(We) can do better

Two weeks ago fire 40 km north east of Perth burnt for 10 days and blazed through some 7,000 hectares of land, burning homes - far too many to count, or for that matter, to contemplate. It impacted on countless species and would have burnt millions of individuals, all of whom, like us, are categorised biologically under the heading Kingdom of Animalia. But that's not how the newspapers reported it...

“The fire destroyed two derelict houses and three sheds”...

This statement pretty well sums up the sort of media reporting that a fire, regardless of size or location, generally generates.

Human life, infrastructure, and on a good day, human “property” such as livestock and pets… but wild life rarely, if ever, cracks a mention!

Yet when a fire, which basically burnt for 10 days, blazed through some 7,000 hectares of land 40 km north east of Perth two weeks ago, it DID burn more than human infrastructure – it burnt homes - far too many to count, or for that matter, to contemplate. It impacted on countless species and would have burnt millions of individuals, all of whom, like us, are categorised biologically under the heading Kingdom of Animalia.

Why the silence? Why not an uproar, collective grieving, and hostility towards its maker?

It’s a question I’ve asked myself over, and over, and over again. About this fire, and the many others before, be they, by design, “prescribed”, “illegal arson” or “accidental.”

But then there is that prevailing assumption, isn’t there, especially when we talk about bushfires.

No one else lives there.

With a mind set like this you can do what you like with the land – the rape, pillage and plunder story that took off in style when our forebears first came to this country and has continued ever since.

Or maybe it’s our superiority complex – the lesser being story that enables humans to categorise wild life as pests, vermin, resources, or as simply irrelevant or expendable in our version of the grand scheme of things.

And then there is the whole burning thing – you know the one – the Aboriginal burning; the need to protect human life, property and infrastructure; reduce fire risk that derives itself from climate change; and of course burning regimes that are for good, or even necessary, for nature conservation and biodiversity.

Little wonder that with this sort of propaganda few, if any, question fire events - unless of course they are personally affected by them.

After all, no-one wants to die, or see their loved ones die – nor do they want to see their homes destroyed, or their livelihoods taken from them.

Same goes for other species, actually, but really, who cares about that?

It is my contention that until such time as the status of wild life elevates way up to where it should be the majority of the population will continue to regard fire, and the repercussions thereof, in this limited, anthropocentric way.
It IS alarming that 1839 bushfires in the last 6 weeks have been reported in WA. What IS more alarming is that these figures, apparently, are not unusual.

Clearly we have a problem… one that is not confined to WA.

507 of these fires have been deemed suspicious or found to be deliberately lit, according to a Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) spokesman.
Ouch!

And one is left to wonder how many more fires are deemed “accidental” - like the most recent one (of course there have been others) that razed through Bullsbook after sparks from an angle grinder left residents unable to see, breathe, and desperately trying to drive out, through fire.

If it was bad for them, imagine if you will, the impact on penned domestic animals, and wildlife, who were also unable to see, breathe, and were equally desperate to escape the fire.

Whilst it is true that some highly mobile wildlife can flee the initial onslaught of fire, especially if there are no fences in the way, the speed, movement, rapidly increasing and radiant heat, height, and extent of the fire would have decreased opportunities for many species, and severely limited the individual’s chance of survival.

Add to those factors the use of back burning, deliberate burning of unburnt pockets, the use of aerial fire suppressants and later, burning gels...

Still, miracles can happen….
Of the carnage, Mallubillai Wildlife Rehabilitator Lyn Manuel said,

“We have two little joeys being treated for bad burns.. but there are no words to describe what we see. The smell of death is everywhere…”

Two weeks after the event an eerie silence is broken only by a wind that knows no barriers. Tree skeletons abound, the soil is scorched, naked and warm to the touch. There are some, not many, tracks to be seen, but even then there are those that tell an all too familiar sad story.

There is no shortage of white ash piles – the intensity of the fire enough to burn bones.
It’s ugly, and I’m angry.
The fire did NOT just destroy two derelict houses and three sheds!

I’m sorry, but the fact that the local resident who started this particular fire is apparently remorseful doesn’t cut it, as far as I’m concerned.

Tell that to the wild life.

Asking people to be more safety conscious when they are operating hot tools or things that generate sparks in the open area, especially when working around dry vegetation is clearly not working now, and never will.
It is my guess though that those in authority know that.

So rather than engage in preventative measures, and place blame, and personal responsibility where it belongs, we are pushed into a model of action and behaviour that has, yet again, significant repercussions for wild life.
The bare earth policy (desertification) - the favoured, politically savvy, mitigation strategy.

No need to for anyone to change their behaviours… well…OK…just don’t use those angle grinders in the open on total fire ban days.

And the war against nature takes on a new dimension - litter becomes fuel, in fact all vegetation becomes fuel, and trees become fire risks that will fall on us, our houses, our sheds, our power poles…and, and ,and.

We can no longer live among the gum trees.

And if that is not bad enough the public clamour for crown land to be decimated in the same way.

They forget.

Someone else lives there.

Fires destroy ecosystems. Fire destroys homes. Fires take lives - millions of them.

The true cost of fire, measured in terms of loss of life, pain and suffering, habitat destruction, environmental degradation, pollution, health impacts…is the real story that needs telling.

Next time you hear that no lives were lost, you too need to do what it takes to set the record straight.
Wild life matters!

This very widely and deeply researched article talks about the role of Australian native animals in protecting forests from fire and reviews the evidence for prescribed burns, criticising Bill Gammage's research on a number of grounds and noting misconceptions about Aboriginal fire management. "Research by the CSIRO published since 1994 has shown that there is a group of around 1000 species of moths called oecophorids whose caterpillars occur at densities of up to 400 per square metre and eat dead leaf litter. These insects are killed by fire and take some years to come back - leaving the bush accumulating leaf litter. With frequent fires they can be lost. Termites consume vast amounts of dead timber Australia wide and in long unburned forests they are particularly dense with huge mounds in southern Australia too but their role in fuel reduction remains unstudied! Cockroaches and a wide range of beetle species and their larvae do the same. Recent research has identified Lyrebirds and Mallee Fowl as playing key roles in fuel reduction, composting litter and twigs in vast amounts reducing fuel loads by tonnes by per year per bird. All these insects, birds and animals that reduce fuel loads are diminished or lost to fire. Fungi are known to be major consumers of dead timber - but their role in fuel reduction is yet to be researched and the role of wallabies, wombats and especially potoroos in distributing fungi, though it is obviously significant, remains unstudied.

Bill Gammage’s popular book ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia’ contains many fundamental flaws and represents ‘blind advocacy’ for repeated burning’ because ‘Aboriginal people did it’.

Like Keith Windshuttle’s ‘Fabrication of Aboriginal History’, Bill Gammage only pursued references - and interpretation of references - that supported his ‘hypothesis’. For Gammage that hypothesis is that all Aboriginal people farmed all of Australia using fire. This proposition was first published by Rhys Jones in an article in Australian Natural History in 1969 ‘Firestick Farming’ - and the references Jones used have as little merit as Gammage’s.

Jones used a painting of Lesueur from 1802 to show landscape burning by Tasmanian Aboriginal people when the painting is clearly of smoke signals. He quoted Peron observing the Derwent River ‘ablaze’ while Peron stated that ‘Tasmanians’ lit the fire to see them off. Bill Gammage now travels the country advocating frequent burning. He is not in any way qualified to do so and often does not look at the bush in these places before he advocates burning. He quotes no Aboriginal people or stories and ignores scientific evidence that cast doubt on his theories.

Mooney et. al. examined over 200 sediment cores of 70,000 years or more of age to determine fire frequency. They found that fire frequency increased 50 fold with the arrival of Europeans. https://palaeoworks-dev.anu.edu.au/?publication=mooney-s-d-et-al-2011-late-quaternary-fire-regimes-of-australasia .

Part of that increase was the use of fire as a weapon by Aboriginal people over more than a century - the firestick verses the musket as Joel Wright, a Gunditjmara Linguist stated in a recent talk. See /node/4240. He (Joel) could find no evidence of landscape burning in the Victorian western district but outlined the use of fire for smoke signals (see TROVE digitised newspapers for many references) and as an effective weapon. Gammage does not deal with these issues yet unlike Rhys Jones and Tim Flannery he had access to all of this information electronically and is a historian - inexcusable in my opinion. He also too often plays on locals’ fear and opinion of fires when he speaks, referring to those who do not want to burn as people or ‘greens’ from the city - see a part transcript of a recent talk by Gammage below.

Australia cannot in any way be seen as an ‘Estate’ nor Aboriginal people as ‘workers’ on an Estate - as if it was destined to be owned by ‘England’. It is a very complex continent geologically which is reflected in its complex plant, bird and animal communities. This in turn is reflected in over 500 tribes and thousands of clans that each manage ‘country’ differently. All are minimalist and complex in their management which is reflected in their more than 500 languages. To apply generalised models of fire management to such a complex landscape is disastrous. To apply American models for fire management is surely wrong and even harder to understand - especially given the radically different landscapes and flora https://www.georgewright.org/243kilgore.pdf. We seem to have adopted our version of ‘Wildland Fire Use’, using fires to achieve ‘other’ management objectives, prolonging bushfires for weeks, especially in National Parks, on the assumption they will make the landscape less likely to burn or burn ‘cooler’.

Eucalypts and other groups of Australian plants have been subjected to volcanic fires for more than 60 million years. We are in a ‘quiet time volcanically’ for the east coast, though volcanoes were active ‘recently’ in Queensland and Victoria 12,000 and 6500 years ago respectively. Humans are able to heal cuts and broken bones but we do not ‘thrive on’ or ‘need’ either. It is likely that vegetation, especially forests, has adapted to recovering from fire but, contrary to popular belief, does not ‘thrive’ on being burned or need it. Even the woodiest seed pods open without fire and many species regenerate from rootstock disturbed by digging mammals like wombats. Burning bush for grazing ‘green pick’ was common in the British Isles in the eighteenth century, though in Australia it often germinated a seemingly ‘inexhaustible’ seed and rootstock of trees and shrubs. Unless burned annually or replaced with introduced pasture species a cessation of burning led to the growth of dense scrub which takes 20 years or more to form a closing canopy and open understorey. This development of dense shrub is what is too often happening in burned bushland today, especially in National Parks and reserves. Just the fact that they can be burned is too often accepted in ‘blind faith’ as ‘reducing fuel’ and making the bush more open and flammable when the opposite is too often the fact. In addition to scrubby regrowth trees and shrubs are almost invariably killed by fire adding to fuel loads, as are the animals and fungi that normally reduce fuels.

The original forests had closed canopies and an open understorey

Judge Stretton stated in the 1939 Victorian Bushfire Royal Commission that the original forests had closed canopies and an open understorey which was easily traversed. In regard to fire he said they were relatively safe and it was repeated burning for grazing that opened the canopy, saw the vegetation thicken and made them unsafe. Even heathlands and grasslands are very different with a full compliment of mammals and birds when old - turning them over and maintaining open areas for orchids etc. and reducing their flammability.

There desperately needs to be multi-disciplinary research that incorporates local history. No single scientific discipline or even science alone confers the qualifications required to undertake the comprehensive research needed to inform fire management. For each area there needs to be a collation of all the geological, indigenous and historic data on fire - what was burned when by whom and why as far as possible. Indigenous people need to be resourced to investigate their own tribal and clan history of the use of fire, as Joel Wright did, and not have it ‘done for them’ by botanists and others. This in addition to identifying the fauna that reduces fuels and the impact of burning on increasing wind speed, drying the bush and streams that flow from it as bush regrows etc. for each area proposed to be burned.

Given the massive increase in burning and the threat it poses to wildlife and local economies etc. pausing the lighting of fires and diverting part of that budget to rapidly detecting and extinguishing any that start would appear the wisest thing to do while reviewing their impact.

An example of a very bad and counterproductive burn is the Melaleuca swamp burn in Cape Liptrap Coastal Park in Victoria in 2014 which saw Napalm (Flash 21), a chemical combination not registered for occupational health and safety for its use in Australia, used when torch lighting failed. The impact was dramatic and the fuel load appeared to increase dramatically when it killed all the melaleucas and burned into the peat. The carbon monoxide from this modified napalm killed dozens of burrow dwelling mammals that may well have survived a fire. This is in a remnant damp ferny vegetation strip coastal park that has never had a wildfire and not been burned since 1939 when the messmate forest stopped the grass fire - no wind and wet bark. Despite its common ‘visual’ classification messmate is not closely related to stringybarks and hybridises with ash type species. This and other proposed fires for this bush with 50 or more lyrebirds isolated against the coast by farmland are as a result of ‘desktop research’ by unqualified or barely qualified people. There has been no formal botanical survey work though more than a dozen threatened species of plants are known. Individuals cannot be condemned for doing their ‘job’ - but what they are charged with doing and how it is done has to be evaluated. Fire will clearly make this southeast facing coastline more flammable and diminish or wipe out its abundant ‘fuel reducing’ fauna. (See https://www.eclecticparrot.com.au )

Kakadu has all but lost its fauna ...

Kakadu National Park, subjected to decades of management burning, has all but lost its fauna from too frequent fire, https://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2014/s4120215.htm which is likely the cause of the loss of the hollow dependent Gouldian Finch from vast areas of its frequently burned former range.

Northern Australia was the last ‘frontier’ and fire almost invariably used against ‘explorers’ by Aboriginal tribes and clans is too easily interpreted as ‘ecological burning’ by botanists. The northern grazing industry has long been dependent on burning for green pick in a landscape that can barely be farmed.

These species losses are occurring in many parks and reserves across Australia where they have been subjected to so called ‘Ecological Burning’ and they too are losing mammals and especially hollow dependent species. This approach to burning, to increase the biodiversity of plants, may actually be in breach of the amended International Biodiversity Agreement of 1994 which states that tetrapods, animals with backbones, are a reliable indicator of biodiversity - not plants. This change to a Treaty signed in 1982 originally was as if in response to burning in Australian National Parks.

Burning or logging a forest, grassland or heathland may increases plant diversity - but it diminishes structural diversity and fauna and may well make the bush more flammable.

The original forests of Gippsland were not flammable, settlers of Fish Creek were not able to burn the forest to clear land until the railway line was cut through, bringing in a ‘draft’. This is a common story Australia wide in formerly wet forested areas.

Research by the CSIRO published since 1994 ( https://www.eclecticparrot.com.au/references/11-Common%201994%20Introduction%20vol%201.pdf ) has shown that there is a group of around 1000 species of moths called oecophorids whose caterpillars occur at densities of up to 400 per square metre and eat dead leaf litter. These insects are killed by fire and take some years to come back - leaving the bush accumulating leaf litter. https://www.eclecticparrot.com.au/references/13-Problems%20with%20control%20Burning%20NPA%20Bulletin.pdf With frequent fires they can be lost.

Termites consume vast amounts of dead timber Australia wide and in long unburned forests they are particularly dense with huge mounds in southern Australia too but their role in fuel reduction remains unstudied! Cockroaches and a wide range of beetle species and their larvae do the same. Recent research has identified Lyrebirds https://www.eclecticparrot.com.au/references/14-Nugent%20et%20al.%202014%20Wildlife%20Research-%20lyrebirds%20and%20fire.pdf and Mallee Fowl (Leonard unpub.) as playing key roles in fuel reduction, composting litter and twigs in vast amounts reducing fuel loads by tonnes by per year per bird. All these insects, birds and animals that reduce fuel loads are diminished or lost to fire.

Fungi are known to be major consumers of dead timber - but their role in fuel reduction is yet to be researched and the role of wallabies, wombats and especially potoroos in distributing fungi, though it is obviously significant, remains unstudied.

Almost all parrot species, possums, owls and many species of bats are at real risk of extinction from the loss of hollows which has occurred and is occurring right across the landscape - by burning as a ‘forest industry’ and for ‘ecological purposes’.

It’s time to stop lighting fires ...

It’s time to stop lighting fires and to use fixed rotating thermal imaging cameras to detect them and the world’s best and biggest firefighting aircraft, when needed, to rapidly extinguish them while we determine the effects and all the costs of this increased ‘fuel reduction’ and ‘ecological’ burning. We also need to evaluate objectively whether or not burning all bush is a major costly ecological mistake - and academically stop playing ‘my PHD is bigger than yours’.

