Comments

Dennis K,

Your view that the Ukrainian government is not neo-Nazi, but rather extremely right-wing and pro-imperialist, concurs with that of Thierry Meyssan of Voltaire Net. I had only just now added the link to his article and plan to publish it in full. On most contentious issues in recent years. Thierry Meyssan has usually been amongst the first to have got it right.

Whilst Thierry Meyssan has got it right, other alternative sources which are usually right and which I have cited have also got it wrong on this occasion.

If you read the paragraphs following the sub-heading "The broader historical context" you will see that I have not "writ[ten] off russophobic sentiment as just some irrational intolerance.'"

The basis of the article is just wrong, or very heavily biased.

This is the current leader.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleksandr_Turchynov

This is his party.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-Ukrainian_Union_%22Fatherland%22

They are not leaders of 'neo-nazis'. The fact that neo-nazis were in the street fighting against the previous government means nothing. Leftists groups were fighting for the same thing. When it comes to political struggles, its the extremists who will take to the streets. You basically have Ukranians who want to align with Europe and the EU (god knows why), and others who want to align with Russia (it is about 1/5th ethnic Russians). Russia is now upset because they might lose power over Ukraine.

Also, there is a long history between those two countries. I wouldn't blithely write off russophobic sentiment as just some irrational intolerance.

Now I can understand why Russian news sources might want to demonise the current government, but well, they have an agenda, don't they?

A U.S. professor was interviewed on ABC radio National today around 12.30pm talking about the urban heat island effect and the strategies that would need to be put in place to mitigate it,given growing urbanisation- cool roofs , green roofs etc. He explained the cooling effect of vegetation and how this would need to be introduced whilst all the time we are losing perfectly good vegetation! Every time a piece of open space gets covered over with buildings or concrete we lose this cooling effect. The solution is to STOP this practice. How frustrating it is to hear an academic broadcasting this stuff when we already know it. We had the answer – low to medium density suburban living and modest population numbers -then we got bullied out of it.

The distinction between the left and the right is really minimal. What you really have, is a predominant belief system, mostly based on faith. Some expound it, and other act as 'kept opposition'. The 'kept opposition' always expound the basic tenets. For example, "Growth" is part of the belief system. You CAN challenge growth, but only if you agree that in the end we need growth. So an article criticising growth, and saying that we need more infrastructure spending, housing grants/loans for homebuyers is OK, because it in the end, says that we just need to work in a different way to get growth. Want to critique chinese investment? Fine, but you just have to critique how we handle it, and conclude it should go ahead.

There's little difference between the "left" and the "right". Both want "big Australia', and support privatisation of public assets, and giant corporations to control Australia. We are losing hold of democracy. Once we voted for parties we assumed they would act in our interests, but now we are continually fighting them, and trying to minimise their damage. The micro parties are considered to be no more than irritant mosquitoes, a distraction from the main event - the Libs and the Labs. In Victoria we have the fight against property developers, and Chinese investors forcing their towers onto Melbourne. Our government is under their beck and call! The sale of our electricity supplies is forcing up the cost of power, and jobs/training have gone. The cost of water, mainly due to population growth and the massive desalination plant, is crippling families trying to pay for even the basics of life! On a national level, the live export trade continues to grow, and expand, and our government celebrates! This is despite heavy protests and continual exposes of deadly animal abuse. The Great Barrier Reef is being dredged, and or forests are not safe from mining, logging and being cleared for production. High immigration is no doubt boosting our gross GDP, but at what cost to the community, our environment and jobs? It's a fake economic growth, full of smoke and mirrors but lacking reality, and sustainability. We are continually having to fight our governments, and the number of not-for-profit and minor political parties is at record levels. Government growth and profit agendas are all short-germ and fatalistic. We need a U-turn to how this once wonderful country is run.

When is this non active, non transparent government going to sit up, wake up, and take note of what this community wants and needs. This month and independent animal welfare group visited saleyards at Warragul and took home 3 sick calves. Doesn't that prove the point Minister of what this story is about???? Yet the authorised powers privileged to enforce and prevent this is still not even attending!!!! Bring on elections this may be the only way that we can help these animals.

Thanks Greg. Personally I think this is already true - and perhaps has been for a while. The cause of Indigenous/Aboriginal people is OUR cause. What happened to them IS now happening to the rest of us. Their fight IS our fight.

In fact, Australians should be very grateful to our Indigenous cousins, they have fought for basic protections such as legal aid and have raised issues of fairness, equity, justice and looking after other consistently over the decades (as we have not been here that long).

The way Indigenous people have been treated is exactly the way we ALL will be treated in this system. Those with power will impoverish us, take away our freedoms, destroy our culture (already mostly destroyed with privatisation of everything one obvious symptom). To see them and there circumstances as separate from us, I believe is a big mistake.

Thus it is not US and THEM in my eyes. The powerful see as us the same. Voices to be silenced or ignored, resources to be extracted from under our feet, leaving us a ruined people so as a small elite can enjoy privilege and wealth. These historical, human forces - Western thinking and behaviour - bought here with European settlement are still operating - although now with more powerful and total effect.

Land was taken from Indigenous people for farming, then mining. Now, the same thing is happening across Australia with Coal Seam Gas.

How The Queensland Government Fracked the State"

It is even worse in America:

Diary of a Dying Country

It is these forces that are stirring unrest across the globe, and we are not insulated from them here.

People should find out as much as possible about the Summary offences and sentencing amendment bill" currently in Victorian parliament. Many people are not aware that Victorian "tunnel vision" Premier Napthine and his government are pushing through legislation to give more power to police to deal with citizens who gather in groups to protest actively on certain government policy issues and unpopular projects. Police will be responsible to decide whose behaviour is unruly and to handcuff, detain and fine persons accordingly As I said to my local MP in an urgent email, we know this happens in China, North Korea and Russia but we dont need it in Australia, thankyou. I have attended many protest meetings and rallies and always valued my democratic right to do so. Although this legislation is disguised as being necessary for dealing with recalcitrant union members, community activists and demonstrators who supposedly prevent people going about daily activities, it is not hard to see how it will evolve to apply to protesters with banners who disagree with the Premier and his government when future issues concern the community. Already, with the aid of an independent "loose cannon" MP , the bill with the innocuous title "Summary offences and sentencing amendment bill" has already passed through the Legislative Assembly (Lower House) and will soon be up for approval by the Legislative Council (Upper House). This devious chipping away at the democratic rights of Victorian citizens should not be allowed to slip through unnoticed. It is urgent that people question government MP's about this legislative assault on our democratic rights to object, assemble and protest. currently in Victorian parliament. Many people are not aware that Victorian "tunnel vision" Premier Napthine and his government are pushing through legislation to give more power to police to deal with citizens who gather in groups to protest actively on certain government policy issues and unpopular projects. Police will be responsible to decide whose behaviour is unruly and to handcuff, detain and fine persons accordingly As I said to my local MP in an urgent email, we know this happens in China, North Korea and Russia but we dont need it in Australia, thankyou. I have attended many protest meetings and rallies and always valued my democratic right to do so. Although this legislation is disguised as being necessary for dealing with recalcitrant union members, community activists and demonstrators who supposedly prevent people going about daily activities, it is not hard to see how it will evolve to apply to protesters with banners who disagree with the Premier and his government when future issues concern the community. Already, with the aid of an independent "loose cannon" MP , the bill with the innocuous title "Summary offences and sentencing amendment bill" has already passed through the Legislative Assembly (Lower House) and will soon be up for approval by the Legislative Council (Upper House). This devious chipping away at the democratic rights of Victorian citizens should not be allowed to slip through unnoticed. It is urgent that people question government MP's about this legislative assault on our democratic rights to object, assemble and protest.

Comment was posted by Greg Wood. - Ed

Dennis K observes:

"One could legally work towards eradicating an ethnic group from the face of the planet through legal population policy."

Dennis, isn't this already the tragic condition faced by Australia's indigenous population? How on earth might accelerated immigration help the oft called for need for some useful form of reconciliation between the original and the successively dominant populations of our 'nation'? How can a rapidly hurtling object ('us', collectively) possibly be reconciled with? In fact, on this current trajectory, we'll soon all be lining up alongside the first nations' people also seeking reconciliation with a rapidly emerging new body politic dominated by ownership and customs that are entirely alien and careless toward our current, but rapidly flagging standards. That would be a bitterly ironic form of reconciliation between the current dominant and indigenous strands of culture.

I find the concomitant cheering by quite a few community sectors for both higher immigration and reconciliation to be utterly confounding, where it isn't just plain machiavellian.

More broadly, the dissolution of social identity is a key instrument in wreaking this holocaust of asset alienation and depletion upon us all. Others include the escalation of mental and spiritual trauma via compressing people into behavioural corridors of undue complexity and severe financial and time stress.

While our government boasts about how they lead the way in "managing population growth", they are hiding real cuts in spending, and "shortages" of public services - which is really due to an excessive population growth. Opposition education spokesman James Merlino said the shortage of investment in schools is causing chaos. Education now doesn't have a high priority. The government has cut education funding by $300 million for TAFE, $48 million from the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL), with a total of $600 million cuts to public school spending. An Auditor General's report released last year showed that 33 per cent of schools – 505 in total – had buildings that were below standard. Melbourne’s population projected to reach 8.6 million, and Victoria 10.3 million by 2061, but spending on infrastructure and services are not being projected at a rate to match. A housing, development-based economy relishes the economic benefits from population growth, but the revenues fail to cover basic infrastructure demands. We have a dreaded "ageing population", but the cost the many years of dependency of children is overlooked. Education is an afterthought, a retro-fitting obligation for our present Napthine government. Rather, education should be thought of as an investment in skills, knowledge and leadership, to secure the future of the next generation in a post-growth era. The federal government is cutting $135 million from Victoria's health budget over the next three years, raising fears more Victorians will wait too long for care in public hospitals, doctors say. Victoria missed out on $20 million it was expected to receive last year and would get $135 million less over the next three years - the equivalent of nearly 5000 heart bypass operations or 6500 hip replacements. The Age: doctors say health budget cuts to Victoria may force longer wait for hospital care Plan Melbourne ambitiously is projecting our population's doubling, but the same isn't happening for public services, jobs, education and health care.

http://www.makeitpossible.com/ (Great video here !)

Lyn White of Animals Australia communicates the following about the very effective campaign, "Make it possible":

"So often we talk about laws failing animals which is why it is so nice to be able to email you today to let you know that some of the most abused animals in our country finally have the law on their side.

The ACT has become the first Australian jurisdiction to prohibit by law some of the worst horrors inflicted on animals in factory farms. I'm sure you'll remember that last year we applauded Tasmania for taking the first steps to address the cruelty of factory farming, setting the scene for the nation's capital to go even further for hens and pigs.

You and I already know it ... No hen should live her whole life in a cage, where she can't even stretch her wings. No pig should be confined to a metal and concrete crate so small that she cannot turn around. No hen should have part of her sensitive beak cut off to fit her into a stressful and overcrowded factory farm.

Well we now have laws in the ACT that say "this is wrong". In fact, a company in the ACT can be fined up to $35,000 for locking a pig in a crate or a hen in a cage.

This landmark legislation is a welcome reminder that with consistent and strategic campaigning we can change laws to improve the lives of animals. It took the ACT Greens six bills and seven attempts to make history this week. For every hen and pig who will now not go on to live a life of abject misery in a factory farm in the ACT — we say thank you for staying the course.

But sadly, we cannot leave it all up our legislators. And with 12 million intelligent, inquisitive egg laying hens still confined to cruel battery cages in other states — we're about to take our campaign to set them free to new heights!

The same day that ACT politicians were banning the battery cage, our creative team was in the studio shooting an exciting new TV campaign. We've enlisted the enthusiastic support of some of Australia's most loved comics and one gorgeous rescued battery hen in a series of unique television commercials which will be backed by eye-catching billboards.

The launch is only weeks away and I can't wait to share with you this next exciting step in our Make it Possible campaign.

In such a short period of time we have seen our vision for a world without factory farming grow from the hopes of a caring few to a national movement championed by hundreds of thousands of Australians. This is such an exciting time to be working on behalf of animals. We can all take heart in and be empowered by 'wins' like we saw this week in the ACT and use them to drive us ever onward on behalf animals everywhere.

For the animals,

Lyn White
Campaign Director

P.S. We don't need to wait for governments (or for the launch of new TV campaigns) to free animals from factory farms. The choices we make at the checkout can start creating a world without factory farming right now. If you haven't already, click here to take the pledge to Make It Possible today."

What population policy means to a people. Talk of 'population policy', of meeting population targets, or using immigration to achieve particular growth goals conceals a much larger problem and moral issue. Furthermore, it allows people who promote such policies, or who accept them for personal benefit, to wash their hands of the moral implications that such policy has. Generally, these questions of population are seen as simply matters of numbers and resources, and it is definitely true that there are issues of numbers, space and resource management behind these. But behind all this is a larger issue, one obvious when seen, but rarely pointed out. The very acceptance of the idea that a 'population policy', or any policy or idea to that effect being implemented for economic or growth purposes creates a moral dilemma. To accept this as valid governance is to reject another idea, that of a people having the right to self determination and self preservation. That growth, or lack thereof of a nation is determined by peoples individual reproductive choices. The problem is that once you entrust growth of the population and future direction to individuals, whether in the government or in business, the 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 peoples 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 exist 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, whos 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 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 countries 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 ones 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 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 they 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 not 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. i ii 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 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 backwards 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.

The author of this post is Dennis K. - Ed

These abject idiots don't realise that they are the ones responsible for the rise of far right extremism. If you want to honestly discuss immigration in totality, you have generally no choice but to go to the far right. They still believe that people will get over it, or, as the Labor party in the UK believed, that if society becomes multicultural enough, it will be a non issue. This is clearly turning out to be not true.

The problem is, that it doesn't work this way, and by not allowing any dissent or criticism of these policies in the mainstream, the only option is the far right, who don't have the same reluctance to talk of these issues. You push people away, rather than make people forget the issue.

This is their biggest mistake. Centrist parties worried about racist groups could simply open up the issue to mainstream discussion, and in one fell swoop, render all these groups powerless.

Now imagine this in a bank or large financial firms. Those who doubt the wisdom of the 'way we do things' simply don't get promoted, leading to nothing but yes men at the top. So when they say "we couldn't have known there was a problem" when the crisis comes, it's kind of true. There was no one around them who dissented. Selection was based on those who had the right attitude. They just don't get exposed to contradictory views.

Margaret, Your comment is extremely valuable and worthy to be made an article - if I get the time to transform it. These investment seminars have a religious quality and are conducted in many different forums at many different levels, to professionals, amateurs and government. The industry marketsits message continuously via multiple channels, organised at local, state, national and global level. See many views on this here: http://candobetter.net/?q=GrowthLobby We can take as many reports like yours by people attending such seminars as they are able to provide. The message gets into peoples' heads and overwhelms their common sense by dint of repetition. So, please everyone, attend more of these seminars and tell all, repeatedly.

Your observations, Denniss about "attitude" fit in well with what I heard at this informative little investment event. A man in the audience, later identified as a developer played a very active part in answering all the questions put to the audience He largely agreed with the presenter and gratuitously gave his own exmaples of property investment successes, even giving the addresses of the said properties. Towards the end of the hour, from his seat in the audience he tried to issue a word of warning for the future and briefly foreshadowed that things may not keep going "to plan" over the next few years. This self declared veteran (he talked of investments going back to the 60s) of property investment was swiftly silenced and the meeting was tidily wrapped up in upbeat mood with no Q and A. (I don't know what the motivations of the developer were to be there and to be so vocal.) The audience was then ushered into a room where they were given refreshments whilst assistants circulated, asking people if they would like to sign up for appointments. The incentive to stay was a lucky door prize of $100.00 and 2 bottles of red wine as prizes for the correct answers to 2 questions.

You are right speculation is a blight on society. There is nothing wrong with seeking to provide housing for renters, etc. But when you do it just to make money - not for the benefit of others - then it is parasitic. This is where the selfish mindset sets in: when speculators make money of house prices rises, government schemes, etc - where do they think that money comes from? It comes often from families, or disadvantaged people, etc - reducing their opportunities. And even worse - as you mention Dennis - it takes money away from productive investments that would create work and opportunities for these same exploited people. Quite frankly, it is disgusting that people promote profiting from others in this way. We have 20,000 homeless (or more) in Victoria - not to mention many stuggling and stressed due to house prices - causing domestic violence, relationship breaksdowns - destroying families and childrens' lives - so some people can get rich doing nothing! It is absolutely outrageous - and the whole scheme is backed by our politicians who promote it with money, tax breaks, high immigration etc. They are all morally bankrupt! They probably all give to charity etc and perhaps think themselves generous because of it, yet profit from this truely filthly lucre! Speculation should be called out for what it is - and those who participate in it should hang their heads in shame! Money for nothing - speculators think beyond yourself and who pays! Selfishness, and greed is what stops people thinking too deeply these days. Matt

All his party had to do was beat one other party, the Liberals, with Abbott at the helm, and they still failed. In other words, they had it on a silver platter and dropped it. Labor and thier apologists blame this on Murdoch, the media, who they claim are 'right wing'! The right say the media is left wing, so go figure that out. Many of us don't have the luxury of having our political views represented by a major party who gets media coverage and who get reprsentatives on talk show panels, so Kelvin is lucky. Many of us aren't centre left OR centre right. What 'the left' and 'the right' have stood for has changed, even swapped. Didn't the left fight for free movement of people? A task which the right now champion. Didn't Labor prop up the ponzi housing market by increasing migration and relaxing foriegn investment requirements? The Left used to push freedom, but now push hate speech laws. The centre left and right will however have no trouble working together to keep out any REAL political change. Besides, a friend of mine was in Stockholm while there was rioting in the streets. Real rioting with burned out cars that we don't get here. The media were reporting this was due to lack of opportunities and economic impovrishment. Is their model so great after all?

In Spain, nearly half of those under 30 - almost 2 million people - cannot find a job. Suicide rates are up and the young fear they have no future in their own country.

The Age: The Lost generation of Spain's unemployed youth

Spain is in population overshoot, over their economic needs. Rather than the feared "ageing population", they are facing an overwhelming number of disenchanted and lost young people.

The irony is that Spain went from receiving far more immigrants in search of "a better life" - 600,000 in 2006 alone - than there were emigrant Spaniards leaving Spain for the same reason. Migrating to a "better life" is a retro dream, one that almost doesn't exist now. The desire to live in Europe, the USA or Australia is being loved to death, and destroyed by population growth!

Spain's young professionals are fleeing the country and Oxfam has predicted that 18 million Spaniards - a staggering 40 per cent of the population - are at risk of social marginalisation within the next decade.

For more than a decade, about a quarter of Spain's economic output revolved around tourism and construction, two industries highly susceptible to downturns in the international economy. There is a stark similarity with Australia's economy - based on property development, service industries and tourism. They are non-productive in tangible outputs, and industries that are first to fail with an economic downturn.

There are plenty of young people - people with a university education - who have simply given up hope. While the cliché of our "ageing population" threat is being used to justify "growth" and more immigration, the real problem now is the number, and cost, of supporting a swelling number of young people with little future!

Immigrants from Africa are adding to their woes. Guardia Civil sources have said that approximately 100 sub-Saharan immigrants have managed to jump the fence complex separating the Spanish exclave of Melilla from Moroccan territory. They said about 500 people had attempted to force their way across the border in the early hours of Monday morning. Some 150 illegal immigrants forced their way across the fence at Melilla, which is protected by razor-wire, earlier in the week.

Spain has called on Europe to help them to stem the rate of immigration into Spain.

Cattle and sheep deaths from the animal exports reached almost 15 000 in the last year according to a Department of Agriculture report. Tasmanian Independent MP Andrew Wilkie introduced his fourth Bill into Parliament on Monday to phase out the industry by 2017. 4000 sheep died in a voyage from Fremantle to Qatar last year, and was kept secret until recently. Another 3000 sheep of that vessel had to be slaughtered when they were offloaded because of the condition they were in. Yet, this atrocious industry, full if tragic and horrific "incidents", is fiercely defended by our governments. It's part of a group agenda to provide "food security" and profits for farmers. Independent Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie has taken on the government and intends to stop the live export industry by 2017. It's propped up by self-interests and a powerful industry lobby group. Not only is it ethically wrong and cruel, but it's bad for Australian workers. They are denied jobs in abattoirs. How are dead and dying animals arriving at ports overseas be acceptable? Wilkie says that Parliament is completely out of step with the community. It's a case of money speaking louder then words. Animals can't be protected once they leave our shores, and it's been proven over and over again. Once they are at the front of the queue, there's no protection from barbaric cruelty of fully conscious animals having their necks sliced and stabbed at.

Great report. This is basically "talking up the market". You convince people that water can run uphill, then they'll invest in your uphill hydroelectric power station. One thing I note with these "investment" try-hards, is when you discuss economic basics their mind jams up, or, quite often, they become hostile. It's part of being trained to be a spiv. You have to develop a disdain for people who have the 'wrong attitude'. Mention reality or basics, and they are trained to view you as a loser trying to put them down. They are told they are winners, with the right attitude. Attitude is everything and they view who deserve the wealth as solely on who wants it the most. Actual work and productive activity don't count. I've gone to similar seminars myself and always leave feeling depressed. "Wealth Creation" without actually creating anything of value. What a joke, The idea of using 'other peoples money' makes me quite sick actually. These people are simply parasites, who are simply learning how to be a more efficient parasites. They're not investors. Investors invest to start a business, to fund a project, to make an invention commercially available. These people are parasites who use a system to extract wealth from those who create it. What's worse, they bleed the country to do it. If she really loved the country, she wouldn't be making a living of the backs of others, but I know the type. She doesn't love the country, just loves the free ride and easy cash. I know some who were born to S. European immigrants who have this 'use other peoples money to secure your future' mentaility. They didn't care how the money was made, just that they could take a share. I just point out that Italy/Greece are broke, and that this idea of just taking and sitting pretty doesn't work in the end.

All this would have been quickly rectified if the Australian constitution included Direct Democracy as it is practised in Switzerland.

As Victorian Premier Dennis Napthine still has to face voters at the state elections scheduled for 29 November this year, he and his parliamentary supporters can be held to account for this atrocious initiative. Be sure to ask each candidate seeking your vote:

  1. Does he/she support the East-West Link and the further destruction of Royal Park;
  2. If, against the known views of the Victorian public, Napthine proceeds to sign the contract, how he/she intends to try to repeal that contract; and
  3. How does he/she propose to act to protect our iconic Hanging Rock at Mount Macedon from the plans of the Napthine Government and property developers to build housing estates?

These egg factories where the working components are living creatures with a nervous system very similar to our own, creatures with all our senses but unable to comprehend the reason for their suffering is totally indefensible. It is morally indefensible without argument but I would venture that in the utilitarian and practical sense it is also indefensible. I know several people who have re-homed resuced chickens from egg factories where the chickens' "useful" lives have expired. In all cases the chickens, in pleasant surroundings, (not hard to provide given a bit of land,) are extremely egg- productive. The concentration of hens and egg laying in these gulags seems to be a move towards control of supply. Since the 1950s suburban block sizes have diminished and with this, individual families' capacity to provide for themselves has also. This inexorable change comes at the great expense of the hens. It would not have been too terrible a life in a suburban hen-house with maybe six others and possibly being released during the day to scratch around in the garden.This is a huge contrast with a life spent in a cramped cage, indoors as one of 30,000 with feet never touching the ground. You would have to be a "special" type of person to choose this as an enterprise, wouldn't you?

Last week I received a call from a property development company inviting me to an investment seminar. Normally I refuse such invitations but in the light of this article and the subsequent comments I decided to go to see what sort of people are considering this type of investment. I was mainly interested in the age group. There were about 40 people in the audience with a large age range represented from twenties to about 70 with more in the middle of this range than at the extremes. I took that in quickly, so mission accomplished, but decided to stay and listen as the presenter assured the audience that it would go for only 1 hour. The presenter was a late Gen X or early Gen Y depending on the definition (she gave her year of birth as 1977) She told us she was the child of Italian immigrants and referred to the adopted land often during the talk as “this wonderful country”. Very early on she revealed that the company was not only a property developer but that they are migration agents assisting more people into “this wonderful country” She explained that property investment was the way to secure one’s financial future as there are “tax incentives galore”. She showed very clearly on a power point slide how the gap between the average wage and the average house price has been widening since the 1960s and pointed out that the purchasing of a house is now out reach for many. (my note -That makes them either homeless or renters) Underpinning all this she pointed out with a series of figures on immigration and births (didn’t mention deaths!) was population growth. She tapped into inflation and the probable increase in the GST as further accelerants to the recipe of certainty for the wisdom of buying property using “other people’s money” to secure one’s future. To successfully take this step, she and the audience determined that you need “guts, patience and the ability to see ahead 10 years” - as that is the time which it will take for a property to double in value. The tax concessions were all new to me. It was more than “negative gearing. It was about the National Rental Affordability Scheme, which is for investment in pre -approved developments in areas where there are acute rental shortages and where approved renters can rent for 20% below market value. The government sets the rent and also pays the investor $10,350 p.a. indexed and tax free for 10 years. This, our presenter spelled out meant about “$130,000 from the government tax free!” for investors. The recipe was, in summary- continued population growth, inflation, housing scarcity, tax incentives. Disclaimer: Do not take this as investment advice!

A new report released by the Victorian National Parks Association (VPNA) has detailed the impact of urban development on Victoria’s coastline. According to the "Coast is Unclear" report , authored by marine and coastal environment consultant Chris Smyth, the urbanised coast has expanded by 15% over the last 20 years and now makes up about 17% of Victoria’s total coastline. Population growth, climate change and a "development-focussed government" are all identified in the report as sources of further degradation of Victoria’s 2000 kilometre coastline. Urban development threatening Victoria's coast: VNPA It's interesting that a site dedicated to property developers have recognised this threat. Victoria’s narrow strips of coastal crown land are "squeezed" between the sea and developed land, and encroaching development coupled with rising sea levels are threatening protected areas. The interface between our land, and the sea, is sensitive to climate change, and has some unique ecosystems. The report cites the development of a new breakwater, boat ramp and beach road at Bastion Point, Mallacoota as a significant example of the "dash for development" approved by successive Victorian governments. It's easy and a no-brainer to rubber-stamp developments and assess their economic worth, but they are adding to the concrete and bitumen overlay, and more people will destroy the integrity of our natural assets - our precious and spectacular coasts! VNPA marine spokesperson Simon Branigan said: "The rate of coastal urban sprawl over the past 20 years is alarming. We now face new pressures such as major port expansions at Westernport and Port Anthony, a breakwater at Mallacoota's Bastion Point, the spread of coastal towns, and the opening up of national parks along the coast to large-scale commercial tourism developers." "Endangered animals such as the Burrunan Dolphin, Eastern Bristlebird, Fairy Tern, Orange-bellied Parrot and the Southern Bent-wing Bat rely on healthy coastal habitat for survival," Mr Branigan said. Instead of attacking "urban development" issues, the VNPA should formulate their own population policy, and face the bigger picture that housing prices and the grab on land will cause the spill-over of housing onto sensitive areas.

