.

Of course, this is still a serious concern (and not my only concern about Donald Trump), but given that Donald Trump, like most people, do not understand the conflict on the Korean peninsula, and given the context of ferocious hostility from nearly all the mainstream newsmedia to Donald Trump during the election campaign, I think this error of judgement is understandable.

On the political and historical context of the Korean Peninsula: The government of South Korea was formed in 1945 by the United States with Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese occupiers. The government of North Korea was composed, with the help the Soviet Union, of those who had led the fight against the Japanese occupiers.

After 1945, Koreans in the South fiercely resisted the regime imposed upon them by the United States, and were savagely repressed. The supposed 'invasion' of the South in 1950 was just a continuation of that civil war.

Nevertheless, the choice between Donald Trump, given such flaws on the one hand and the finacially corrupt Clinton family, given that it has helped start wars that have killed hundreds of thousands and promises more of the same, on the other, should be open and shut.

Koreans then had to face a large coalition of forces allied to the United States, including Australia.

Between 1950 and 1953, Korea suffered even more aerial bombardment per square kilometre than even Vietnam was subsequently to suffer. Given this past and the close proximity, today, of United States warships and warplanes armed with nuclear weapons, the condemnation of North Korea for developing its own nuclear weapons by the Western mainstream media is grotesquely hypocritical.

Sadly, Donald Trump appears to be taken in by the decades-long propaganda against North Korea and, like many, only sees the threat to South Korea and Japan North from North Korea's nuclear weapons and not the vastly greater threat faced by North Korea.

Nevertheless, the choice between Donald Trump, even given such flaws on the one hand, and the financially corrupt Clinton family, that helped start wars that have killed hundreds of thousands and which promises more of the same, on the other, should be open and shut.

Update, 01:14AM+10 22/11/2016: In the original version of this comment, the initial part of my response to another post on johnquiggin.com was mistakenly included within in a pair of <blockquote> tags, and erroneously appeared to to be a quote of the person to whom I was responding (see here). This has now been corrected. What was previously within <blockquote> tags, above, is now in the paragraph which follows the first blockquoted text. My apologies - James.

This to be posted to a forum on johnquiggin.com, There's a lot of ruin in a country :

J-D, dale

According to United_States_presidential_election,_2016 at Wikipedia, the popular vote for Donald Trump was 60,350,241 or 47.30% of the vote. The popular vote for Hillary Clinton was 60,981,118 or 47.79% of the vote.

That means that Hillary Clinton got less than 1% more of the popular vote than did Donald Trump. However, if the votes from California (5,488,261 to Clinton, 2,969,532 to Trump), with a population of 37,253,956 or more than 11% of the 324,954,000 population of the United States, are excluded, Donald Trump would have got 57,296,326 votes or 3.4% more than Hillary Clinton's 55,351,661 votes.

-

Had the American Presidental electoral system been based - more democratically, I agree - on the popular vote and not the electoral college vote, then Donald Trump, no doubt, would probably have focussed more of his energy on the more populous states like California and Washington and, I think, won the popular vote.

Another serious shortcoming of the American Presdential electoral system is that it does not allow for preferential or "instant run-off" voting. It is, instead, based on the primitive "first-past-the-post" system. It was clearly impossible in the circumstances of the 2016 election, or of any other Presidential election I am aware of, for candidates like the Greens' Jill Stein or Libertarian Gary Johnstone to have won. A higher vote for either of them would have turned the election into a lottery. (It is striking that Jill Stein, who complained so bitterly that the system was rigged against her, failed to raise this issue.)

Notwithstanding the marginal benefit gained by Donald Trump from the Electoral College system on this occasion, the system was clearly rigged against Donald Trump. This included the astonishingly hysterical campaign by the American mainstream media, and even most of the 'alternate' newsmedia against him.

That Donald Trump won, in the face of overwhelming hostility from the mainstream media and in the face of opposition from most of the leaders of his own Republican Party, including the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, is testimony to Donald Trump's wisdom and his managerial skills and to the strength of the grassroots movement that supported him.

Most of the 'alternative' newsmedia, including Russia's RT.com, contrary to Hillary Clinton's claim that Donald Trump was a puppet of Vladimir Putin, were also hostile to Donald Trump. The only reporter who I can recall showing any balance and sympathy towards Donald Trump was the aforementioned Sophie Shevardnadze.

At best, nearly all of the other 'reporting' on RT.com was indifferent to the outcome of this critical election. At worst, it mimicked the Western mainstream media's (msm) smears against, and ridicule of, Donald Trump. The worst were the journalsts from the United States' branch of Rt.com, RT America. An example of RT America's appalling misreporting is Here's who to blame for Trump, The good news of the election, and More, the 12 November edition of 'comedian' Lee Camp's Redacted Tonight.

So, paradoxically, Russia (or at least some who pretend to be countering the msm and presenting Russia's world view) did interfere in the United States' election against Donald Trump and in favour of war-hawk Hillary Clinton.

I am still waiting for someone to respond to my earlier point about Hillary Clinton's complicity in the murder of hundreds of thousands from Serbia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yema and Syria.

Whilst only time will tell how many of his promises President-elect Donald will keep, the likelihood that the United States would impose a Libya-style 'no-fly zone' over Syria in the immediate future has been considerably reduced and we should not have to see the black flag of the Islamic State flying over Damascus.

The following comment was also posted to the abovementioned discussion. (In that post I misspelt 'Shevardnadze' as 'Shervardnadze'.)

@Ikonoclast,

Could I suggest that you read from sources other than the mainstream newsmedia about Donald Trump - the same msm that propagandises for war against Syria and propagandised for the invasion of Libya in 2011, gaves us Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" in 2003, Kuwaiti "incubator babies" in 1990, the Red Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1965, the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, the magic bullet, etc., etc.?

Perhaps you could start by watching that video linked to above. Should that video not persuade you, then perhaps you could explain to the rest of us why you think Stephen Cohen and Sophie Shevardnadze are wrong.

Ikonoclast wrote:

... Trump ... IS part of the elite. Like the rest of the elite, he preys on, exploits and oppresses the poor and the weak. ...

Had you watched the different debates and other material from Donald Trump, you would know that he has explicitly repudiated the crowd of billionaires that he was previously amongst.

In any case, even if it were possible to believe all the worst smears against Donald Trump, he would still only be fractionally as terrible as a woman who has helped cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria, taken bribes from the misogynist rulers of Saudi Arabia and laughed when she heard news of the cruel murder of Muammar Gaddafi.