Farms are repeatedly damaged by escaped ‘prescribed burns; and ‘prolonged’ fires, losing stock and fences, damaging rural community mental and bronchial health and breaking up families when burns go on for weeks.

Domestic and agricultural water supplies are compromised, fisheries and aquatic life are lost as dead vegetation washes into streams with rain following fires, robbing them of oxygen.

We have neglected even more deadly grassfires (per head of effected population).

We have neglected arson, often a mental health issue and an increasing problem we seem to be in collective denial about. Yet arson was was the cause of 50% of the 2009 Black Saturday fires https://www.wilderness.org.au/articles/summary-and-implications-report-victorian-2009-february-fires, most of the Hobart fires of 1967 and was the entire cause of the deadly Dandenongs fires of 1962 and 1968 which killed more than 30 people. Surveillance by fixed rotating thermal imaging cameras will greatly help in catching ‘fire lighters’.

There is virtually no research into lightning in Australia while in Canada ‘hot’ and ‘cold lightning’ has been identified. ‘Cold lightning’ is 95% of all strikes and negatively charged. While it will blow a tree apart and is very dangerous it passes through so quickly it rarely starts fire - but it can likely ‘cook sap’ in a tree and make it appear as if it has been burned in the past. ‘Hot Lightning’ is positively charged lightning that makes up as little as 5% of all strikes and though it starts fires it is almost always followed by rain.

The Australian history of bushfires includes a vast numbers of grass fires - like many of the most deadly on Ash Wednesday and as part the ‘Hobart Bushfires’ of 1967. Introduced species of pasture grasses die off in the summer, especially along roadsides and the increasingly in fire breaks which can act as fuses, ( https://www.myenvironment.net.au/index.php/me/Work/Fire/Fire-Resources/Fire-Break-submission-Chris-Taylor ) representing a high tonnage of highly flammable fuels in the fire season. These flammable grasses in semi rural areas, open to swirling winds unlike closed vegetation, their fires are particularly deadly and are often called bushfires. A good example of this issue is being addressed by the Kirkstall CFA with its replacement of pasture grasses with native species on road reserves. (https://www.eclecticparrot.com.au/references/02-Kirkstall%20euro%20grass%20conversion.pdf) This reduces fuel loads by 50-90% and native grasses are most often ‘green’ in the fire season.

The reintroduction of dead leaf and timber eating insects, the restoration of populations of Lyrebirds, leaf eating Koalas that even have an oecophorid that eats their droppings, where they have been lost should be key to future bushfire management. This approach to fire management is beyond the ‘skill sets’ and qualifications of judges, lawyers, foresters and botanists we have charged with fire management. Current fuel reduction burning becomes a ‘self fulfilling prophecy’ even when it leads to more fires as appears to have happened, especially in Western Australia. To stop burning where it makes bush more flammable may challenge a practice since colonial times, but will cost far less and provide significant economic returns from improved water production, fisheries, tourism and public health.

There is strong support by CSIRO and other scientists for research before we burn what is left of our older bush area in Cape Liptrap Coastal Park which is one of the increasingly rare examples of older bush remaining with its fuel reducing fauna - see letters https://www.eclecticparrot.com.au

In anything to do with fire management there has to be a ‘No Fault Claims Bonus’. Science is rarely ‘wrong’ but biological sciences should be continually evolving on this most recently occupied continent. We are faced with the corrosion of the Indigenous cultural records from loss of scar, ceremonial, birthing and marked trees along with the potential extinction of many species of birds and animals, also of indigenous stories, from unnecessary or ill-informed burning. Both science and the management it informs must be able to change in response to new information. We need the experience of thousands of foresters and botanists to integrate with the breadth of research in other biological sciences which need a significant portion of fire research funding. There is significant rural employment potential Australia wide to control the animals that spread flammable weeds, protect the forests and bushland from fire and realise natural bushland’s potential economic value for water, fisheries production, tourism and carbon sequestration.

Naturalist Bob McDonald January 2015

Bill Gammage Promoting Fire in East Gippsland

Bill Gammage applied his ideas on burning in response to questions from the audience at a meeting he addressed at Bairnsdale on the 5th of November 2014;

Bill Hodge - 3rd Generation Mountain Cattleman

Would you be in favour of giving a certain area of bush for mountain cattlemen to manage as they see fit for say 5 or 6 years?

Gammage: Yes I’ve already suggested to Graeme Stoney (Mountain Cattleman) and others that after that fire which is inevitably going to come, there is already in place a plan that basically divides an area into three - leaves one area alone - doesn’t do anything; puts only fire in another area and then puts fire and grazing and the way cattlemen burn in the third and see what happens in those three different areas.

LR: Why didn’t you interview any Aboriginal people?

Gammage: If I had Aboriginal friends, I did talk to them. Places like around Narrandera and Alice Springs and the Coorong, North east Tasmania. I did speak to Aboriginal people. But if I didn’t know Aboriginal people I felt it was far too rude to roll up from Canberra, especially of all places (crowd snickers) and say well here I am, you got 20 minutes, give me some basic information and I’ll be out of here. It’s just too rude. These are really important matters - not only the land management, but totems and so on and um yeah… you really need to be really trusted before you can even brave such a question and since my book is about the whole of Australia, it would have been more than a lifetime’s work to have done that.

Danny O’Brien, Member for Eastern Victoria: We in the Government have increased the burning targets; we’ve exceeded them once and dismally failed them last year. Is the solution in your opinion more burning of more area or better burning or different burning?

Gammage: All of the above, (applause) and after you’ve done that more of the above (applause).

I have commended the Government for increasing the hectares. I think we should accept that politicians have a very different problem and there are a great many electors opposing any sort of burning and they are translating that into practice. So when they expand their areas of controlled burning they are really softening up public opinion in favour of ALL burning and that is extremely valuable because, let’s face it country people and like-minded people are a minority in a democracy and we’re never going to get anywhere unless you can change the votes of people in the city -and so doing softening up in this way. I congratulate them but I do think that it shouldn’t be seen as a failure if you don’t reach your target. What you do is say, ‘well we’re experimenting with weather and conditions and times of the year and that therefore makes any fixed target problematic and uncertain.’ Local people will give you a bit of leeway to burn locally, to seize the day; and those local people might be DEPI on the ground, CFA, farmers, loggers, whoever it may be. And what we want you to do when you burn is record the results basically and build up information about that area, which can then be translated into more efficient practice

---------------

It’s time to stop lighting fires
Bob McDonald, Naturalist* Pub: Jan 14
15.01.15 4:30 am

Originally published in Tasmanian Times
12 comments

This exhibition is part of a movement asking for no foreign intervention in Syria. Australia backs foreign intervention in Syria, which means we subsidise the provision of weapons for the overthrow of a democratically elected government which most Syrians want to keep. Here is an extract from the article inside: “We have a well in our house, and since there’s no water—because the ‘rebels’ broke the pipes—my father was giving water to neighbours. He was in his house when a sniper entered the garden and shot him, killed him. Those ‘rebels’ don’t represent the Syrian people. Syrian soldiers aren’t fighting against normal people, they’re fighting against people equipped with the most advanced weapons and trained just to come to Syria. They destroy our homes, churches, mosques. But what makes me happy, our people, because they love Syria so much, decided not to leave. Even my dad, he knew he lived in a very dangerous area, but he decided not to leave, and he paid for it with his life.” This article by Eva Bartlett is republished from her blog at https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/aleppo-photographer-brings-syrian-reality-to-the-united-nations/ (Broken link fixed. - Ed, 1:53pm 24/1/14)

Hagop Vanesian’s exhibition, “My Homeland,” ran at the United Nations Headquarters from January 8-16.

by Eva Bartlett

Twenty-six distinct photos, in black and white. Scenes of a ravaged city and the human beings within struggling to exist, let alone to find hope for the future. Gravestones of rubble. Homes looted, trashed. Civilians defending their country. Children aged beyond their years by the horrors they’ve lived.

Hagop Vanesian, a 44 year old Syrian-Armenian photographer from Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo (Halab), was meticulous in his choice of photographs for the exhibition, “My Homeland,” which opened at the United Nations Headquarters on January 8 and runs until January 16.

“I chose the photographs showing the destruction, and children. I have many photographs of children, maybe 25-30 percent are of children, these little angels suffering. They are innocent, they don’t understand about politics, they suffer a lot.”

Vanesian, a silversmith by trade, started taking photos twelve years ago, and very early on started documenting his city, building by building.

“Before the war, I was doing documentary photography all over Aleppo. Everyday, I took my camera and photographed people, how they were living,” Vanesian said. “When the war started, I decided to document it. It was very hard at first. For the first couple of days, I couldn’t take a single photograph. This was my birth place, where I grew up. I have memories there, but even my memories were destroyed, especially in Old Aleppo.”

Iman Tahan, from Aleppo, spoke of her feelings after seeing the photos. “These photos, I wish they weren’t real, I wish nothing like this had happened to my country. I remember every street in these photos. I feel so sad, a lot of memories there.”

One of the memories she spoke of was the murder of her father, in his home, by terrorists.

“We have a well in our house, and since there’s no water—because the ‘rebels’ broke the pipes—my father was giving water to neighbours. He was in his house when a sniper entered the garden and shot him, killed him. Those ‘rebels’ don’t represent the Syrian people. Syrian soldiers aren’t fighting against normal people, they’re fighting against people equipped with the most advanced weapons and trained just to come to Syria. They destroy our homes, churches, mosques. But what makes me happy, our people, because they love Syria so much, decided not to leave. Even my dad, he knew he lived in a very dangerous area, but he decided not to leave, and he paid for it with his life.”

Syrian photographer, Hagop Vanesian, explaining the human stories behind the photos.

Narrating to those around him, Vanesian explained the significance of and story behind each photo. Of one photo, a smiling woman holding a photo of a young man, he said: “When she saw me photographing, she started to cry. She said, ‘please, don’t photograph this, let us remember Aleppo as it was.’ Then she asked me to photograph she and her son. From her purse she took a photograph of her son, with a big, proud smile. Her son was martyred. Brave woman, Syrian woman.”

For Vanesian, the stories behind the photos need to be told. “Some photographers have come and taken photos, stayed one week, two weeks… They photographed the camps, photographed the war from the other side. Maybe they got more powerful photographs than me. But what I got, I got the stories of the people. Because I lived there, I suffered like them. As they were living, I was living. Without water, without electricity.”

Until about eight months ago, Vanesian was living the life of an average Syrian in Aleppo, except that he was also documenting it.

“One day, I was walking in the Old City, drinking sahlab (made of milk, with cinnamon),” he said. “After I finished, I threw my cup on the ground… there was no trash can. I saw a child, maybe four years old, pick up the cup and start licking the remainders of the sahlab. I couldn’t bring myself to photograph him. When I saw this child licking my cup, I thought, ‘where is the humanity?’ I can’t forget him.”

Pointing at his photographs, he noted two “residential graveyard” photos: one, a group of children and women sitting amongst the gravestones, and the second, a young girl standing near a tombstone.

“Residential areas in Aleppo, and children’s playgrounds, have turned into graveyards. The tombstones of these graves are made from stones from collapsed buildings. I asked the girl in the second photo, ‘What are you doing?’ It was a snowy day. She said she wanted to know where they were going to put the body of her aunt, she wanted to see the place.”

Regarding the photo of a sombre-faced boy, dressed in a suit jacket for ‘Eid holiday, he commented: “That boy, his father is kidnapped, his mother killed. He’s living with his aunt, near the front line of the fighting. Did you see his eyes? I didn’t find any children smiling. They’ve lost their smiles.”

Syrian children, psychologically-scarred, rendered older than their years by the difficulties they’ve facced. Photo by Hagop Vanesian

Other photographs show the expected bullet-ridden walls and bullet-shredded metal doors, including one photo with two children, likewise sombre-faced, standing next to a warped metal door.

“If you look closely at the children’s eyes, you see the anger. They’re not smiling, they’re like adults. They grew up, they saw what adults see. They’re around 10 and 13 years old. Before, children in Syria were smiling, but these last few years, you don’t see that. They will need psychological treatment in the future. The psychological damage is worse than the physical damage.”

One particularly poignant photograph—a man with one leg missing, on crutches, gun slung over shoulder—shows the determination of the man, reflects the determination of Syria, to fight back and survive.

“He’s defending his neighbourhood in Aleppo, but actually he was displaced from Nubool, the village where he lost his leg during fighting. He is still fighting, even with one leg. He will fight to the end,” said Vanesian.

Two photos of homes looted and destroyed, one Christian, one Muslim, speak of Syria’s multi-religious fabric, that most Syrians I’ve spoken with maintain was never sectarian.

“I intentionally put these photos side-by-side. It’s not only Muslim houses that are looted, Christian homes are too. They don’t differentiate, doesn’t matter whose house, they’re going to loot it.”

Unsurprisingly, the anti-Syrian group, the so-called “National Syrian Coalition” issued a letter accusing the exhibition as being propaganda, and calling for the display to be shut down.

Syrians attending the exhibition felt otherwise.

Rana Nasrallah, a Syrian from the predominantly Druze city of Sweida, now living in New Jersey, was among Syrian expats attending the exhibition.

“Each picture talks, speaks of the different problems in Syria. These photos show the truth exactly as it is in Syria. I was in Syria a month and a half ago, I saw with my eyes. I had a good life there. I feel broken for what has happened to my country.”

Fadi, from Midan, what he describes as a mixed Armenian-Muslim area of Aleppo near the front line of the fighting, agreed that the exhibition was representative of the reality.

“One hundred percent, the photos tell the truth. I’m Muslim. We never had any sectarian problems. We lived together, doesn’t matter what you believe, who you pray to. Now…”

Al-Akhbar and al-Mayadeen correspondent Nizar Abboud attended, reporting on the exhibition but also pointing out the need for such an exhibition. “The world is hearing one point of view on Syria, and this is not by coincidence. I think this is premeditated. Also, there is self-censorship in the media, including my colleagues who work at the United Nations. They like to play the tunes those who pay them would like to hear. “

Earlier, in a private interview, the Syrian Ambassador to the UN, Dr. Bashar al-Ja’afari—who organized and attended the exhibition—told me: “For four years I have been trying very hard to do something inside the UN. Every time we attempted to do something, we were confronted by a huge amount of bureaucracy and excuses.” He, too, said the intent of the exhibition was not political. “It’s about Syria and the Syrian people. It’s about what happened in Aleppo, through undeniable photos. Any honest, objective Syrian who loves his homeland should have a great interest in showing what is going on in Syria. All Syrians should push for organizing more exhibitions, not only at the United Nations but all over the world.”

One of the accusations thrown at Vanesian is that he had photographed only from areas where the Syrian army was present.

“I photograph the front lines, so I need protection, like most photojournalists in areas of war. Transportation is no longer safe in Syria. Some of my friends and relatives have been kidnapped and we haven’t heard about them for over a year.”

That said, Vanesian took risks with many of his photos, including one shot from the side of the terrorists, unbeknownst to their snipers.

“Most front line lanes are covered with fabric, to block the view of snipers and prevent them from shooting the other side. When I took this photo, my back was to the snipers, but I was hiding behind a stone. The other side of the fabric is the safe area, but I came to this side to take the photo. If I had moved my head, I would have gotten shot. If you put your finger up, they’ll shoot right away.”

While the photographs and the issue of Syria under war from the NATO-Gulf-Turkish-Zionist alliance are inherently political, Vanesian maintains that his objective is solely humanitarian.

“I’m not doing this for political reasons, I just take the photos to let people see what is happening. With my photographs, I just want one thing: for people to remember there are people suffering in Syria. Just let them think, for a moment, about the suffering. I can’t bring back Aleppo as it was. I lost it, as I lost friends, relatives… I can’t bring my city back. The market in Aleppo was the longest enclosed market (in the world). It is burned completely. The destruction of Aleppo is a shame for humanity. The heritage has been destroyed; it belongs to all the world.

All those people in my photos, I didn’t just click the shutter, didn’t just take their photographs, I got their stories. I didn’t make money from their photos. I wanted to show these photos for humanitarian reasons, nothing else.”