Here's the URL for the following site and film: http://www.raw.info/

Over three years, CEO of Compassion in World Farming, Philip Lymbery, travelled the world bearing witness to the hidden cost of cheap meat and the devastating impact of factory farming – on people, animals and our planet. The result - Farmageddon - "is a wake-up call, exposing factory farming as one of the most pressing issues of our time; responsible for unparalleled food waste, damage to our health and the countryside, and the biggest cause of animal cruelty on the planet".

"Our food system is screwed. We are suffering; our lands are suffering; animals are suffering. We need to turn things around; we need to stop factory farming. Unless we do something now, we face Farmageddon – a future of rubbish food, trashed lands, surging disease and growing world hunger".

According to the UN, the world must produce 70% more food to feed our planet by 2050, with a population of over 9 billion! Yet nothing is being said to address the overpopulation causing the unrealistic rise in food demands, and the inevitable famine it will cause. One "solution" is factory-farming, of confining and compacting the lives and lifespan of livestock to produce more - with less space and resources! The pollution, the cruelty, the diseases and the over-use of anti-biotics is being ignored, and also the constraints of biological, botanical and ecological systems.

As I understand, the EW link through Royal Park could well be a "cut and cover" exercise rather than an innocuous sounding tunnel. This would create a huge gorge through the park. The on-off ramps and fly overs will be very apparent and very close to the zoo. The ambiance, conservation, recreational and heat modifying qualities of the area will be lost . I am told 2,000 trees in Royal Park were removed for the building of the Commonwealth Games Village housing development where land was given away by the state government for housing to accommodate athletes for a 10 day event. With a further 5,000 trees to be removed for the EW link we are definitley heading in the wrong direction.

Like the cliché of the "ageing population", the "global financial crisis" is being used to blame the shortage of jobs. It's really the fact that our artificially driven population growth is faster than jobs creation, and the global economy is causing industries to leak out of our country.

The auto industries are going, and so are Qantas jobs.

In northern areas of Victoria, in the regional towns, there is 17 per cent youth unemployment; in some of the north and west areas of metropolitan Melbourne, we've got unemployment levels amongst our young people of 16 and 17 per cent.

Our politicians are speaking about "growth", but what's really growing is the national rate of youth unemployment which in 2008 was 8.8 per cent; now we're topping 12 per cent. And that's going to continue unless we have a national strategy to take away. Contrary to the "ageing population" being an economic burden on the welfare system, it's really the swelling number of young people in economic overshoot, bereft of opportunities and training.

Our economy is hollow, and based on population growth rather than real economic growth. It's like a leaking bucket - it's being filled in one end by a flow of new-comers, immigrants supposedly to fill in skills shortages, but leaking out the bottom with people overflowing into welfare queues, and skills, in redundancy.

Each year, a small, brown Japanese water bird - the Latham's Snipe - migrates from the northern hemisphere to south-eastern Australia. The rare bird is protected under several international agreements, including the Japan Australia Migratory Bird Agreement and by the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Since 2005, the community group Port Fairy Landcare has been fighting against a proposed development for a 32-lot subdivision on a site adjacent to the wetlands. The development was approved of last year by the Moyne Shire Council, and now it will go to VCAT. The proposed residential development site covers about 40 percent of the known habitat of the Latham's Snipe locally. We may be facing the Sixth Extinction, due to human environmental demands, but it incrementally and seemingly insignificantly is creeping into our own back yards and coastal areas. The current major threat to Latham's Snipe outside of Australia appears to be the modification and loss of habitat. This has been caused by the drainage, clearance and modification of wetlands for residential, agricultural and industrial development. Port Fairy Landcare group takes fight to save rare water bird's habitat to VCAT So well camouflaged, they blend into the background until, with a loud krek!, they suddenly burst from their hiding place, only to land somewhere nearby where they become instantly invisible again. Latham’s Snipe is the only one of the 36 species of migratory shorebirds protected under the EPBC Act* and Australia’s migratory bird agreements with China, Japan and Korea, that has its own criteria for identifying “important habitat.” The Powling Street Wetland in Port Fairy, Victoria regularly supports a hundred or more snipe over spring and summer with the highest count in recent years being 430. That this unique site that should be protected for the snipe—a bit of a ‘no brainer’. However, the cash rewards for property developers is more material and lucrative than the camouflaged and seemingly insignificant little bird! BirdLife Australia believes that the proposed high-density residential subdivision will be a tipping point for the birds leading to a large decline in the number of snipe that are able to use the wetland. The snipe are getting squeezed out, and there are exceptionally few, if any, wetlands capable of supporting such high numbers for them to move to. If the international agreements and the EPBC Act can't protect this site, there is little hope for a precedent of protection for other threatened species.

Anne Louise Lambert was at the picnic at Hanging Rock yesterday. Her speech was preceded by a couple of on-side politicians who were welcomed and applauded warmly. When Anne Louise Lambert started speaking you could not help but give her all your attention. She conveyed her deep attachment to and appreciation of the area, particularly the rock. She was able to suspend belief in her audience conveying an impression that the rock was a person with rights and feelings. It was very emotional and all the more powerful for her mastery over her own emotions, not giving in to them but keeping them bottled at very high pressure. Her acting profession and training would have ensured this and as is the case of any excellent performance it came through with great clarity because it was absolutely real.

It is prevalent in Europe. Multiculturalism is an 'after the fact' idea and governments do have policies for promoting it.

http://www.unesco.org/most/p97.htm

'Policy of multiculturalism in Europe has failed' - expert (7/5/2013), Voice of Russia

It didn't get enacted with a popular vote, or consensus, but rather was put into motion, and then when sold as an inevitability, the state coerced people to go along.

It is like war IMHO. Governments go to war for various geo-political reasons, but the soldiers and people don't understand these, so they have to invent 'simple' reasons for the rubes to go along. Those who do are 'patriots' and 'tolerant', those who are skeptical are 'traitors' or 'bigots'.

The following is a continuation of the discussion on johnquiggin.com, posts from which which have copied onto this page.

I note that ikonoclast's latest post (@#5) addresses almost none of the content of my latest post (@#3)

Ikonoklast, if you would prefer that I continue in this discussion with you, you should address my arguments and supporting evidence. Why not start with what I wrote in #44 on page 1. Either show me why I am wrong or else acknowledge that what I have posted is correct.

Ikonoklast wrote:

Are you saying, Russian oppression doesn't happen in Chechnya?

You realise that the Boston marathon bombers were Chechen terrorists and that the FBI failed to act on warnings given to them by Russian intelligence that Chechen terrorists preparing to bomb the Boston Marathon? Anyway, feel most welcome to explain how you know that justice lies with the cause of such terrorists and not with the Russians and their regional allies in the Caucasus.

Ikonoklast wrote:

Russia is ruled by Chekists and oligarchs.

As I explained above President Vladimir Putin was democratically elected. He was elected with a far higher margin than war criminal Presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush.

Ikonoklast wrote:

On the other hand, meeting violence with violence (on a mass scale) is guaranteed to escalate the situation and result in ever more deaths. The young male hot-heads who remain to fight [in Syria will win] nothing but ruins.

Presumably, you would also have objected to the violence with which the young Australian 'hot-heads' on the Kokoda Track and at Milne Bay met the violence of the Japanese invaders in 1942? If you took the time to look at the facts about Syria, you would know that Syrian soldiers are no less defending their country against invasion by a cruel and viscious enemy than were Australians in New Guinea in 1942.

The following is a continuation of the discussion on johnquiggin.com .

Iconoclast @#43 wrote:

You are absolutely right (@#37) about the deadly criminality of the US.

Thank you.

Iconoclast continued:

However, you neglect to mention the deadly criminality of the current Russian and Chinese regimes.

Could you provide examples of the criminality of the Russian and Chinese Governments?

Were you aware that the Russian Government, including President Vladimir Putin, was democratically elected? Were you aware that Russia has a free press that is far more truthful than the war propagandists and corruption denialists in the Fairfax media, the ABC, the SBS, the Murdoch Press?

For some time now, it has been understood by people, who are put themselves to the trouble of discovering the truth, that if you want to know, let alone understand, what is going on in Venezuela, Syria, the Ukraine, Bahrain, etc., that you are wasting your time watching CBS, the BBC, etc. To find out what is happening there, go to sites such as "Russia Today" (rt.com) and the Iranian PressTV (presstv.ir) etc.

If you can find examples of dishonest reporting on any of those web-sites, please feel welcome to provide examples here or on my web-site.

Iconoclast wrote:

These days I tend to regard anyone wielding a weapon as a bad person ...

Can't you see that it had not been for some "bad persons" "wielding weapons" Syria would have been leveled by the United States and its allies last year with a death toll approaching that suffered by Iraq and its people would now be living under Sharia law?

Very good point you make: "I don't see different cultures. Everyone lives according to the same 'work-home-consume' lifestyle. Everyone more or less is required to be Politically Correct, to adopt neo-liberal world views." With regard to 'multiculturalism is a failure' (citing German Chancellor), I assume you don't mean to imply that there is a country with a multiculturalist policy on the European continent?

The only benefit from Multiculturalism is food. And that is just what people say to try and defend a policy which is essentially culturally destructive. I don't see people turning on the radio to hear 'multicultural' music. Perhaps people will listen to a program from their own background, if then. I don't see people being 'worldly' because of diversity. These millenials worldly because they go to school with people who aren't white? I don't think so. Also, multiculturalism had nothing to do with the snowy river scheme. It may have been an unintended by product (after the fact, not intentionally), but in now way necessary. The Chancellor of Germany said multiculturalism is a failure, and other European leaders are admitting the same. From my observation from many months through Europe, I concur, and would state that 'failure' is an understatement. Of course, Australians like to think it's "different here". But we say that about or property market and economy and urban sprawl too ... Lastly, I don't see different cultures. Everyone lives according to the same 'work-home-consume' lifestyle. Everyone more or less is required to be Politically Correct, to adopt neo-liberal world views. The immigrant adopts our way of life, or follows one we don't want. There is not true multiculture, not true different lifestyles, no truly different social structures or outlooks. These get destroyed as people are forced to homogenise and assimilate.

Capitalism will eventually die. Automation and increases in manufacturing are putting people out of work. We will have to adopt a system which doesn't require everyone to work for a living. The problem is, if we have free trade, then this could pose a problem for people who aren't more nationalistic and demand a national solution to their economic question. I think Capitalism probably made sense when it first flourished, but not now. The idea has been corrupted (which ALWAYS happens when an idea becomes an institution) and its run by self selecting cronies who are, frankly, silly. I really hate the "conspiracy" explanation. It tells people 'don't bother, these people are super, super organised and will counter every move'. It also means people treat the status quo as legitimate and with gravitas, when really, its just silly. Let's face it. Those pushing for more growth are just silly. They're buffoons who aren't laughed at and people pretend to take seriously.

Banyule Homestead is the oldest home in Melbourne, and was built by Joseph Hawdon, one of our pioneers. The land over the years has been whittled away for housing, but it was sold previously to a private buyer as "surplus" asset. Despite the homestead's precious history and architectural significance Heritage Victoria approved of a planning permit to build units on the last remaining piece of land, near the Yarra river, sealing the fate of the house as unsuitable for any public purpose. How can heritage site sit by side with modern developments and still keep the integrity of the property as a whole? This approval by Heritage Victoria exposed this organisation for what it is - an oxymoron! They are part of the process of ensuring advantages and approvals for property developers, with the thin façade that heritage is being protected - when is isn't!

This was posted as a further comment to the discussion in response to this comment and also posted here.

Those who had watched Christopher Boyce being interviewed by Mark Davis in The Falcon Lands on SBS's Lateline last Tuesday should not be surprised that Bob Car and Kevin Rudd were complicit in the 2011 invasion of Libya and in the ongoing terrorist war against Syria in which 130,000 have died.

A brief summary of The Falcon Lands and discussion can be found in the article on SBS Dateline: Christopher Boyce blows whistle on CIA corruption of Australian democracy, Labor Party & trade union movement (18 Feb 2014). The link to the Iview page on which it can still be watched is on that page.

Also (as comments are now closed on the last Monday Message Board of 3 February, can I say here) those who would like to help Anne-Lousie Lambert, who played Miranda in the 1975 Australian Classic film Picnic at Hanging Rock, save the set of that film from destruction by property developers, please attend the protest tommorrow beginning at 11 AM. There will be music all day. Details can be found on the story aty the top of my home page at candobetter.net.

This is to be posted to discussion in response to article Pot, meet kettle (20/2/2014) on johnquiggin.com.

The Syrian people (and Venezuelans and most Ukranians) obviously understand the deadly criminality of the United States government and its allies, including Australia, in Iraq (as also attested by former US Attorney general Ramsey Clarke in speech embedded on my site). This has resulted in many hundreds of thousands deaths since 1990 (with one estimate putting the toll as high as 3.3 million).

The Syrian people have heroically resisted attempts by the United States and its allies to impose similar regime change on them.

Since March 2011, when hordes of foreign 'Islamic' terrorists, supplied by the United States and the Arab dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, launched their war against the Syrian people in March 2011, 130,000 Syrians have died. Australia, particularly former 'Labor' leaders Bob Carr and Kevin Rudd, has been complicit in these crimes against humanity with expanded sanctions imposed upon Syria and its ambassador expelled from Australia in 2012 on the provably untrue pretext that the Syrian Government massacred its own supporters in Houla in 2012.

For more information, visit my site and sites linked to from there, including GlobalResearch. My site also includes two articles by Australian Professor Tim Anderson republished from Global Research.

The scam goes something like this: "Due to recent upgrade in our database, we are terminating all unverified accounts permanently. Reply and give the information below:Username,Password,Date of Birth,Phone&Country. Note! You have one week to comply. Gmail Inc." They are after your personal information, of course. Don't be panicked. Report them as spam or phishing and delete. Just in case you have managed to withhold some personal information from gmail and think you now must surrender it. And, of course, you must never tell anyone your password.

Hi Dennis, You make some good points here. On this idea that capitalism is some kind of evolution that had to happen - manifest destiny etc. I have written an entire book about how that is an ideology and capitalism does not have to happen, is not inevitable, especially the turbo driven kind that relies of fossil fuel. It is called, Demography, Territory and Law 2: Land Tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain and it will be coming out soon - as soon as I manage to format the index and fix a few other things. Although there is no solo directed conspiracy ruling the world, the mechanism of money and profit makes for pretty predictable outcomes; profit will overrule almost all democracy and environmental benefits if there is a buck to be made.

Williamstown's OLDEST 3 story emblemic hotel should have had a reprieve if Heritage Victoria had recommended State Heritage Register but unbelievably today we heard that the Executive Director of Heritage Victoria is not recommended it be saved from Demolition by a rampant developer in the Pt Gellibrand peninsula. http://www.savewilliamstown.net/Save_Williamstown/NEWS/Entries/2013/12/11_TERRIBLE_VCAT_DECISION_-_APPROVAL_TO_DEMOLISH_the_Oriental_Hotel_-_the_1854_oldest_building_in_Williamstown_after_the_Time_Ball_Tower.htm Developer lets it get dilapidated and is rewarded by HV now not protecting it. There are 60 days to protest. This report will be available publicly on the Heritage Victoria website from 9am tomorrow. http://www.dpcd.vic.gov.au/heritage/victorian-heritage-register/registration/current-recommendations-open-for-comment

You know there are conspiracy theories about Alex Jones!

A conspiracy is any secret plan. So that includes Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair, two siblings discussing how they will screw over a third and two lovers over how they will dump their spouses. The existence of one doesn't validate the other.

Note that the large 'global' conspiracies are the ones with the least, the weakest evidence. They also seem to contradict the small scale nefarious activity.

There are secret plans, but the argument that the world works according to one secret plan, well thats the one I doubt. It's human nature to ascribe events to a plan. Since day zero peope have been looking for the force who decided when it rains, when there is a drought. We are wired to look for a someone. Usually people don't consider it may be a something.

Thats were I think people come unstuck. They are looking at something like Capitalism and how it has evolved, and just believe that it must be a directed plan. Of course, if someone is a Marxist, this makes sense, because Marxism teaches that everything IS planned and political.

It's the global conspiracies I'm skeptical of, the Bilderbergers, International Jewry, Illuminati, Freemasons, David Icke's Lizard people, Climate Change, Climate Change Skepticism. I've wasted many hours of my life having heard them all. I think these people wanted it to be true. Thats how hoaxes spread, people want them to be true. (The Gulf of Tonkin and WMD's in Iraq are good examples of this). Human logical infallibility.

Do you not wonder how it is that the bigger the conspiracy is, the more adept the people are at keeping it secret? That something like a few republicans spying is found out, but a global conspiracy or country wide false flag is kept perfectly secret?

My apologies for the delay in publishing this comment, Dennisk. I was distracted by an attempt to break the above comment by Sheila into separate pages in a Drupal book. Having so many YouTube broadcasts on one page causes my FireFox web browser to freeze. - Ed

Here is a story that explains this concept (source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/abstractions-versus-the-real-world-economic...) "Offshoring production to underdeveloped nations gives needy people jobs, increases their incomes, reduces poverty, and expands their nations’ GNPs. It also enables people in developed nations to purchase products produced offshore at lower prices enabling them to consume a wider range of things. As a result, everyone everywhere is better off. Convinced? Most economists are, but it hasn’t worked that way. Everyone everywhere is not better off—as the whole world now knows. Why? In the latter part of the 80s or early part of the 90s, a large retailer (don’t remember which one) thought it would be a good idea to bring an employee of a factory in Bangladesh to America to see how the clothing the factory was producing was being marketed to Americans. So a Bengali woman was selected to represent her factory and brought to America. This idea didn’t work out well. The woman not only saw how the products were being marketed but how much they cost and she was infuriated. She knew what she and her coworkers were being paid, about two percent of the price of the garments. She did not remain silent and was quickly sent back to Bangladesh. Here is the gist of her story: She said she and her coworkers were not financially better off after being hired by the factory. Yes, the wages were better than those that could have been earned before, but they weren’t much benefit. Why? Because when the paychecks began to arrive, the local landlords and vendors increased prices on everything, so just as before, all of their incomes went to pay for basic necessities. The landlords and vendors got the money; the workers were not better off, and those in the community who were not employed by the apparel factory were decidedly worse off. It fact, it quickly became apparent that the workers were working for nothing. They did the work; the landlords and vendors got the pay. But, of course, the country’s GNP was better, which is all that matters to economists who still claim that Bangladesh’s economy is improving. And although Americans were able to buy the apparel more cheaply than they could have before the manufacturing was offshored, the American apparel workers who lost their jobs are decidedly not better off. Two conclusions follow from this scenario: employment alone is not a sufficient condition for prosperity; full employment can exist in an enslaved society along side abject poverty, and an increasing GNP does not mean that an economy is getting better. Remember these the next time the unemployment rate and GNP numbers are cited. Those numbers mean nothing. More than thirty years has now passed and nothing has changed in Bangladesh. Most Bengalis still continue to live on subsistence farming in rural villages. Despite a dramatic increase in foreign investment, a high poverty rate prevails. Observers attribute it to the rising prices of essentials. The economic model described above just does not work, not in Bangladesh or anywhere else. Explaining why reveals what’s wrong with economics and why current economic practices, which have not essentially improved mankind’s lot over the last two and a half centuries, won’t ever improve it. Economists build models by what they call “abstraction.” But it’s really subtraction. They look at a real world situation and subtract from it the characteristics they deem unessential. The result is a bare bones description consisting of what economists deem economically essential. Everything that is discarded (not taken into consideration in the model) is called an “externality.” So the models only work when the externalities that were in effect before the models are implemented do not change afterward."

Join the Hanging Rock Action Group for a very special picnic. The day’s events will include: - Anne Louise Lambert, best known as ‘Miranda’ from the film ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ sharing her experiences of Hanging Rock - State MPs Joanne Duncan and Amanda Millar speaking about their views on development at the Rock - Wild Action Zoo showcasing the area’s diverse wildlife - Live music all day. Bring a picnic lunch and meet us at the Petanque area from 11am onwards. Speakers will start at 12pm. Everyone is welcome so please share this event and invite your friends! This event is about coming together as a group of individuals who share a common love of Hanging Rock, and concern for the development proposed by the Macedon Ranges Shire Council. Council has proposed a major development at Hanging Rock Reserve, including a conference centre and accommodation. We aim to convince Council to consult with the community before progressing their plans. Find out more about Hanging Rock Action Group at Hanging Rock Action Group Last year the council released a 10-page “Hanging Rock Information Bulletin”, while Tourism Macedon Ranges endorsed the council’s position last Friday. Mayor Roger Jukes said the council considered private investment, secured after state and federal infrastructure funding, as the best way to help the cash-strapped reserve. The public were not consulted! The Macedon Ranges Shire Council with minimal community consultation is currently seeking expressions of interest for a large scale development at Hanging Rock Reserve. The Hanging Rock Action Group is an alliance of community groups and individuals who are committed 1. Have Council undertake its Community Consultation Framework, 2. Distil the real issues and facts of the proposed development, and 3. Raise community awareness of the issues. HRAG stands for an open & transparent process that gives our community the opportunity to participate as guaranteed in Councils Community Consultation Framework. Once implemented HRAG will cease to exist. Please note, Hanging Rock Reserve has a $10/car entry fee. See facebook

Christine Lagarde spoke on Q&A tonight. Many of the tweets were much more entertaining than the economic cliches, however she did several times make the point that growth economics fails to factor in what it refers to as 'externalities' - the environment we all depend on for survival. These are costs of growth and they must 'have a price' she said. What she did not say was that you can take growth and development so far that you cannot repair what you have destroyed; it is lost forever. Australia has lost in a very short time: access to affordable housing, plenty of space, natural spaces, its own intact ecology; a small, close knit post-war society; local industry, inventions and manufacture; the simple life; time to think and live; the freedom of being few... Early Australia had a very high proportion of natural scientists and people from all over the world. It did not actually need a multicultural policy; that was a cover to continue the rapid population growth first manifested in the goldrushes. The goldrushes were a time when Finance became reliant on land-production (speculation). It remains addicted to this form of wealth transfer. The Snowy River Scheme was an environmental disaster but certainly provided a lot of electricity. Unfortunately enough is never enough if you have a growing population; so now we have growth lobbies which constantly want more Snowy-type schemes. There is no end to infrastructure madness unless you allow the population to stop growing. La Guarde might also have added that the economy depends on social capital as well. Rapid and continuous immigration destroys social capital by disrupting connections to place and local networking and social organisation. We have huge mass immigration now in Australia with the direct cost democracy - because Australians have not been consulted and this continuous growth is a response to corporate demand, which our governments put before the citizens. These are costs of population growth. It doesn't pay for itself. We do.

Yes, continual reliance on more and more, faster and faster immigration is just like alcoholism or heroine addiction. It starts out seeming like such a nice quick fix to some problem or other - labour supply, wages inflation, sluggish housing market, investor dollars - and it finishes up destroying you by ruining your natural environment and access to resources. You'll do, you'll say anything, you'll invent an industry of excuses like 'multiculturalism', but it's all just the way down to slavery, dispossession and caste system. Look at what it has done to Australia's political class; they've become like the pigs in Animal Farm. Hard to believe what we have to take orders from these days. Ex-priests, developers, lawyers and economics majors. Pathetic! And it's all justified by Multiculturalism, now almost synonymous with the corruption of our political system.

History is absolutely full of proven conspiracies. On our front page we have strong indications of one about CIA and Australian government: http://candobetter.net/?q=node/3692.

Conspiracy is just planning in secret, which is fundamental to big business and to governments and to criminals. And to hospitals trying to get out of admitting fault.

Excerpt from Fantastic site on conspiracies

There are quite a few scintillating sites on the internet that look at conspiracies vs 'conspiracy theory'. However Jonathan Elinoff on InfoWars has come up with this competitive list of proven conspiracies that most people would be embarrassed to dismiss.

1.

The Dreyfus Affair: In the late 1800s in France, Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully convicted of treason based on false government documents, and sentenced to life in prison. The French government did attempt to cover this up, but Dreyfus was eventually pardoned after the affair was made public (an act that is credited to writer Émile Zola).

2.

The Mafia: This secret crime society was virtually unknown until the 1960s, when member Joe Valachi first revealed the society’s secrets to law enforcement officials.  What was known was that organized crime existed, but not that the extent of their control included working with the CIA, politicians and the biggest businesses in the world.

3.

MK-ULTRA: In the 1950s to the 1970s, the CIA ran a mind-control project aimed at finding a “truth serum” to use on communist spies. Test subjects were given LSD and other drugs, often without consent, and some were tortured. At least one man, civilian biochemist Frank Olson, who was working for the government, died as a result of the experiments. The project was finally exposed after investigations by the Rockefeller Commission.

A short video about MK-ULTRA from a documentary called Secrets of the CIA:

4.

Operation Mockingbird: Also in the 1950s to ’70s, the CIA paid a number of well-known domestic and foreign journalists (from big-name media outlets like Time, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS and others) to publish CIA propaganda. The CIA also reportedly funded at least one movie, the animated “Animal Farm,” by George Orwell. The Church Committee finally exposed the activities in 1975.

5.

Manhattan Project:  The Manhattan Project was the codename for a project conducted during World War II to develop the first atomic bomb. The project was led by the United States, and included participation from the United Kingdom and Canada. Formally designated as the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), it refers specifically to the period of the project from 1942–1946 under the control of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under the administration of General Leslie R. Groves. The scientific research was directed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.  The project’s roots lay in scientists’ fears since the 1930s that Nazi Germany was also investigating nuclear weapons of its own. Born out of a small research program in 1939, the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion ($22 billion in current value). It resulted in the creation of multiple production and research sites that operated in secret.  With the total involved, this makes it one of the largest conspiracies in history.  Entire towns were built for short periods of time, employing people, all under secrecy and top national secrecy at that.  The government never admitted to it, the media never reported on it, and people had no idea for over 25 years.  Project research took place at over thirty sites across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium-production facility at what is now the Hanford Site, the uranium-enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the weapons research and design laboratory now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory. The MED maintained control over U.S. weapons production until the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947.

6.