Hagop Vanesian’s website is: http://www.hagopvanesian.com

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian freelance journalist and activist who has lived in and written from the Gaza Strip, Syria, and Lebanon. Her blog is https://ingaza.wordpress.com/

The New Zealand Defence Force early in Janurary surprised a third unlicensed fishing boat, far south-east of Tasmania, illegally poaching toothfish - the ocean's "white gold".   The New Zealand government so far has intercepted three ships with their offshore patrol ship, HMNZS Wellington, in cooperation with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.  
(image: head of Patagonian Toothfish)
This summer is Sea Shepherd’s 11th Southern Ocean Defence Campaign and the first to target toothfish fishing operators in the waters of Antarctica. Patagonian toothfish, a species of cod icefish, can grow up to 10 kilograms in weight and are a highly prized eating fish.

Three ships using illegal gillnets to catch prized toothfish were operating in a protected fishery research area about 2500 kilometres from Hobart, according to details released by Interpol.

(image: gillnets)

The illegal fishing boats, believed to be carrying a catch worth $8 million on the black market in South-East Asia, are all flying flags of convenience to avoid prosecution. Fishing in the Southern Ocean is regulated by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).

Thanks to the New Zealand Navy operating in waters south of Australia, they were able to disclose the presence of three criminal ships using illegal gillnets to catch prized toothfish, operating in a protected fishery research area about 2500 kilometres from Hobart.   

In contrast,  the ship tasked with Southern Ocean patrols for Australia, Ocean Shield, was at found to be at anchor off Christmas Island.   Our government promised that the vessel would be employed on two 40-day patrols of the Southern Ocean. We have criminals in our marine "backyard", but the Australian ocean patrol vessel, Ocean Shield, is on AWOL!

The duty of patrolling the Southern Ocean has been silently abrogated to our neighbouring New Zealand, and a not-for-profit organisation.

Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Peter Dutton, said the government remained committed to the protection of Australia's sovereign territories and interests in the Southern Ocean, but their priorities were elsewhere!

This broken promise by an Australian government in neglecting the security of our oceans is alarming, disappointing but not surprising. 

Our Australian government has for years ignored Japan's thinly disguised "research whaling", and by procrastination and hollow protests, have allowed the killing to go on relentlessly, without redress. Similar to years of failure of our Australian governments to monitor and halt illegal whaling, this government is failing to control the illegal poaching of prized toothfish! 

If poacher are fishing from a boat that is not signed up to the CCAMLR agreement then the illegal fishing boat is simply fishing on the high seas and prosecution is almost impossible. The only way to prosecute a boat for illegal fishing is to prove that its owner is from a country signed up to CCAMLR.

Gillnets pose many threats, and they are more effective and deadly than longlines. The level of incidental bycatch is greater, and lost or abandoned gillnets have the potential to continue killing marine life through ‘ghost fishing’.

At least the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society will continue to hunt down the illegal vessels.

(image: Sea Shepherd vessel Sam Simon berthed in Wellington)

Successful poachers are making mockery of Australian law, and our so-called national security.  It appears that Minister for Customs and Border Protection, Peter Dutton, has gone to sleep at the wheel, or has abrogated his duties to a successful, vigilant and a service at no cost to the taxpayers from a not-for-profit organisation?

Previously published (22/1/2015) on JohnQuiggin.com.

Ernst and Young, leading consultants to the Queensland government have released a report claiming that electricity costs would be lower under privatisation. Although the report was commissioned by private infrastructure lobby group Infrastructure Partners Australia, it's just a rehash of the same line EY have been pushing for years in similar reports commissioned by pro-privatisation governments. The central claim is that electricity prices have risen more in Queensland and NSW, under corporatisation than in Victoria and SA, under privatisation. What they don't tell you is that this merely offsets increases imposed in the leadup to privatisation, with the result that retail prices are much the same in all four states, and far higher than when the process of market reform (supposedly to reduce prices through competition) began in the 1990s.

Professor John Quiggin, of the University of Queensland criticised the Ernst and Young report on privatisation of the electricity industry.

The Ernst and Young report ignores the biggest factor leading to higher electricity prices throughout Australia: the failed process of market reform, corporatisation and privatisation of which the LNP government’s asset sales is a part, rofessor Quiggin said.

Although the problems have differed from state to state, there is no evidence that states which undertook full scale privatisation in the 1990s have performed any better. South Australia has some of the highest electricity prices in the world, and Victorian prices are comparable to those in NSW and Queensland.

Candobetter.net's Editor's comment. There is a very good resource on privatisation here: http://www.herinst.org/BusinessManagedDemocracy/government/privatisation/risk.html

Original Source: http://johnquiggin.com/2015/01/22/ernst-and-young-oversell-privatisation/

Originally published on PaulCraigRoberts.org. Article has also been republished (20 Jan 2015) on Global Research.

Today (January 19) is Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday. King was an American civil rights leader who was assassinated 47 years ago on April 4, 1968, at the age of 39. James Earl Ray was blamed for the murder. Initially, Ray admitted the murder, apparently under advice from his attorney in order to avoid the death penalty, but Ray soon withdrew his confession and unsuccessfully sought a jury trail. Documents of the official investigation remain secret until the year 2027.

As Wikipedia reports,_{#fn1" id="fn1txt"> 1} "The King family does not believe Ray had anything to do with the murder of Martin Luther King. . . . The King family and others believe that the assassination was carried out by a conspiracy involving the U.S. government, and that James Earl Ray was a scapegoat. This conclusion was affirmed by a jury in a 1999 civil trial against Loyd Jowers and unnamed co-conspirators."

The US Department of Justice concluded that Jowers' evidence, which swayed the jury in the civil trail, was not credible. On the other hand, there is no satisfactory explanation why documents pertaining to the investigation of Ray were put under lock and key for 59 years.

There are many problems with the official story of King's assassination, just as there are with the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. No amount of suspicion or information will change the official stories. Facts don't count enough to change official stories.

Many Americans will continue to believe that having failed to tar King as a communist and womanizer, the establishment decided to remove an inconvenient rising leader by assassination. Many black Americans will continue to believe that a national holiday was the government's way of covering up its crime and blaming racism for King's murder.

Certainly, the government should not have fomented suspicion by settling such a high profile murder with a plea bargain. Ray was an escapee from a state penitentiary and was apprehended at London's Heathrow Airport on his way to disappear in Africa. It seems farfetched that he would imperil his escape by taking a racist-motivated shot at King.

We should keep in mind the many loose ends of the Martin Luther King assassination as we are being bombarded by media with what Finian Cunningham correctly terms "high-octane emotional politics that stupefies the public from asking some very necessary hard questions" about the Charlie Hebdo murders, or for that matter the Boston Marathon Bombing case and all other outrages that prove to be so convenient for governments.

Those gullible citizens who believe that "our government would never kill its own people" have much understanding to gain from knowledge of Operation Gladio and Northwoods Project, about which much information is available on the Internet and in parliamentary investigations and officially released secret documents.

The Northwoods Project was presented to President John F. Kennedy by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. It called for shooting down people on the streets of Washington and Miami, shooting down US airliners ("real or simulated"), and attacking refugee boats from Cuba in order to create an atrocity case against Castro that would secure public support for a full-fledged invasion to bring regime change to Cuba. President Kennedy refused the plot and removed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, an action that some researchers conclude led to his assassination.

Operation Gladio was revealed by the prime minister of Italy in 1990. It was a secret operation coordinated by NATO and operated by European military secret services in cooperation with the CIA and British intelligence.

Parliamentary investigations in Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium and testimony by secret service operatives have established that Gladio, originally established as a "stay-behind" secret army to resist Soviet invasion, was used to commit bombing attacks on Europeans, especially women and children, in order to blame communists and keep them from gaining political power in Europe during the Cold War era.

In answer to questioning by judges about the 1980 bombing of the central train station in Bologna resulting in the deaths of 85 people, Vincenzo Vinciguerra said: "There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men . . . a super-organization with a network of communications, arms and explosives [which] took up the task, on NATO's behalf, or preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces."

Vinciguerra told the UK newspaper The Guardian that "every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organized matrix . . . mobilized into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organizations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state's relations within the Atlantic Alliance."

There is no doubt about Gladio's existence. The BBC did a 2.5 hour documentary on the secret terrorist NATO organization in 1992. There are a number of books, articles and reports in addition to the parliamentary investigations and testimonies from participants.

There are reasons to believe that, although exposed, Gladio is still in operation and is behind terrorist attacks, such as Charlie Hebdo, in Europe today. Of course, today Washington has such control over Europe that no parliamentary investigations comparable to those that exposed Operation Gladio are possible.

With the documented and officially admitted existence of many official government conspiracies against their own peoples resulting in numerous deaths, only witting or unwitting agents of government conspiracies respond to valid questions about alleged terrorist events by trying to shout down truth-seekers.

The function of shutting down suspicion of official stories has been well performed by the "mainstream" print and TV media in the Western world. This presstitute function has been joined by many tabloid internet sites, such as Salon, and other such sites that originate in money or desire for profit.

Money flows to those who serve the establishment. The way to riches is to cover for the powerful private interest groups that comprise the One Percent and control the government.

Many websites unwittingly contribute to the power of the One Percent to control explanations and to discredit truth-seekers. This is the main function of comment sections on Internet sites where paid trolls operate._{#fn2" id="fnztxt"> 2}

Studies have concluded that the largest percentage of a population is too insecure to take a position different from peers. Most Americans simply do not know enough to have confidence in making independent decisions. They go with the flow and rely on their peers to tell them what is safe to think.

Trolls are hired for the purpose of making disparaging and ad hominem attacks on those who diverge from accepted opinion. For example, I am constantly attacked in personal terms in comment sections by people hiding behind first names and aliases._#fn2"> 2 Others employ left-wing and progressive hatred of Ronald Reagan to discredit me on the grounds that anyone so wicked and evil as to serve in the Reagan administration cannot be trusted. Many of my denigrators worship the ground that Hillary Clinton walks on.

Today in the so-called "western democracies," it is permissible to be politically incorrect against Muslims and to invoke denigration and hatred against them. However, it is not permissible to criticize the government of Israel for indiscriminate and murderous attacks on Palestinian citizens. The position of the Israel Lobby and its obedient and well-intimidated presstitutes is that any criticism whatsoever of Israel is anti-semitism and an indication that the critic desires a new holocaust. In other words, the Israel Lobby defines any critic of any Israeli government policy as an incipient mass murderer.

This effort to silence all critics of Israeli policies applies also to Israelis and Jews themselves. Israelis and Jews who legitimately criticize Israeli policies in hopes of steering the Zionist State away from self-destruction are branded "self-hating Jews" by the Israel Lobby. The Lobby has demonstrated its power to destroy academic freedom and to reach into private Catholic universities and public state universities and both block and withdraw tenure appointments of candidates, both Jews and non-Jews, who have incurred the Lobby's disapproval.

I see Martin Luther King as an American hero. Whatever his personal failings, if any, he stood for justice and for the safety of every race and gender under law. King actually believed in the American dream and wanted to achieve it for everyone. I am confident that had I confronted King with criticism, he would have considered my case and responded honestly regardless of any power he might have held over me.

I cannot expect the same consideration from any western government or from the trolls that operate in comment sections provided by Internet sites in hopes of boosting their readership.

Gullible and credulous people are incapable of defending their liberty. Unfortunately these traits are the principal traits of western peoples. Western liberty is collapsing in front of our eyes, and this makes absurd the desire by Vladimir Putin's Russian opponents to integrate with the collapsing western states.

Footnotes

#fn1">1#fn1txt"> ↑ Whilst this is consistesent with my own knowledge of the murder of Martin Luther King, I was unable to find these exact words on the Wikipedia page.

#fn2">2#fnztxt"> ↑ I consider Paul Craig Roberts' attitude to discussion on the Internet to be mistaken. Whilst obsessed individuals, trolls and various sociopaths can make it more difficult to conduct a useful on-line discussion, it is my experience that, where a forum discussion is effectively moderated, it is possible to use forum discussions to create a worthwhile result. On number of occasions I have been able, with the use of logic and evidence, been able to show that what has been taken to be "accepted wisdom" is wrong.

"The WTO can no longer ignore what is happening behind its magnificent structure of complex trade rules. The persistence of opposite exchange-rate misalignments, of countries with overvalued currencies and others with undervalued ones, for long periods is eroding the multilateral trading system. The WTO cannot remain silent to such reality. The core principles of its construction – transparency, predictability and confidence – are under question. The strengthening of trade rules, with the negotiation of instruments to neutralise the effects of exchange rates, is fundamental to the existence of the WTO. Otherwise, the WTO might become a diplomatic-juridical fiction – void of economic reality." Ref: Effects of exchange-rate misalignments on tariffs

I recently received a partisan political joke. Although it was funny, the punch line was about one side of politics being innumerate idiots (and, by implication, the other not). This inspired me to argue that it is the collective innumeracy of all politicians that we need to address; not assignment of blame to one side of politics as if that will solve a problem that all the major political parties collaborate to cause. One example: No shortage of foreign cars in Australia..............

This site lists some of Paul Keating's achievements whilst in office:
http://static.moadoph.gov.au/ophgovau/media/images/apmc/docs/24-Keating-Web.pdf

Here are three of them:

• Architect of the deregulation of the Australian economy
• The Government floated the Australian currency and allowed foreign banks to operate in Australia from 1983
• Achieved a general lowering of tariff levels

Paul Keating floated the AUD and sought to reduce protectionism in favour of free trade. Despite his many laudable qualities was this a failure of strategic economic management?

Shouldn't extreme population growth have delivered improving, rather than deteriorating, economies of scale for manufacturing?

This link explains what is actually a very simple concept. There is logic in floating tariffs to compensate for floating exchange rates: Effects of exchange-rate misalignments on tariffs

In 2013 General Motors, in its trade negotiations with China, sought to link the exchange rate to the tariff structure used for motor vehicle trade between China and the US for obvious reasons. Perhaps Australia had been a learning experience for GM, rendering them Forex Punch Drunk?

Think about it. When the AUD was worth USD 0.60 the car import tariff was 5%. When the AUD was at parity with the USD the effective tariff would have had to rise to 75% for the Australian car industry to maintain the same level of competitiveness against cheaper imports. Exporting would still have been hard, but the size of the domestic market for Australian cars might have been maintained while the Australian dollar remained strong. The automobile industry was not causing the exchange rate misalignments. They were beyond its control.

From 1998 to 2003 the average AUDUSD exchange rate was around 0.6. Let's consider a car costing USD10,000 imported over that period. (10,000 x 1.05 Duty)/0.6 = AUD17,500.

Over the period since 2003 the average AUDUSD exchange rate has been around 0.85. From late 2010 to early 2013 the exchange rate was above parity (ie > 1.0). This is when Ford and GM started talking about closing down Australian operations.

Let's consider the same imported car when the exchange rate is 1:1. (10,000 x 1.05 Duty)/1.0 = AUD10,500. To bring it up to AUD17,500 the import duty would have needed to be raised to 75%. (10,000 x 1.75 Duty)/1.0 = AUD17,500.
Wouldn't this have been a reasonable strategy? How could any fair and reasonable assessment conclude that because the car industry could not immediately reduce its factory gate prices by 43% (ie 1 - 10,000/17,500) in response to radical exchange rate fluctuations, it should not be protected by a tariff whose benchmark had been established at an exchange rate of 0.6 with a rate of 5%? Surely a floating Australian dollar must be combined with floating tariffs?

The collective intelligence of the entire parliament of Labor and Liberal politicians was unable to identify or address such problems associated with Paul Keating's deregulation. Therefore, as the AUD rose from 2003 onwards for reasons directly linked to the actions of innumerate (??) politicians, Australia's manufacturing industry has been dealt a severe blow. No jobs for our children in manufacturing?

What drove the Australian dollar higher? Clearly a contributor to this was a booming mining sector (selling rocks for US dollars and bringing the money home in Australian dollars) combined with extreme population growth driving demand for goods & services and inflows of capital as people arrived; particularly while the rest of the world floundered under the burden of the GFC. Australia's Government chose a surge in mass migration to drive demand and interest rates higher as the rest of the world lowered interest rates.