Asbestos: Between 1930 and 1960, manufacturers did all they could to prevent the link between asbestos and respiratory diseases, including cancer, becoming known, so they could avoid prosecution. American workers had in fact sued the Johns Manville company as far back as 1932, but it was not until 1962 that epidemiologists finally established beyond any doubt what company bosses had known for a long time – asbestos causes cancer.

7.

Watergate: Republican officials spied on the Democratic National Headquarters from the Watergate Hotel in 1972. While conspiracy theories suggested underhanded dealings were taking place, it wasn’t until 1974 that White House tape recordings linked President Nixon to the break-in and forced him to resign.

8.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The United States Public Health Service carried out this clinical study on 400 poor, African-American men with syphilis from 1932 to 1972. During the study the men were given false and sometimes dangerous treatments, and adequate treatment was intentionally withheld so the agency could learn more about the disease. While the study was initially supposed to last just six months, it continued for 40 years. Close to 200 of the men died from syphilis or related complications by the end of the study.

9.

Operation Northwoods: In the early 1960s, American military leaders drafted plans to create public support for a war against Cuba, to oust Fidel Castro from power. The plans included committing acts of terrorism in U.S. cities, killing innocent people and U.S. soldiers, blowing up a U.S. ship, assassinating Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees, and hijacking planes. The plans were all approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but were reportedly rejected by the civilian leadership, then kept secret for nearly 40 years.

Author James Bamford, “A Pretext For War”, discusses the declassified “Operation Northwoods” documents revealing that in 1962 the CIA was planning to stage phony terrorist attacks on the US and blame it on Cuba to start a war:

10.

1990 Testimony of Nayirah: A 15-year-old girl named “Nayirah” testified before the U.S. Congress that she had seen Iraqi soldiers pulling Kuwaiti babies from incubators, causing them to die. The testimony helped gain major public support for the 1991 Gulf War, but — despite protests that the dispute of this story was itself a conspiracy theory — it was later discovered that the testimony was false. The public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, which was in the employ of Citizens for a Free Kuwait, had arranged the testimony.  It turned out that she had taken acting lessons on request of the CIA and was actually the niece of a major politician in Kuwait.  Nayirah was later disclosed to be Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of Saud bin Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwaiti ambassador to the USA.  The Congressional Human Rights Caucus, of which Congressman Tom Lantos was co-chairman, had been responsible for hosting Nurse Nayirah, and thereby popularizing her allegations. When the girl’s account was later challenged by independent human rights monitors, Lantos replied, “The notion that any of the witnesses brought to the caucus through the Kuwaiti Embassy would not be credible did not cross my mind… I have no basis for assuming that her story is not true, but the point goes beyond that. If one hypothesizes that the woman’s story is fictitious from A to Z, that in no way diminishes the avalanche of human rights violations.” Nevertheless, the senior Republican on the Human Rights Caucus, John Edward Porter, responded to the revelations “by saying that if he had known the girl was the ambassador’s daughter, he would not have allowed her to testify.”

11.

Counter Intelligence Programs Against Activists in the 60s:  COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. The FBI used covert operations from its inception, however formal COINTELPRO operations took place between 1956 and 1971. The FBI’s stated motivation at the time was “protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order.”  According to FBI records, 85% of COINTELPRO resources were expended on infiltrating, disrupting, marginalizing, and/or subverting groups suspected of being subversive, such as communist and socialist organizations; the women’s rights movement; militant black nationalist groups, and the non-violent civil rights movement, including individuals such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and others associated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, the American Indian Movement, and other civil rights groups; a broad range of organizations labeled “New Left”, including Students for a Democratic Society, the National Lawyers Guild, the Weathermen, almost all groups protesting the Vietnam War, and even individual student demonstrators with no group affiliation; and nationalist groups such as those “seeking independence for Puerto Rico.” The other 15% of COINTELPRO resources were expended to marginalize and subvert “white hate groups,” including the Ku Klux Klan and National States’ Rights Party.  The directives governing COINTELPRO were issued by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these movements and their leaders.

This is a documentary on COINTELPRO:

12.

The Iran-Contra Affair: In 1985 and ’86, the White House authorized government officials to secretly trade weapons with the Israeli government in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages in Iran. The plot was uncovered by Congress in 1987.

13.

The BCCI Scandal:  The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank founded in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier. The Bank was registered in Luxembourg. Within a decade BCCI touched its peak, it operated in 78 countries, had over 400 branches, and had assets in excess of US$ 20 billion making it the 7th largest private bank in the world by assets.  In the late 1980?s BCCI became the target of a two year undercover operation conducted by the US Customs Service. This operation concluded with a fake wedding that was attended by BCCI officers and drug dealers from around the world who had established a personal friendship and working relationship with undercover Special Agent Robert Mazur. After a six month trial in Tampa, key bank officers were convicted and received lengthy prison sentences. Bank officers began cooperating with law enforcement authorities and that cooperation caused BCCI’s many crimes to be revealed.  BCCI came under the scrutiny of regulatory bodies and intelligence agencies in the 1980s due to its perceived avoidance of falling under one regulatory banking authority, a fact that was later, after extensive investigations, proven to be false. BCCI became the focus of a massive regulatory battle in 1991 and was described as a “$20-billion-plus heist”.  Investigators in the U.S. and the UK revealed that BCCI had been “set up deliberately to avoid centralized regulatory review, and operated extensively in bank secrecy jurisdictions. Its affairs were extraordinarily complex. Its officers were sophisticated international bankers whose apparent objective was to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection.”

This is a report from July 23, 1991 on the BCCI:

This is a report from July 8, 1991 on Connections between BCCI and the CIA:

This is a report from August 6, 1991 on how the BCCI funded Pakistan’s Nuclear Programs:

This is a report from March 4, 1991 on the BCCI:

14.

CIA Drug Running in LA: Pulitzer Prize Award winning journalist Gary Webb exposed this alongside LAPD Narcotics Officer turned whislteblower and author Michael Ruppert, CIA Contract Pilot Terry Reed, and many others.  In August 1996 the San Jose Mercury News published Webb’s “Dark Alliance”, a 20,000 word, three-part investigative series which alleged that Nicaraguan drug traffickers had sold and distributed crack cocaine in Los Angeles during the 1980s, and that drug profits were used to fund the CIA-supported Nicaraguan Contras. Webb never asserted that the CIA directly aided drug dealers to raise money for the Contras, but he did document that the CIA was aware of the cocaine transactions and the large shipments of cocaine into the U.S. by the Contra personnel. “Dark Alliance” received national attention. At the height of the interest, the web version of it on San Jose Mercury News website received 1.3 million hits a day. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the series became “the most talked-about piece of journalism in 1996 and arguably the most famous—some would say infamous—set of articles of the decade.”

April 6, 1987 Report on CIA Drug Running:

January 20, 1987 Report on CIA Drug Smuggling

November 19, 1993 Report on CIA Drug Running:

15.

Gulf of Tonkin Never Happened:  The Gulf of Tonkin Incident is the name given to two separate incidents involving the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 2, 1964 two American destroyers engaged three North Vietnamese torpedo boats, resulting in the sinking of one of the torpedo boats.  This was also the single most important reason for the escalation of the Vietnam War.  After Kennedy was assassinated, the Gulf of Tonkin gave the country the sweeping support for aggressive military action against the North Vietnamese.  The outcome of the incident was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by “communist aggression”.  In 2005, an internal National Security Agency historical study was declassified; it concluded that USS Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese on August 2, but that there may not have been any North Vietnamese vessels present during the engagement of August 4. The report stated “It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night…”  In truth, Hanoi’s navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on August 2.  In 1965, President Johnson commented privately: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”  In 1981, Captain Herrick and journalist Robert Scheer re-examined Herrick’s ship’s log and determined that the first torpedo report from August 4, which Herrick had maintained had occurred—the “apparent ambush”—was in fact unfounded.  In 1995, retired Vietnamese Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap, meeting with former Secretary of Defense McNamara, categorically denied that Vietnamese gunboats had attacked American destroyers on August 4, while admitting to the attack on August 2.  In the Fall of 1999, retired senior CIA engineering executive S. Eugene Poteat wrote that he was asked in early August 1964 to determine if the radar operator’s report showed a real torpedo boat attack or an imagined one.  In October, 2005 the New York Times reported that Robert J. Hanyok, a historian for the U.S. National Security Agency, had concluded that the NSA deliberately distorted the intelligence reports that it had passed on to policy-makers regarding the August 4, 1964 incident. He concluded that the motive was not political but was probably to cover up honest intelligence errors.

November 9th, 1995 New Clip on Gulf of Tonkin:

16.

The Business Plot:  In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And yes, we’re talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one US President and grandfathered another one.  Smedley Butler was both a patriot and a vocal FDR supporter. Apparently none of these criminal masterminds noticed that their prospective point man had actively stumped for FDR in 1932.  Smedley spilled the beans to a congressional committee in 1934. Everyone he accused of being a conspirator vehemently denied it, and none of them were brought up on criminal charges. Still, the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee did at least acknowledge the existence of the conspiracy, which ended up never getting past the initial planning stages.  Though many of the people who had allegedly backed the Business Plot also maintained financial ties with Nazi Germany up through America’s entry into World War II.  In 1934, the Business Plot was publicly revealed by retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testifying to the McCormack-Dickstein Congressional Committee. In his testimony, Butler claimed that a group of men had approached him as part of a plot to overthrow Roosevelt in a military coup. One of the alleged plotters, Gerald MacGuire, vehemently denied any such plot. In their final report, the Congressional committee supported Butler’s allegations of the existence of the plot, but no prosecutions or further investigations followed, and the matter was mostly forgotten.

On July 17, 1932, thousands of World War I veterans converged on Washington, D.C., set up tent camps, and demanded immediate payment of bonuses due them according to the Adjusted Service Certificate Law of 1924. This “Bonus Army” was led by Walter W. Waters, a former Army sergeant. The Army was encouraged by an appearance from retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, who had considerable influence over the veterans, being one of the most popular military figures of the time. A few days after Butler’s arrival, President Herbert Hoover ordered the marchers removed, and their camps were destroyed by US Army cavalry troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur.  Butler, although a self-described Republican, responded by supporting Roosevelt in that year’s election.  In a 1995 History Today article Clayton Cramer argued that the devastation of the Great Depression had caused many Americans to question the foundations of liberal democracy. “Many traditionalists, here and in Europe, toyed with the ideas of Fascism and National Socialism; many liberals dallied with Socialism and Communism.” Cramer argues that this explains why some American business leaders viewed fascism as a viable system to both preserve their interests and end the economic woes of the Depression.

BBC – Whitehouse Coup (Part 1)

For Part 2, click here.

For Part 3 click here.

17.

July 20, 1944 Conspiracy to Assassinate Hitler:  Among another 20 some odd attempts, this one was one of the largest conspiracies involving hundreds of loyalists in the highest echelons of Hitler’s inner circle.  Near the end of WWII, things were rapidly going south for Germany and the time seemed ripe for guilt-ridden Nazi officers to assassinate Hitler and overthrow his government. Colonel Henning von Tresckow recruited Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg to join the conspiracy in 1944.  The plot to take out Hitler and then all of his loyal officers was called Operation Valkyrie.  The plan was to use the Continuity of Government Proceedings during an assassination on Hitler’s life to take over full control of the government in Germany.  The assassination would be blamed on the Nazi SS and therefore allow Stauffenberg to take full control of all aspects of the government.  It almost worked.  In July 1944, Stauffenberg was promoted so that he could now start attending military strategy meetings with Hitler himself. On more than one occasion Stauffenberg planned to kill Hitler at such a meeting with a briefcase bomb, but he always held off because he also wanted to take out Hitler’s two right-hand men, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler. On July 20, he went for it anyway and exploded a bomb inside Hitler’s conference room with a remote detonator. Hitler survived only minor injuries.

18.

Operation Ajax: For years, Britain had a spiffy trade deal with Iran regarding their prodigious oil fields. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was basically a giant money machine for the Anglo half, while the Iranian half got shafted. That all changed in 1951 when Iran nationalized the AIOC and the Iranian parliament elected Mohammed Mossadegh as Prime Minister. Mossadegh was relatively secular, something that pissed of Iranian clerics, but he was also very nationalistic.  He was a democratically elected, pro American figure but the West saw his nationalizing of the oil fields a communist move(something Mossadegh thought was the right of the people to profit and pay for services in the country with).  Those oil fields were under the control of British Petroleum, but unfortunately Mossadegh overruled this long standing business control.  The United States sent Kermit Roosevelt, FDR’s nephew and CIA coordinator in to figure out the mess.  The best he could come up with was to confront Mossadegh and have him overthrown and this was accomplished by bringing in what the agency refers to as “jackals.”  The United States backed the return of the Shah of Iran, one of the most brutal dictators the country had ever seen and intentionally overthrew years before with the democratic leader, Mossadegh.  Until 1979, that is, when a pissed off Iranian populace finally revolted and replaced the monarchy with an anti-West Islamic Republic.  The result was a violently anti-American revolution lead by the Ayatollah Khomeini which overthrew the Shah and took hostage US Embassy workers, many of whom were involved in the plot with Kermit Roosevelt that installed the Shah.  The planning for the Coup took place largely in that embassy, but Americans were told this was due to the rise of radical Islam and rise of democracy hating Muslims, which of course was far from the truth.

Part 1 of a video done on Operation Ajax history:

Part 2 of the video:

19.

Operation Snow White:  Some time during the 1970s, the Church of Scientology decided that they’d had enough.  Apparently, the Church of Scientology managed to perform the largest infiltration of the United States government in history. Ever.  5,000 of Scientology’s crack commandos wiretapped and burglarized various agencies. They stole hundreds of documents, mainly from the IRS. No critic was spared, and in the end, 136 organizations, agencies and foreign embassies were infiltrated.

20.

Operation Gladio:  Gladio is a code name denoting the clandestine NATO “stay-behind” operation in Italy after World War II, intended to continue anti-communist resistance in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organizations, “Operation Gladio” is used as an informal name for all stay-behind organizations, sometimes called “Super NATO”.  The role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in sponsoring Gladio and the extent of its activities during the Cold War era, and its relationship to right-wing terrorist attacks perpetrated in Italy during the Years of Lead and other similar clandestine operations is the subject of ongoing debate and investigation. Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have had parliamentary inquiries into the matter.  What can we prove about that role?  Thousands of documents, depositions and testimony as well as recorded conversations and admission by the highest levels of government in Italy.  That’s about as credible as it gets, regardless of the CIA’s adamant denial it ever happened.   What took place?  The shooting of innocent civilians, terrorism and assassinations all blamed on leftist communists were actually apart of well coordinated, “black operations.”  Black operations are typically involving activities that are highly clandestine and, often, outside of standard military protocol.

“The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”  Black ops missions often fit into the deniable category, a situation in which there is no claim of responsibility for the action, and/or a false flag operation is used to give the appearance that another actor was responsible, or – most often – black operations involve extensive arrangements so as to be able to hide the fact that the black operation ever occurred. Black military operations, or paramilitary operations, can be used by various secret services to achieve or attempt to achieve an unusually sensitive goal. The methods used in black operations are also used in unconventional warfare. Depending on the precise situation in a given case, and the level of authoritarianism of the national government or other responsible party, some tasks will be conducted as black operations, while there are usually other activities that can be admitted openly. Black operations may include such things as assassination, sabotage, extortion, spying on allied countries or one’s own citizens, kidnapping, supporting resistance movements, torture, use of fraud to obtain funds, use of child soldiers, human experimentation, trafficking in contraband items, etc.  Since 9/11, many black operations and long time unethical standings have been approved for legality in the war on terror.  In other words, since September 11th, 2001, it is no a longer conspiracy for any of this to occur, a simple decision by a top level military or CIA official is enough, without oversight or even one thread of admission by the Government or Private conspirators.  Much of the Black operations today are performed by private contract companies like Blackwater (now Xe).

This is a documentary banned in teh United States that was allowed to air on BBC.  It was an investigation into Operation Gladio:

21.

The CIA Assassinates A Lot Of People (Church Committee): The Church Committee is the common term referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church in 1975. A precursor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee investigated intelligence gathering for illegality by the CIA and FBI after certain activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair.  The Committee uncovered, among many other things, that the CIA had violated its charter to perform only gathering of intelligence.  For example, the assassinations of Allende in Chile and Mossadegh in Iran. Assassinations against Central and South American leaders and revolutionaries, as well as Africa, Middle East and East Asia.  The list was tremendous.  They even declassified a “Heart Attack Gun” the Agency had made for the use of killing someone without it being detected.  Cancer, car accidents, skiing accidents, suicide, boating accidents, heart attacks, and just plain being shot were common assassination methods.  The hearings, although recorded in full in congressional record, the mainstream media and official policies, is still largely not taught in American schools on recent history.  The American public still has no idea this was ever actually confirmed or even took place.  It is common for people to still refer to any of these assassinations as a joke or made up conspiracy.

Watch the one-minute video below for the description of a former CIA secretary and Congressional testimony on this secret assassination weapon which caused heart attacks.
To watch the revealing 45-minute documentary from which the above clip was taken,

click here

22.

The New World Order:  This popular conspiracy theory claims that a small group of international elites controls and manipulates governments, industry and media organisations worldwide. The primary tool they use to dominate nations is the system of central banking. They are said to have funded and in some cases caused most of the major wars of the last 200 years, primarily through carrying out false flag attacks to manipulate populations into supporting them, and have a grip on the world economy, deliberately causing inflation and depressions at will. The people behind the New World Order are thought to be international bankers, in particular the owners of the private banks in the Federal Reserve System, Bank of England and other central banks, and members of the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group.  Now, although this conspiracy theory was ridiculed for years, it turns out that the Bilderberg does meet and requests no media coverage.  They receive no media coverage.  The world’s elite meet every year and it goes largely unreported, for what?

[efoods]Discussions at the meetings include the economy, world affairs, war and in general, world policy.  After the financial collapse, the Bilderberg played a key role in proposing that the world prepare for a new world order and have a standard world currency.  This was propsed shortly after by almost all attendees of the Bilderberg meeting.  During the 20th century, many statesmen, such as Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, used the term “new world order” to refer to a new period of history evidencing a dramatic change in world political thought and the balance of power after World War I and World War II. They all saw these periods as opportunities to implement idealistic or liberal proposals for global governance only in the sense of new collective efforts to identify, understand, or address worldwide problems that go beyond the capacity of individual nation-states to solve. These proposals led to the creation of international organizations, such as the United Nations and N.A.T.O., and international regimes, such as the Bretton Woods system and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which were calculated both to maintain a balance of power as well as regularize cooperation between nations, in order to achieve a peaceful phase of capitalism.  In the aftermath of the two World Wars, progressives welcomed these new international organizations and regimes but argued they suffered from a democratic deficit and therefore were inadequate to not only prevent another global war but also foster global justice.  American banker David Rockefeller joined the Council on Foreign Relations as its youngest-ever director in 1949 and subsequently became chairman of the board from 1970 to 1985; today he serves as honorary chairman. In 2002, Rockefeller authored his autobiography Memoirs wherein, on page 405, he wrote:

“For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents … to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

Thus, activists around the globe formed a world federalist movement bent on creating a “real” new world order. A number of Fabian socialist intellectuals, such as British writer H. G. Wells in the 1940s, appropriated and redefined the term “new world order” as a synonym for the establishment of a full-fledged social democratic world government.  In the 1960s, a great deal of right-wing conspiracist attention, by groups like the John Birch Society and the Liberty Lobby, focused on the United Nations as the vehicle for creating the “One World Government”, and contributed to a conservative movement for United States withdrawal from the U.N.. American writer Mary M. Davison, in her 1966 booklet The Profound Revolution, traced the alleged New World Order conspiracy to the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve System in 1913 by international bankers, who she claimed later formed the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921 as the shadow government. At the time the booklet was published, “international bankers” would have been interpreted by many readers as a reference to a postulated “international Jewish banking conspiracy” masterminded by the Rothschilds and Rockefellers.  American televangelist Pat Robertson with his 1991 best-selling book The New World Order became the most prominent Christian popularizer of conspiracy theories about recent American history as a theater in which Wall Street, the Federal Reserve System, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg Group, and Trilateral Commission control the flow of events from behind the scenes, nudging us constantly and covertly in the direction of world government for the Antichrist.

After the turn of the century, specifically during the financial crisis of 2007–2009, many politicians and pundits, such as Gordon Brown, Henry Kissinger, and Barack Obama, used the term “new world order” in their advocacy for a Keynesian reform of the global financial system and their calls for a “New Bretton Woods”, which takes into account emerging markets such as China and India. These declarations had the unintended consequence of providing fresh fodder for New World Order conspiracism, and culminated in former Clinton administration adviser Dick Morris and conservative talk show host Sean Hannity arguing on one of his Fox News Channel programs that “conspiracy theorists were right”.  In 2009, American film directors Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel released New World Order, a critically-acclaimed documentary film which explores the world of conspiracy theorists, such as American radio host Alex Jones, who are committed to exposing and vigorously opposing what they perceive to be an emerging New World Order.

May 24, 1992 Report on New World Order:

23.  Kennedy Assassination – the 2nd Investigation by Congress Few People Know About, United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA): The HSCA was established in 1976 to investigate the John F. Kennedy assassination and the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination. The Committee investigated until 1978, and in 1979 issued its final report, concluding that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated by a conspiracy involving the mob, and potentially the CIA.  The House Select Committee on Assassinations undertook reinvestigations of the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1979, a single Report and twelve volumes of appendices on each assassination were published by the Congress. In the JFK case, the HSCA found that there was a “probable conspiracy,” though it was unable to determine the nature of that conspiracy or its other participants (besides Oswald). This finding was based in part on acoustics evidence from a tape purported to record the shots, but was also based on other evidence including an investigation of Ruby’s mafia connections and potential CIA and/or FBI connections to Oswald.  To this day, many conspiracy deniers are unaware that the Congressional investigation into JFK’s assassination concluded beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was a conspiracy.  What made them come to this conclusion?  Aside from reading the report, many witnesses (some of whom were CIA agents and station chiefs in Dallas that morning) were killed the night before testifying.  For example, George de Mohrenschildt was a petroleum geologist who befriended Lee Harvey Oswald during the months preceding the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.  He also worked for the CIA.  He also blew his brains out the night before he was to testify to the committee.  The committee also uncovered, among many things, that Oswald left the marines where he learned how to speak fluent Russian (at the height of the cold war).  He was given money by the State Department to travel to Russia where he stopped off in Japan at a top secret US Military facility.  The Warren Commission even mentioned this part.  What most people do not know is that he probably was working in the Cold War infiltrating the Russians as either a “dangle,” “double agent,” or “defector” of some kind.  What is interesting is that upon his return he got more money from the State Department to buy a house and work with an ex FBI Chief and CIA officials in training anti-Castro Cubans for an invasion.  In Louisiana, where he was working, the CIA was involved in Operation Mongoose, Where Oswald worked under CIA Agent David Ferrie, who killed himself before testifying in a trial on the Assassination as well.  Operation Mongoose worked closely with Southern Mafia figures largely because the casinos in Cuba, which were shut down after Fidel obtained control over the country, were epicenters for control on the island.  The CIA even hired the mafia to assassinate Fidel on many occasions, 3 attempts which failed are common knowledge.  What is funny is that figures who worked very close with Oswald either ended up dead (over 100 of them connected to the assassination died within a few years of unusual circumstances) or they ended up in other conspiracies.

For instance, E Howard Hunt (CIA Agent) confessed to being involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy on his deathbed.  E Howard Hunt was one of the Watergate Burglars.  Barry Seal, who worked with Oswald and Ferrie ended up being one of the largest cocaine smugglers in the United States during Iran Contra, as a key player for the agency and informant for the DEA.  There is so much more to get into, but there just isn’t enough time.  Oswald’s tax returns are still classified top secret to this day.  Why?  Perhaps he was still getting $$ from the United States, which places him on the payroll.  That money trail leads to figures, many of whom were murdered, that would have blown the story wide open.  For 14 years, most didn’t know this.  The HSCA investigaitons by congress went against the findings of the Warren Commission and both reports are from the same source, Congressional Committees.  Which is true?  Why do we only teach one to our children in school?

December 30, 1978 Report on HSCA Findings:

24.

1919 World Series Conspiracy:  The 1919 World Series (often referred to as the Black Sox Scandal) resulted in the most famous scandal in baseball history. Eight players from the Chicago White Sox (nicknamed the Black Sox) were accused of throwing the series against the Cincinnati Reds.  Details of the scandal remain controversial, and the extent to which each player was involved varied. It was, however, front-page news across the country when the story was uncovered late in the 1920 season, and despite being acquitted of criminal charges (throwing baseball games was technically not a crime), the eight players were banned from organized baseball (i.e. the leagues subject to the National Agreement) for life.  There are hundreds of other conspiracies involving throwing games, sporting matches and large scale entertainment events.  It is common knowledge for many, this list would have to go into the thousands if we included all of them.

25.

Karen Silkwood:  Karen was an American labor union activist and chemical technician at the Kerr-McGee plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, United States. Silkwood’s job was making plutonium pellets for nuclear reactor fuel rods.  After being hired at Kerr-McGee, Silkwood joined the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union local and took part in a strike at the plant. After the strike ended, she was elected to the union’s bargaining committee and assigned to investigate health and safety issues. She discovered what she believed to be numerous violations of health regulations, including exposure of workers to contamination, faulty respiratory equipment and improper storage of samples. She also believed the lack of sufficient shower facilities could increase the risk of employee contamination.  In the summer of 1974, Silkwood testified to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) about these issues, alleging that safety standards had slipped because of a production speedup which resulted in employees being given tasks for which they were poorly trained. She also alleged that Kerr-McGee employees handled the fuel rods improperly and that the company falsified inspection records.  On November 5, 1974, Silkwood performed a routine self-check and found almost 400 times the legal limit for plutonium contamination. She was decontaminated at the plant and sent home with a testing kit to collect urine and feces for further analysis. Oddly, though there was plutonium on the exterior surfaces (the ones she touched) of the gloves she had been using, the gloves did not have any holes.

This suggests the contamination did not come from inside the glove box, but from some other source, in other words, someone was trying to poison her.  The next morning, as she headed to a union negotiation meeting, she again tested positive for plutonium. This was surprising because she had only performed paperwork duties that morning. She was given a more intense decontamination. The following day, November 7, 1974, as she entered the plant, she was found to be dangerously contaminated — even expelling contaminated air from her lungs. A health physics team accompanied her back to her home and found plutonium traces on several surfaces — especially in the bathroom and the refrigerator. The house was later stripped and decontaminated. Silkwood, her partner and housemate were sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory for in-depth testing to determine the extent of the contamination in their bodies.  Later that evening, Silkwood’s body was found in her car, which had run off the road and struck a culvert. The car contained no documents. She was pronounced dead at the scene from a “classic, one-car sleeping-driver accident”.