So we have Government; and by that I mean Government supported by all the major political parties, that is orchestrating the following:

• An unregulated exchange rate for the Australian Dollar
• General lowering of tariff levels
• No link between tariffs and the unregulated exchange rate
• "Liberal" FIRB decisions on foreign ownership of Australian assets that differ radically from those of other countries, and trading partners, in the region
• Manipulating demand using the mass migration tool to create an inherent conflict of interest between driving GDP growth with population growth, managing interest rates, managing global competitiveness and managing house prices.

To hell with the future. Let's drive a cheap BMW after selling a house or two to reap the "Chinese Bonus"??

Was this inevitable? Ask any innumerate politician for an answer and they may not even understand the question. Isn't patriotism, wherever feasible, about retaining the means of production? Or as Karl Marx said; "The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people."

This article was originally published on Fightback!news on 31 December 2014. See also: Feeling of 'solid Western support' behind Kiev's renewed assault on Donbass on RT. For more news on the fight by the people of of Donbass against the Kiev regime, read other Fightback! articles on Ukraine or visit the #Donbass Twitter page. Article also includes 2 embedded videos: Ukraine: Helping rebuild homes (7/1/15) (2:57) and Donbass under fire: Separatists (27/12/14) (58:12)

After the U.S.-backed fascist coup in Kiev, Ukraine in February 2014, the people of Donbass rebelled for independence from Ukraine. A popular anti-fascist resistance quickly emerged. The breakaway state of Novorossiya, or New Russia, was formed and Kiev sent in troops and tanks to crush the people's resistance. Civil war gripped the country. Now, almost a year later, while the resistance soldiers on, a humanitarian disaster perpetuated by the Kiev government's war of aggression has struck the citizens of Donbass. International Students Aid to Donbass, based in Wroclaw, Poland, is one of many aid groups springing up across the world in solidarity with the ongoing resistance and the victimized people of Eastern Ukraine.

Sanela Bajrasambasic, ICRC (Red Cross) delegate appeals for aid to help Donbass residents rebuild homes bombed by Kiev regime (see embedded video)

Fight Back! interviewed one of the founders of International Students Aid to Donbass (ISAD), who wished to remain anonymous.

Fight Back!: Can you explain about the student organization generally?

ISAD student: Sure. The idea for creating a solidarity with Donbass group which could coordinate humanitarian assistance emerged in October when a handful of international students in Wroclaw some of whom had been activists back in their home countries, wanted to find a way to aid the people of Donbass, who are truly in a miserable situation. We felt like we could no longer sit back and watch as innocent people in Novorossiya starved and died of sickness. Some of us were especially passionate about the situation in Ukraine and we racked our brains until we decided that sending such necessities as food, medicine and clothing could be the best way we could help and draw in other students. The idea of a humanitarian aid organization seemed like a perfect way to express our solidarity with the war-struck people of Novorossiya with the limited resources and capacity we had. So, we sat down, discussed our ideas, and International Students Aid to Donbass was born in early November. We contacted Russian NGOs that handle humanitarian assistance and set up a collection point in cooperation with them. However, we're still our own independent group; we see working with them as one of the greatest opportunities available.

Fight Back!: Are you able to tell a bit about the make-up of International Students Aid to Donbass? Obviously, the name indicates that the membership is multinational.

ISAD student: Being a group primarily composed of international students, our group truly is diverse. We have people from the U.S., Poland, and various European countries. Our group can communicate in more than half a dozen languages. ISAD is also diverse in more ways than just our national make-up. We all come from a broad range of backgrounds and political persuasions. Our group includes communists, Eurasianists and students who simply hate war and the pain it brings anywhere, and want to help alleviate the pain of the men, women and children who are enduring it. Some of us are passionate supporters of Novorossiya and the resistance, while others simply sympathize with the ordinary people who are suffering. As a humanitarian organization, we have no strict political line. The thing that fundamentally unites all of us is the fact that we are saving people's lives by delivering desperately needed goods to the people that need them most. This simple yet important mission has grown our numbers in the short time that we've been active and continues to motivate our work.

Fight Back!: Are there any security issues, seeing as you're operating in a country which, on a state level, supports the fascist government in Kiev? How does the political situation in Poland affect the work of the organization?

ISAD student: Absolutely. Security is a serious problem that we have to carefully deal with. Our members have faced verbal and physical threats and hostilities from Ukrainian nationalists in Poland. A significant number of Ukrainians now have easy access to visas, even free ones, to come work and study here. Some Ukrainian nationalists come here on visas because they don't actually want to fight in the war, and find plenty of space here, without consequences or obligations, to howl about how patriotic they are and threaten those who disagree. Because of security issues stemming from such people and the fact that the Polish state supports the Kiev junta, we keep even our social media private and, unfortunately, can't publicly list our aid point. Speaking of the general political situation in Poland, politicians here love to fan the flames of Russophobia in order to distract people from the real issues they face domestically. Additionally, Poland acts as the war hawk within NATO, so tensions here are always virulently anti-Russia, anti-Donbass, and the propaganda in the media is ridiculously overbearing. Between state-sanctioned Russophobia and aggressive Ukrainian "activists," we have to consciously, always and everywhere, pay paramount attention to security.

Fight Back!: What exactly does your day-to-day work look like?

ISAD student: Our work is simple. We pool together our money, time and energy and go on weekly shopping trips for food, medicine and clothing which we can ship monthly to Donbass. The important thing to remember is that we are students. We're operating on student budgets with student schedules, but we do the best we can with our resources. We all sacrifice our own money and time, but we all feel gratified by the humanitarian work we're doing. We also try to spread awareness of the situation in Ukraine, but the political situation renders that secondary to practical work.

Fight Back!: Do you have any future plans for expanding your work?

ISAD student: In the next few months, our main plan is to find new people to work with. As far as I know, we are one of the only, if not then the only such organization of its kind actively working in Poland, and especially Wroclaw. Before we started, we looked around for other such groups, but found none. In addition to continuing our work with our existing contacts, we're going to contact other humanitarian organizations, particularly those that specifically deliver assistance to children in Donbass. Of course, our capacity is limited, but finding more students and people in Poland, and indeed the world, who are interested in participating will only increase our determination and ability to carry out our mission to save Donbass people.

Fight Back!: Is there anything you'd like to say to supporters and sympathizers in the West, particularly progressives in the U.S.?

ISAD student: I think the most important thing is that this model of organization is universally applicable. Any number of people anywhere can get together and open an aid point. A little work goes a long way. Even if you only have one or two people and can only get a few food items, some over-the-counter medicine and used clothing, such things mean the world to people in Donbass whose only lifeline is international humanitarian assistance. Especially in the West and in the U.S., where the propaganda is so strong and labels the ordinary people of Donbass "pro-Russian terrorists," humanitarian aid work is important to exposing the lies, and most people can find it agreeable despite their political convictions. At the end of the day, we're saving people from a war being senselessly waged against them by some of the most powerful countries of the world in an imperialist geopolitical bid to weaken Russia and snatch Ukraine for the Western camp. The people stuck between the fighting need our help. Support from progressives benefits both the people of Donbass and the struggle against war and propaganda in the heart of the West itself. We encourage anyone interested to get involved and, of course, we're happy to help with logistics and share our experience.

International Students Aid to Donbass can be contacted at polskidonbasu [ AT ] gmail.com

Appendix 1: Red Cross appeals for help to rebuild homes in Donbass (2:57)

Appendix 2: Donbass under fire: Separatists(58:12)

As the Ukrainian army launches a new attack on the Donetsk Peoples' Republic, claiming to have retaken Donetsk Airport from 'separatist' forces, the justification for such an attack has once again become a subject for discussion. While the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko says the new offensive is aimed at 're-uniting' Ukraine, and Western media believe this both to be a reasonable objective and the real one, the actual situation is entirely different...

Much of the perversion of truth on the true nature of the Ukrainian government and the nature of the 'Eastern rebellion' can be put down to the success of the 'False Flag' attack on MH17 - carried out by the Ukrainian air force with as yet unverified assistance from Western intelligence agencies. This tragic state of affairs is thanks to the skill of the propaganda campaign conducted primarily by the US and its close allies, but facilitated by the Western media apparatus. It is tragic because the simplest of investigations of the crash site and wreckage of the plane would have readily demonstrated who was responsible; not only was clear physical evidence of the damage visible, and reported and photographed by some early observers, but forensic analysis would have found traces of the bullets that so clearly perforated the cockpit.

Given this background, the appearance of an article in the Fairfax press by veteran correspondent Paul McGeough describing his visits to the crash site with partner Kate Geraghty should have been cause for optimism; that this renowned 'investigative journalist' seemed uninterested in identifying the criminals responsible for killing so many people and instead focused on collecting sunflower seeds in 'Cockpit village' was cause for exasperation!
I sent the letter below to McGeough, in addition to Jonathan Green who interviewed him on the ABC. It also went to ABC Consumer Affairs, and the editors of the Australian National Review, and the editors of English Pravda.

Dear Paul,

While I admire your desire to give the relatives of victims of the MH17 atrocity something to fill the void left by the loss of their loved ones, I was astonished that your intense focus allowed you to both reveal and overlook crucial evidence that would provide something far more substantial to those relatives.

For those of us who paid no attention to the wild claims made in Western media following the downing of MH17, and made their own judgements based on evidence available, there was little evidence more convincing that photographs of the cockpit of the aircraft showing severe damage from artillery of some kind. For the benefit of the other recipients of this email I copy below your description in the Fairfax press of your visit to ‘Cockpit village’ – the very place where that vital fragment was observed and photographed:

“We headed out of the city before dawn. On a highway strewn with the smouldering wreckage of vehicles destroyed in the previous night's fighting, some with bodies still lying in or near them, we threaded our way through rebel checkpoints, back to what we had dubbed "the cockpit village".

This was Rassypnoe, a hamlet in which locals watched in awe as MH17's nose cone smashed into a field of shoulder-high sunflowers, just metres from buildings on the village's western flank.

When we visited the village in the last week of July, Eugene Lukovkin, a 30-year-old separatist gunman, gave us a graphic account of the crash – "bodies falling like bullets"; the nose section making a muffled sound, "like it landed in a swamp".

Recalling that he had been disposing of his grandmother's trash, Lukovkin told me: "The plane headed towards me. I could see the smoke as it fell to pieces – it had been missiled. One section was coming at me and the rest of it seemed to keep going. I dumped the rubbish cart and started running; others were running too – we think maybe some of the falling people are alive.

"There were lots of bodies – dead." Pointing to the left side of the cockpit, he says: "This is where one of the pilots was – I knew he was in charge because he had stars on his shoulder."

When we returned at dawn on our last day, none of the locals were to be seen. We drove to the field in which the buckled cockpit lay and quietly went to work – chopping enough sunflower heads to fill a big suitcase that we had bought at the market for this purpose. No one came to ask what we were doing.

Thirty minutes later we were back on the road, driving north to the Ukrainian government-controlled city of Kharkiv, from where we caught a commercial flight to the capital Kiev.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/my-christmas-offering-sunflower-seeds-for-mh17-families-from-the-fields-of-ukraine-20141226-12dily.html

You also described this experience in a radio interview on the ABC with Jonathan Green:

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/sunflower-seeds-for-mh17/5992360

While there is little doubt outside the sphere of influence of the Western corporate media that a Ukrainian fighter jet shot down MH17 using both an air to air missile and 30mm cannon fire, the necessary evidence to establish this fact has clearly not been sought by the Dutch investigators, or their findings are being suppressed. Of particular interest here is the report from the ‘separatist gunman’ that he had seen the pilots body in the cockpit wreckage.

In the accepted scenario of the crash, endorsed by the blank black box recording, the pilots were the prime and initial target of the aerial attack; not only are there multiple penetrations of this part of the aircraft, and relatively few elsewhere, but the cockpit came down separated from the main fuselage by some distance.

Examining the high quality photograph of the left side of the cockpit, one can see evenly spaced holes as from strafing, but from bullets fired at the other side of the cockpit – the holes are quite obviously made by objects emerging from inside as the outer layer of the double skin is peeled outward, while the holes in the inner skin are perfectly round and the size of the 30 mm bullets. In the version of your article above there is also a photograph taken by Kate Geraghty of ‘a pilot’s seat’. A forensic analysis on both the seat and the pilot’s body would surely show evidence of perforations by the tungsten shells used by the SU25 and presumed responsible for the damage.

World peace depends on truthful and careful reporting now

Some people may believe that discussion of exactly how MH17 came down is becoming academic, as we lurch from one dangerous crisis to the next. But unlike discussion of the causes of the First World War – so apparently topical at the moment – this is anything but academic. Already the framing of Russia as not just involved but even as responsible for the atrocity has ‘facilitated’ NATO’s expansion eastwards, and enabled the Kiev coup leaders to pursue their corrupt agenda with European approval and assistance. And given that it is now clear ‘cui bono’ as a result of this attack, we must confront the stark possibility that MH17 was an act of state terrorism in which our own governments may have been complicit.

There are already very many commentators, experts and authorities who have come to this conclusion, not simply based on the evidence that MH17 was shot down by a Ukrainian fighter jet – which is considerable – but because of the complete lack of evidence offered by Western agencies and governments for their contention that ‘Russian backed separatists’ shot it down with a BUK surface to air missile. Only days after the attack, Russian authorities appealed to the US to release satellite pictures from a new satellite they apparently had directly over Ukraine at the time of the crash. This information has been repeatedly requested by Moscow but with no response. It is not possible to conclude other than that such information would be incriminating both to Kiev and the US – if it showed a BUK missile launch by the Separatists as it surely would then we would have seen such information immediately.

Russia Today has just released a second documentary on the attack – ‘Reflections on MH17’, ( http://rtd.rt.com/films/reflections-on-mh17film/) which focuses on the extraordinary failure of Dutch and Ukrainian authorities to properly investigate the causes of the accident, while observing that conclusions on what weapon was responsible could be easily made with some simple laboratory analyses. It could not be said that such an investigation would ‘bring closure’ to the relatives of MH17 victims, but exposing the real culprits would do a lot more for the victims and potential victims of NATO’s aggressive policies in Europe. These criminals who would happily sacrifice a few hundred truly innocent civilians as part of their strategic game cannot be allowed to escape justice, and the wrath of their own citizens.

I must just acknowledge the welcome new perspective brought to the Australian media by the Australian National Review – to whom I am also copying this letter. To my knowledge this is the only mention in our print press of the ‘real story’ of MH17, – but I await its serious discussion from our national broadcaster.

Inside you may view the execution of a so far nameless woman in a town in Idlib province, Syria, which was taken over by 'rebels' about one year ago. She pleads to see her children before she is executed, but to no avail. She is told to kneel, while a bunch of unpleasant looking and frighteningly stupid and arrogant-sounding men discuss matters loudly - for minutes on end - before she is suddenly dispatched. Obviously this is not an isolated act, but we ask women to make themselves aware of this act of political brutality against all of us and to unite against US/NATO foreign intervention in Syria, which is making it much harder for the Bashar al-Assad Government (which does not execute women for adultery) to combat these evil forces. The overwhelming message from Syrian people is please stop foreign intervention in Syria. Please let the Syrian army fight these 'rebels'. See Friends of Syria and Australians for Mussahala (Reconciliation) in Syria, and Socrates and Syria.

"The sign on the wall reads ‘Jabhat al Nusra’ in red letters. One doubts that there is much distinction between Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS. Certainly not in terms of brutality or mindless devotion to some blinding fundamentalist belief. That the ‘imam’ who presides over the execution gives a sermon to an assembly of men with guns and smart phones, rather than a crowd of residents and citizens who are meant to learn from the punishment gives it a ridiculous and farcical atmosphere, except the poor woman really dies." David Macilwain.

Below is an edition of the Syrian government's news with the President's statement about terrorism and Charlie Hebdo. President al-Assad says that he understands terrorism very well because the Syrian Government has been fighting it now for four years and it is responsible for thousands of deaths in Syria.

The Australian government is supporting the activities of such terrorists, which it identifies as 'moderate rebels', in order to topple the government for its NATO friends, who want to get control of the general area and its petroleum resources. Bashar al-Assad is frequently described as the leader of a 'brutal regime', but he was overwhelmingly elected last year in free elections to which Syrians travelled from all over the world to participate in, and received votes from Syrians in other countries when they were able to vote - which was not the case in Australia.