26.

CIA Drug Smuggling in Arkansas:  August 23, 1987, in a rural community just south of Little Rock, police officers murdered two teenage boys because they witnessed a police-protected drug drop.  The drop was part of a drug smuggling operation based at a small airport in Mena, Arkansas. The Mena operation was set up in the early 1980?s by the notorious drug smuggler, Barry Seal. Facing prison after a drug conviction in Florida, Seal flew to Washington, D.C., where he put together a deal that allowed him to avoid prison by becoming an informant for the government. As a government informant against drug smugglers, Seal testified he worked for the CIA and the DEA. In one federal court case, he testified that his income from March 1984 to August 1985, was between $700,000 and $800,000. This period was AFTER making his deal with the government. Seal testified that nearly $600,000 of this came from smuggling drugs while working for — and with the permission of the DEA. In addition to his duties as an informant, Seal was used by CIA operatives to help finance the Nicaraguan Contras. The CIA connection to the Mena operation was undeniable when a cargo plane given to Seal by the CIA was shot down over Nicaragua with a load of weapons. In spite of the evidence, every investigator who has tried to expose the crimes of Mena has been professionally destroyed, and those involved in drug smuggling operations have received continued protection from state and federal authorities.

February 20, 1986 report on Mena Drug Smuggling:

April 7, 1988 Report on CIA Drug Running:

March 25, 2995 News Clip on Mena Drug Smuggling:

27.

Bohemian Grove:  For years, many conspiracy theorists were saying that the rich and powerful met every year in the woods and worshiped a giant stone owl in an occult fashion.  It turns out, ABC, CBS, NBC, and many other credible news agencies investigated this and found out, its true.  It is said to be just all fun and games, like brotherhood style fraternity stuff.  These news clips can be viewed by clicking here.

Bohemian Grove Secrecy Upheld, Nixon Speech 7-30-1971, NBC

Bohemian Grove Weinberger and Reagan Retreat Mentioned 7-21-1983, NBC

Bohemian Grove Detailed Report 7-23-1982, NBC

Bohemian Grove Detailed Report 7-23-1981, ABC

Bohemian Grove Mention at Smith Testimony 1-15-1981, ABC

Nixon Tape Discusses Homosexuals at Bohemian Grove

Alex Jones asks David Gergen about Bohemian Grove Rituals

For more clips on the Bohemian Grove including comprehensive investigations by the mainstream media, clik here…

28.

Operation Paperclip: Operation Paperclip was the code name for the 1945 Office of Strategic Services, Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency recruitment of German scientists from Nazi Germany to the U.S. after VE Day.  President Truman authorized Operation Paperclip in August 1945; however he expressly ordered that anyone found “to have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism” would be excluded.  These included Wernher von Braun, Arthur Rudolph and Hubertus Strughold, who were all officially on record as Nazis and listed as a “menace to the security of the Allied Forces.” All were cleared to work in the U.S. after having their backgrounds “bleached” by the military; false employment histories were provided, and their previous Nazi affiliations were expunged from the record. The paperclips that secured newly-minted background details to their personnel files gave the operation its name.

29.

The Round Table:  British businessman Cecil Rhodes advocated the British Empire reannexing the United States of America and reforming itself into an “Imperial Federation” to bring about a hyperpower and lasting world peace. In his first will, of 1877, written at the age of 23, he expressed his wish to fund a secret society (known as the Society of the Elect) that would advance this goal:  “To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonization by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labor and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity.”

In his later wills, a more mature Rhodes abandoned the idea and instead concentrated on what became the Rhodes Scholarship, which had British statesman Alfred Milner as one of its trustees. Established in 1902, the original goal of the trust fund was to foster peace among the great powers by creating a sense of fraternity and a shared world view among future British, American, and German leaders by having enabled them to study for free at the University of Oxford.  Milner and British official Lionel George Curtis were the architects of the Round Table movement, a network of organizations promoting closer union between Britain and its self-governing colonies. To this end, Curtis founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in June 1919 and, with his 1938 book The Commonwealth of God, began advocating for the creation of an imperial federation that eventually reannexes the U.S., which would be presented to Protestant churches as being the work of the Christian God to elicit their support. The Commonwealth of Nations was created in 1949 but it would only be a free association of independent states rather than the powerful imperial federation imagined by Rhodes, Milner and Curtis.  The Council on Foreign Relations began in 1917 with a group of New York academics who were asked by President Woodrow Wilson to offer options for the foreign policy of the United States in the interwar period.

Originally envisioned as a British-American group of scholars and diplomats, some of whom belonging to the Round Table movement, it was a subsequent group of 108 New York financiers, manufacturers and international lawyers organized in June 1918 by Nobel Peace Prize recipient and U.S. secretary of state, Elihu Root, that became the Council on Foreign Relations on 29 July 1921. The first of the council’s projects was a quarterly journal launched in September 1922, called Foreign Affairs.  Some believe that the Council on Foreign Relations is a front organization for the Round Table as a tool of the “Anglo-American Establishment”, which they believe has been plotting from 1900 on to rule the world. The research findings of historian Carroll Quigley, author of the 1966 book Tragedy and Hope, are taken by both conspiracy theorists of the American Old Right (Cleon Skousen) and New Left (Carl Oglesby) to substantiate this view, even though he argued that the Establishment is not involved in a plot to implement a one-world government but rather British and American benevolent imperialism driven by the mutual interests of economic elites in the United Kingdom and the United States. Quigley also argued that, although the Round Table still exists today, its position in influencing the policies of world leaders has been much reduced from its heyday during World War I and slowly waned after the end of World War II and the Suez Crisis. Today it is largely a ginger group, designed to consider and gradually influence the policies of the Commonwealth of Nations, but faces strong opposition. Furthermore, in American society after 1965, the problem, according to Quigley, was that no elite was in charge and acting responsibly.

American banker David Rockefeller joined the Council on Foreign Relations as its youngest-ever director in 1949 and subsequently became chairman of the board from 1970 to 1985; today he serves as honorary chairman. In 2002, Rockefeller authored his autobiography Memoirs wherein, on page 405, he wrote: “For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents … to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”  Barkun argues that this statement is partly facetious (the claim of “conspiracy” or “treason”) and partly serious – the desire to encourage trilateral cooperation among the U.S., Europe, and Japan, for example – an ideal that used to be a hallmark of the internationalist wing of the Republican Party when there was an internationalist wing.  However, the statement is taken at face value and widely cited by conspiracy theorists as proof that the Council on Foreign Relations (itself alleged to be a front for an “international banking cabal”, as well as, it is claimed, the sponsor of many “globalist” think tanks such as the Trilateral Commission) uses its role as the brain trust of American presidents, senators and representatives to manipulate them into supporting a New World Order.

Conspiracy theorists fear that the international bankers of financial capitalism are planning to eventually subvert the independence of the U.S. by subordinating national sovereignty to a strengthened Bank for International Settlements with the intent to “create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole”.  In a 13 November 2007 interview with Canadian journalist Benjamin Fulford, Rockefeller countered:  “I don’t think that I really feel that we need a world government. We need governments of the world that work together and collaborate. But, I can’t imagine that there would be any likelihood or even that it would be desirable to have a single government elected by the people of the world … There have been people, ever since I’ve had any kind of position in the world, who have accused me of being ruler of the world. I have to say that I think for the large part, I would have to decide to describe them as crackpots. It makes no sense whatsoever, and isn’t true, and won’t be true, and to raise it as a serious issue seems to me to be irresponsible.”  Some American social critics, such as Laurence H. Shoup, argue that the Council on Foreign Relations is an “imperial brain trust”, which has, for decades, played a central behind-the-scenes role in shaping U.S. foreign policy choices for the post-WWII international order and the Cold War, by determining what options show up on the agenda and what options do not even make it to the table; while others, such as G. William Domhoff, argue that it is in fact a mere policy discussion forum, which provides the business input to U.S. foreign policy planning. The latter argue that it has nearly 3,000 members, far too many for secret plans to be kept within the group; all the council does is sponsor discussion groups, debates and speakers; and as far as being secretive, it issues annual reports and allows access to its historical archives.

30.

The Illuminati:  The Order of the Illuminati was an Enlightenment-age secret society founded on May 1st, 1776, in Ingolstadt (Upper Bavaria), by Adam Weishaupt, who was the first lay professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt. The movement consisted of freethinkers, secularists, liberals, republicans and pro-feminists, recruited in the Masonic Lodges of Germany, who sought to promote perfectionism through mystery schools. As a result, in 1785, the order was infiltrated, broken and suppressed by the government agents of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria, in his campaign to neutralize the threat of secret societies ever becoming hotbeds of conspiracies to overthrow the monarchy and state religion.  In the late 18th century, reactionary conspiracy theorists, such as Scottish physicist John Robison and French Jesuit priest Augustin Barruel, began speculating that the Illuminati survived their suppression and became the masterminds behind the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The Illuminati were accused of being enlightened absolutists who were attempting to secretly orchestrate a world revolution in order to globalize the most radical ideals of the Enlightenment: anti-clericalism, anti-monarchism, and anti-patriarchalism. During the 19th century, fear of an Illuminati conspiracy was a real concern of European ruling classes, and their oppressive reactions to this unfounded fear provoked in 1848 the very revolutions they sought to prevent.  Although many say that the Illuminati was disbanded and destroyed  so long ago, it is well known that the Rothschild dynasty following the family’s involvement in the secret order in Bavaria received much attention for its major takeover of Europe’s central banks.  The Rothschild dynasty owns roughly half of the world’s wealth and evidence suggests it has funded both sides of major wars, including the United States Civil War.

31.

The Trilateral Commission:  The Trilateral Commission is a private organization, established to foster closer cooperation among the United States, Europe and Japan. It was founded in July 1973 at the initiative of David Rockefeller, who was Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations at that time. The Trilateral Commission is widely seen as a counterpart to the Council on Foreign Relations.  In July 1972, Rockefeller called his first meeting, which was held at Rockefeller’s Pocantico compound in New York’s Hudson Valley. It was attended by about 250 individuals who were carefully selected and screened by Rockefeller and represented the very elite of finance and industry.  Its first executive committee meeting was held in Tokyo in October 1973. The Trilateral Commission was officially initiated, holding biannual meetings.  A Trilateral Commission Task Force Report, presented at the 1975 meeting in Kyoto, Japan, called An Outline for Remaking World Trade and Finance, said: “Close Trilateral cooperation in keeping the peace, in managing the world economy, and in fostering economic development and in alleviating world poverty, will improve the chances of a smooth and peaceful evolution of the global system.” Another Commission document read:  “The overriding goal is to make the world safe for interdependence by protecting the benefits which it provides for each country against external and internal threats which will constantly emerge from those willing to pay a price for more national autonomy. This may sometimes require slowing the pace at which interdependence proceeds, and checking some aspects of it. More frequently however, it will call for checking the intrusion of national government into the international exchange of both economic and non-economic goods.”

March 29, 1981 News Clip on Trilateral Commission:

May 2, 1995 News Clip on Trilateral Commission:

32.

Big Brother or the Shadow Government:  It is also called the “Deep State” by Peter Dale Scott, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.   A shadow government is a “government-in-waiting” that remains in waiting with the intention of taking control of a government in response to some event.  It turned out this was true on 9/11, when it was told to us by our mainstream media.  For years, this was ridiculed as a silly, crazy conspiracy theory and, like the others listed here, turned out to be 100% true.  It is also called the Continuity of Government.  The Continuity of Government (COG) is the principle of establishing defined procedures that allow a government to continue its essential operations in case of nuclear war or other catastrophic event.  Since the end of the cold war, the policies and procedures for the COG have been altered according to realistic threats of that time.  These include but are not limited to a possible coup or overthrow by right wing terrorist groups, a terrorist attack in general, an assassination, and so on.  Believe it or not the COG has been in effect since 2001.  After 9/11, it went into action.  Now here is the kicker, many of the figures in Iran Contra, the Watergate Scandal, the alleged conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, and many others listed here are indeed members of the COG.  This is its own conspiracy as well.

March 1, 2002 News Clip on Secret Government:

The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World is a book written by Air Force Col. L fletcher Prouty, published in 1973.  From 1955 to 1963 Prouty was the “Focal Point Officer” for contacts between the CIA and the Pentagon on matters relating to military support for “black operations” but he was not assigned to the CIA and was not bound by any oath of secrecy. (From the first page of the 1974 Printing) It was one of the first tell-all books about the inner workings of the CIA and was an important influence on the Oliver Stone movie JFK. But the main thrust of the book is how the CIA started as a think tank to analyze intelligence gathered from military sources but has grown to the monster it has become. The CIA had no authority to run their own agents or to carry out covert operations but they quickly did both and much more. This book tells about things they actually did and a lot about how the operate.  In Prouty’s own words, from the 1997 edition of The Secret Team: This is the fundamental game of the Secret Team. They have this power because they control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, and when needed, the full support of a world-wide U.S. military supporting base structure. They can use the finest intelligence system in the world, and most importantly, they have been able to operate under the canopy of an assumed, ever-present enemy called “Communism.” It will be interesting to see what “enemy” develops in the years ahead. It appears that “UFO’s and Aliens” are being primed to fulfill that role for the future. To top all of this, there is the fact that the CIA, itself, has assumed the right to generate and direct secret operations. “ He is not the first to allege that UFOs and Aliens are going to be used as a threat against the world to globalize the planet under One government.

March 1, 2002 report on Secret Government:

The Report From Iron Mountain is a book, published in 1967 (during the Johnson Administration) by Dial Press, that states that it is the report of a government panel.  According to the report, a 15-member panel, called the Special Study Group, was set up in 1963 to examine what problems would occur if the U.S. entered a state of lasting peace. They met at an underground nuclear bunker called Iron Mountain (as well as other, worldwide locations) and worked over the next two years. Iron Mountain is where the government has stored the flight 93 evidence from 9/11.  A member of the panel, one “John Doe”, a professor at a college in the Midwest, decided to release the report to the public.  The heavily footnoted report concluded that peace was not in the interest of a stable society, that even if lasting peace “could be achieved, it would almost certainly not be in the best interests of society to achieve it.” War was a part of the economy. Therefore, it was necessary to conceive a state of war for a stable economy. The government, the group theorized, would not exist without war, and nation states existed in order to wage war. War also served a vital function of diverting collective aggression. They recommended that bodies be created to emulate the economic functions of war. They also recommended “blood games” and that the government create alternative foes that would scare the people with reports of alien life-forms and out of control pollution. Another proposal was the reinstitution of slavery.  U.S. News and World Report claimed in its November 20, 1967 issue to have confirmation of the reality of the report from an unnamed government official, who added that when President Johnson read the report, he ‘hit the roof’ and ordered it to be suppressed for all time. Additionally, sources were said to have revealed that orders were sent to U.S. embassies, instructing them to emphasize that the book had no relation to U.S. Government policy.  Project Blue Beam is also a common conspiracy theory that alleges that a faked alien landing would be used as a means of scaring the public into whatever global system is suggested.  Some researchers suggest the Report from Iron Mountain might be fabricated, others swear it is real.

Bill Moyers, the American journalist and public commentator, has served as White House Press Secretary in the United States President Lyndon B. Johnson Administration from 1965 to 1967. He worked as a news commentator on television for ten years. Moyers has had an extensive involvement with public television, producing documentaries and news journal programs. He has won numerous awards and honorary degrees. He has become well known as a trenchant critic of the U.S. media. Since 1990, Moyers has been President of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.  He is considered by many to be a very credible outlet for the truth.  He released a documetnary titled, The Secret Government, which exposed the inner workings of a secret government much more vast that most people would ever imagine. Though originally broadcast in 1987, it is even more relevant today. Interviews with respected top military, intelligence, and government insiders reveal both the history and secret objectives of powerful groups in the hidden shadows of our government.

Here is that documentary:

For another powerful, highly revealing documentary on the manipulations of the secret government produced by BBC, click here (view free at link provided). The intrepid BBC team clearly shows how the War on Terror is largely a fabrication. For those interested in very detailed information on the composition of the shadow or secret government from a less well-known source, take a look at the summary available here.

33.

The Federal Reserve Bank:  The fundamental promise of a central bank like the Federal Reserve is economic stability.  The theory is that manipulating the value of the currency allows financial booms to go higher, and crashes to be more mild.  If growth becomes speculative and unsustainable, the central bank can make the price of money go up and force some deleveraging of risky investments – again, promising to make the crashes more mild.  The period leading up to the American revolution was characterized by increasingly authoritarian legislation from England.  Acts passed in 1764 had a particularly harsh effect on the previously robust colonial economy.  The Sugar Act was in effect a tax cut on easily smuggled molasses, and a new tax on commodities that England more directly controlled trade over.  The navy would be used in increased capacity to enforce trade laws and collect duties.  Perhaps even more significant than the militarization and expansion of taxes was the Currency Act passed later in the year 1764.

“The colonies suffered a constant shortage of currency with which to conduct trade. There were no gold or silver mines and currency could only be obtained through trade as regulated by Great Britain. Many of the colonies felt no alternative to printing their own paper money in the form of Bills of Credit.”   The result was a true free market of currency – each bank competed, exchange rates fluctuated wildly, and merchants were hesitant to accept these notes as payment.  Of course, they didn’t have 24-hour digital Forex markets, but I’ll hold off opinions on the viability of unregulated currency for another time.  England’s response was to seize control of the colonial money supply – forbidding banks, cities, and colony governments from printing their own.  This law, passed so soon after the Sugar Act, started to really bring revolutionary tension inside the colonies to a higher level.  American bankers had learned early on that debasing a currency through inflation is a helpful way to pay off perpetual trade deficits – but Britain proved that the buyer of the currency would only take the deal for so long…  Following the (first) American Revolution, the “First Bank of the United States” was chartered to pay off collective war debts, and effectively distribute the cost of the revolution proportionately throughout all of the states.  Although the bank had vocal and harsh skeptics, it only controlled about 20% of the nation’s money supply.

Compared to today’s central bank, it was nothing.  Thomas Jefferson argued vocally against the institution of the bank, mostly citing constitutional concerns and the limitations of government found in the 10th amendment.  There was one additional quote that hints at the deeper structural flaw of a central bank in a supposedly free capitalist economy.  “the existing banks will, without a doubt, enter into arrangements for lending their agency, and the more favorable, as there will be a competition among them for it; whereas the bill delivers us up bound to the national bank, who are free to refuse all arrangement, but on their own terms, and the public not free, on such refusal, to employ any other bank” –Thomas Jefferson.  Basically, the existing banks will fight over gaining favor with the central bank – rather than improving their performance relative to a free market.  The profit margins associated with collusion would obviously outweigh the potential profits gained from legitimate business.  The Second Bank of the United States was passed five years after the first bank’s charter expired.  An early enemy of central banking, President James Madison, was looking for a way to stabilize the currency in 1816.  This bank was also quite temporary – it would only stay in operation until 1833 when President Andrew Jackson would end federal deposits at the institution.

The charter expired in 1836 and the private corporation was bankrupt and liquidated by 1841.  While the South had been the major opponent of central banking systems, the end of the Civil War allowed for (and also made necessary) the system of national banks that would dominate the next fifty years.  The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) says that this post-war period of a unified national currency and system of national banks “worked well.” [3]  Taxes on state banks were imposed to encourage people to use the national banks – but liquidity problems persisted as the money supply did not match the economic cycles.  Overall, the American economy continued to grow faster than Europe, but the period did not bring economic stability by any stretch of the imagination.  Several panics and runs on the bank – and it became a fact of life under this system of competing nationalized banks.  In 1873, 1893, 1901, and 1907 significant panics caused a series of bank failures.

The new system wasn’t stable at all, in fact, many suspected it was wraught with fraud and manipulation.  The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis is not shy about attributing the causes of the Panic of 1907 to financial manipulation from the existing banking establishment.  “If Knickerbocker Trust would falter, then Congress and the public would lose faith in all trust companies and banks would stand to gain, the bankers reasoned.”  In timing with natural economic cycles, major banks including J.P. Morgan and Chase launched an all-out assault on Heinze’s Knickerbocker Trust.  Financial institutions on the inside started silently selling off assets in the competitor, and headlines about a few bad loans started making top spots in the newspapers.  The run on Knickerbocker turned into a general panic – and the Federal Government would come to the rescue of its privately owned “National Banks.”  During the Panic of 1907, “Depositors ‘run’ on the Knickerbocker Bank. J.P. Morgan and James Stillman of First National City Bank (Citibank) act as a “central bank,” providing liquidity … [to stop the bank run]  President Theodore Roosevelt provides Morgan with $25 million in government funds … to control the panic. Morgan, acting as a one-man central bank, decides which firms will fail and which firms will survive.”  How did JP Morgan get so powerful that the government would provide them with funding to increase their power?  They had key influence with positions inside the Administrations.

They had senators, congressmen, lobbyists, media moguls all working for them.  In 1886, a group of millionaires purchased Jekyll Island and converted it into a winter retreat and hunting ground, the USA’s most exclusive club. By 1900, the club’s roster represented 1/6th of the world’s wealth. Names like Astor, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Pulitzer and Gould filled the club’s register. Non- members, regardless of stature, were not allowed. Dignitaries like Winston Churchill and President McKinley were refused admission.  In 1908, the year after a national money panic purportedly created by J. P. Morgan, Congress established, in 1908, a National Monetary Authority. In 1910 another, more secretive, group was formed consisting of the chiefs of major corporations and banks in this country. The group left secretly by rail from Hoboken, New Jersey, and traveled anonymously to the hunting lodge on Jekyll Island.  In fact, the Clubhouse/hotel on the island has two conference rooms named for the “Federal Reserve.”  The meeting was so secret that none referred to the other by his last name. Why the need for secrecy?

Frank Vanderlip wrote later in the Saturday Evening Post, “…it would have been fatal to Senator Aldrich’s plan to have it known that he was calling on anybody from Wall Street to help him in preparing his bill…I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System.”  At Jekyll Island, the true draftsman for the Federal Reserve was Paul Warburg. The plan was simple. The new central bank could not be called a central bank because America did not want one, so it had to be given a deceptive name. Ostensibly, the bank was to be controlled by Congress, but a majority of its members were to be selected by the private banks that would own its stock.  To keep the public from thinking that the Federal Reserve would be controlled from New York, a system of twelve regional banks was designed. Given the concentration of money and credit in New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York controlled the system, making the regional concept initially nothing but a ruse.

The board and chairman were to be selected by the President, but in the words of Colonel Edward House, the board would serve such a term as to “put them out of the power of the President.” The power over the creation of money was to be taken from the people and placed in the hands of private bankers who could expand or contract credit as they felt best suited their needs.  Why the opposition to a central bank?  Americans at the time knew of the destruction to the economy the European central banks had caused to their respective countries and to countries who became their debtors. They saw the large- scale government deficit spending and debt creation that occurred in Europe.  But European financial moguls didn’t rest until the New World was within their orbit. In 1902, Paul Warburg, a friend and associate of the Rothschilds and an expert on European central banking, came to this country as a partner in Kuhn, Loeb and Company.

He married the daughter of Solomon Loeb, one of the founders of the firm. The head of Kuhn, Loeb was Jacob Schiff, whose gift of $20 million in gold to the struggling Russian communists in 1917 no doubt saved their revolution.  The Fed controls the banking system in the USA, not the Congress nor the people indirectly (as the Constitution dictates). The U.S. central bank strategy is a product of European banking interests.  Government interventionists got their wish in 1913 with the Federal Reserve (and income tax amendment).  Just in time, too, because the nation needed a new source of unlimited cash to finance both sides of WW1 and eventually our own entry to the war.  After the war, with both sides owing us debt through the federal reserve backed banks, the center of finance moved from London to New York.  But did the Federal Reserve reign in the money trusts and interlocking directorates?  Not by a long shot.  If anything, the Federal Reserve granted new powers to the National Banks by permitting overseas branches and new types of banking services.  The greatest gift to the bankers, was a virtually unlimited supply of loans when they experience liquidity problems.

From the early 1920s to 1929, the monetary supply expanded at a rapid pace and the nation experienced wild economic growth.  Curiously, however, the number of banks started to decline for the first time in American history.  Toward the end of the period, speculation and loose money had propelled asset and equity prices to unreal levels.  The stock market crashed, and as the banks struggled with liquidity problems, the Federal Reserve actually cut the money supply.  Without a doubt, this is the greatest financial panic and economic collapse in American history – and it never could have happened  on this scale without the Fed’s intervention.  The number of banks crashed and a few of the old robber barons’ banks managed to swoop in and grab up thousands of competitors for pennies on the dollar.

This article was posted: Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 11:16 pm

Of course we've benefited from migration, and heavy post war immigration has created a nation, and an economy. It's not the fact that we had migration, but the supposition that MORE of the same can continue to give the benefits of the past is wrong. Once we reach an optimum population size, in relation to our land, environment, cultural mix, economy size and outputs, continuing mass migration is detrimental- culturally, environmentally, and socially. What was once a benefit has now become a burden. "Decentralization", "growth" and "development" can only be successful with mass migration? Continued growth is not what the public want, not when it exacerbates dis-economies of scale, increases the costs of living and produces an over-sized burdensome economy that costs more than the benefits. Some diversity is stimulating and creates understandings of cultures, but the multicultural push has passed it use-by date and is being pushed by growth-ists for their interests.

Unfortunately, when young people realise the problems the world has, they fall into the 'its a conspiracy' trap1, where they imagine the world is run by some organised elite who plan world events for more power and money. No doubt there are bona fide psychopaths in power though, in all institutions.

This awareness usually means descending into becoming 'political', which really means falling to a narrow neoMarxist spectrum where economics is everything and the solution is adopting the right system and the right words. The world will be OK, they beleive, if we adopt the right system. If there are still problems, it evidence we need to push our system more. Everything then gets interepreted in the lens of a 'conspiracy'. The problem is, once you go into the conspiracy realm, there is no going out. Everything is evidence of a conspiracy. Lack of evidence just proves the conspiracy is hiding. WMD's in Iraq are proof they had them. Lack of WMD's are proof they are hiding them.

If Socialism fails, it's because we weren't socialist enough. If free markets aren't working, they weren't free enough. If 'growth' doesn't provide prosperity, we didn't grow enough. This isn't conspiracy, it's just the way people work. Activists like Klein just promote another tyranny to replace the current.

It's great that Lorde is speaking up and speaking out. That kind of moral courage is the most valuable courage and bravery that can exist. We laud physical bravery, but moral bravery is rarer and far more world changing. I just hope she continues here education by open though and being open minded and thinking, rather than just reading.

Footnote[s]

1. Presumably, you also accept the findings of the Warren Commission that a lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President Kennedy on 22 Novemeber 1963 and that there was no conspiracy. - Ed

Title and emphasis added - Ed

Those threatened invasion of cultures are insecure about their own
Multiculturalism includes the historical Australian identity. If anyone is threatened by the invasion of cultures, it is only because of insecurity about your own. Although to some it is a shame that this could not develop in isolation, to others, the 'multi' part is just as, if not more, interesting and exciting. It has given us great food, entertainment, opened our eyes to the world, built our infrastructure, such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme, improved our overall wealth, which can only be created through labour, nothing else can produce wealth, and I see it as the way forward to strengthen, enrich and grow this nation so that it is able to stand tall in the international arena and defend itself adequately on the economic and security front.

The failure is not multiculturalism, but government. Government has not taken the opportunity afforded it by people wanting to migrate here to open up new centres of growth and development particularly in the rich northern latitudes of this great continent. The consequent overpopulation of its major cities from migration as a result and the negative consequences of this lays not at the feet of the migration policy itself but at the governments failure at decentralization.

Decentralization, growth and development can be successful only with mass migration. If they are worried about loss of cultural identity. Simple, allow in more people from Britain, USA, New Zealand. The queues from those countries alone is endless.

That purported speech is a hoax, as suggested even by the above article. I saw the speech. Nothing was cut. Not to say the contents of the construct weren't true, just the means of delivery. Editor's response: You are absolutely right. We should have checked the New Zealand Herald first off. Bad - nay - terrible - reporting on our part. Head hung in shame.

That is an incredibly sophisticated and succinct speech, especially for a 17 year old. It is not quite an "out of the mouths of babes" situation as that phrase usually refers to the guilelessness and uncluttered perspicacity of children which also points out what Lorde has – that the emperor has no clothes. Lorde's speech on the other hand is very informed and enormously brave.

Candobetter does not make statements preferring "preferring one ethnicity over another"? Surely this means that our planet is one world, a level-playing field where patriotism is seen as subversive and racist? There is a fine line between "racism" and patriotism, and we cannot ignore that sometimes these lines are blurred, and the Australia First Party is purely about supporting our sovereignty and our nation as unique one. By default, it means "preferring one ethnicity over another"! It means supporting the original inhabitants of our land, the indigenous peoples of Australia who are being forced to be another minority group in a "multi-cultural" and "multi-racial" society. We need to support the Australians who have over many years adopted this land as their own, through nation building and heritage. Multiculturalism was adopted by previous governments as a tool to support high rates of immigration, liberal border control policies, and the fragmentation of society. Without common heritage and ideals, governments know the population will be divided, dampened by political-correctness, and thus conquer community outrages to small fringe grass-roots groups. Multiculturalism is about homogenizing our past, our history, our values, and our culture - that's assumed not to exist! It assumes that Australia has no "culture" and is purely a global mix with little identity than what has been imported from overseas nations. Australia has unique folk music, traditions, architecture, fine arts, literature, dance, poetry and history. Our pioneers were tough and formed a foundation for a strong nation. Even though not all of admirable, Australia traditionally had low crime rates, high standards of living and our own industries - until privatisation and free trade agreements! With gigantic multi-national trade agreements being signed, our living standards and wages and industries are under threat. At least Japan can be admired for their patriotism, for keeping their identity intact, and for avoiding the pressure to accept mass immigration. Despite their "ageing population" their economy is holding fast and living standards remain high. We shouldn't feel under pressure to denounce Australia. Any people living here should all be adapting to one umbrella - and be Australian with ONE passport and ONE nation.

Candobetter.net Editor comment: Note that candobetter.net makes no statements preferring one ethnicity over another, so some of the content below does not speak for us. We do like to publish comments uncensored and permit all to have a voice, however. Candobetter.net is " A website for reform in democracy, environment, population, land use planning and energy policy and the comment below fits several of these criteria and comes from a minor political party which offers an alternative at the ballot box. AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY MULTICULTURALISM MEANS DEATH:- Death to the way of life for all real Australians, including the descendants of Hellenic people in Australia. People from Hellas, whose vision brought them to this Southern Land, to take up the challenge to become “New Australians”, and through endeavour established a new life of family, and prosperity, now face a struggle to ensure this Australian heritage is passed on to descendants. And whilst the hearts of some “New Australians” at times may reflect to Hellas, sons and daughters born to Australia’s soil reflect to Australia. This is their future and purpose. But through multiculturalism, the promise of a future for such sons and daughters is threatened, as is the very survival of us all, and our Australian civilisation. Be under no illusions:- MULTICULTURALISM MEANS DEATH! Multiculturalism is a primary tool for the Globalising Big Business caste of money changers, used to break down the community bond that makes an Australian - that being European derived and of our Native Soil, and to inflict their culturally deficient, low grade multiracial society, of no common heritage or values except consumerism and materialism. Exponential growth economics, fed by swarm level population expansion, is what matters to globalisers, and traditional Australia must be torn apart to achieve this end. The globalisers intent for Australia is the allocation of our resources to the Pacific Region economic zone, and our Native Land as a dump for the over breeding hordes of Asia, Africa, and the third world, all to suit their growth mania syndrome and want for $$$$$$. All and everything of our Australia is for sale, and the end result will be the swamping and demise of the Australian People. For the oncoming generation of descendants this means not only reduced opportunity, and displacement, but eking out an existence in a country being reduced to third world standards. Aussie youth’s Uni places sold to foreign bidders; real jobs lost in productive industry transferred to cheaper Asia; priced out of house purchasing due to overseas buyers; drugs and violent crime rampant; alien creeds, sleaze and all types of degeneracy; no sense of community; reappearance of contagious diseases; overpopulation chaos, environmental decline; corruption unlimited, etc. This is inherent in the multiculturalists society, a far cry from vibrant traditional Australia, and that which Hellenic people settling here sought to be a part of. In the fragmented multiculturalists system, wealth and power is secured for the benefit of money changing elites and their paid hirelings. Real Australians are of little consequence; only consumers in a future of serfdom, and replaceable by the next wave of cheap third world immigrant labour. And all administered by Quislings in the Liberal/Labor/Green parties. MULTICULTURALISM MEANS DEATH! All fairdinkum Australians, and including the post WWII European migration stream, have been betrayed by multiculturalist misfits who show utter contempt for our Australian traditions and heritage, and the aspirations of Hellenic and other European settlers. With no mandate, this traitor class are compliant in condemning our Aussie way of life, and all our Australian People to oblivion in their “Asian Century”. Against this, Australia First unashamedly demands a High Culture in an “Australian Century” for our people. The likes of Demetriou of the VFL prostituting our Australian football code with multiculturalism propaganda, and Papadopoulos, formerly of so called Ethnic Affairs, undermining the Australianism of Aussies of Hellenic origin, typify the paid mouthpieces of the multiculturalists camp, in their subverting of our Aussie culture and identity at every opportunity. Toads of this ilk have no place in Australia, and must be held accountable for their actions. MULTICULTURALISM MEANS DEATH! AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY stands for a new order of society, cleaned of the money changers’ pox of multiculturalism - where Australia’s own culture and identity, the essential bond for all our European Peoples flourishes, and where responsibility, values, harmony, fiscal equity and social justice prevails. This order alone can provide for purpose and enjoyment of life, and will ensure the survival of our Australia. In reclaimed Australia, the Orthodox Church, a bulwark of Christian Heritage and moral values, will be administratively fully Australianised, for the wider benefit of our Australian community. Real Australians are called to join our Australian Peoples’ Movement - for if you don’t fight- you will surely lose! AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY www.australiafirstparty.net. email: [email protected] National Contact Line 02 85870014 P O Box 223 Croydon 3136 PO Box 593 Rockdale 2216 PO Box 893 Rockhampton 4700 PO Box 129 Collie 6225 PO Box 101 Holden Hill 5088 AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY - RECLAIMING AUSTRALIA FOR AUSTRALIANS

When it comes to political issues, I must say that compared to other nations, Australians are rather apathetic and not likely to stand up for themselves. I'm still not sure why, whether it is a holdover of the colonial mentality of obedience and serving a system, the relative comfort and decadence we've had, or the fact that Australian history has been rather placid, without any major struggles. The more I think about it, the more I think it has to do with loss of autonomy. People responsible for their own fate and the fate of their descendants will more likely take responsibility for what happens, then people who feel that the fate of their descendants is in someone elses hands. I've always admired the pioneers of America's western frontier. They managed to build a free society, a functioning society out of very little. These people had thier own fate in their hands, no oversight from experts or government cajolence. They couldn't just sit back and let someone else solve their problems. They couldn't assume that someone else would do it. Reminds me of this classic snippet from The Simpsons Uh, Lisa, the whole reason we have elected officials is so we don't have to think all the time. Just like that rainforest scare a few years back: our officials saw there was a problem and they fixed it, didn't they?" –Homer Simpson

It goes back further than Whitlam. What about Harold Holt's murder by the same alphabet soup industry in 1967? Who did he offend? Well first he was about to make Australia energy independent through the construction of nuclear power stations. This was to begin the day after his assassination and it was dropped that same day(s) by the incoming Prime Minister John Gorton. Secondly, he gave aboriginals the vote which went against the Greemasonic Grand Master of Australia wishes whom he said to a previous delegation of aboriginals to his office in Canberra as the reason for the delay in implementing this (at that time). The incoming Whitlam government called the US ambasador in to enquire about the consequences of the Whitlam governments anti-US policies. The ambassdor was frank ... to a point. we have ways, a mixed bag of tricks, but did not elaborate too much further.

What Christopher Boyce had to say about the removal of Whitlam and CIA infiltration of the Australian Union Movement at the time of Bob Hawke was surprising to hear, but not surprising. A remarkably well-chosen subject by Mark Davis, who filmed and interviewed Boyce. After Boyce there was an interview with Snowden, by Hubert Seipel (Snowden Speaks at http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/story/about/id/601800/n/Snowden-Speaks), which was a fantastic continuation. Christopher Boyce said, several times, that he was astounded at how Australians did not seem to want to stand up for themselves. We have recently had many comments about why 'Babyboomers' have let our country be overpopulated and peoples' rights be so diminished. My argument has been that our system disorganises citizens, geographically and through wedge politics. I would also like to draw peoples' attention, again, to the mysteriously important role of the Multicultural Foundation of Australia, which has connections that seem to utterly surpass its apparent significance. This foundation was begun by Bob Hawke whom Christopher Boyce clearly believed to be one of the principle political figures who worked for the CIA to corrupt the Australian trade union. (Hawke declined the opportunity to refute Boyce's allegation in an interview.) Since then, nearly every past and present opposition leader and prime minister of Australia has become a member. The site tag for the MFA is here (http://188.95.51.122/?q=taxonomy/term/1180 or https://188.95.51.122/?q=taxonomy/term/1180).

We may have staved off Maltheus, in the short term, due to technological advances in agriculture and knowledge of ecological systems, genetics, and production. Malthus lived at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Like the Agricultural Revolution before it, the Industrial Revolution did increase the means of subsistence, and on a global scale. Historically, global food supply has matched global population, allowing the population to grow. However, the Earth cannot sustain the continued exponential growth of its human population. Dr Norman Borlaug warned in his Nobel Prize speech in 1970 of the "population monster" that must be tamed. His 40 years of food security reprieve has ended now, and the UN say that food production must increase by 70% by 2050! Nobody is taking the warnings seriously, and magnanimously imagine that human numbers can keep growing, and Nature will take care of us. In Cook's time, and at the time of the Industrial Revolution, there were new lands to conquer, and new colonies to plunder, and exiting native populations to exterminate. We've had the Green Revolution, and that was 40 years ago. It secured food for many people. Now, planet Earth has already been maximised with regards to population, and we are now in ecological overshoot. The "food security" issues of today is a euphemism for a Malthusian crisis - disguised to one based on the "challenges" of transport, aid, economics, markets, funding and technology. Between 2007 and 2025, food production in Africa must increase from its current production level of 2.2 billion tonnes to 3 billion tonnes to keep up with population growth. While human inventiveness can meet some challenges, and intelligence can overcome some of the Earth's limits by increasing outputs, the Earth's natural resources are still finite, and biological systems can only be replicated at rates constrained by available elements, water, biology, chemistry, ecology, climate science, soils and botanical/ecological systems.

The use, non use of the great artesian bore potential is an international scandal and based on false (deliberately so) "facts". This is pertinent to the building at a great waste and expense to taxpayers of the scandalously over priced desalination plant in sydney during the last drought, but it concerns the whole nation. The false premise is that it is a one off resource and cannot be replaced. rubbish. The exact opposite is the true reality. Unless it is used and used extensively it cannot be replaced because it refills itself when used every fifteen years - how do they think it got there in the first place? BUT SURELY THEY KNOW THIS and its underutilization is a deliberate ploy to keep the Australian nation under the control of the International. What a disgrace! What is the mechanism of this freeemasonic control of our politicians, which clearly emanates from the USA and UK? In what circle(s) - deep, dark and connected do they operate? Who will expose them? How can they be exposed? How will they be brought to justice?

Now we see the Australian Federal Police harassing the Channel 7 studios in Sydney. They are scared shitless Corby has said something which would incriminate them and bring the whole charade crashing out into the open light of day, to prevent this was the reason they put her away in the first place. The government was behind the drug shipment from Brisbane to Sydney gone wrong thanks to the stupidity of the organizers or baggage handlers on their drug shipment payroll.

But why all the fuss over one lousy shipment?

Because it threatens to bring out into the open the whole scheme of drug smuggling by the Western English speaking governments1 which help prop up their Black Budget economy for the World Control Matrix.

, a giant too big for any one person to get their head around and which they are now puting their finishing touches to. They will stop at nothing. Michel's suffering is zero to them. They are the literal evil mon(b)ster of the deep, far more evil and savage than any movie could portray.

They have done the same to Martin Bryant, and many others individually and nationally to get their way and will stop at nothing to impose their NWO on the world but they have met a stumbling block in and DOES NOT include Russia and China and Iran and North Korea and did not include pre destruction Palestine, Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and countless other nations who did not toe the line.

But they will be beaten and destroyed by the Russia China coalition and their allies and thank God for that.

Footnote[s]

1. See also: Who benefits from the Afghan Opium Trade?, Afghanistan: Heroin-ravaged State, Heroin is "Good for Your Health": Occupation Forces support Afghan Narcotics Trade, Money Laundering and The Drug Trade: The Role of the Banks , Unprecedented Increase in World Opium Production on Global Research, The Afghan economy is reconverting to opium and Global opium and heroin production explodes on VoltaireNet, 'Unprecedented increase in opium production'.

I find the refugee advocates kind of amusing. Most refugees pass through a number of countries before reaching Europe or Australia. Mexicans going to the USA are the exception, but they are not refugees anyway, just opportunists.

Now, what's interesting is that no refugee advocate even considers any number of these countries as being viable 'final' destinations. They act as if the only places in the world worth worrying about, or going to, are, well, those in Europe, USA, UK, Canada, Australia...

I didn’t quote everything, for the sake of brevity. My second response is to treat this as an existentional question. Existentional in the sense that argues that political engagement is how we define ourselves, recognise eachother and become socially alive. Without political engagement, humans remain isolated and confused, unwell, depressed, impotent... I think you may be right to accuse the babyboomer statistical cohort of containing a significant number of existentionally disengaged members. The cultural cringe that Edna Everedge lampooned portrayed a set of somehow still immature elderly people reduced to communing with garden gnomes, their only identity material assets and mementos of sparse initiation ceremonies, like weddings and RSL membership. Aristotle said that man is a political animal, and I don’t really like the “Boomer” term, and generational trends are very, very general. And again, I don’t want people to think that I blame boomers for everything, I don’t, they had poor role models in my opinion. "[...]The ideology of multiculturalism was developed between 1966 and 1975 by a small number of academics, social workers and activists initially located on the fringe of the political arena of migrant settlement and welfare, a political arena that itself was not large, despite the fact that these issues affected the lives of so many. " [Al Grassby was not initially inclined to multiculturalism but one of his speechwriters was a multiculturalism activist and Grassby profited from having clear concept and direction from this" This is the conclusion that I have come to as well, that these social changes were pushed for minority interests and were created by academics and politicians rather than any kind of ‘awakening’. I note that there was never a mass movement to change Australia’s make up, or in the UK, USA or Europe, but it happened and some people did agitate for them. People assume that this social change was voted for, it wasn’t. Over time, it was adopted after the fact, a fait accompli. But every social change is always pushed by a minority, with the majority eventually going along. However, I can also see how it was allowed, and see the mentality of the day which made it permissible. As to whether people should have interpreted 'ending the White Australia policy' as meaning mass immigration, I seem to recollect there was quite a lot of fear about this at the time, but it was managed by propaganda. People who expressed antipathy to asian immigration were ridiculed - for instance Bruce Ruxton. Ruxton, as I recall, was a working class passionate returned soldier advocate, lacking in sophisticated airs. The Vietnam War and conscription protests also helped to make him an easier target. What he stood for were largely the values that the government of his day had promoted, but fashions had changed and he was tarred as an anachronism. “Sophisticates” thought that their advances sensibilities were better than what working class people believed. They knew were society should head, and those saying otherwise were impeding progress. This is part of the upbringing, that the professor, the expert was more knowledgeable, and the average guy was ignorant and should listen to them. I don't understand what you mean here. Do you mean that those same people will complain elsewhere about lack of social cohesion etc? I was at that meeting too, but I thought that Kelvin Thomson's view was (a) the multicultural horse has left the stable so closing the door is no longer effective and so it is a non-issue, and (b) the concern of Victoria First is numbers, not ethnicity. Thomson had already announced this and for me the logical thing was, if people wanted to have an organisation about what kinds of immigrants Australia takes, then they would be welcome to form one and to invite people to join it. It seems to me that there are two concepts here: One is How many immigrants and the other is What kind of immigrants? It seems to me that the first one has precedence. There is nothing wrong with Vic Firsts approach, if it wants to deal specifically with numbers. But these two concepts relate to ‘how do we control our borders for our benefit’. Yes, one is numbers and one is type, and to you they are separate, but it is easy for the growth lobby to frame the argument as ‘do we accept people who say no to immigration to protect outdated ideas’? The issue is, if you’ve failed to be neutral on the second concept, then you yourself have answered that no, there are some cases where it is not acceptable and that it is OK to say to people that they have to surrender some personal vision or self interest to avoid a particular immigration restriction. Despite this a lot of people continued to attend those meetings. Finally, John Howard made noises as if he was quite sympathetic to the reasons that people supported Hanson. This probably caused a lot of Hanson supporters to direct their preferences to him over the ALP. Then, in the wake of the Port Arthur Massacre, he banned guns. This endeared him to the middle classes and fashionable intellectuals who had formerly hated him because he seemed not of their class and because he had been sent into the political wilderness years before for expressing anti-Asian immigration ideas. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that he managed to bott quite a large portion of Hanson's support base for a while. Yes, all through the Western world, centrist parties are adopting the rhetoric of right wing ones to draw voters from them and prevent the more extreme parties gaining support. Howard made noises about “we will control who comes here”, opened up the borders and made a big deal about refugees so he could look like he was tough on immigration. Perhaps more important, what did people seeing what happened to Pauline Hanson learn? They learned that, not only could you be embarassed and even beaten up if you tried to fight high immigration because of your social values, but that the Australian Government would have no qualms about throwing you into prison for it. But, infinitely worse, infinitely shocking, so bizarre and unthinkable that people may wonder if they imagined this, our current Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, raised the money to prosecute Pauline Hanson which permitted her to be prosecuted and sent to prison.[6] Both parties belong to the same ideological class, neo-liberalism. They are happy with other parties, as long as those parties also agree with them. They don’t believe in democracy, but there are ‘valid’ views, and ones which fall out should be eschewed or banned or marginalized. The totalitarian mindset. They view the country as just a resource, a collection of tax payers and voters. They probably don’t understand why anyone would care what it was made up of. We’re just numbers, interchangeable parts. But that’s all they have to care about, because they only get assessed on economic matters, and how many votes they get. If they can import voters, then why shouldn’t they? The question is, what moral argument do people have against a nation being seen as nothing more than a collection of tax payers and voters? That argument has been degraded over the decades, but no one takes responsibility here. At the heart of most peoples ideology, is an acceptance of this. Pauline Hanson didn't learn this lesson either, which is why she perhaps her party devolved over time. No one was sure what it was really about. In the end, it wasn't about anything. I was not aware that this was a 'baby-boomer' achievement. I thought it was a cultural change engineered by successive governments. I always thought that racism in Australia was grossly exaggerated, and used as a label to gloss over other more acceptable objections - like wanting to protect your job, or wanting to stop more housing developments. Certainly calling people racist has been used often to try to shut people up who objected to overdevelopment. These days they even intimidate people into saying, "We're not against 'development', just 'poorly designed developments' etc. as if it were somehow unreasonable to be against having everything covered by infrastructure. I think that the property lobby was in on this from the beginning. They have funded a ton of pro-big population and multiculturalism literature from academics for years now. There has been no-one to fund the counter-arguments. The property development and business lobby have done this in Australia and in Britain for centuries. The Liberal Party was founded by immigrationist forces around the time of Federation.[5] I doubt from the beginning, but early on. They pushed it, but didn’t invent it. Racism was invented by Trotsky, and the Eastern European communists had a term to describe ideas in line with the part, it was ‘political rectitude’. Sound familiar? I think this had more to do with the outcome of WWII, and the rise of Liberalism than economic lobby’s. No doubt growth lobbies saw the opportunity to exploit it, but I don’t think they engineered this. The removal of immigration restrictions happened almost simultaneously in Europe, the UK, USA and Australia, all around the mid 60’s. This had been a work in progress since the end of WWII and was largely a reactionary move to counter ideology which was seen as ‘nazi’. This manifested itself in several forms. The push to prove there were no racial differences, the push to remove any racial discrimination, the push against the acknowledgments that traits were hereditary, nurture over nature, openness over nationalism. Also, the ideology of self destruction. These ideas were largely accepted, but now starting to fade as a new generation and scientific evidence is rolling in. What has happened recently is that the internet has permitted a huge globalisation of the property market at the same time as we have lost almost all protection via the National Foreign Investment Board. In a country like Australia where there is no decoupling of work permits from immigration and where permanent immigration means real-time permanent, rather than just a year as it does in most of Western Europe, this means disastrous loss of control. But this doesn’t account for local investors. Also, this problem is occurring because of a bubble. Bubbles are self perpetuating, a positive feedback cycle. As people jump on, prices go up. Prices going up mean more profits, people are more eager to jump on. This creates a feedback cycle. All it takes is a few triggers to start it, then it takes a life of its own. In this case, low interest rates and cheap, easy credit at the turn of the century and a few small concessions like the FHB grants starts a frenzy. Properties are being subdivided everywhere because people realize there is money to be made and there are eager people who will buy with the expectation of making money. Remember, this was global, not just Australia. Lax lending standards, low interest rates and being able to borrow against home equity just made the market go boom worldwide. Even without foreign investors, we still would have had a bubble, it just may not have lasted as long, or been as big. I don't think property developers were able to coordinate a worldwide conspiracy to make a global housing bubble. All analysis points to the banks and credit. The bubble will burst when credit is not longer available to inflate the bubble, which could happen quickly. What happened was that the market charged whatever it could get and it went after both salaries. In other words the market profited from a social change that was clamoured for as a benefit. Of course, it wasn't really the "market" it was a government of land-speculators making rules whereby they helped to inflate the price of property. But you are talking to a land-tenure sociologist here and I know that women all once had land, just as female bears do. We lost it in many cultures, but not all, along the way, and overpopulation was part of the reason. In a socio-economic system where most citizens don't own much property, being able to earn a wage is a means to some freedom, and why would women not want to be free? However real freedom is owning land and assets and having a home to stay home in, IMHO. I personally would like fifty per cent of seats in parliament to be for women (not for 'women's issues' but for women's bums on seats) and I personally want our inheritance system to be reformed so that male and female children cannot be disinherited by their parents in favour of the spouse; so that male and female children all have the possibility of inheriting assets, preferably land; so that there would be no need to compensate a widower or widow for their partner's decease because the widow or widower would have their independent fortune. (This is the Napoleonic or Roman system that is in almost all European countries and similar systems prevail in many places. The Anglophone systems are very disempowering.) Prices in a free market system are always the most the market will bear. Increase earnings, and the market can bear more. Should household income increase (double), the market can bear more to pay for the ‘house’ part of household. This creates an inefficiency, because now more resources are expended to purchase the same product. No one sees it that way, because the mentality was consumption creates wealth. The more people spend, the better, even if they get the same. The idea that if people spend more for the same outcome, it's an economic positive is insane, but thats current economic thinking. It is no wonder we are drowining in debt. I don't think people saw this coming, any more than they saw most things coming, because of their ignorance of how big business and government work together, because of their naive faith in an entirely false belief that they lived in a democracy and were empowered, and because they emotionally followed fashions as they humanly sought identity and political engagement. It was easy to mislead a bunch of disorganised, poorly educated, disaggregated, statistical cohorts who suffered from cultural cringe and an absence of historical knowledge. I would say its basic economics. If everyones wages were to double tomorrow, prices would double, yet if you said you could double everyones earnings, they would clamour for it. Why? I think our system will dispossess anyone, white or brown. I believe that what is happening to Australia is the same thing that happened to Africa and India, the Solomans and Easter Island - disorganisation, dispossession, loss of self-government through colonisation by superior numbers and or forces. Have you ever asked yourself why it is assumed that the USA, UK, Canada, Europe will change colour, and why this is seen as inevitable, and why no one at all demands this of Japan, Kenya, Korea, Liberia, Swaziland, Pakistan, Bangladesh? It is a morality so ingrained and so obvious, that no one sees it. I don't believe that changing colours will make all that much difference, but you probably don't either. Actually, I do. Countries control their borders. If those borders or population policy is managed in a way where an identifiable group disappear, or are threatened, then that is a crime against that group. Remaining 'neutral' is just as bad. Our politicians, ALL OF THEM, remain 'neutral' because the democratic system only grants them power if they are neutral, so they are, immoral and criminal. What really changes is one's social organisation; one's real empowerment through clan and territorial connections. See Demography Territory and Law, The Rules of Animal and Human Population, Countershock Press, Australia, 2013. (Kindle) Also available as paperback here: Paperback edition. My book is all about this. The fact that I think the British-inherited system we live under is totally wrong means that I am not a person who believes that a solution for us lies in British immigration (as Pauline Hanson did, I believe). I think we need to allow our population to decrease, but I have already written a lot about that. I don’t believe in just opening up to Britain either, especially since they’ve done a good job creating problems there. I was personally always shocked by the injustice and judgementalness and the sheer disregard for democracy meted out to people who tried to stand up for their rights as they perceived them. I was disgusted and dismayed at the impact of wedge politics which seemed to use these differences of opinion to corral people into very narrow associations and to demonise people who, at time of Federation, would all have talked civilly together. I saw what was happening as the destruction of democracy. I made a decision that the message I wanted to get out was ecological; it was the disappearance of green spaces and freedom to move, of biodiverse surroundings. To get that message out I could not afford to get involved in defending specific peoples' rights, however I did get to expose what was happening, as I am doing now. I also received a lot of poor treatment myself by people who mistakenly thought that I was fighting for discriminatory immigration policies I suspect that’s it’s just 20th century thinking, that political ideology is everything. The future of the world depends on whether people adopt the right words or not. It’s almost religious. People treat politics as a religion, so those who disagree aren’t just adversaries, but heretics. Our very existence depends on people adopting the right ideas! Opposing ideas are now treated not as just an alternate perspective, or different interests, but as some kind of mental illness. The Soviets used to treat dissenters as mental patients, because they believed anyone who objected to the system coulnd’t have been thinking right. Yes, you are right; it did not fit with the ideology that the middle classes and fashionable intellectuals casually absorbed or that was taught to them from kindergarten through primary school and secondary school. As to why people did not imagine what could happen further down the track in terms of huge populations, skyrocketing prices and loss of human rights - it seems to me that most people responded to herding. They were afraid of what would happen to them if they resisted going in the direction they were being pushed and they accepted with more or less relief any rationale that the dogs herding them gave for forcing them into ever-narrowing choices, rationales that suggested that Australia was a big rich land, that we would all get cleverer, that sacrifices must be made for 'progress' and that 'progress' was an evolutionary pathway of a chronologically forward nature which always led to more and better stuff and to freedom and power in the end. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Asch Interesting experiment here, people do act in a herd manner! But the lesson here is that it only takes a few to change the direction too. Just a few people speaking up can change everything. I can't comment on where it is most prevalent. I was counselling a 30 year old mentally ill man recently who lived in utter precarity. He had a one room flat in public housing that he was too afraid to sleep in because someone had died in it before he moved in and their imprint was still on the carpet and the level of violence in those flats was terrifying. He said, "I'm tormented by my racist thoughts of resentment towards all the refugees that have public housing and contribute to the difficulties and violence." This was the first time I had thought about the impact that refugees (including accepted asylum seekers) might have on public housing demand. Until then I had thought that the number of refugees is so tiny that they pale into insignificance next to economic immigrants. However if there is an accumulated concentration of several thousand refugees over a few years in a limited quantity of public housing, it is obvious that there will be an impact. It's a fact that a lot of poor refugees do finish up in the public housing system and that it is full of violence. This guy did not feel that he could speak up because to him his resentments seemed to have a racist basis. So he could not formulate a statement that he had a right to decent housing as a citizen and if that right was being negatively affected by numbers of immigrants, then he had a right to demand a reduction in immigration. His solution was to couch-surf and sleep on benches, as he slid towards suicide. You will not be surprised to hear that he felt entirely worthless. This sounds similar to someone I know, who also is depressed and had an attempt on his own life. Last time I spoke to him, he was wracked with guilt over what happened to the Aboriginals and what “we” did to them. I found this odd because his parents were immigrants from Greece, but identifying as European, he took on the burden of European colonization of this land. It seem so religious to me, like the idea of ‘original sin’, a sin you are born with and forever guilty for. He studied philosophy. Poor guy must have been brainwashed into thinking he born as wretched scum, forever to be an oppressor and creator of misery. Unfortunately, this thinking isn’t that rare. As I have written, if they saw it coming, they were afraid, or, if they fought it, they were made to suffer. It helps that generations now have lived in cities and have no idea of how all the other creatures depend on their local ecology remaining intact. And that we do ultimately as well, and that you cannot self-govern via the global market. I guess you bring me back to reality here. I do not believe that I ever did this. However I have seen groups revel in righteous indignation and the pursuit of people they thought were political outlaws. Once people did this to the tribe down the track when they had a bone to pick. Now our 'tribes' are temporary alliances, like brands, formed through identification with marketed values etc; and our loyalties and controls are easily manipulated; there are very few real sources of orientation. In an industry where I work, I have seen over 20 years, a degrading of trust and work conditions, a kind of dog-eat-dog ethos, a psychopathic pursuit of power and the reduction of normal people into cowards and tell-tales. This seems to me to be the result of bureaucracy and the abolition of the seniority system, which at least gave a lot of organic social structure to industry before, tempered the naked ambition and brought stability and safety. The majority of people, as far as I can see, don't want this, but they don't know how to get out of it. I think the way out is to talk about it, as we are doing here. I agree. I consider the treatment of certain politics today akin to religion. People aren’t built to live in mass society, by the millions in a global space. The mental space is too large. People have transient alliances and constant change actually has been shown to delay mental maturity. It also leads to trespasses against others. The people developing your neighborhood aren’t your neighbours. The people you affect with your decisions aren’t people you have to answer to day to day. One thing I have learned from older people is the loss of a sense of ownership. Back in the 50’s and 60’s, people had a real sense of ownership over their society and their country. I’ve heard many people who grew up back then talk about how they felt they owned their country and how they lament the fact that people today can’t experience that. They had freedom to do stuff without people interfering or external forces controlling them. Life was less regulated and there was a community. People could let their children do things which today would have DOCS on your doorstep. There wasn’t a camera on every street corner.