Lada Ray reports that Russia will stop transporting gas to Europe via Ukraine and redirect it through Turkey. She also describes Ukraine activities leading up to renewed war on East Ukraine, with the US, France and Poland having agreed to supply advanced arms to Ukraine. In addition, two ships, one from Australia and one from Canada docked in the Odessa port in the past week to two. Each was full of winter uniforms for the Ukraine army. The following article is from Lada Ray's English language blog at https://futuristrendcast.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/confirmed-russia-to-stop-transit-of-gas-to-europe-through-ukraine/

This is a bombshell that was dropped by Russia earlier today.

It has been officially confirmed! The head of Gazprom Alexei Miller announced that Russia would discontinue the Ukrainian route for Russian gas transit to the EU. I expected this announcement ever since I broke the news of the Turkey/Russia deal on 12/2/14, but I did expect it in a year or two: read here and here. Looks like the time is getting compressed and the pressure for change is intensifying.

I understand at this time the flow of gas through Ukraine has been restricted to 2/5th of the usual volume. However, it appears it will soon be stopped completely.

Russia to switch fully to the Turkish Stream to move the quantities necessary to satisfy all of European demand. Ukraine up till now was responsible for about 50% of the Russian gas transit to the EU, with Nord Stream, Belarus and Turkey accounting for the rest.

Ukraine, as always during the heating season, has been stealing Russian gas. This is in addition to massive debt Ukraine has with Russia. Russia is by far Ukraine’s largest creditor; gas debt alone constitutes nearly $5.5 bln. Total Ukraine’s debt to Russia, including corporate is well over $30 bln, according to Vladimir Putin.

This is a much bolder move than anyone expected. EU is in shock. According to Gazrpom’s head Alexei Miller, EU didn’t want South Stream Russia tried to build as partners together with the EU. Therefore, Russia will now deliver gas to Turkey, and then to the border between Turkey and Greece. From thereon, it will be EU’s responsibility to build pipelines through its territory.

Gazrpom is to become a big player in Turkey, and Turkey in return will enjoy massive gas price discounts and large profits from the resale of gas to the EU and other buyers.

Read related articles from 12/2/14: German Vice Chancellor: No Ukraine in NATO; Russia, Let’s Make Up! and from 12/5/14: Declaration of Cold War: What Chain of Events is US Provoking With New Hostile Move? In these I discuss in detail the Putin/Erdogan agreement on building the alternative pipeline to Turkey!

I see several interesting things at play here:

1. My predictions:

First of all, let’s recall that I said from the beginning of 2014 and many times throughout 2014 that when Russia feels even slightly inconvenienced by the West, off to the East they go. My prediction came true spectacularly within only two or three months, when in May 2014 Russia signed a number of mega-deals with China on gas supply, the Power of Siberia gas pipeline construction, high-speed railroad construction, and much more. Then, Putin also signed massive gas supply deal with Turkey to bypass the unfriendly EU, plus, a massive nuclear energy deal. Turkey is, of course, also a part of the East (Middle East).

Second prediction I made was that Europe would start experiencing gas shortages due to Russia’s re-orientation to the East. I said it would happen a few years from now. It appears my predictions’ time table is accelerating!

See the PREDICTIONS page on top navigation bar, as well as my 2014 articles under RUSSIA category for much more on that. Some of the articles are: What Brought Down Russian Satellite? Angela Merkel’s Biggest Fear? Plus Ukraine Election Prediction; Ukraine Part 7: Russia’s Geopolitics, USA’s Bluff and EU’s Big Mistake; Interview with predictions: The Road to Moscow Goes Through Kiev.

2. It seems Miller and Gazprom are very confident that EU has no alternative to the Russian gas at this time. For the longest time EU and Ukraine had been able to blackmail Russia every year, taking advantage of the fact that the EU was Russia’s largest customer and Ukraine – the largest transit artery.

Russia was customarily accused of various transgressions, the blame was yearly shifted to Russia for any gas flow disruptions due to Ukraine’s stealing of Russian gas; the expense for Ukraine’s theft was also placed on Russia’s shoulders alone, while EU denied any responsibility, always siding with Ukraine. It appears Russia/Gazprom feel that enough is enough and that it’s time to cut the Gordian Knot. The fact that Russia now has strategic agreements with Turkey and China helps Russia’s leverage.

3. This is where the economy and geopolitics mix. Russia warned a long time ago that should EU’s behavior not change, there would eventually be more return sanctions. It appears Russia wasn’t kidding!

Recent events, in which Ukraine and certain EU countries acted strangely, to say the least, apparently were the last drop, reinforcing Russia’s intentions. The events I am referring to were: Ukraine PM Yatsenyuk giving multiple interviews and speeches in Germany accusing Russia of attacking the Nazi Germany and Ukraine, while Merkel stood by him, failing to react to the outright lie. The recent Volnovakha, Donbass tragedy in which 10 people died and scores were wounded when a bus with Donetsk pensioners was hit by a bomb or a mine on the Ukraine side. This incident was immediately blamed on the Donbass self-defence. Ukraine tried to get EU to recognize LNR and DNR as terrorist organizations, while designating Russia as the state aiding terrorism, followed by a new round of sanctions. While the resolution failed, another resolution to adopt a new round of anti-Russian sanctions may pass (I don’t have the latest on that). Meanwhile, per reports, US, France and Poland, among others, have agreed to supply advanced arms to Ukraine. In addition, two ships, one from Australia and one from Canada docked in the Odessa port in the past week to two. Each was full of winter uniforms for the Ukraine army. Poroshenko went to Paris to participate in the Unity March together with Merkel and Hollande, as I wrote here, to express solidarity with the victims of the French terrorist acts, while hundreds and thousands were dying at home unnoticed by anyone. Poroshenko’s trip strangely coincided with Yatsenyuk trying to promote Russia as aggressor in Germany and the Volnovakha bus tragedy. Right after returning from France Poroshenko announced three new waves of mobilization to recruit over 200,000 soldiers – we now know that when they re-start the war with Donbass, they’ll be able to kill more efficiently thanks to all those Australian and Canadian uniforms keeping them nice and warm. In the meantime, the bombings of Donbass have intensified by 10-20 times. For the past week or so the number of dead and wounded from Ukraine’s shelling is greater than for the past 3-4 months combined – exact numbers are not known yet, but the preliminary number is 52 dead during the past few days. As a result of Poroshenko’s visit to Paris and the killing of 10 civilians in Volnovakha, the Astana, Kazakhstan peace conference planned for today, January 15, was cancelled. To wrap up the vicious cycle of events, the man who was instrumental in organizing the Astana peace conference was The French president, Hollande. Please refer back to my article: Urgent! Secret Link Between French False Flag Attacks and Ukraine, in which I also said that Hollande was wavering from the party line, trying to play peacemaker, and terror acts in France were meant to remind him to toe the line. Finally, S&P and other Western agencies are set to lower Russia’s rating to junk status: China/Russia to Launch Own Credit Rating Agency to Rival the Big Three.

4. US has been trying to squeeze Russia out of the EU gas market in order to sell to the EU its own, more expensive, shale gas. The shale industry in the US is in difficult circumstances and many fields have been conserved because of low prices and insufficient international demand for the US shale gas. The banks that financed fracking companies are afraid of not getting their money back; many are on the verge of bankruptcy. Obtaining the lucrative EU market is the best thing for the US. Of course the expensive US shale gas will undermine the EU economy, making EU products less competitive, which will help the US economy and keep EU on a short leash for the US purposes. However, building LNG terminals is expensive, they take a lot of valuable space near ports, and it takes time. Such infrastructure isn’t available for the time being. It appears that despite tough talk, EU is ‘stuck’ with cheaper and readily available Russian gas.

5. World Grand-Master Putin at work! Russia’s leverage has increased exponentially from signing strategic mega-deals with China last May and Turkey last December. It appears Putin has decided this was the right time to play one of Russia’s aces; or if you will, to play Russia’s Turkish Gambit!

6. Last fall, when Russia, Ukraine and EU negotiated, EU promised to vouch for Ukraine’s payment for the ongoing supply of Russian gas. In reality, Ukraine never re-paid $3.1 bln in past arrears due before New Year’s. EU also didn’t vouch for Ukraine’s payments past New Year’s. Therefore, any gas Ukraine receives now is unpaid for, which in itself triggers gas supply stoppage.

7. The Ukraine pipeline infrastructure is Soviet built and was never really maintained by Ukraine. It’s either time to fix it, or to abandon it. Perhaps this is the right time to abandon what cannot be fixed – and I am speaking broadly. Ukraine and EU’s behavior have gone far beyond any permissible or even conceivable. The way Ukraine and EU behave towards Russia can be expressed by the following Russian sayings: ‘to spit into a well from which you drink’ and ‘to saw off the branch you are sitting on.’ It appears that with those who don’t understand good will, reason or logic the only way is the way of an ultimatum.

Back in 1986 after the joints on the Challenger Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) leaked, causing a catastrophic explosion, a Presidential Inquiry found that both the contractor supplying the equipment (Morton Thiokol) and NASA had failed to act on the advice of engineering experts working for Morton Thiokol. Damages were paid to the families of the 7 dead astronauts and NASA suffered a major setback.

In an almost perfectly analogous scenario, the ABC is launching Australia on an extreme population growth trajectory when all the scientific and economic evidence supports grounding this "population rocket" until due diligence can confirm whether it should be cleared for take-off.

"The Challenger accident has frequently been used as a case study in the study of subjects such as engineering safety, the ethics of whistle-blowing, communications, group decision-making, and the dangers of groupthink. It is part of the required readings for engineers seeking a professional license in Canada and other countries. Roger Boisjoly, the engineer who had warned about the effect of cold weather on the O-rings, left his job at Morton Thiokol and became a speaker on workplace ethics. He argues that the caucus called by Morton Thiokol managers, which resulted in a recommendation to launch, "constituted the unethical decision-making forum resulting from intense customer intimidation." For his honesty and integrity leading up to and directly following the shuttle disaster, Roger Boisjoly was awarded the Prize for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Many colleges and universities have also used the accident in classes on the ethics of engineering."

The above quote comes from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster

All the data prepared by the engineering experts supported the conclusion that launching at a temperature below 37 degrees Fahrenheit was dangerous and risked catastrophic failure of the seals. The lowest temperature of a previous launch had been 53 degrees.

The ABC has adopted a far worse contempt for the truth in its illegitimate deconstruction of the Australian Climate Change debate; which has not even put the facts on the table for discussion. The ABC has deliberately omitted from its "Carbon Tax Debate" the relevance of one of the highest rates of population growth of any country combined with one of the highest emissions per capita of any country. Emissions growth in Australia dwarfs even the most optimistic economic "tricks" proposed to reduce them in the short to medium term.

On 16 September 2014 on RN Breakfast Greg Combet was reiterating his belief that a Carbon Tax was the solution. As usual no facts were provided to support the opinion; just "belief". That's OK; but it's not OK to suppress all counter arguments.

A week or so earlier on RN Breakfast Sheryle Bagwell lamented that with the Carbon price now so low it would have been a very cost effective strategy (???). The European experience has been that the low Carbon price has rendered Carbon Trading less effective.

A counter argument is that in the last decade the prices of PV Solar and low energy light bulbs have dropped far further, in percentage terms, than the most extreme level of proposed Carbon Tax would increase the cost of coal fired power. Economic "tricks" like a Carbon Tax haven't worked, but it is economic "tricks" that have been driving the global economy on a course of environmental destruction for the last century or more.

Another counter argument is that the Economic panacea of Globalisation is, in fact, the antithesis of sustainability. What more ironic solution could occur than an Economic solution based on globalisation of Carbon trading?

Yet another counter argument is that extreme population growth drives extreme emissions growth far faster in the short term than any form of emissions trading strategy can reduce them. Therefore population growth management is relevant to emissions management in Australia (and globally). Every migrant that arrives in Australia roughly triples their emissions, on average, the moment they arrive.

So perhaps the ABC should stop relying on Economists and Politicians to solve this problem?

Germany is open about its recent increase in emissions, which has resulted from expansion of brown coal fired power generation and closure of 8 nuclear power stations. We have not heard such transparent commentary from the ABC's front line propaganda tools: QANDA and RN Breakfast.

Their propaganda over the last 6+ years has been analogous to broadcasting that the sole cause of obesity is lack of exercise (emissions reduction measures) and that obese people should not reduce their calorific intake (population growth driving emissions growth).

The ABC is guilty of deliberate, destructive propaganda against the public interest; yet apparently it cannot be called to account by the legal system. The ABC accepts endless population growth as inevitable; which is inherently absurd in a country with one of the highest rates of population growth on earth driven primarily by an autocratically imposed mass migration (self colonisation) program.

2014-15: Migration program set at 190,000 places; humanitarian intake 13,750 places.

The ABC seeks to launch Australia on an extreme population growth trajectory (like a Space Shuttle that should never have been allowed to take off) by stealth and without consensus. It deliberately and unlawfully insists on breaching its Statutory Duty of impartiality to this day. The ABC knows with absolute certainty that the metaphorical O-rings on the population growth rocket are going to fail, but is it "the unethical decision-making forum resulting from intense customer intimidation" that drives the ABC's misconduct? In this case is the ABC's "customer" the Government rather than the people that it has a Statutory Duty to serve? Has the ABC unilaterally decided to elevate itself to the role of self proclaimed politician in flagrant disregard for its role as taxpayer funded broadcaster dedicated to impartiality in the public interest? Do Liberals, Labor and Greens all support the same dumb growth policy? Yes. They have all categorically stated this.

The ABC appears to be unaccountable for its misconduct; and all Australians continue to be betrayed. Ignorance is no excuse for the gravity of this unlawful and irrational skulduggery. You cannot engineer a solution to a problem if you ignore the relevant facts. Engineering 101.

How is it that the ABC's Chairman reported this conclusion in his public statement of 12 March 2014; after Vote Compass, pro population and pro carbon tax bias complaints remained open at the time:

"The first review, by Andrea Wills, found no breaches of editorial policy but made a range of suggestions about ways to improve our content. The second review, by Gerald Stone, identified four items out of almost 100 separate pieces of content that raised concerns. He asked for further investigation of these programs, which were conducted and the results reflected in his conclusions."

No mention was made of either pro Carbon Tax or pro Population Growth bias despite the evidence presented in numerous complaints over the last 6 years.

Jane Stillwater holds the Edward Snowdon, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange signs up. Is it necessary to explain that this sign is to be read in context of the "Je suis Charlie/I am Charlie" (Hebdo) signs currently being held in their tens of thousands around the world in a celebration of the illusion of free speech and a free press in Western countries? Or the connection with reporting on war conspiracies? Ms Stillwater was one of a small group of United States citizens who took the responsibility of going to the most recent Syrian presidential elections. The group members later spoke at the United Nations about how well the elections (which resoundingly returned Bashar al-Assad) were conducted. See http://candobetter.net/node/3888 This information, however, was not taken up by the mass media. Jane Stillwater's blog is at http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/blog-post.html

Video inside: For those of you who can't remember how all this terrorism got started. Although we also have to keep in mind the longer history of colonialism and petroleum-hunting in the Middle East, which goes back to the 19th century and involves the descendants of the same national and corporate players.

This article argues that you could probably get away with some nasty cartoons in a truly free press because such a press would freely report all sides to a dispute and not leave whole regions and classes of people with no expression in an international argument mediatized by the very same bunch of pillaging and plundering power elites, corporate and government, who profit from their silence. The article also wonders (but does not profess to know) whether the cold blooded assassinations at Charlie Hebdo were really an act of Islamic terrorism, or another false flag, on the principle of cui bono.

I remember thinking that Charlie Hebdo was overdoing rather unfunny cartoons to demonstrate defiance without seeming to give any thought to how wronged people in the Middle East have a right to feel, due to the effects of continuing colonialism – corporate and national – under the auspices of a US-led NATO. My observations in this 2012 article, “Anti-Islamic film - not so funny,” earned me capitalized insults as a leftist apologist for Islamic terrorism, anti-feminism and censorship. There was so much sound and fury in this correspondence that it left no room for any alternative explanation or dialogue. And that is the dynamic that false flags exploit.

Western treatment of Middle East and Media support for this

It’s all very well to celebrate a free press, but, since when is the Western mainstream newsmedia actually independent and free? Not only is it heavily biased in its reporting on the Middle East – when so much is at stake – but their barracking for the destruction of US/NATO targets seems actually to incite hatred and thereby encourage some people to join jihads. Let me put it this way, the mainstream newsmedia has a way of presenting the powers it wants to split and topple in the Middle East (and the East) as if they were all variations on Vlad the Impaler, imbuing its reports with quivering outrage and bathos, so that it must seem to many that the only honorable thing to do is to go and fight with the ‘rebels’ whom the press and NATO champion. Hence, it appears, the influx of foreign ‘rebel’ fighters from Australia, France, Britain and elsewhere and the widespread ignorance of the other side.

Charlie Hebdo might have a reputation for being outspoken, but to me it seemed to toe the US/NATO establishment line on illegal wars in the Middle East. For instance it didn’t question virtually baseless Western allegations that Bashar al-Assad is a ‘brutal dictator’, but casually exploited the propaganda in a cartoon showing the Syrian president standing triumphantly in front of a mountain of human bones like a hunter. If Charlie’s objective was largely to lampoon religion of all kinds, then there was another reason not to lampoon Bashar al-Assad, who presides over the last secular Arab state. [1] In other words, modern Charlie Hebdo was not politically subtle, critical, inquiring or a champion of Truth. Perhaps if it had been, it could have built bridges.

It seems to me that if the mainstream news and traditional alternative media really reported fairly, both, all sides of what is happening in the Middle East, then maybe people would not get so bothered about cartoons. Also maybe the cartoons would be a bit funnier and more informed. If the mainstream newsmedia did not constantly support and whitewash the Western military financial and industrial machine, this kind of violent response from the Middle East would have far less support. If the mainstream Western media interviewed, not just ‘rebels’ but government and a wide variety of citizens in Saudi Arabia or in Syria, for instance, those countries would have real voices and we would have ears to hear them. If it had done so in Iraq and Libya those countries might today be intact.

At candobetter.net we have often carried copies of letters to our media, especially SBS and ABC, the Australian state television channels, asking them to report more accurately on Middle Eastern and Eastern affairs because of the danger to peace that reporting propaganda carries. See http://candobetter.net/taxonomy/term/5364 Only on one occasion have we recorded a retraction. See ABC Australia apologises for bias against Russia in reporting MH17 crash. However this was a private apology, not a public statement on television.

False flag?

I have so far written with the assumption that the Charlie Hebdo assassinations were not a false flag. Because false flags are the other side of the history of aggressive capitalist interference in the Middle East and other oil producing countries of the ‘undeveloped world’, and they are fundamental to the history of war. How else do you get peoples who hardly know each other to try to kill each other? You have to give them a reason that they believe is true.

A truly free Western newsmedia would make false flags a lot harder to fly, but today’s newsmedia actively conveys state propaganda designed to terrify the public into supporting wars and bad laws, whilst presenting it as news and entertainment.

False flags have also been used by the US as methods to goad other countries into supporting it. Europe is too close to comfort to the Middle East to be gung ho about starting wars there. Its support for the US in NATO recently has been bizarre. On one interpretation [3], it could be that, like Russia, it chooses to appease the United States, in the hope of preventing all-out war. The terrorist attacks could have been a warning to Hollande not to take an independent stand vis a vis Russia. Just five days ago he was upbeat about the sanctions being lifted if talks went well. How long is that going to last after this series of terrorist attacks?

One cannot help but ask, if this horrible Charlie Hebdo massacre was really an act of terrorism by Muslims, why would they attack cartoonists and lone journalists, instead of the big media owners and NATO policy-supporting politicians? After all, the US has had no qualms in planning and carrying out or supporting assassinations of leaders, such as of Fidel Castro, Sadadm Husein, Muammar Gaddaffi, and, still in the firing line: Bashar al-Assad. One might say it could be too hard for a bunch of poor Muslims to get to anyone rich and powerful, but poor Muslims are supposed to have flown planes into the World Trade Center and to have carried out numerous other sophisticated acts of terror. In the case of false flags though, the power elite is not going to target its own. That would better explain to me the targeting of politically lesser citizens.

I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of the reporting of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and its sequel, but some aspects immediately seem odd. One is the shooting of a policeman in the head without blood appearing, censored by France2 News because of its graphic nature – except that the real footage, whilst tragic, was strangely ungraphic. See http://www.conspiracyclub.co/2015/01/07/paris-fake-terrorism/. Then there was the identity card left in a vehicle by one of the terrorists, reminiscent of the passport found in the wreckage of the 9-11 towers. After that there was the police chase of two suspected terrorists which culminated in a shoot-out where the terrorists lost their lives, leaving no-one to tell their story. And then there was the second in command detective who shot himself at Lieges, the night of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations. http://www.lepopulaire.fr/limousin/actualite/2015/01/08/un-commissaire-de-police-de-limoges-se-suicide-dans-son-bureau_11283307.htmlHe was deeply involved in the investigation of the Charlie Hebdo cases of Muslim protest, which had been ongoing for years and was the second detective to apparently suicide in the same team in slightly over one year.

The mainstream Western press has a tendency to report the US-NATO view and which ever so-called revolutionary group they support. It does not canvas the opinions of people who do not identify with Western supported revolutionaries; it does not ask government opinion. If the press reporting on the Middle East, notably on Syria, Iran, Iraq and Libya (as well as Russia and Ukraine in Eastern Europe) actually got reports from many sides, then the people in those countries and those who identify with them would be less likely to see the Western Press as an enemy.

The West has been instrumental in bringing down leaders and governments and sowing chaos to an extent in the Middle East that most Western citizens have no inkling of because this chaotic war and looting machine called ‘capitalism and democracy’ is marketed by the Western Press as a positive force, whilst the people it is trampling are portrayed as irrational, bloodthirsty religious maniacs and international terrorists. The mainstream press generally does not make overt fun of Islam and Mohammed, but a wing of the press that identifies itself as revolutionary free press and critical of the status quo, does, purportedly to dramatise and ridicule Islam’s apparent contempt for free speech.

Charlie Hebdooriginally became a fatwa target in 2 November 2011when it published an edition on Islam, with a cover of a a cartoon Muslim saying, “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing!”. In 2012 it followed with a large number of insulting cartoons about Mohammed as a gesture of indignation against moves to censor media critical of Islam.

The context was a film called Innocence of Muslims which parts of which available on you-tube portrayed the founder of Islam in a very bad personal and political light and Muslims as aggressively anti-Christian. Publicity about this film was accompanied by widespread riots by Muslims against foreign embassies, particularly US embassies, including riots in Sydney on 15 September 2012, with police injured. At the same time warships from more than 25 countries, including the United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, were together launching a military exercise in the Straits of Hormuz, in response to threats to close it off. There was plenty of reason for Muslims to be angry with and frightened by the West apart from that film. Today the stakes are even higher and the misery of war-torn and subdivided Middle East is even greater than it was.

Maybe therefore Westerners should hold their own governments and media proprietors to greater account if we are to avoid World War Three.

Yes, we do need a really free press in the West. That is worth fighting for. Then maybe we can have cartoons and the truth in all its aspects, with a voice for everyone.

NOTES

[1]President Bashar al-Assad, although the butt of so much mediatized professionally politicized opprobrium, totally fails to bluster and threaten, but continues doggedly to present Syria’s case.

[2] International and human rights professor of law, Francis Boyle’s Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three-Decade US Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution , (Kindle Locations 1787-1841), have suggested this view to me.

I was inspired to write this short article after reading evolutionary sociologist Sheila Newman's multi-species population work on cooperative breeding and incest avoidance in Demography, Territory, Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Population, Countershock Press, 2013, chapters 3 and 4. Newman gives theory plus examples of self-controlled populations in variety of species. My primary observation of dingo breeding habits in their native habitat supports this theory and is supported by it.

Dingoes have the ability to self-regulate their population, and avoid breeding when times are lean, by suppressing their own estrus (female) and testrus (male) cycles. In normal circumstances, the alpha male and female are able to suppress breeding in subordinate pack (family) members, so that only one pair out of each pack reproduces. A stable dingo pack includes the alpha male and female, and surviving pups from the previous year’s litter. These pups have a vital role as beta pack members, who perform the task of ‘alloparental helper’, to wet-nurse, regurgitate food and deliver food (carcasses) for the pups and to provision the mother.

I have personally witnessed a beta female wet nurse pups of an alpha female (therefore the large litter of 8 pups was well provisioned), and have also seen an alpha female assist a young Mother from a different pack by nursing her pups as well as her own. There was also a case of an alpha female who provisioned her own pups by nursing, and then provisioned another (deceased) female’s litter on the other side of the Island, thus altruistically self-sacrificing for the sake of survival of another dingo’s litter.

Dingoes therefore have an innate ability to help each other survive, indeed, help the species survive, by cooperatively nurturing their young. I have also seen adoption of pups between packs, if numbers in the packs are low and beta members required.

When this role is successfully completed, in most cases, the beta pack members disperse to find new territories and make new alliances, bonding with dingoes from outside their own territory and staring their own packs.

Despite circumstances of provisioning each-other’s packs beyond their own territorial boundaries, in stable dingo packs, incest is non-existent. There is a complete avoidance of inbreeding, producing successful population control (to either raise or lower the population as required), promotion of genetic diversity, maintenance of social hierarchies, with territorial boundaries fixed and serving an important role.

However when pack social structure is disrupted, or entire packs are destroyed, this all changes.

I have seen one circumstance of near-incest and one of incest in unstable dingo packs.

In the first instance, the alpha female’s brother, whose own pack was completely wiped out, and who had no other females within his territory, followed his sister around desperately when she was in ovulation and ready to mate. I watched as the sister and her mate attempted copulation, but were constantly interrupted by the brother. The most fascinating observation of their behaviour was that although they were firm with the brother, insisting that he couldn’t mate, they were kind and gentle while pushing him away. The desire for him to mate was so strong that he had little choice but to continue to try and mate his sister, but there is no doubt that if his pack had survived, and he was able to find an appropriate female, he would not have been in a position to attempt to mate his sister.

In another circumstance, an entire pack was wiped out, except for a male and a female pup. The pair mated when they were 10 months old. Dingoes don’t usually have their first estrus until they are 2 years old, and it was a clear indication that there was something very wrong. Surprisingly, the female produced a very healthy litter of 8 pups. I believe she had a large litter to compensate for the fact that the rest of the pack was gone and the population needed boosting. I am convinced this was a form of preservation of the species, allowing for the fact that the carrying capacity of her territory was large enough for 8 new pack members.

These incestuous occurrences only took place because of loss of stable pack social structure, and bespoke of a species in crisis.

See also: Help Save Koalas From Extinction! (9/1/2014) on the Australian Wildlife Protection web site.

With the destruction of yet another juvenile dingo on Fraser Island, the Australian Wildlife Protection Council (AWPC) and the National Dingo Preservation and Recovery Program (NDPRP) today issued a joint criticism of the Queensland Government for its continuing mismanagement of the Fraser Island dingo population.

The juvenile male dingo was destroyed by Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service staff this week after it allegedly stalked tourists near Eli Creek on the Island and nipped an 11 year old child.

Spokespersons for the Australian Wildlife Protection Council Inc. (AWPC) and the National Dingo Preservation and Recovery Program Inc. (NDPRP), Ms Jennifer Parkhurst and Dr Ernest Healy, respectively, stressed that:

‘Such allegations of aggression by dingoes on Fraser Island are frequently subjective, often being misinterpretations of innocent dingo behaviour, and have characterised the mismanagement of dingoes on the Island for a long time. The Queensland authorities have a long track record of manufacturing perceptions of dingo ‘aggression’ on Fraser Island, at times even encouraging a fear mentality against dingoes amongst tourists’.

Ms Parkhurst, a wildlife photographer who studied dingoes on the Island at close hand for many years, stated that, this most recent destruction of a juvenile dingo on Fraser Island, after contact with tourists, highlights an even deeper mismanagement issue.

‘The underlying problem with the Queensland government’s approach to managing the Island, which is World Heritage listed, is the sheer volume of tourists that it allows onto Fraser Island, currently running at well over 400,000 per year. The dingoes are literally over run by tourists, including beach areas which are traditionally places where dingoes forage for food. Efforts by the authorities to virtually confine dingoes to the central areas of the Island, where they can be ‘wild’, without contact with people, are ill-conceived and unachievable. While this prioritisation of commercial values over biodiversity values continues, more dingoes will die and their ability to survive on Fraser Island in the medium to longer-term will be in doubt.’

Ms Parkhurst said hopes that the Newman government would mean a fresh approach to dingo management on Fraser Island have now proven unfounded.

‘Despite a review of the Fraser Island dingo management policy on coming to government in 2012, the current Queensland government has fallen into the same old mismanagement practices. Part of the problem is that there has not been a sufficient turnover of Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service staff to ensure departmental cultural renewal in relation to dingo management on the Island.’

Dr Healy emphasised that the ongoing culling of Fraser Island dingoes is being permitted by the Queensland authorities without sufficient base-line dingo population data to know whether the authorised killing of dingoes is undermining the viability of the Island’s population:

‘Convincing answers are yet to be provided by the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service as to the total dingo population of Fraser Island, the population age structure, including the number of breeding pairs, and the genetic health of the dingo population. This is essential knowledge for any responsible dingo management policy. It has been lacking.

At present the authorities simply keep citing a figure of between 100 and 200 animals, a figure that has been blindly thrown around by the authorities for years without adequate research to substantiate it. The fact that the Queensland authorities have only recently put forward a detailed research agenda to address these dingo population questions bears out the inadequacy and potential risk of dingo management practices up to this point.’

The AWPC and the NDPRP are concerned that the majority of animals killed on Fraser Island have been juveniles. Without accurate population data on the Island’s breeding population, the impact of culling juveniles upon the overall dingo population’s survival prospects is not known. Destruction of juveniles impacts negatively upon future generations because they perform an important role as parental helpers in raising subsequent litters and they disperse to form new packs.

January 8, 2015

It is believed that up until two weeks post election 457 visa workers from Spain and their families were still arriving to work on East West Link. However the latest news is that the Authority behind the East West Link is being disbanded by the Andrews Government. There are, however, still many issues left over from the Napthine Government and East West Link that need to be carefully monitored in the area of environment, democracy and heritage.

East West Link News: The good news received yesterday is that Linking Melbourne Authority responsible for the East West Link is being disbanded by the Andrews Government."Authority behind the East West Link ditched" by Clay Lucas. http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/authority-behind-east-west-link-ditched-20150107-12jg0e.html

This spells the demise of this monster project which would have been an environmental, social and economic disaster for the State. Many seem to be in a state of disbelief at the news. Few have been commending the Andrews Government for the action taken to wind up the East West Link. In our view its a bigger win than the Franklin Dam victory.

One activist has asked "Now just what are we all gonna do with ourselves this year? " There is plenty still to do re East West Link and other issues. And any win is temporary, any loss permanent as David Suzuki has commented, so eternal vigilance is the order of the day:

Priority Issues Re Winding Up the East West Link :

1 Royal Park Heritage The former Planning Minister, Matthew Guy, included the Royal Park on the State Heritage Register but spelt out exemptions to allow the East West Link to be routed through the Park, thus - in our view - negating its heritage standing! Our organisation and the Royal Park Protection Group Inc. sought legal advice and were advised that this matter could be referred to the Supreme Court but the cost precluded us from proceeding. We hope to raise this issue with the Acting Planning Minister. We have raised it already with the Director of Heritage Victoria.

2 Status of New Sports Facilities in Royal and Princes Parks. As you might be aware the City of Melbourne received funding of up to $14 million to fast track development of sports facilities in Royal Park and Princes Park to compensate for the forecast loss of sporting facilities on the Ross Straw Field in Royal Park with the construction of the East West Link. We have been extremely alarmed over the loss of open parkland for passive recreation and informal sports and the addition of light towers to the Flemington Road sports ground next to the Royal Children's Hospital and in Princes Park. As far as we know, a memorandum of understanding between Linking Melbourne Authority and the City of Melbourne was signed but given LMA is being wound up and that the East West Link will not proceed, is this agreement still valid? We are fighting the installation of sports lighting. The light spill and the towers themselves would have a detrimental impact on the environment, on cultural landscapes, on heritage and residential amenity.