Tensions at the Manus Island detention centre erupted into a violent breakout last night, after asylum seekers were told their only option for resettlement was to live in Papua New Guinea. By definition, refugees are not able to live in their own country, and must find a safe place to live. Surely Papua New Guinea fits this criteria?

Thirty-five asylum seekers escaped from the centre through a fence, safety-glass panels were smashed, bunk beds were "broken apart" and the pieces used as weapons and thrown.

Refugee Action Coalition spokesman Ian Rintoul says he was told by asylum seekers inside the centre that the trouble started after they were told their prospects of resettlement in another country were bleak.
The country does not have a visa category for refugees and there has been little public information about how, and where, they might be resettled.

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said: "In Manus they would have freedom of movement around Manus. They would have work rights and all of those normal things you would expect. In terms of access to other programs and things of that nature, that is for the Papua New Guinean government".

At the meeting with Immigration department officials around 2pm Manus Island time, the asylum seekers were told that they would not be leaving PNG – that if they wanted to go somewhere else other than PNG, they would have to arrange this with other countries themselves.
Millions of people around the world have no choice but to flee their homeland to escape war, genocide, torture and persecution. In an effort to plug the human migration tide, four months after Abbott led the conservative Liberal-National coalition to power, he promising to “stop the boats”, he is claiming victory in “Operation Sovereign Borders”.

Amnesty International described the situation on Manus Island (PNG) as “tantamount to torture”, with detainees (including pregnant women and young children) being denied sufficient water, medical help, privacy, and living in cramped conditions and unbearable heat. Conditions on Nauru are similarly inhumane. These offshore detention centres will cost $2.867 billion for 2013/14. They believe that these detention camps should be closed. Asylum seekers should be able to live in the Australian community, with the right to work, while their claims are being assessed.

However, a "right" to work and housing does not guarantee the jobs and public housing exists here in Australia, due to our record-breaking rates of net overseas migration.

I don't think you can assume, Denniss that the people bidding at auctions are the ones who are actually buying the properties. I got my mother to bid for me for a house. I missed out unfortunately that time, but my mum would have looked like an older person competing with a younger generation which was not the case. A lot of my friends get someone older to bid for them.

Your conclusions are based, I think, on rational deduction but wrong assumption of what is normal. From anthropological and zoological data, one finds that, in a stable normally constructed society (organically grown with minor immigration component) the generations will cooperate on food production, housing and child-rearing. The competitiveness between generations that you take for normal are caused by disorganisation and scarcity. Most societies do not expect everyone to marry and raise children either. Most contain a goodly number of bachelors that cooperate with the breeding adults. This feature is present in the social organisation of other species, as the work I cite in Demography Territory and Law, The Rules of Animal and Human Population, Countershock Press, Australia, 2013. (Kindle) Also available as paperback here: Paperback edition, chapters 3 and 4.

You also do not seem to have picked up on the fact that elderly people become more dependent if taken out of their known environment. This competition for housing should also be understood as a sign that we are overpopulated. And as a sign that the cohort of age-of-childbearing immigrants has obviously exceeded the proportion that would have arisen with natural replacement. So, it sounds as if overpopulation is producing the kind of aggression that has been predicted by those who said Australia is growing too big. Aggression is usually enracinated by a sense of entitlement. All these things seem to be present in your attitude here, Dennis. I hope you will forgive me for this observation.

What was feared has come to pass.

According to Greenpeace, The world's largest fishing vessel, the factory freezer ship Lafayette, has turned up in the Pacific Ocean east of Australia.

SMH: Monster fishing in Pacific, east of Australia

This monstrosity is 5 times the size of the Margiris, that was banned from Australian waters in 2012. As fish numbers deplete, due to human population growth causing dwindling fish numbers, the machinery to chase and capture them is getting bigger and bigger!

Greenpeace campaigner Nathaniel Pelle said: ''The waters where it is now face a crisis of overcapacity. A vast number of vessels are making their way into the Pacific chasing reduced fish numbers.''

They will be near Australia's waters, devouring fish from over the imaginary border. How are fish to know which "side" is safe?

A converted tanker capable of processing 1500 tonnes of fish a day, further causing the crash of marine biodiversity. A 2012 investigation by the US Centre for Public Integrity found giant fishing vessels were responsible for a 90 per cent decline in the South Pacific jack mackerel fishery. Not to be thwarted by evidence, this factory freezer vessel will continue with business as usual, and is hoping prevailing currents will make jack mackeral fish swim in their direction.

By setting high quotas, it ensures they will not be exceeded, and humanity's rapacious appetite for fish continues.

I don't think they are politically more savvy per se, just have a different attitude. It's human nature. Young people like my wife and I who are trying to forge ahead aren't going to like it when at the open for inspection for the precious few affordable family homes in the area, there are Boomers there too. My wife asks "Don't they already have homes?". She's right, but they wan't something else too I suppose. The thing is, we can have children, they can't, hence the aversion. It's not a rational "weigh up the facts" aversion, it's a gut instinct. Behind all the articles on the subject in the media, I beleive is a gut instinct and will to power. Our human nature makes us seek to procreate, to rear the next generation which will continue our genes. When a young person sees an old person filling an ecological niche, they react inside. The older person may either be wanting to maintain power, or simply stuck in their ways. Thats what I think it is, ultimately. Those retirees in those homes are impeding reproduction, and this subconscious realisation then manifests itselfs as 'rational' arguments against the retirees. The problem is, that calls to view the old and young as 'equal' aren't going to work, because biologically they are not. Many people probably don't understand the mechanics leading to their decision making. Boomer morality says there should not be discrimination on age/sex/race but there always is. So young people are inclined to observe the reasons why Boomers don't deserve the wealth, Boomers observe the reasons why they should keep it, and justify it by being able to help their own children (genetic interests). As this article did. This conflict is arising because living standards are decreasing, but as I said, its not that Boomers are the fault, the rot was set in before, its that boomers are the most VISIBLE manifestation of that problem.

Dennis's comments in italic bold mine in regular font.

"It may not have been asked for, but it was the outcome."

My response to this first statement is to want to distinguish between what was up to 'the babyboomers' and 'what was not'. As I just developed from a comment by Anonymous, ("Who is the leader of the Babyboomers?") they are [nothing but a pack of cards! as Alice said] a statistical cohort of people extending across two decades, separated by time, household, education, structural divides which included a changing rural/city divide, increasingly geographical infills via immigration, and, especially lately, professional wedge politics: Lib/Lab/'Green'/vs the rest, ably promoted by a duopoly mass media of Murdoch-Fairfax and Government-ABC.

My second response is to treat this as an existentional question. Existentional in the sense that argues that political engagement is how we define ourselves, recognise eachother and become socially alive. Without political engagement, humans remain isolated and confused, unwell, depressed, impotent... I think you may be right to accuse the babyboomer statistical cohort of containing a significant number of existentionally disengaged members. The cultural cringe that Edna Everedge lampooned portrayed a set of somehow still immature elderly people reduced to communing with garden gnomes, their only identity material assets and mementos of sparse initiation ceremonies, like weddings and RSL membership.

Such a bizarre change from the times preceding, of convicts and rumcorps, scientists and explorers, gold-seekers and bushrangers, Federation politicians and poets, pre-WW2 artists and writers.

A number of the Post WW2 lot seem curiously conformist to superficial but rigid standards, with the sexes separate, the men obediently employed, the women detached.

Engagement is very difficult when you are structurally disorganised.

Think about it. You and I probably came from very different places, backgrounds and experiences, by reason of sex, age, location and social class. Even though we may both be babyboomers, there could be 25 years difference in our ages; we may belong to different generations. I may have been too young for Vietnam and you might have been conscripted or even volunteered. You may be religious; I am not. This may be the first time we have met and talked about this.

"I can ask for a lot of things, but the things I ultimately agitate for, determine the outcome. This is what you are missing. When you put an idea into motion, the outcome isn't the outcome that your ideology says should happen, but the outcome that nature says will happen."

I guess you need to state the natural rule you think applies here.

My perception is that there was a failure (due to political-economic and structural problems that disorganised many Australians) to engage, to agitate for anything much amongst the wider, disorganised public. However you feel that people did agitate. During the 1960s and 1970s it is true that some Australians were very engaged in agitating for particular political outcomes. Some of these were the multiculturalists, the Communists and the B.A. Santamariarists, the latter who both arose in relationship to the Australian unionist and protectionist movement of Federation - which was a much more engaged period, I think. Mark Lopez, author of The origins of multiculturalism in Australian politics 1945-1975 finds that multiculturalism was pushed by a very few people through skilful lobbying. In his paper, The Politics of the origins of multiculturalism: Lobbying and the power of influence," (2000)[Referenced in [1], he writes,

"[...]The ideology of multiculturalism was developed between 1966 and 1975 by a small number of academics, social workers and activists initially located on the fringe of the political arena of migrant settlement and welfare, a political arena that itself was not large, despite the fact that these issues affected the lives of so many. " [Al Grassby was not initially inclined to multiculturalism but one of his speechwriters was a multiculturalism activist and Grassby profited from having clear concept and direction from this.] [...] "The decisive shift towards multiculturalism in public policy occurred during the first Whitlam Labor Government (December 1972 to May 1974), even though there was no preconceived or planned introduction of multiculturalism and it was not part of the Labor Party platform. Multiculturalism became accepted as a basis of ethnic affairs policy during this period largely as a result of the successes of the multiculturalists as lobbyists. The appeal of the merits of multiculturalism was never sufficient in itself to ensure its acceptance as public policy: it was necessary for the multiculturalists to vigorously and strenuously promote it, often in the face of indifference or sometimes stiff opposition from those who supported other approaches." [...]"Fraser adopted it as a model and, using his authority as the Opposition Spokesman, he introduced it into the Coalition platform for the May 1974 federal election; the first inclusion of multiculturalislm in the immigration policy of a major party. This development also established a degree of bipartisanship sufficient to protect this new ideology from the rigours of adversarial parliamentary politics." [...]"By the end of 1975, the influence of multiculturalism was evident in five federal departments: Labour and Immigration, Social Security, Education, the Media, and the Attorney-General's Department. Despite their efforts from 1973, the multiculturalists' breakthrough in influencing the union movement was delayed until May 1976, when they established a Migrant Workers' Centre in the Victorian Trades Hall. "

"Take immigration for example, how many boomers in the 60's and 70's wanted immigration restrictions? How many wanted immigration laws loosened? If I remember correctly, a few at Vic First prided themselves on loosening standards. Now they are complaining about the outcome. How else do you end a 'white Australia', without mass immigration? What did this person expect to happen?"

If you interpret the expression of a high rate of desire for better assimilation as a sign of not wanting immigrants from non-English speaking countries, then it seems that most Victorians, at any rate, objected to non-British immigrants.[1] (A lot objected to British immigrants as well - those of Irish stock, for instance.)

There is little documentation on whether most people objected to the idea of a much bigger Australia, but I know that ever since the first million there have been people wanting to keep Australia small.[2] Since Australia was founded due to Britain's overpopulation and Malthus's theories were popularised in our early history, there were a lot of Malthusians in Australia. Charles Darwin's visit in the 1850s reinforced this, although it also reinforced the presence of the Catholic Church, as the pope weighed in. The main political tension was that of wage earners and small business wanted protection and big business wanted open markets and a big local population, although Britain preferred a smaller population in a commodity economy to provide her factories with raw materials. In Federation agreements towards the constitution, workers succeeded in stopping slave imports (blackbirding) and also in stopping slave-wage-earner imports through the exercise of the White Australia Policy which attempted to screen immigration out from large dense populations associated with low-wage labour. [3]

Environmentalists in the 1970s were particularly against big populations, especially after the first oil shock, which caused concern about scarcity. Leone Sandercock recorded in her books[4] citizens' anger at inflated land-prices in Victoria under the Hamer government, and at the rapacious development and destruction of green spaces. This overdevelopment was related to the rapid population growth of the 1960s and 1970s - composed of high natural increase plus high immigration, even though immigrants were initially housed in special facilities, in part to avoid anger at housing unaffordability.

As to whether people should have interpreted 'ending the White Australia policy' as meaning mass immigration, I seem to recollect there was quite a lot of fear about this at the time, but it was managed by propaganda. People who expressed antipathy to asian immigration were ridiculed - for instance Bruce Ruxton. Ruxton, as I recall, was a working class passionate returned soldier advocate, lacking in sophisticated airs. The Vietnam War and conscription protests also helped to make him an easier target. What he stood for were largely the values that the government of his day had promoted, but fashions had changed and he was tarred as an anachronism.

It was, however, still okay to disapprove of overpopulation. And people, especially environmentalists, talked with concern about overpopulation all over the world; in France, in the US, and in Australia. US presidents endorsed this concern, as did Whitlam.

I think that the people who supported multiculturalists by militating for the end of racially discriminatory immigration were mostly middle class people or intellectuals who trusted the government; they did not think that they would lose control of policy. So they accepted or were persuaded to accept non-racially discriminatory immigration, but they did not think that they were going to have to accept a massive increase in numbers.

It seems highly likely that other Australians who did not identify with the middle classes or intellectuals (as Katharine Betts intimates in her book, Immigration Ideology) were not so trusting of government. But their ideas were unfashionable and criminology tells us that the middle classes and fashionable intellectuals can rarely imagine how poor people fear 'the authorities'. Because middle classes and fashionable intellectuals rarely go to prison, they assume that the system is fair and impartial. Another, obvious reason that non-professionals and unskilled and semi-skilled labour were against high immigration was that they knew their jobs were easily filled by new immigrants, even if those immigrants had poor English. This was not a problem for the doctors or lawyers, for instance. The doctors had a very protective union and the law is a very local specialty. (Now even the doctors have been disorganised.)

(Did the quality of the Australian education system also decline? Because it seems that many people never acquired enough knowledge of their own country to even realise what reasonable population numbers were. At Sustainable Living Festivals a few years running, some environmentalists ran surveys to see what people understood about population. What they found was that, at those festivals at any rate, most people had no idea of the size of Australia's or the world's population. They were so innumerate and geographically ignorant that, even if you gave them a choice, they would get it wrong by millions, in some cases billions (even for Australia!). These were, for example, people in suits with jobs who strolled through Federation square in their lunch hours.)

The immigration numbers did not increase immediately

In fact the numbers did not increase much until John Howard, according to my observation of them; they stayed around 80,000 p.a. averaged over the years. Net Overseas Migration (with the exception of Bob Hawke's Tiananmen square year) until Howard. But 80,000 p.a. net was far too many, and, by the 1980s environmentalists groups had formed, notably Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population (AESP) - now called Sustainable Population Australia (SPA). AESP seemed to be fairly confident of eventually succeeding in lobbying government through sheer power of reason. They based this on the belief that Australia was a democracy and that citizens opinions counted, especially if they were supported by scientific authority.

Something happened in the meantime.

Why did AESP form, though? It seemed to be largely a response to the retreat by the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) from its constitutional requirement to support efforts to keep Australia's population small. This disquieting retreat by the ACF was dramatised when it attempted to pull out of an agreement to fund a book about how the looming environmental problems of continuing population growth in Australia. Ultimately it must have given in because the book was published as R. Birrell, D. Hill and J. Nevill, Eds., Populate and Perish published by the Australian Conservation Foundation and Fontana, 1984. Nonetheless, future events would show that that old environmental flagship, the Australian Conservation Foundation, had been captured by the growth lobby.

Around this time a political party that was against a big population for environmental and social reasons, formed. This was Australians Against Further Immigration (AAFI). Initially they were welcomed as allies of the environmental movement against overpopulation. But then some of them came out against multiculturalism and specifically against Chinese immigration. They were then hounded down by the press and government spokespeople and stigmatised as racist.

Organisations who defined themselves as purely ecological were careful to distinguish themselves from AAFI in public situations.

This was my own first experience of 'wedge politics', where it does not matter if you have some things in common with another group; if that group has unfashionable ideas as well your group will be punished by the press and other social police for associating with it. This weakened the environmental movement against population growth because a lot of its members would also have been concerned about the social effects of multiculturalism and those people could not express their concerns in the environmental organisations.

It is very unhealthy to create a situation where people in the same country cannot discuss important issues, but are instead expected to be rude to anyone who seems to have a different opinion. It is natural for people to be curious and want to know all about important social issues, to explore every angle - but this is strongly discouraged in Australia these days. The way that immigration is treated is as a religion, if you define a religion as a creed where some things cannot be discussed because it is against the rules and you have to have faith. This is not much different from the political differences between sunnis and shiites when neither side can safely evaluate the other's point of view. This kind of wedge politics makes us ripe for manipulation; it is a great way to limit citizens' knowledge and stop them from organising.

I was never bothered by different races/ethnicities; I was raised with neighbours of various origins and played with bush aboriginal children. It was numbers that bothered me - until - I stumbled over in the Multicultural Foundation of Australia big business connections linked to the nuclear industry, to property development (engineering) and more. Most astounding was the membership of the Foundation - almost entirely composed of past and present prime ministers and opposition leaders. It was founded by bob Hawke in (from memory) 1985. Its has hugely financial national and international network although almost no funds, as far as I can work out. I have been writing about this now for a few years and my articles get thousands of reads, but no-one know how to tackle this or where to take it because of how high it goes. It's something that all Australians need to see for what it is, but of course none of the mass media would ever look at it; they know where their bread and butter lies. See Multicultural foundation tag

"Others at this meeting warned for lack of social cohesion and were booed! Booed! Yet I bet these same people will complain about lack of social cohesion and infighting..."

I don't understand what you mean here. Do you mean that those same people will complain elsewhere about lack of social cohesion etc? I was at that meeting too, but I thought that Kelvin Thomson's view was (a) the multicultural horse has left the stable so closing the door is no longer effective and so it is a non-issue, and (b) the concern of Victoria First is numbers, not ethnicity. Thomson had already announced this and for me the logical thing was, if people wanted to have an organisation about what kinds of immigrants Australia takes, then they would be welcome to form one and to invite people to join it.

It seems to me that there are two concepts here: One is How many immigrants and the other is What kind of immigrants? It seems to me that the first one has precedence.

"Or smaller homes. How many people back 30 years ago said we need to share our wealth, that we have too much? How many people even TODAY say we should share our wealth and space. I heard this 20 years ago any ANYONE who objected was pilloried as a 'racist'. Any one who said "no room" was a bigot."

The business about sharing the wealth comes from the same place that the innumerate estimates of Australia's population come from. People are very poorly educated. They can be born and bred here and not even realise that they live at the edge of an enormous desert. They think cities begin and end with the buildings; it doesn't occur to them that huge moving machines called 'farms' and mines cover half the countryside in order to support them. They read often enough in the Australian and the Age or hear on TV or the ABC that we are a big, empty, wealthy country and they believe it. That's the power of authority; the authority imbued in the press. People believe what the media tells them more than they trust their own eyes.

Yes, you are right. People were taught to fear the consequences of expressing unfashionable opinions about multiculturalism. In fact they were terrified. It does seem that probably a majority of people do dislike multiculturalism and a high immigration flow particularly if it is from very varied origins, however they have been taught not to express this.

How were they taught? Well, the treatment meted out to AAFI was pretty awful, but what happened to Pauline Hanson was frankly terrifying. As she gained in popularity, the major parties treated her as a serious threat and they don't treat serious threats with kid-gloves. Wedge politics came out in force and people simply did not dare to attend her meetings for fear of being outed. Those who did attend her meetings (arguably very brave people with the courage of their convictions) were physically attacked by thugs from the Socialist Alliance etc. The photographs of people attending the meetings were also published in the press, which meant their neighbours and employers would recognise them.

Middle class people and intellectuals do not get involved in that kind of thing and, besides, they were sympathetic to multiculturalism; they held, as Katharine Betts argued in her Immigration Ideology, 'cosmopolitan values'. There was a great divide between them and the majority of Australians, it seems.

Despite this a lot of people continued to attend those meetings. Finally, John Howard made noises as if he was quite sympathetic to the reasons that people supported Hanson. This probably caused a lot of Hanson supporters to direct their preferences to him over the ALP. Then, in the wake of the Port Arthur Massacre, he banned guns. This endeared him to the middle classes and fashionable intellectuals who had formerly hated him because he seemed not of their class and because he had been sent into the political wilderness years before for expressing anti-Asian immigration ideas. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that he managed to bott quite a large portion of Hanson's support base for a while.

I can't remember if he massively upped immigration before or after Hanson was imprisoned, but it must have been very convenient to have her locked away, along with one of her political associates. They were both exonerated after several months in prison but, their political opportunities had come and gone whilst they were locked up.

Perhaps more important, what did people seeing what happened to Pauline Hanson learn? They learned that, not only could you be embarassed and even beaten up if you tried to fight high immigration because of your social values, but that the Australian Government would have no qualms about throwing you into prison for it.

But, infinitely worse, infinitely shocking, so bizarre and unthinkable that people may wonder if they imagined this, our current Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, raised the money to prosecute Pauline Hanson which permitted her to be prosecuted and sent to prison.[6]

"And speaking of "racism", the term which any anti-growth advocate is deathly afraid of, was it not demanded that racism not be tolerated? That xenophobia has no place in Australia? Wasn't one of the BIG "achievements" of the boomer generation 'breaking down barriers'? So now the property lobby can use it and scare the population away from our cause. Nice."

I was not aware that this was a 'baby-boomer' achievement. I thought it was a cultural change engineered by successive governments. I always thought that racism in Australia was grossly exaggerated, and used as a label to gloss over other more acceptable objections - like wanting to protect your job, or wanting to stop more housing developments. Certainly calling people racist has been used often to try to shut people up who objected to overdevelopment. These days they even intimidate people into saying, "We're not against 'development', just 'poorly designed developments' etc. as if it were somehow unreasonable to be against having everything covered by infrastructure.

I think that the property lobby was in on this from the beginning. They have funded a ton of pro-big population and multiculturalism literature from academics for years now. There has been no-one to fund the counter-arguments. The property development and business lobby have done this in Australia and in Britain for centuries. The Liberal Party was founded by immigrationist forces around the time of Federation.[5]

No-one knew about this except the people who benefited directly from it. Even Neville Hicks in This Sin and Scandal, Australia's Population Debate 1891-1911, Australian National University Press, Canberra, ACT, 1978 (a history of the anti-birthcontrol movement in Australia) misinterpreted the valuable data he accumulated, which showed me that property speculation united the powerful to prevent contraception and to promote mass immigration in order to save their investments in property and to prop up the banks. Maybe also he misinterpreted it because of the times he wrote in. His interpretation was to take seriously the rhetoric of the businessmen and politicians who tried to suppress abortion and contraception. This led him to believe that they were motivated entirely by religious convictions and prurient obsessions. Somehow he overlooked the fact that they were all on boards of organisations that faced bankruptcy if the land they had invested in did not regain value in the 1890s depression.

What has happened recently is that the internet has permitted a huge globalisation of the property market at the same time as we have lost almost all protection via the National Foreign Investment Board. In a country like Australia where there is no decoupling of work permits from immigration and where permanent immigration means real-time permanent, rather than just a year as it does in most of Western Europe, this means disastrous loss of control.

"Both partners having to work. Feminists were rallying against the "patriarchy" and insisting women should have the same opportunities as men. Now, like men, they can enjoy having to work to keep the family going. I grew up being told that suggesting that women perhaps would be better of at home instead of working was sexist and bigoted."

What happened was that the market charged whatever it could get and it went after both salaries. In other words the market profited from a social change that was clamoured for as a benefit. Of course, it wasn't really the "market" it was a government of land-speculators making rules whereby they helped to inflate the price of property. But you are talking to a land-tenure sociologist here and I know that women all once had land, just as female bears do. We lost it in many cultures, but not all, along the way, and overpopulation was part of the reason. In a socio-economic system where most citizens don't own much property, being able to earn a wage is a means to some freedom, and why would women not want to be free? However real freedom is owning land and assets and having a home to stay home in, IMHO. I personally would like fifty per cent of seats in parliament to be for women (not for 'women's issues' but for women's bums on seats) and I personally want our inheritance system to be reformed so that male and female children cannot be disinherited by their parents in favour of the spouse; so that male and female children all have the possibility of inheriting assets, preferably land; so that there would be no need to compensate a widower or widow for their partner's decease because the widow or widower would have their independent fortune. (This is the Napoleonic or Roman system that is in almost all European countries and similar systems prevail in many places. The Anglophone systems are very disempowering.)

I don't think people saw this coming, any more than they saw most things coming, because of their ignorance of how big business and government work together, because of their naive faith in an entirely false belief that they lived in a democracy and were empowered, and because they emotionally followed fashions as they humanly sought identity and political engagement. It was easy to mislead a bunch of disorganised, poorly educated, disaggregated, statistical cohorts who suffered from cultural cringe and an absence of historical knowledge.

"Bill Clinton in the 90's, said that white people would be a minority by 2040 in the USA and that this was good, and the crowd went wild, not with anger! I remember, and it still happens now, many people saying how great the world would be when "we" are not the majority, or mixed out, or whatever. That "we", these idiots didn't realise, that were being displaced were their children and grandchildren. Now they are complaining about their children and grandchildren not having a place after fighting people trying to secure it!"

I think our system will dispossess anyone, white or brown. I believe that what is happening to Australia is the same thing that happened to Africa and India, the Solomans and Easter Island - disorganisation, dispossession, loss of self-government through colonisation by superior numbers and or forces. I don't believe that changing colours will make all that much difference, but you probably don't either. What really changes is one's social organisation; one's real empowerment through clan and territorial connections. See Demography Territory and Law, The Rules of Animal and Human Population, Countershock Press, Australia, 2013. (Kindle) Also available as paperback here: Paperback edition. My book is all about this.
The fact that I think the British-inherited system we live under is totally wrong means that I am not a person who believes that a solution for us lies in British immigration (as Pauline Hanson did, I believe). I think we need to allow our population to decrease, but I have already written a lot about that.

"I'm not leveling this at you personally, as I will give you the benefit of the doubt."

I was personally always shocked by the injustice and judgementalness and the sheer disregard for democracy meted out to people who tried to stand up for their rights as they perceived them. I was disgusted and dismayed at the impact of wedge politics which seemed to use these differences of opinion to corral people into very narrow associations and to demonise people who, at time of Federation, would all have talked civilly together. I saw what was happening as the destruction of democracy. I made a decision that the message I wanted to get out was ecological; it was the disappearance of green spaces and freedom to move, of biodiverse surroundings. To get that message out I could not afford to get involved in defending specific peoples' rights, however I did get to expose what was happening, as I am doing now. I also received a lot of poor treatment myself by people who mistakenly thought that I was fighting for discriminatory immigration policies.

"In ALL those examples, there were plenty of warnings. In all those examples, honest appraisal would have hinted at this outcome. But this wasn't allowed, because it didn't fit with the ideology. Because any opinion that didn't fit the morality was just wrong. It COULDN'T be right. There is this thinking that something which sound offensive must be wrong. Not just morally wrong, but scientifically wrong and logically wrong."

Yes, you are right; it did not fit with the ideology that the middle classes and fashionable intellectuals casually absorbed or that was taught to them from kindergarten through primary school and secondary school. As to why people did not imagine what could happen further down the track in terms of huge populations, skyrocketing prices and loss of human rights - it seems to me that most people responded to herding. They were afraid of what would happen to them if they resisted going in the direction they were being pushed and they accepted with more or less relief any rationale that the dogs herding them gave for forcing them into ever-narrowing choices, rationales that suggested that Australia was a big rich land, that we would all get cleverer, that sacrifices must be made for 'progress' and that 'progress' was an evolutionary pathway of a chronologically forward nature which always led to more and better stuff and to freedom and power in the end.

"Now, so it doesn't appear that I'm just attacking boomers, I'll use a Gen X example, because I acknowledge its not a unique generation thing, its just most VISIBLE in that generation."

I can't comment on where it is most prevalent. I was counselling a 30 year old mentally ill man recently who lived in utter precarity. He had a one room flat in public housing that he was too afraid to sleep in because someone had died in it before he moved in and their imprint was still on the carpet and the level of violence in those flats was terrifying. He said, "I'm tormented by my racist thoughts of resentment towards all the refugees that have public housing and contribute to the difficulties and violence." This was the first time I had thought about the impact that refugees (including accepted asylum seekers) might have on public housing demand. Until then I had thought that the number of refugees is so tiny that they pale into insignificance next to economic immigrants. However if there is an accumulated concentration of several thousand refugees over a few years in a limited quantity of public housing, it is obvious that there will be an impact. It's a fact that a lot of poor refugees do finish up in the public housing system and that it is full of violence. This guy did not feel that he could speak up because to him his resentments seemed to have a racist basis. So he could not formulate a statement that he had a right to decent housing as a citizen and if that right was being negatively affected by numbers of immigrants, then he had a right to demand a reduction in immigration. His solution was to couch-surf and sleep on benches, as he slid towards suicide. You will not be surprised to hear that he felt entirely worthless.

"Gen X still want tolerance, no hate, for a diverse society of all races to live peacefully. As a result, we've had to limit free speech and begin policing people who's thoughts might upset this. NSA have a massive surveillance program in place. I'm sure Australia has the same. The UK do too, they used it to arrest people who threaten 'tolerance'. They use it AGGRESSIVELY, but none of these people who object to a growing police state protested this."

As I have written, if they saw it coming, they were afraid, or, if they fought it, they were made to suffer. It helps that generations now have lived in cities and have no idea of how all the other creatures depend on their local ecology remaining intact. And that we do ultimately as well, and that you cannot self-govern via the global market.

Now, in the future when my daughter finds out that she's living in a 1984 style world (maybe), she's going to blame Gen X/Y, RIGHTFULLY. We'll say (not me, we), "Oh, we fought AGAINST that. WE didn't ASK for surveillance, for video cameras everywhere". But its NOT true. We lauded those who used surveillance to dob in 'racists' on public transport. We demanded that hate speech not be tolerance. We said, time and time again, there are LIMITS to free speech. To make this happen, you need surveillance. We overlooked when police arrested someone for something they said in private.

I guess you bring me back to reality here. I do not believe that I ever did this. However I have seen groups revel in righteous indignation and the pursuit of people they thought were political outlaws. Once people did this to the tribe down the track when they had a bone to pick. Now our 'tribes' are temporary alliances, like brands, formed through identification with marketed values etc; and our loyalties and controls are easily manipulated; there are very few real sources of orientation. In an industry where I work, I have seen over 20 years, a degrading of trust and work conditions, a kind of dog-eat-dog ethos, a psychopathic pursuit of power and the reduction of normal people into cowards and tell-tales. This seems to me to be the result of bureaucracy and the abolition of the seniority system, which at least gave a lot of organic social structure to industry before, tempered the naked ambition and brought stability and safety. The majority of people, as far as I can see, don't want this, but they don't know how to get out of it. I think the way out is to talk about it, as we are doing here.

NOTES

[1] "[...] opinion polls on immigration found widespread disapproval of the source countries that contributed the most to ethnic and cultural diversity. An Age Poll of July 1971 produced close to a majority for severely restricting Italian and Greek migrants, with only three to four per cent believing that the government should recruit them." Mark Lopez, "The Politics of the origins of multiculturalism: Lobbying and the power of influence, Paper at 10th Biennial Conference of the Australian Population Association, Year 2000.

[2] "A history of politics and population in Australia: Thomas Malthus in Australian thought"

[3] "Overpopulation, immigration, multiculturalism and the White Australia policy"

[4]Leone Sandercock, The Land Racket (1979) and Property, Politics and Urban Planning (1990).

[5] Chapter 6 of Sheila Newman, The Growth Lobby and its Absence, RMIT Thesis, 2000.

[6] "Yes it is true. In 1998, Tony Abbott, John Wheeldon (former ALP Senator) and William "Peter" Coleman (a former NSW Liberal Opposition Leader and father-in-law to Peter Costello) established a trust fund (aka slush fund) titled "Australians for Honest Politics" with the express purpose of raising funds to fight against Pauline Hanson and One Nation, who were at the time drawing traditional Coalition voters away from the Coalition.

The slush fund raised around $100,000.

Tony Abbott has always refused to reveal who was behind the funding of this slush fund, although in 2003, ABC's Lateline revealed that Western Australian businessman Harold Clough was believed to be one of those who contributed funds.

You can view a copy of Abbott's trust fund here.

It should be noted that this was a particularly grubby chapter of Tony Abbott's political life, and has been partially covered here.

If you are interested, there is an excellent timeline of events relating to Tony Abbott and his slush fund covered here." Source: "Tony Abbott FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)"

Denniss, are you saying that Gen Y is more politically savvy than the Baby Boomers? Are you also saying that the Baby Boomers should have taken some sort of action or protested at a time when things seemed to be going OK yet now that things are obviously going down the gurgler, it's understandable for disillusioned Gen Y to sit on on its collective hands and blame its parents?

Dennis K wrote:

Your generation actually said that history had ended because the end had been reached!

Such a generalisation about the whole of the Baby Boomer generation cannot be true. As you should know, it was an individual right-wing 'free market' ideologue Francis Fukuyama who made this pronouncement after what was labeled 'socialism' was overthrown in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

As history was supposedly 'ending' in 1991, with the dissolution of the former Soviet Union by the corrupt drunkard President Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007) the United States was starting a succession of wars against Iraq which have, so far, cost many hundreds of thousands of lives (3,300,000 according to one estimate). Other bloody wars which have begun since history supposedly ended in 1991 include:

  • The break-up the former republic of Yugoslavia;
  • the 9/11 false flag terrorist attack and the invasion of Afghanistan for which 9/11 was the pretext;
  • The invasion of Libya in 2011;
  • The terrorist proxy war against Syria which has so-far cost 130,000 lives;
  • Meddling in the Ukraine by the United States in order to replace a democratically elected government with a puppet of the United States;

The concept of a baby boomer now exists - and it has reality in Australian's minds - even if the exact period is nebulous. It is pretty easy for Gen Y's to define - one possibility is the people who when under 30 years old had the option of spending less than one half million dollars on a basic house. And most likely the house was in a nice suburb with a backyard, and not 1 hour or more from the city (although this definition includes many Gen X'ers). I would imagine that some sort petition would do in terms of an apology. I am a Gen Xer, but I am happy to post an apology to my kids for not doing more earlier. It is not that hard. But first one must wake up. There are plenty of sites that support petitions easily.

I'm not sure why anyone would have assumed immigration would end. Was there back then, a goal which the government and academia spoke of? Or was it just wishful thinking? Even today, I ask people "at what point does Australia become 'diverse' enough?" and there is NEVER an answer. Because the answer is it never will be. So I KNOW what will happen in the future, but no one really cares because it seems A-OK today. So a massive problem is unfolding, which of course, everyone will deny they ever supported when called to account. Thats where I think there is a generation gap. Boomers I find still have faith in the system, just not some of the people. Your generation actually said that history had ended because the end had been reached! The world as it was when they grew up, they believe was good, it just went bad due to bad people. Younger ones distrust the system, entirely. They are realising that it was bad to begin with and see Boomers as people who got theirs while the getting was good. There is no going back now. There is no 'unwinding'. In short, we know that history hasn't ended. The moral problems haven't been resolved. The final 'good' hasn't come. As I said, when I discuss issues like this with older people, its always about 'planning permits', and 'this minister', or 'lobby this person/group'. When I discuss it with younger people, the problem is the system itself. It just occurred to me perhaps the reason the representation at Vic First was generally older was not so much because of young people being busy, but because its the older people who still have faith at a political solution, WITHIN our current system can actually work.

I think a lot of baby boomers, like me, didn't object to ongoing immigration levels during the 1980s and 1990s because we had jobs and housing was affordable. The levels were lower then, and so was our total population. Nobody thought it would continue to our detriment, but also be massively increased! We assumed that our borders were under control, and so was immigration - that it would wind down once the effects became detrimental and heavy on living standards, jobs, housing costs and the environment. The "white Australia" immigration policy ended, so who would not have assumed that immigration itself would not wind up once Australia reached a maximum, comfortable population size? Also, it's incremental, making it easier to overlook, and harder to assess in the long term. Also, baby boomers are not sitting on a mountain of wealth! Superannuation schemes have been slashed, due to the GFC. They find it hard to get jobs, due to age-ism. Pensions are almost impossible to get, and staying in the family home is expensive, due to council rates and cost of utilities. Many must maintain their adult children, in the family home, due to the impossible high costs of housing and mortgages. It's convenient to pitch generations against each other at this diverts from the real cause of hardship - poor policies based on on-going growth and corporate greed.

Churchill said if anyone wanted a good argument against democracy, spend 5 minutes talking to the average voter. It is a great ideal, but representative democracy I don't think can work. It is a system where people can vote themselves the treasury, where those who influence others gain power. Science is now showing that people make decisions based on biology, their inbuilt prejudices, and HOW the problem is framed. Rationality has far less to do with it that we thought. Experiments have been able to see the brain making a decision and predict what it is, before the person making the decision has even started thinking about it. What appears to be a rational choice, was actually made before you thought about it. Likewise, there is ample evidence to show that how a person makes a 'rational' decision has a lot to do with how the question is framed, or their psychology. That is, I don't believe that democracy could ever provide decisions made due to informed consent. Democracy I don't believe, actually provide ANY consent. The democratic decisions is perhaps in a minority due to free will.

An estimated 100 elephants will be killed across Africa today. Poached, in all likelihood, in front of their families. Their tusks ripped off to meet the global greed for ivory.

A group of volunteers has been flying over Kenya's Tsavo National Park counting elephants, and have found in preliminary results that numbers are down from 12,500 three years ago, to about 11,000.
It does appear to be the smallest recorded population since 2002.
Poaching remains a huge problem and it is believed as many as 30,000 African elephants are killed every year for their ivory tusks. Fines for possession of ivory used to be about $130, but now it is more than $250,000. (Why shouldn't anyone found guilty of murdering an elephant, or being an accessory to the fact, be put in jail? - Ed)

By some estimates more than 80 elephants die every day across Africa simply for their tusks, but that is not the only challenge the animals face. It's not just the ivory trade that's threatening the elephants' existence but human encroachments on their land. There's been development of infrastructure such as houses, roads, market places and so on," said Dr Charles Musyoki, head of species research at the Kenya Wildlife Service.

Elephants have been credited with stampeding over houses and eating entire harvests leaving the subsistence farmers in their wake homeless and hungry as a result.

There are three things that are responsible for the African elephant’s move towards complete extinction:

  1. an ever increasing human population,
  2. the harmful effects of climate change, and
  3. criminal poaching ventures.

Sub-Saharan Africa will record the world’s largest population growth from 1.1 billion to 2.4 billion people between 2013 and 2050. By the year 2050 the current population in Africa will have more than doubled by 1.3 billion people making Sub-Saharan Africa the largest growing region in the world.

Delegates from around 50 countries will descend on London for the world’s largest ever conference on the illegal wildlife trade with the aim of changing the trend of elephant's demise. The event, hosted by the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, and attended by the Prince of Wales, will hear that as many as 50,000 elephants are being poached each year to satisfy the booming ivory market, driven largely by China. The country's insatiable and destructive appetite for economic growth comes at a great cost to the world's natural resources, and an intelligent iconic animals. The world "poaching" has connotations of chicken-stealing, and is inadequate to describe the horrendous and cruel loss of animal lives, and the criminality of the human race!

Unless they also solve the human overpopulation crisis, and the elephants' dwindling habitats, they will plug up one threat, and ignore the other!

Independent- UK: If we fail the African forest Elephant will blink out within our lifetimes

Dennisk wrote:

...how many boomers in the 60's and 70's wanted immigration restrictions? How many wanted immigration laws loosened?

...

Or smaller homes. How many people back 30 years ago said we need to share our wealth, that we have too much? How many people even TODAY say we should share our wealth and space. ...

...

In ALL those examples, there were plenty of warnings. In all those examples, honest appraisal would have hinted at this outcome. But this wasn't allowed, because it didn't fit with the ideology.

What you write of is not the consequence of informed consent by the baby boomers. It is the consequence of Australian democracy (like the democracies of so many other countries around the world) having been subverted by the 1975 coup against the Labor Government of Gough Whitlam as described in the book the CIA – a Forgotten History 1 by William Blum. Chapter 40, entitled Chapter 40: Australia - 1973-1975: Another free election bites the dust in 1975, shows how the Labor government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, Lionel Murphy and Rex Connor, which put the interests of ordinary Australians ahead of foreign and domestic corporations, was overthrown in the coup of 1975.2

What is not as well appreciated is that after the 1975 coup, instead of remaining an effective opposition, the Labor Party has been, since its defeat at the 1980 Federal elections (if not sooner), whiteanted by corporate glove puppets within, including Paul Keating, Anna Bligh and Peter Beattie and the well-known CIA operatives Bob Hawke and Bob Carr.

In subsequent years, when the Labor Party regained office at the national level and in various states, it implemented even more extreme free market policies than the supposedly more right-wing coalition of the Liberal and National Parties. Naomi Klein should have included a chapter in her book The Shock Doctrine (2007) about the mis-rule of Australia by Hawke and Keating. Sadly, she did not.

Footnotes

1. This book has since been re-published with the title
Killing Hope – U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II

2. The subversion of Australian democracy was also observed by Christopher Boyce who, in 1974, began work in a communications center in California through which CIA cables were routed. There, he learnt that the CIA acted to remove the Labor Government in 1975 and, prior to that, the democratically elected Chilean government of President Salvadore Allende. Allende died in the military coup of 1973. This convinced Boyce that he should oppose his own government by spying for the then Soviet Union. This is described in the book The Falcon and the Snowman and the movie of the same name.

Anonymous, your 'Who is the leader of the babyboomers?' is wonderful.

There is no leader of the babyboomers because all they are is a statistical construction befitting a book by Lewis Carrol or Bernard Salt, who has written several books turning statistical constructions into fictitious social classes. He has been so successful that people now believe that such classes exist. The ABC interviews him about them, government attempts to legislate around them, and people go witch-hunting them.

But a leader for the babyboomers will appear, just as we have ethnic leaders and environmental leaders; someone to push their own agenda in the guise of representing the Baby Boomer Class cannot fail to take advantage of this opportunity.

The leader of the Baby Boomers needs to report in here if not to apologise immediately, at least to discuss the grievances and report back to a full meeting of Baby Boomers for consideration.

Quark you say: " At best you could use your call for an apology as a publicity stunt to alert the sleep- walking public as to what is happening, but you would be hunting down the wrong group." An apology is NOT a publicity stunt. It requires significant humility on the part of Boomers. It would mean a lot to Gen Y's and Gen Z's (not to mention Gen X's). I know people very well who are very bitter about the past selfish behaviours of Boomers, and how those behaviours have affected them - significantly. An apology is essential to these people to repair their relationships and allow them to focus on the real task of rebuilding society. An apology would also be significant in many other ways - it would indicate a rejection of the selfish, consumerism of the past and may facilitate deep reflection, not just in Boomers, but in the generations following who may have picked up selfish ways of thinking and behaving and who have not questioned that because that is now how almost everyone behaves! An open rethinking by Boomers could lead to a complete re-assessment of our value system across all Australian society. This one act in itself could be the most meaningful act that Boomers ever do in their lives! And it would majorly offset any harmful feelings they have created. Of course, there are Boomers who have worked hard to fix problems, but they are in a minority - I know I have been involved with them (as one of the few "youngsters" - and I am not that young) and they are the same tiny core of people who have been working tirelessly for years! Often 40 years or more. Others may have done bits and pieces here and there, but not put themselves out too much. Sheila is not wrong in saying Boomers were manipulated, and that they are not all well off - no one is denying that. But the darker truth is that manipulation succeeds by appealing to the base desires of people and/or their indolence. Of course manipulation serves the elite, but it achieves its aims by promising to benefit the selfish desires of the masses. Thus many Boomers may not have wanted our utilities to be privatised, and possibility felt this quite strongly - but because of indolence they did not take action! And the privatisations and other things went ahead. Others perhaps said nothing as they felt that they could make money or for other selfish reasons. Who knows. Many may not have spoken out against high immigration given that it leads to more customers, promotions, higher wealth for those already here, etc. Awareness of this may have been enough for many to not speak out strongly about possible drawbacks. In any case, an apology would put all these issues to bed - especially if it is followed up with serious intent to correct the situation - whether created on purpose or not! Things are getting very desperate. The other generations need the Boomers help and support! And they need to know the Boomers are behind them and condemn what has been created (even though created in part by them). SO PLEASE PUT YOUR HUBRIS AND PRIDE ASIDE AND ADMIT THAT MAYBE THINGS COULD HAVE BEEN DONE BETTER - AND DEFINITELY NEED TO CHANGE NOW. BOOMERS - PLEASE TAKE RESPONSIBILITY AND HELP YOUR KIDS AND GRANDKIDS.

I think boomers may be able to stop a high rise here, or road there, but no meaningful change. The ideas which can actually effect any change, and KEEP it are just forming. And I will say again, this isn't unique to boomers. There are many younger ones who are the same, its just that I can find some Gen Y who are morally quite different, but I can't with boomers. I do appreciate what you do, there is no doubt about it, and I'm grateful for all that contribute. Nothing against anyone here. I'm just saying that self introspection is needed. Australia is not the only country which had a property boom, or mass immigration or decline in living standards. I chat with many Americans, and see similar problems there, Chinese investment pushing up prices, casualisation ,loss of open space, push for growth. Australia's problems are more focused on real estate, because we have a weird real estate fetish culture in Australia which is not new. Auctions are rare in other countries, but ALWAYS been common here. Auctions generally exacerbate prices. My point is that our problems are kind of generic "western problems", not specifically just caused by a few developers or Matthew Guy. These are symptoms of an underlying problem, and that problem resides in us.

I can ask for a lot of things, but the things I ultimately agitate for, determine the outcome. This is what you are missing. When you put an idea into motion, the outcome isn't the outcome that your ideology says should happen, but the outcome that nature says will happen.

Take immigration for example, how many boomers in the 60's and 70's wanted immigration restrictions? How many wanted immigration laws loosened? If I remember correctly, a few at Vic First prided themselves on loosening standards. Now they are complaining about the outcome. How else do you end a 'white Australia', without mass immigration? What did this person expect to happen?

Others at this meeting warned for lack of social cohesion and were booed! Booed! Yet I bet these same people will complain about lack of social cohesion and infighting...

Or smaller homes. How many people back 30 years ago said we need to share our wealth, that we have too much? How many people even TODAY say we should share our wealth and space. I heard this 20 years ago any ANYONE who objected was pilloried as a 'racist'. Any one who said "no room" was a bigot.

And speaking of "racism", the term which any anti-growth advocate is deathly afraid of, was it not demanded that racism not be tolerated? That xenophobia has no place in Australia? Wasn't one of the BIG "achievements" of the boomer generation 'breaking down barriers'? So now the property lobby can use it and scare the population away from our cause. Nice.

Both partners having to work. Feminists were rallying against the "patriarchy" and insisting women should have the same opportunities as men. Now, like men, they can enjoy having to work to keep the family going. I grew up being told that suggesting that women perhaps would be better of at home instead of working was sexist and bigoted.

Bill Clinton in the 90's, said that white people would be a minority by 2040 in the USA and that this was good, and the crowd went wild, not with anger! I remember, and it still happens now, many people saying how great the world would be when "we" are not the majority, or mixed out, or whatever. That "we", these idiots didn't realise, that were being displaced were their children and grandchildren. Now they are complaining about their children and grandchildren not having a place after fighting people trying to secure it!

I'm not leveling this at you personally, as I will give you the benefit of the doubt.