3 Zoo's Territorial Ambitions to expand its Parking in Royal Park. As you may be aware the Zoo had negotiated secretly with Linking Melbourne Authority to alienate a great slab of Royal Park after construction of the East West Link was completed for its parking. We propose to pursue this question with Zoo management to promote public transport and alternative forms of transport to the Zoo. This has already been raised with the Zoo Director.

4 Immigration of 457 Workers to Work on East West Link. Rumour abounds that as late as two weeks after the election workers from Spain and their families were still arriving under 457 visas to work for the East West Connect consortium on the East West Link. If any one has information on this subject can you let me know? Meantime see photo taken in Royal Park by Age photographer Paul Jeffers of the East West Link opponents grouped on the very spot that the tunnel was to emerge into Royal Park Park on the Ross Straw Field. Work was to start on this spot in January until the Andrews Government called a halt to the project. (See photo in Clay Lucas' article)

5 Supreme Court Cases re East West Link. Don't think we have forgotten the stand that Councils plus Tony Murphy took over the East West Link. We have yet to hear when the cases of Yarra and Moreland Council and Moonee Valley Council will be heard. It would be great to get a comment on the final decision on the Tony Murphy case in the Supreme Court.

Source: Julianne Bell, Protectors of Public Lands Victoria

A new temporary entry visa for skilled migrants, without any of the safeguards of labour market testing and English language requirements, would be a betrayal of Australian workers.

Unemployment has risen to 6.3 per cent. Over 775,000 Australians are out of work. The total number of hours worked in Australia in November actually fell by 0.3 per cent. Youth unemployment is at a 15 year high of 13.8%. In the northwest of Melbourne it is 17.2%, up from 13.1% in 2013. Originally published on Kelvin Thomson's website at http://kelvinthomson.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/local-workers-sold-out.html

The Liberal Government would be much more helpful if it cut back our migrant worker programs that are placing unfair competition on local young people, and invested instead in our skills and education sectors. The billions of dollars in cuts by the Liberal Federal and State Governments to our skills, training, TAFE, higher education, secondary and primary education sectors hampers job opportunities for young people. Making young people ineligible for the Newstart Allowance is punitive and will do nothing to tackle the real reasons behind rising unemployment.

Despite the rhetoric that high skilled migration is needed for the mining and agriculture sectors, the reality is a high proportion of migrant workers come to Victoria. The Skilled Migration Program grew from 125,755 places on 2011-12 to 128,973 in 2012-13. In 1995-96 the Skilled Migration Program was just 24,100. The Occupations with the highest number of primary visa grants were professionals (4,656 or 51.1%) and technicians and trade workers (2,416 or 26.5%) in the 457 Visa Class.

As Skilled Migration researcher Bob Birrell has said:

“There are already significant problems with graduate employment in professions such as dentistry, computer science, medicine and engineering.

Liberalisation such that being mooted is going to crash head-on with that situation.”

The Liberal Government should be focusing on how to maximise employment opportunities for our own university graduates and apprentices, and strengthening requirements for employers to advertise jobs locally before recruiting ­workers from overseas, not making it easier for companies to bypass Australian workers.

See also: Greek 'political blackmail' of EU won't work anymore, says top Merkel party member (1/1/15) on PressTV, Austerity Measures in Greece and the Eurozone. Repealing “Flawed Economic Policies” (31/12/14) by William Black on Global Research, Angela Merkel hails Greece austerity measures (9/10/12) on PressTV.

Neoliberal Policies in Greece. Liberating the Country from the Grip of its Creditors

Previously published on Global Research (2/1/15).

Editorial introduction: The savage cutbacks of social services and government employment demanded of the newly elected left-wing Greek SYRIZA government by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is barely an order of magnitude less brutal than the civil war inflicted upon the Greek people in 1944 by the British and former Nazi collaborators. Given the support given to neo-Nazis by the same vested interests served by the IMF barely 1,000km away in Ukraine, what guarantee can there be that the Greek people will be any less brutalised than they were in 1944?

As has been shown elsewhere_{, 1} it was not for lack of courage and steadfastness that the Greek people were defeated after 1944. There is every reason to hope that, in 2014, the Greek people will be able to stand up to the New World Order Tyranny of the IMF.

However, a complicating factor is mass immigration, which in Greece and many other countries, destroys the quality of life of the working and middle classes. Unfortunately, in Greece, the most outspoken opponents of mass immigration are the modern day ideological bedfellows of the Nazi collaborators of the late 1940s.

Even before the dissolution of the Greek parliament and the ensuing electoral campaign, International and European powers have launched a campaign of lies and threats aimed at cowering the Greek electorate away from voting for SYRIZA (United Social Front) in the upcoming general election to take place on 25 January. Seconded by the mainstream European media, the "leaders", Juncker, Merkel, Hollande, Renzi, or Schäuble, are preparing yet another brutal intervention into Greece's home affairs, a country they have already turned into a mess of social ruin through the inhuman and barbarous austerity policies they have dictated.

The result will be decisive in the social war against the vast majority of the European population!

The Committee for the Abolition of the Third World Debt (CADTM) does not have the least doubt about the real intentions of those who have used Greece as a European testing ground for the most extreme neoliberal policies and used the Greeks as guinea pigs for social, political and economic shock therapies. We must be ready for an escalation of their campaign. They cannot allow that SYRIZA gain victory and be emulated throughout Europe! They will stop at nothing because they are well aware that the result of the Greek elections will be decisive in the social war they are waging against the vast majority of the European population!

It is because the stakes are so high that we can expect the "leaders" of Europe and of Greece to refuse to accept the result of the poll which, for the first time in Greek history, should bring victory to the Greek left. They will certainly try to stifle the left wing government that will be the democratic result, because its eventual success will be interpreted as tremendous encouragement, to the workers and peoples of Europe, to resist.

The CADTM, which has always been alongside the Greek people in their struggle against austerity and the grave infringements of their social and democratic rights, again calls on European and worldwide social movements and radical parties to unflinchingly support the resistance and struggle of the Greek people. The illegitimate, illegal and odious debt that the Greek people have been burdened with is not their debt. The CADTM considers that the creation of an international popular commission to audit Greece's debt in order to identify the illegitimate, illegal and/or odious parts that should not be repaid, would set a precedent and nourish the debate on debt repudiation in all the peripheral European countries.

To support the Greek people and the Greek left in their struggle to liberate the country from the grip of creditors and from the dictatorship of the markets is now the duty, not only of grass roots activists, but also of every European citizen that refuses this Europe of austerity that produces misery, racism and barbarism.

Footnotes

#fnGcw1">1#fnGcw1txt"> ↑ See About the Greek Civil War.

Did the U.S. and the Saudis Conspire to Push Down Oil Prices? Article by Mike Whitney, republished with permission from Counterpunch.

“Saudi oil policy… has been subject to a great deal of wild and inaccurate conjecture in recent weeks. We do not seek to politicize oil… For us it’s a question of supply and demand, it’s purely business.”

– Ali al Naimi, Saudi Oil Minister

“There is no conspiracy, there is no targeting of anyone. This is a market and it goes up and down.”

– Suhail Bin Mohammed al-Mazroui, United Arab Emirates’ petroleum minister

“We all see the lowering of oil prices. There’s lots of talk about what’s causing it. Could it be an agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to punish Iran and affect the economies of Russia and Venezuela? It could.”

– Russian President Vladimir Putin

Are falling oil prices part of a US-Saudi plan to inflict economic damage on Russia, Iran and Venezuela?

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro seems to think so. In a recent interview that appeared in Reuters, Maduro said he thought the United States and Saudi Arabia wanted to drive down oil prices “to harm Russia.”

Bolivian President Evo Morales agrees with Maduro and told journalists at RT that: “The reduction in oil prices was provoked by the US as an attack on the economies of Venezuela and Russia. In the face of such economic and political attacks, the nations must be united.”

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said the same thing,with a slightly different twist: “The main reason for (the oil price plunge) is a political conspiracy by certain countries against the interests of the region and the Islamic world … Iran and people of the region will not forget such … treachery against the interests of the Muslim world.”

US-Saudi “treachery”? Is that what’s really driving down oil prices?

Not according to Saudi Arabia’s Petroleum Minister Ali al-Naimi. Al-Naimi has repeatedly denied claims that the kingdom is involved in a conspiracy. He says the tumbling prices are the result of “A lack of cooperation by non-OPEC production nations, along with the spread of misinformation and speculator’s greed.” In other words, everyone else is to blame except the country that has historically kept prices high by controlling output. That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? Especially since–according to the Financial Times — OPEC’s de facto leader has abandoned the cartel’s “traditional strategy” and announced that it won’t cut production even if prices drop to $20 per barrel.

Why? Why would the Saudis suddenly abandon a strategy that allowed them to rake in twice as much dough as they are today? Don’t they like money anymore?

And why would al-Naimi be so eager to crash prices, send Middle East stock markets into freefall, increase the kingdom’s budget deficits to a record-high 5 percent of GDP, and create widespread financial instability? Is grabbing “market share” really that important or is there something else going on here below the surface?

The Guardian’s Larry Elliot thinks the US and Saudi Arabia are engaged a conspiracy to push down oil prices. He points to a September meeting between John Kerry and Saudi King Abdullah where a deal was made to boost production in order to hurt Iran and Russia. Here’s a clip from the article titled “Stakes are high as US plays the oil card against Iran and Russia”:

“…with the help of its Saudi ally, Washington is trying to drive down the oil price by ?ooding an already weak market with crude. As the Russians and the Iranians are heavily dependent on oil exports, the assumption is that they will become easier to deal with…

John Kerry, the US secretary of state, allegedly struck a deal with King Abdullah in September under which the Saudis would sell crude at below the prevailing market price. That would help explain why the price has been falling at a time when, given the turmoil in Iraq and Syria caused by Islamic State, it would normally have been rising.

The Saudis did something similar in the mid-1980s. Then, the geopolitical motivation for a move that sent the oil price to below $10 a barrel was to destabilize Saddam Hussein’s regime. This time, according to Middle East specialists, the Saudis want to put pressure on Iran and to force Moscow to weaken its support for the Assad regime in Syria… (Stakes are high as US plays the oil card against Iran and Russia, Guardian)

That’s the gist of Elliot’s theory, but is he right?

Vladimir Putin isn’t so sure. Unlike Morales, Maduro and Rouhani, the Russian president has been reluctant to blame falling prices on US-Saudi collusion. In an article in Itar-Tass, Putin opined:

“There’s a lot of talk around” in what concerns the causes for the slide of oil prices, he said at a major annual news conference. “Some people say there is conspiracy between Saudi Arabia and the US in order to punish Iran or to depress the Russian economy or to exert impact on Venezuela.”

“It might be really so or might be different, or there might be the struggle of traditional producers of crude oil and shale oil,” Putin said. “Given the current situation on the market the production of shale oil and gas has practically reached the level of zero operating costs.” (Putin says oil market price conspiracy between Saudi Arabia and US not ruled out, Itar-Tass)

As always, Putin takes the most moderate position, that is, that Washington and the Saudis may be in cahoots, but that droopy prices might simply be a sign of over-supply and weakening demand. In other words, there could be a plot, but then again, maybe not. Putin is a man who avoids passing judgment without sufficient evidence.

The same can’t be said of the Washington Post. In a recent article, WP journalist Chris Mooney dismisses anyone who thinks oil prices are the result of US-Saudi collaboration as “kooky conspiracy theorists”. According to Mooney:

“The reasons for the sudden (price) swing are not particularly glamorous: They involve factors like supply and demand, oil companies having invested heavily in exploration several years ago to produce a glut of oil that has now hit the market — and then, perhaps, the “lack of cohesion” among the diverse members of OPEC.” (Why there are so many kooky conspiracy theories about oil, Washington Post)

Oddly enough, Mooney disproves his own theory a few paragraphs later in the same piece when he says:

“Oil producers really do coordinate. And then, there’s OPEC, which is widely referred to in the press as a “cartel,” and which states up front that its mission is to “coordinate and unify the petroleum policies” of its 12 member countries…. Again, there’s that veneer of plausibility to the idea of some grand oil related strategy.” (WP)

Let me get this straight: One the one hand Mooney agrees that OPEC is a cartel that “coordinates and unify the petroleum policies”, then on the other, he says that market fundamentals are at work. Can you see the disconnect? Cartels obstruct normal supply-demand dynamics by fixing prices, which Mooney seems to breezily ignore.

Also, he scoffs at the idea of “some grand oil related strategy” as if these cartel nations were philanthropic organizations operating in the service of humanity. Right. Someone needs to clue Mooney in on the fact that OPEC is not the Peace Corps. They are monopolizing amalgam of cutthroat extortionists whose only interest is maximizing profits while increasing their own political power. Surely, we can all agree on that fact.

What’s really wrong with Mooney’s article, is that he misses the point entirely. The debate is NOT between so-called “conspiracy theorists” and those who think market forces alone explain the falling prices. It’s between the people who think that the Saudis decision to flood the market is driven by politics rather than a desire to grab “market share.” That’s where people disagree. No denies that there’s manipulation; they merely disagree about the motive. This glaring fact seems to escape Mooney who is on a mission to discredit conspiracy theorists at all cost. Here’s more:

(There’s) “a long tradition of conspiracy theorists who have surmised that the world’s great oil powers — whether countries or mega-corporations — are secretly pulling strings to shape world events.”…

“A lot of conspiracy theories take as their premise that there’s a small group of people who are plotting to control something, to control the government, the banking system, or the main energy source, and they are doing this to the disadvantage of everybody else,” says University of California-Davis historian Kathy Olmsted, author of “Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11?. (Washington Post)

Got that? Now find me one person who doesn’t think the world is run by a small group of rich, powerful people who operate in their own best interests? Here’s more from the same article:

(Oil) “It’s the perfect lever for shifting world events. If you were a mad secret society with world-dominating aspirations and lots of power, how would you tweak the world to create cascading outcomes that could topple governments and enrich some at the expense of others? It’s hard to see a better lever than the price of oil, given its integral role in the world economy.” (WP)

“A mad secret society”? Has Mooney noticed that — in the last decade and a half — the US has only invaded nations that have huge natural resources (mainly oil and natural gas) or the geography for critical pipeline routes? There’s nothing particularly secret about it, is there?

The United States is not a “mad secret society with world-dominating aspirations”. It’s a empire with blatantly obvious “world-dominating aspirations” run by political puppets who do the work of wealthy elites and corporations. Any sentient being who’s bright enough to browse the daily headlines can figure that one out.

Mooney’s grand finale:

“So in sum, with a surprising and dramatic event like this year’s oil price decline, it would be shocking if it did not generate conspiracy theories. Humans believe them all too easily. And they’re a lot more colorful than a more technical (and accurate) story about supply and demand.” (WP)

Ah, yes. Now I see. Those darn “humans”. They’re so weak-minded they’ll believe anything you tell them, which is why they need someone as smart as Mooney tell them how the world really works.

Have you ever read such nonsense in your life? On top of that, he gets the whole story wrong. This isn’t about market fundamentals. It’s about manipulation. Are the Saudis manipulating supply to grab market share or for political reasons? THAT’S THE QUESTION. The fact that they ARE manipulating supply is not challenged by anyone including the uber-conservative Financial Times that deliberately pointed out that the Saudis had abandoned their traditional role of cutting supply to support prices. That’s what a “swing state” does; it manipulates supply keep prices higher than they would be if market forces were allowed to operate unimpeded.

So what is the motive driving the policy; that’s what we want to know?

Certainly there’s a strong case to be made for market share. No one denies that. If the Saudis keep prices at rock bottom for a prolonged period of time, then a high percentage of the producers (that can’t survive at prices below $70 per barrel) will default leaving OPEC with greater market share and more control over pricing.

So market share is certainly a factor. But is it the only factor?

Is it so far fetched to think that the United States–which in the last year has imposed harsh economic sanctions on Russia, made every effort to sabotage the South Stream pipeline, and toppled the government in Kiev so it could control the flow of Russian gas to countries in the EU–would coerce the Saudis into flooding the market with oil in order to decimate the Russian economy, savage the ruble, and create favorable conditions for regime change in Moscow? Is that so hard to believe?

Apparently New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman doesn’t think so. Here’s how he summed it up in a piece last month: “Is it just my imagination or is there a global oil war underway pitting the United States and Saudi Arabia on one side against Russia and Iran on the other?”