In ALL those examples, there were plenty of warnings. In all those examples, honest appraisal would have hinted at this outcome. But this wasn't allowed, because it didn't fit with the ideology. Because any opinion that didn't fit the morality was just wrong. It COULDN'T be right. There is this thinking that something which sound offensive must be wrong. Not just morally wrong, but scientifically wrong and logically wrong.

Now, so it doesn't appear that I'm just attacking boomers, I'll use a Gen X example, because I acknowledge its not a unique generation thing, its just most VISIBLE in that generation.

Gen X still want tolerance, no hate, for a diverse society of all races to live peacefully. As a result, we've had to limit free speech and begin policing people who's thoughts might upset this. NSA have a massive surveillance program in place. I'm sure Australia has the same. The UK do too, they used it to arrest people who threaten 'tolerance'. They use it AGGRESSIVELY, but none of these people who object to a growing police state protested this.

Now, in the future when my daughter finds out that she's living in a 1984 style world (maybe), she's going to blame Gen X/Y, RIGHTFULLY. We'll say (not me, we), "Oh, we fought AGAINST that. WE didn't ASK for surveillance, for video cameras everywhere". But its NOT true. We lauded those who used surveillance to dob in 'racists' on public transport. We demanded that hate speech not be tolerance. We said, time and time again, there are LIMITS to free speech. To make this happen, you need surveillance. We overlooked when police arrested someone for something they said in private.

I implore everyone to read Sheila Newman's comment headed "Why talk about Baby Boomers as if they are all rich and housed?". (quark, you can link to Sheila's comment as follows: <a href="#comment-116760">"Why talk about Baby Boomers as if they are all rich and housed?"</a> - Ed) It is an expose of the little understood situation which continues NOW to erode living standards and quality of life in Australia for the majority and to destroy our environment. It is ongoing! We, (that's all of us) have even more responsibility now than did previous generations as the decline is now VERY RAPID. Twenty years ago it was not as noticeable. The requests for an apology as for the indigenous stolen generation or to the mothers in the general population who had their babies taken from them (this is what is sounding like) are not going to remedy the situation and amount to wallowing and inaction. Furthermore, the abominable practices referred to specifically had stopped at the time of the apologies. In this case it continues. At best you could use your call for an apology as a publicity stunt to alert the sleep- walking public as to what is happening, but you would be hunting down the wrong group. The big business elites would think all their Christmases had come at once. It’s scarier to confront them than to complain about a whole generation who are diverse in terms of culture, education and means. I suggest we do NOT go along with this split across generations, so often encouraged by the media and try together to regain our rights. There are heaps of local groups largely populated with members of the BB generation trying to save natural areas. A couple individuals I know have spent the last 30 years trying to save our forests. A group has been trying to save Royal Park for a decade or more and have the fight of their life on their hands right now 1 as a road is about to be built right through it. It’s the same process of endless growth that erodes our natural areas that makes housing unaffordable.

Rather than wasting their time and the precious time of the rest of us, in extracting an apology, please join in and help and most importantly, educate yourselves on what is happening. This is difficult because the corporate media do not want you to understand what is happening and their news is confusing to everyone who relies on it. Gen Z and the generation after may not be grateful to you for your perseverance as the next generation takes things for granted if things are good. That’s to be expected. If they are not grateful and as children just enjoy their lives then you/we will have succeeded.

Footnote[s]

1. Quark, you can link to another article on candobetter, for example, Sheila's article "The last summer for Royal Park?", as follows:
<a href="/?q=node/3685">"Why talk about Baby Boomers as if they are all rich and housed?"</a>
To link to that article from another site (as I encourage all contributors and visitors to do) you would use:
<a href="http://candobetter.net/?q=node/3685">"Why talk about Baby Boomers as if they are all rich and housed?"</a>
... or, possibly:
<a href="https://candobetter.net/?q=node/3685">"Why talk about Baby Boomers as if they are all rich and housed?"</a>
- Ed

The other thing to keep in mind - which Sheila hints at - is that the younger generations are going to be (and many already are) very angry about their situation. Certainly the manipulators would like to direct this anger away from them to the Boomers as a group - and there is no doubt growing anger about our situation in Gen X (and Gen Y particularly). An apology by Boomers and serious visible attempts to support them and to correct things is perhaps a very effective strategy to defuse that anger and redirect energies in more positive ways. Of course, I am not suggesting that an insincere apology be given just for these purposes, I am just pointing out what effect it might have.

Thanks for that enlightening exposition. There is no doubt manipulation has been taking place (as you explain). My concern is that this type of manipulation has always been going on, and always will go on. Thus as a community we need to be much more watchful of the stories that are told, and much more awake to and wary of manipulations. Acknowledging that we have been manipulated, and the consequences of this seems important to me (rather than denial). I am not suggesting that Boomers are any better or worse people that Gen X's or Gen Y's, and I am aware that many are not well off, and some groups worse than others - the Vietnam vets for one, who have been treated terribly. And I am not suggesting that a generational war or blame game would be useful here, I am just suggesting that a little self reflection, and facing some honest truths, might be useful. One of these truths seems to be that the Boomer generation went along with a system of lies and distortions that was to their detriment, and also that of subsequent generations. That all said, we do need to fix these problems urgently. And in this regard the attitudes of all generations needs to change - as you suggest our communities are not as strong as perhaps others in the world, and thus we need to take much more interest in what is happening, and be much more active in resisting. I hope you have a better day tomorrow! Matt

Dennisk wrote:

The situation today is partly what people asked for.

So, other features of our society (as Sheila has noted), which Dennisk, presumably, thinks baby boomers asked for, include:

  • long daily commutes to and from work for the order of one or two hours in either direction;
  • both partners having to work for ever longer hours in order to pay rent, mortgage and meet other living expenses;
  • the credentials creep: ever longer-hours spent on the weekends and evenings to obtain the skills and qualifications necessary to gain promotion or even just to retain our existing job, where training had previously often been provided in the employer's time at the employer's expense;
  • more and more buildings and common land, including bushland on which people could meet and engage in recreation being privatised; and
  • free-standing homes with grass and dirt, in which we could grow food and flowers and on which children could play, are disappearing and being replaced by ugly sterile high-rise apartment blocks, the air-conditioning of which consumes vast quantities of electricity.

Hi DennisK, I agree with you about your assessment of people who want to sell to people overseas rather than to Australians in need of housing. However I don't see why you think they are responsible for the fact that this has become possible or a norm for the rich. And I don't know why you seem to think that such people typify babyboomers. You write, "The situation today is partly what people asked for." You then give an example of a middle-aged person who sought the opportunity to speculate on his property. (By the way there are plenty of young people who think this way too.) You say, "he got what he asked for. We FOUND people to buy them at increasing prices, foreign investors, and we FOUND a way for his daughter to buy a home in the coming years, a tiny unit miles from work and subdivision. A solution was found to keep his model of the world viable." Who is "we"? Do you really think this was some kind of democratic movement? I would put it to you that a very well-organised growth lobby devised this kind of economic benefit for itself, sold it to the media and to political parties (largely by showing them how they could enrich themselves through it). The political parties then, in government and opposition, colluded to make laws that would assist this speculative vision, to the great disbenefit of the majority of the population. The media which is invested in global property transactions and the television lifestyle programs etc then marketed this idea down the chain, turning the family home from shelter and social capital into a commodity. It was all snake oil except for those at the top, who controlled the initial investments. The bozos down the line, if they sold their homes for a lot of money, then had to pay tax to the state governments (which are very dependent on this) and then find somewhere else to live. They only way they can make any kind of profit, if they are lucky, is to downsize. If they are old they often find themselves isolated and traumatised by the move, poorer in social capital (well-known neighbours and services) and no better off financially. Who benefits? The banks and the developers (which are more and more the same thing.) There are many babyboomers who don't own houses and who struggle with high rents and to find employment or to survive on pensions. Women are well-represented within this number. Most women are quite poor and rely on the Commons to supplement their unreliable incomes. I don't like to reveal my personal circumstances on line but I assure you that I do not fall into the investment property circle. Plenty of babyboomers share their houses and intend to pass them on. Inheritance laws in Australia, however, do permit parents to disinherit their children, and for spouses to inherit the family home instead of children. This kind of law is common in anglophone countries, but is uncommon in other countries, where most systems ensure that children inherit first, so property gets passed down to children. In the absence of children it goes back to the parents of the deceased. In this way land and other assets are kept within families, clans and localities, focusing power locally. In the absence of direct inheritors land goes back to the state. In such systems, the government also provides public housing and does most of the development, housing is perceived as a cost and population growth is relatedly perceived as a cost - making it very hard for growth lobbiests to establish. The Anglophone inheritance and land-tenure system, on the other hand, promotes the idea that land is a commodity to be improved and resold to the highest bidder. Such systems tend to accrue wealth and power in private hands in a process that would take me too long to explain here. Accompanying this value is the idea that we must all work in order to be worthwhile and that people who own lots of property and other assets somehow deserve to be in positions of power over those who must work for them and pay them rent. We have very poorly developed citizenship here, poor solidarity. The economic system tears families and clans apart, leaving citizens almost no social structure or capital to organise against bad laws. Most of the work I do and candobetter.net aims for is the reform of this system. You write, "The situation today is partly what people asked for. But I don't think its due to an evil. It's due to our morality. Although I do find Boomer morality baffling, and at times ugly and evil." The growth lobby is a highly organised transnationally basedcommercial phenomenon . I think it is pretty evil in its total dedication to affecting Australian politics in order to enrich its members. It may have within its ranks a few real-estate employees who haven't worked out what they are doing to the country, but I haven't met any. I have met a few apologetic ones, but they are dependent on the system for their incomes. Since I started exposing what they do, the Property Council of Australia has become a little more discreet, but only in 2010, this is what its plans were. http://candobetter.net/?q=node/2830 They are shocking. Believe me, it has succeeded in those plans. Have a look at what a property council panel that included Bernard Salt had to say. http://candobetter.net/?q=node/2644 Also shocking, remarkable in its disrespect for truth and citizens' welfare. Yet the ABC frequently promotes such people as 'experts'. For instance, recently Waleed Aly invited a number of people to participate in a panel to discuss population growth in Australia inBig Ideas for Australia: Growing Pains. However he privileged the growthists by putting them on stage, each with their microphone, but he put the President of SPA Victoria and Tasmania in the front row of the audience, and only offered her a roving microphone, which was snatched away from her lips when she started to make any point. I never got a chance to use it. Bernard Salt, in the mean time, was promoted as if he were some kind of disinterested and distinguished expert. The growth lobby originated the kind of talk which has given rise to the divide and conquer between generations. The growth lobby constructed this straw babyboomer man and it is successfully marketing it to a mystified and angry people. The laws that made it possible to sell to foreigners in our country were changed by stealth, beginning with Fraser. Menzies privatised the housing industry. Whitlam tried to bring back substantial public housing and to bring down the cost by having the states undertake the land development for housing (which is what happens in France and many other countries in Europe). This was almost certainly a major source of Whitlam's unpopularity. Fraser started opening up the Foreign Investment laws and every pm after that opened them further. Now they are so wide open that Australia hardly functions as a national polity. It would not be so bad if we had kept our immigration and working permits separate, as they do on the continent, which means that people come in for a year, buy a house but then discover they cannot work, so they sell it back into the total housing stock. The tax system erodes speculative profit so serial house buying and selling does not pay there. Keating eroded foreign investment too but did made a slight gesture to protect built property, but even this protection was blown away under Howard or Rudd - can't remember which - both were pretty terrible. Currently land-clearing is encouraged by Foreign Investment policies that encourage new developments and housing over purchase of established housing. Land and housing go to the best currency, which creates a two tiered system of rich foreigners and poor natives (people born here). The average person has no idea of what is happening. They know they are being done over, but they don't understand how. This perception can be explained by the political theory of focused benefits and diffuse costs. The benefits to big asset holders (industries like property development, finance, building materials) of high immigration and wide-open foreign investment policy are focused. That means that the people in those industries know where the money comes from and how to maintain the flow. That is why the Property Council of Australia, the Real Estate institute, APop, the HIA and every state government are constantly finding ways to bring in more immigrants. For those who pay in tolls, taxes, high housing and commercial rents, high property prices, high student costs, high food, water, power costs, crowded roads, the way the system works is not very clear at all. It is easy to put them off with a false scent - such as to blame the baby boomers. Most people find it very hard to believe that their governments would not defend them from this kind of dispossession; it is like suggesting to them that their parents are evil. Environmentalists, wildlife defenders and people trying to protect their property rights and social capital in local areas are most aware of the link between population growth and property development because they are on the sharp end of the costs. How does someone who 'informs' themself by watching the ABC or reading the Australian, the Age, Herald Sun, or watching Seinfed, work out what is happening? All they hear is that growth is inevitable, that it's all really 'progress' therefore must be good for us, and that the baby boomers are being 'selfish'! In fact they hear all these lies from the cynical smiling lips of the property development and growth lobbyists first! I would like to know how the average baby boomer would know what was happening in a country ruled by the Murdoch and Fairfax Press (both beneficiaries and drivers of the global housing market). Check out Australian and State parliamentarians. So many are mixed up in property development. Look at the structure of our political parties, e.g. the ALP - it is practically a land speculation entity - see http://candobetter.net/?q=node/1781. I admit that I don't have the same info on the Libs or the Greens, but do you seriously think they are any different? Mr Rudd and Mr Swann, years ago in Queensland were important in putting the structures and investments in place that turned the ALP into a land-speculation phenomenon. I guess you could call me a babyboomer, but I have been fighting this for years now, writing expose after expose. And most of the other people I know who are fighting for property rights and against growth are also babyboomers and most of them are women, actually. See: http://candobetter.net/?q=node/2384 We all wonder where the hell the young people are to take over the fight. We assume that they are just as confused as the majority of the older folk. Sorry this is so long. Very hard day and meant to go to bed and not write anything. Hope I have defused some of this intergenerational hostility. More appropriate that it be inter class hostility.

Rudd apologised because there was a change in morality. The boomers made an error of judgement, thats different. The boomers aren't unique though, its just their influence is the most visible and most pronounced due to circumstances they inherited.

The situation today is partly what people asked for. But I don't think its due to an evil. It's due to our morality. Although I do find Boomer morality baffling, and at times ugly and evil.

I spoke to someone, Gen X, some years ago when the boom was taking off. He mentioned his investment property, and how rising prices were fantastic and they will just keep going up and up. Obviously a RE toady. I asked him how, if prices were going to just keep skyrocketing, how people will afford it in the future. He said wages would go up, and I pointed out that wages weren't going up the same rate, and if they did, prices would too, so whats the gain? So I asked again, if your property skyrockets, who's going to afford it? I said, how will your child afford it? He didn't have answers to the question. Didn't think about it. Just said that there will be people to buy it and she'll get a home.

So what we have is:

  1. A desire to sell ever inflated property, but NO idea who will pay; and
  2. No plan for how his child would be a home owner in this vision, apart from some vague notion that we might possibly be earning millions by then...

So he got what he asked for. We FOUND people to buy them at increasing prices, foreign investors, and we FOUND a way for his daughter to buy a home in the coming years, a tiny unit miles from work and subdivision. A solution was found to keep his model of the world viable.

Another example. Some retirees I spoke to (actually in relation to the sale of a property), said their generations philosophy (they are older than boomers) was to NEVER let go of property once you have it. I asked them, if retirees hold property, sometimes two or more, where the work is and schools were, where do you expect young people to go? I got a vague response, the kind you get when someones never considered it, about maybe buying further out is an option. I said, well if THEY never let go, what about their children? They said theirs would eventually free up and I said something like 'when?'. Then I got that look a cow gets when its been shown a card trick...

So here again, they are getting exactly what they asked for. They said the solution is when their homes are freed up. Now they are crying that the government is looking to free them up! How many times do people say "when the Boomers retire and move out, it will free property". I didn't see anyone say to this "what if they don't move out in time?".

Even with immigration, didn't people ask for this? The future of the world that I was told was necessary and an inevitability, was a future which could only made possible through mass immigration... Now they are complaining about it?

Generation analysts have also commented on this, that the Baby boomer generation have a kind of magical thinking, that what will happen is what SHOULD happen according to their morality. I would like them to accept there was a problem with their model. Won't happen though, we need a generational change.

Yes, I should emphasise here, that this is not so much a matter of laying blame (as said - I think Gen Y might just forgive the boomers and focus on fixing the problems) - but rather of accepting blame! Many of the boomers, and perhaps many Gen X's and some Gen Y's, are lost in a sea of selfishness - and the first step out would seem to me to be - as you suggest - recognition of this. It is fundamentally selfishness that leads to inaction and lack of concern regarding the plight of others, allowing one to "turn a blind eye". Occupy was a wake up call in regard to this, but luckily for many the police soon cleared this blot from their sight, and thus allowing their consciences to soundly sleep once again. Matt

I don't see it the same as with Rudds apology. Rudd apologised because we changed our morality, not because of error of judgement.

The Boomers made an error of judgement, I'll post why later today. People who support negative gearing really believe they are doing us a favour. People who buy houses, tear them down and subdivide really believe they are offering opportunities and making housing affordable. I explained how it actually drives up prices to a real estate agent and he honestly didn't get it. His brain literally stalled. My mother used to keep pushing me to buy investment properties and rent them, she believed this was doing good for people. I doubt they will apologise for doing the right thing.

The Growth lobby aren't malevolent, they really believe they are doing the right thing. If their scheme fails, they'll just change their tune and pretend it was that way all along.

Could somene please let us know what crime was committed by a whole generation against another that requres a collective apology? Are we talking genocide, murder, theft, aggavated cruelty? Please enlighten me.

... but not simply that.

An apology needs to be encompass sincere, accurate recognition of the problem that then leads to effective appropriate action. Otherwise it's just a platitude to cover over yet more of the same - as was KRudd's apology.

It will be hard to get any boomers to enact such sincere apology. They've either done well from these conditions and are neither inclined to risk a jot of it nor able to see through the denial that underpins their existence, or they've been excluded from and alienated by the plunder.

Russia Today (RT) has, in contrast to the lying Western corporate and government media, reported far more truthfully about the fight by the people of the world against the bloody attempts by the United States and it allies to impose their and corrupt rule over much of the globe, for example in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Venezuela and Syria.

On occasions RT has also reported well on the environmental threats to our planet. Contrary to "left wing" "political correctness", the threats from population growth and high immigration are also reported. An example is the article Labour's surrender monkeys dare not criticize Britain's conscript economy of 16 August 2013. This article was re-published on candobetter. This shows how high immigration into the United Kingdom, which is a condition of its membership of the European Union has, in recent years, destroyed the employment and eduction prospects of many young natives of Britain.

Unfortunately, amongst people, who rightly oppose imperialist war, can often also be found immigrant-rights campaigners who have no regard for the state of our environment or for the social cohesion of societies into which large numbers of immigrants wish to move.

One such person is Larry King. In Can America fix its broken immigration system?, he gives a platform to the extremist "open border" advocate United States actor Edward James Olmos. Olmos, and King argue for removal of any immigration controls into the United States on the grounds that:

  1. the hardship faced by existing illegal immigrants in the United States should be reduced;
  2. the ancestors of most of today's native American population previously immigrated from Europe;
  3. greedy United states corporations have exploited Latin America; and
  4. any person should have the right to cross any border anywhere he/she chooses.
    1. Curiously, even Olmos acknowledged that his own parents once opposed illegal immigration from Latin America into the United States, as do many United States citizens of his ethnicity.

      Evidently it has escaped their attention that, due to past high immigration and union-busting, the standards of living for most of United States' working class is already approaching that of the Third World

      Right at the end of this interview (after roughly 15 minutes), Olmos and King take this position to its logical and ludicrous extreme: If we are to allow free movement from Latin America into the United States, then why not also from other countries with even larger populations, such as China? They both acknowledged that this would add vastly more to the population of the United States, but claimed that this was morally necessary and inevitable.

Let me put forward this outrageous idea:

If the history of Australia since white settlement was to be summed up in one sentence, perhaps it could be this: "a failure to accept responsibility".

According to many Australians (for a long time anyway) white settlers were not really responsible for what happened to Aboriginal people here - whites were just ignorant, manipulated victims themselves (apparently). The lie of this was fought by Indigenous communities for decades - culminating in finally receiving a formal apology nearly 6 years ago to the day. Finally (after too long) it was acknowledged that aborigines were not responsible for their own slaughter and stolen generations. That perhaps many everyday white people had gone along with (or even contributed to) the slaughter, poisonings, etc, and yes, many of them did benefit from this in various ways.

Now we have a similar case with Baby Boomers. If Gen Y are impoverished debt slaves, it is (apparently) not the Baby Boomer's fault, they are not responsible (despite the fact they inherited a reasonable system from their parents). Well whose fault is it then? Certainly not the 22 year olds who now face paying one millions dollars for a basic family home in Mt Waverly (check the sales prices - this is no overstatement) on a part-time salary with union laws that make striking in many cases illegal (eg: once an EBA is signed)

Really Boomers, you need to face the facts that evil needs to be resisted. And the failure to resist it is just that - a failure!

Take the evil of negative gearing (welfare for the rich) which boomers did go along with and not universally decry - perhaps it was because most of them benefited directly or indirectly (through either investments or just plain house price rises). This is just one example. Can you see the pattern!

Imagine if the Germans after WWII claimed: "it is not our fault, we were manipulated, we are not in anyway responsible for Hitler and his atrocities". Obvious rubbish - many German citizens at the time did play a role. The honourable thing to do is to admit it - and then apologise. Not pretend that they had no responsibility at all.

How about a little less hubris from our boomers, and a little more humility and contrition? Then perhaps how about some action to help try and fix this mess? How about some people on the streets? How about some boomers outside Trade Minister Rob's office at 12.00 tomorrow. How about hitting the streets for things like March Against Monsanto (mostly young people there I noticed). Or is that all too hard? We will see when March in March comes around how many boomers are out there.

If my daughter grew up into a world where there is little freedom, surveillance and tracking everywhere, I would understand her generation blaming mine. I would show the work I've done trying to fight it, and maybe she'll think "well, Dad tried", but I wouldn't expect, not for a minute, for them to treat me different and not judge my generation as a group. Judging people as a group is often useful practice. So yes, I am actually aware that the apathy of my generation may cause resentment towards me, and I'm doing all I can to stop it. It may not be enough due to the apathy of my peers. Secondly, I don't actually expect retirees to not ask for anything less than top dollar, of course. I was pointing out that this is a fact which results in situations where we have to re-evaluate needs and wants when it comes to space. I do reserve the right to feel irritated though. Just because what they do is legal, and "part of the system", doesn't mean people have to accept it as moral. I don't care if the law says its legal and free market capitalism says its good, these are values which don't serve our needs now. Things like that must be evaluated in context of the time and place. They didn't anticipate this change. More accurately, they thought this social crisis wouldn't need a solution that involved them, despite the fact they may have been contributing. Or they failed to realise there was a crisis. Thats the nature of things. Surely the masses of retirees, living in family homes on their own in my suburb, where the school is closed down because people who want to start families can't afford to move here, would have realised something is odd? Something amiss? Or did they just accept the young people can't get decent homes, shrug their shoulders and move on and think that all will be right anyway. The younguns will just live in with their children until their children are 30 in bedsits and be happy to travel an hour towards work and not bother to cast an eye in their direction? Did they think that they could destroy backyards by selling them for profit, so they can continue to live a lifestyle that working people can't get, create more debt, and not have people say 'enough is enough'? A bit of self introspection and a bit more "hey, do you think this will end up meaning...." would have gone a LONG way during the 15 years or so this crisis has been building. Sadly, its human nature to do that, to believe those who tell you want you want to hear, to accept the impossible model of the world where you become rich defing logic, where you can take from others and they'll just accept it. Which just highlights the need for people to be very careful what they believe,how they model the world. If you stand in peoples way. They will knock you down. Values are re-evaluated. Suddenly, the 'right' to stay in your own home doesn't have the value it did before. I note that the UK is considering a similar scheme. It's all well and good to argue for lower immigration, but I need a solution soon, and I don't see the anti-immigration movement gaining ground fast enough to be useful. I think the far right are the only ones with a cohesive argument, but most people oppose them, even those who want to cut immigration! At least this is a potential plan which has analogues in other countries and could be put into practice soon. Lastly, intergenerational warfare isn't new, didn't the 60's generation go to war against their parents too?

Whatever the actual number of humans that the poor worn out continent of Australia can support, it should be heading back down as soon as possible. It can't do that straight away because the population is quite young (despite all this ageing obsession) and has many women in their child bearing years. They are not on the whole having big families. (most not as small as Tim's although some do it that way.) The more Australia adds to its population now (60% of Australia's population growth is immigration) the harder it will be to go back to a sustainable population that lives within the carrying capacity of the continent. One of the main indicators of over population is the continuing damage to the environement as shown in State of the Environment reports. We are headed inexorably in the wrong direction with a bunch of clowns in charge.

There's an absurd assumption that if we have free trade between nations, we must have free movement of people between the countries too. We have free trade with Japan, but Australians can't live freely in Japan, and they are not coming here in their hoards like the Chinese. They are actually patriotic and unified. Why should free trade mean open borders? It's considered by libertarians that open borders and immigration restrictions are a terrible injustice against people from Third World countries. Gallup polls have found that 700 million people would like to permanently move to another country, many of them from developing nations with failed political systems. Freedom of movement is considered a defining feature of what it means to be European. The UK has been at the forefront of these efforts, trying to limit immigration and restricting access to welfare. However, by imposing restrictions on the freedom of movement, the EU would be returning to the economic and cultural nationalism it was meant to overcome. What's wrong with nationalism? Its as if free trade of goods must also include the flow of people, the destruction of sovereignties and free access to welfare and jobs. It's a homogenisation of nations into one conglomerate, and this means a loss of national identity, culture, standards of living and identity. There has to be some costs in nationhood and identity, and that is restriction of full free movement and residency. Third world immigration brings third world overpopulation and third world living conditions. It also brings in third world "diversity" of crime. Recently, law-enforcement authorities carried out raids on cockfighting rings across New York City in "Operation Angry Bird." As the New York Daily News reported: "As many as 3,000 roosters were rescued, nine arrested and 70 people rounded up in a ring that stretched through Brooklyn and Queens into Ulster County." Now, we had a sham "marriage" of a girl as young as 12, and racial tensions following a gang rape of a 14 year old Pacific Island girl in Sydney, by men of "African appearance". There is a certain level of assumed "racism" and "xenophobia" included in patriotism, and sovereignty. The concepts are blurred in the extremes, but like other living species, we must all be responsible for protecting our environments, our territories, and our social, economic and cultural assets. People are not cars, computers or machinery. These should pass borders, but not people!

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