It sounds like Freidman has joined the conspiracy throng, doesn’t it? And he’s not alone either. This is from Alex Lantier at the World Socialist Web Site:

“While there are a host of global economic factors underlying the fall in oil prices, it is unquestionable that a major role in the commodity’s staggering plunge is Washington’s collaboration with OPEC and the Saudi monarchs in Riyadh to boost production and increase the glut on world oil markets.

As Obama traveled to Saudi Arabia after the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis last March, the Guardian wrote, “Angered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudis turned on the oil taps, driving down the global price of crude until it reached $20 a barrel (in today’s prices) in the mid-1980s… [Today] the Saudis might be up for such a move—which would also boost global growth—in order to punish Putin over his support for the Assad regime in Syria. Has Washington floated this idea with Riyadh? It would be a surprise if it hasn’t.” (Alex Lantier, Imperialism and the ruble crisis, World Socialist Web Site)

And here’s an intriguing clip from an article at Reuters that suggests the Obama administration is behind the present Saudi policy:

“U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry sidestepped the issue (of a US-Saudi plot) after a trip to Saudi Arabia in September. Asked if past discussions with Riyadh had touched on Russia’s need for oil above $100 to balance its budget, he smiled and said: “They (Saudis) are very, very well aware of their ability to have an impact on global oil prices.” (Saudi oil policy uncertainty unleashes the conspiracy theorists, Reuters)

Wink, wink.

Of course, they’re in bed together. Saudi Arabia is a US client. It’s not autonomous or sovereign in any meaningful way. It’s a US protectorate, a satellite, a colony. They do what they’re told. Period. True, the relationship is complex, but let’s not be ridiculous. The Saudis are not calling the shots. The idea is absurd. Do you really think that Washington would let Riyadh fiddle prices in a way that destroyed critical US domestic energy industries, ravaged the junk bond market, and generated widespread financial instability without uttering a peep of protest on the matter?

Dream on! If the US was unhappy with the Saudis, we’d all know about it in short-order because it would be raining Daisy Cutters from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, which is the way that Washington normally expresses its displeasure on such matters. The fact that Obama has not even alluded to the shocking plunge in prices just proves that the policy coincides with Washington’s broader geopolitical strategy.

And let’s not forget that the Saudis have used oil as a political weapon before, many times before. Indeed, wreaking havoc is nothing new for our good buddies the Saudis. Check this out from Oil Price website:

“In 1973, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat convinced Saudi King Faisal to cut production and raise prices, then to go as far as embargoing oil exports, all with the goal of punishing the United States for supporting Israel against the Arab states. It worked. The “oil price shock” quadrupled prices.

It happened again in 1986, when Saudi Arabia-led OPEC allowed prices to drop precipitously, and then in 1990, when the Saudis sent prices plummeting as a way of taking out Russia, which was seen as a threat to their oil supremacy. In 1998, they succeeded. When the oil price was halved from $25 to $12, Russia defaulted on its debt.

The Saudis and other OPEC members have, of course, used the oil price for the obverse effect, that is, suppressing production to keep prices artificially high and member states swimming in “petrodollars”. In 2008, oil peaked at $147 a barrel.” (Did The Saudis And The US Collude In Dropping Oil Prices?, Oil Price)

1973, 1986, 1990, 1998 and 2008.

So, according to the author, the Saudis have manipulated oil prices at least five times in the past to achieve their foreign policy objectives. But, if that’s the case, then why does the media ridicule people who think the Saudis might be engaged in a similar strategy today?

Could it be that the media is trying to shape public opinion on the issue and, by doing so, actually contribute to the plunge in oil prices?

Bingo. Alert readers have probably noticed that the oil story has been splashed across the headlines for weeks even though the basic facts have not changed in the least. It’s all a rehash of the same tedious story reprinted over and over again. But, why? Why does the public need to have the same “Saudis refuse to cut production” story driven into their consciousness day after day like they’re part of some great collective brainwashing experiment? Could it be that every time the message is repeated, oil sells off, and prices go down? Is that it?

Precisely. For example, last week a refinery was attacked in Libya which pushed oil prices up almost immediately. Just hours later, however, another “Saudis refuse to cut production” story conveniently popped up in all the major US media which pushed prices in the direction the USG wants them to go, er, I mean, back down again.

This is how the media helps to reinforce government policy, by crafting a message that helps to push down prices and, thus, hurt “evil” Putin. (This is called “jawboning”) Keep in mind, that OPEC doesn’t meet again until June, 2015, so there’s nothing new to report on production levels. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to get regular updates on the “Saudis refuse to cut production” story. Oh, no. The media is going to keep beating that drum until Putin cries “Uncle” and submits to US directives. Either that, or the bond market is going to blow up and take the whole damn global financial system along with it. One way or another, something’s got to give.

Bottom line: Falling oil prices and the plunging ruble are not some kind of free market accident brought on by oversupply and weak demand. That’s baloney. They’re part of a broader geopolitical strategy to strangle the Russian economy, topple Putin, and establish US hegemony across the Asian landmass. It’s all part of Washington’s plan to maintain its top-spot as the world’s only superpower even though its economy is in irreversible decline.

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at [email protected].

Subject: The 1789 Revolution and Fertility in France. This work is of great interest because it contradicts what we are constantly told by the growth lobby, the ABC, SBS, and the Murdoch and Fairfax Press. In clear historical terms the findings in this article, long accepted in France, contradict the so-called demographic transition, which says that populations reproduce to the maximum until they have completed industrialisation. France arrived at a steady state of population subsequent to the French Revolution and industrialisation had nothing to do with it. In my opinion the author's excellent historical demography is interpreted within a flawed paradigm, which is the notion of social and material progress as a some kind of chronologically programmed biological evolution for humans. Leaving that aside, this article is a rich resource which has, as far as I can see, been neglected since its publication by mainstream Anglophone demographic ‘theory’, presumably because it undermines the notion of overpopulation being inevitable and shows that a free people can run its own affairs without some overarching authority of centralised church or government. I translated this article because I could find no previous translations, although the author went to live in the United States where he was well known and wrote the piece (in French) from there. I could see its importance because the relationship between the revolution, population dynamics and localised self-government is the subject of my upcoming third book in the Demography, Territory Law series, which will be called: Land-tenure and the origins of democracy in France.

Translation by Sheila Newman. Please cite if you are reproducing this work. The original French version was first published in Communications, 1986, pp.35-45, doi: 10.3406/comm.1986. 1653. http://www.persee.fr/doc/comm_0588-8018_1986_num_44_1_1653.

Between the modern era and today, births and deaths in all developed countries have gone through a fundamental decline. This phenomenon has been called “the demographic transition” or “the demographic revolution”, by analogy with the industrial revolution, which represents in some ways the economic aspect of the series of parallel transformations which rocked the contemporary world. According to estimations based on a sample of parishes taken by the National Institute of Demographic Studies [l’Institut National d’Etudes Demographiques INED], the birth rate in France approached 40 births per 1000 people in the middle of the 17th century. This was a normal rate for a European country where marriages were late and life-long celibacy relatively widespread. Until the last quarter of the 20th century, the birth rate reached over 35 per 1000 in England or in Germany and it was not often much lower in Scandinavia. In the same era, it frequently exceeded 45 per 1000 in the countries of Eastern Europe as well as in the United States, where a different kind of marital pattern prevailed again. The French birth rate, however, slowed from the end of the 18th century. Soon after 1830, it went below 30 per 1000. We are looking at the emergence of a new reproductive system. This change in behaviour constitutes a preview of what is to come for the rest of Europe. But we will have to wait for nearly a century before another country undergoes a similar decline.

Fertility at the beginning of the demographic revolution

At the end of the Old Regime French women had an average of over five children. Marriage age rose from the middle of the century, such that the birth rate slowly declined. After 1790, however, the birth rate suddenly fell abruptly. No-one disagrees that the fall in fertility at this time was due to the spread of contraception within marriage. The best proof is the shape of the statistical curves for legitimate births calculated from family reconstructions by demographic historians, notably Louis Henry and his colleagues at INED. Birth control manifests clearly in a behavioural constant indicating that couples who practised contraception were those who had reached a certain family size which they did not wish to go beyond. The term, ‘birth control’ should be taken seriously: we are not referring to spacing of births, but to stopping them. The fall in the birth rate in France, as elsewhere, was accompanied by a characteristic fertility pattern reflecting mothers’ age and length of marriage.

Albeit that it is possible to identify on this basis the emergence of birth control among the privileged classes, like court nobles and some urban middle classes, the decline in the birth rate at the end of the 18th century was a phenomenon with such a wide social base that it could be seen at the national level. And, at that level, in the measure that it is possible to date with precision the intrusion of contraception in marital relations, a remarkable synchronicity appears between the demographic transition and the French Revolution. Because this result is so striking, we need to stop for a second to describe how it was obtained.

Reconstructions of families are generally published by marriage cohorts, which is to say by marriage dates. Parish registers give the date of a marriage and births from that marriage are listed in the baptism register. We can recognise the emergence of birth control by noting that couples established in a particular period adopted a new behaviour, but the method for estimating this does not give us a precise date for the event itself. A young American researcher, David Weir, reorganised the data from the big INED survey in a way that suggested a more precise date. Rather than dating the entire duration of a marriage, he simply dated intervals between births, ordered according to the number of preceding births. This number, as we have seen, is the factor that determines the decision to control fertility. Whilst trying to find out when the intervals between conceptions began to increase, Weir came up with a relatively precise answer: “In rural France, the fertility transition started in 1790.”

The coincidence between the political revolution and the demographic revolution is too beautiful to be completely convincing. People have often tried to find a connection and to explain it in terms of attitudes and institutions: Challenging monarchical authority might have corresponded to a challenge to the idea of the family; the logic of the enlightenment might have overtaken reproductive matters, until then ruled by religion and tradition; the principles of liberty and self-government might have imposed themselves within couples as they did within the wider society… Didn’t Yves Blayo and Louis Henry, analysing their data, find a spectacular drop in mortality, possibly due to similar factors?

Unfortunately INED’s sample is not detailed enough to reveal the state of legitimate fertility in all its regional diversity. Besides, the sample is taken from rural parishes, and the birth rate in towns was often lower than in the country. The survey is not representative at the department level, and the small numbers could play tricks at the parish level. The picture also loses some of its clarity at the beginning of the 19th century, for a number of reasons. To start with, the Revolution threw the civil registry (of births, deaths and marriages) into confusion, because it passed from the hands of the clergy to those of public servants, who were sometimes illiterate. Following this, the wars of the Revolution and Empire affected French demography, initially through the desire to avoid conscription, subsequently through the loss of young men impacting on the marriage rate. We cannot exclude transient effects on fertility in a period of crisis which were later statistically absorbed. It is therefore not surprising that the picture remains somewhat vague, and there is more work to do to bring it into focus. For example, the INED survey gives the impression of a population where there was progress in birth more or less everywhere at the end of the century. In contrast, the data published by Statistique de la France after 1800 reveal a fall in the birth rate still limited to Normandy and Aquitaine, without having spread into some regions where contraception was however apparent at the parish level.

The Beginning of the 19th century

So, from 1800 we have access to data from the official civil registry, published in a rudimentary form. This data presents problems of interpretation: under-registration and difficulties in centralising information from thousands of communes, at a time when scribes used goose feathers, but, above all, the problem is lack of detail. We will have to wait for the very end of the century to have access to the age of mothers at the births of their children. On the other hand, legitimacy is noted from the beginning of the century: the data is taken down for legal rather than statistical purposes. Furthermore, the lack of detail for the civil registry is combined with an insufficiency of censuses. It is only from 1851 that published data categorises the population by age and by matrimonial status – essential information if one wishes to follow the evolution of marriage and to measure its effect on reproduction.

Despite the limited information, analysis is possible. By combining the civil registry data and that of censuses, we can follow the evolution of fertility. Although these statistics do not give us the precise picture that we obtained from the reconstruction of families, they have the advantage of being much more accessible. They permit two essential tasks which were impossible for the period before 1800: study of the geographical distribution of fertility and of its decline, and that of its association with other characteristics - demographic, socio-economic or cultural – of the population.

An initial level of analysis should allow us to tell the difference between the effect of marriage and that of legitimate fertility. These two effects are confused when we use a crude birth rate. According to the ideas of contemporaries (which included Malthus), it was the the proportion of celibate persons and the age of marriage which constituted the best method of adjusting the population to resources. Without the means to support a family, a person did not marry. However, birth control made it possible to deactivate the Malthusian trap, from the minute that passion between the sexes was not, as the English pastor thought, inexorably tied to uninterrupted production of babies.

With the available data, we can follow by department trends in the proportions of unmarried and married women of different ages, and how those trends affect the potential fertility of the population. Fortunately, the contribution of illegitimate births to fertility is relatively small in general. Knowing the distribution of married women and the number of legitimate births, we can calculate a fertility rate for marriages that takes into account the effect of marriage. In order to do this, we asked how the number of births registered compared with the theoretical number that women would have had with the characteristic constant fertility of a population not using birth control. Using this principle, we calculated an indicator which expresses legitimate fertility according to that of the Hutterites, a population whose religion formally forbids contraception, and which has the highest fertility measured to date.

In 1831, the first date for which we can use this indicator, there were seven departments where legitimate fertility was less than 40 per cent of that of the Hutterites: the Seine, which takes in Paris, Calvados, Eure and Oise, and three Valley of Garonne departments – Gironde, Lot-et-Garonne and Tarn-et-Garonne. In these regions the demographic transition was complete – or nearly complete. In Calvados, for example, the rate of legitimate fertility would hardly vary before the end of the century; it stabilised at a very low level for the times, but which, after other departments had completed their transition, would seem comparatively high. We may assume that the irreversible decline in fertility was already well in train at least fifty years earlier. While the aforementioned seven departments seem to lead the trend, the great reduction had already begun in half the departments of France. When a department went below 60% of the Hutterite fertility rate, one can no longer doubt that birth control is being used in most households. Map 1 shows how the levels of legitimate fertility as a percentage of the Hutterite one were distributed in 1831.

In the family economy system that predominated then in western Europe, marriage constituted the best regulating mechanism. However, what most strikes us when studying the maps of legitimate fertility and marriage for 1831, is that one is practically the negative of the other. Where people marry late, reproductive behaviour has hardly changed. On the other hand, birth control has been introduced in regions where the marriage rate is the most intense. In this beginning of the 19th century, everything seems to indicate that the French limited births using two different strategies. Brittany fits into the category of departments where late marriage and celibacy dominated. Birth control is associated with early marriage in the region of Paris and in the Garonne valley. One notices some intermediate examples, like that of la Manche, which combined both strategies. The inverse correlation between marriage and marital fertility is the most original characteristic of regional French demography in the 19th century, for the same phenomenon is generally not found in other European countries.

A.Wrigley, the English demographer, has suggested that contraception would have replaced, in Rural France, the traditional method that adapted population to subsistence through fluctuations in the rate of marriage. Wrigley explained this new strategy could have come about because adjusting the marriage rate was suddenly insufficient in the face of what was required. The novel element was a decline in the death rate. In the 18th century, the age of marriage increased, along with the proportion of people who never married. But the decline in mortality became spectacular, and could have caused an unprecedented population increase. According to INED estimates, life expectancy at birth went from 25 to 40 years between 1740-1749 and 1830-1839 – an increase of 13 years since the Revolution! This was an exceptional decline in Europe. According to Wrigley, it was too rapid for the traditional adjustment via marriage to be effective. To use Jacques Dupâquier’s expression, marriage is a good accelerator, but a bad brake. One can put off the wedding when times are tough, but, once the marriage has been celebrated, the household has many reproductive years before the couple’s fertility runs its natural course. Birth control in extant marriages would have provided the solution that permitted disaster to be avoided. From then on, in regions where birth control in marriage had become practice, marriage need not be restrained. In fact, marriage age diminished constantly over the 19th century, especially in regions where birth control was strong. The proportion of people who remained unmarried for life declined everywhere. One can summarise the transition by saying that, very early, the French rejected a traditional morality that preached continence and celibacy, and opted for marriage.

The sequence would thus be: decline in mortality, growth in population that could not be sufficiently curbed using the traditional methods as brakes; discovery of birth control; return to equilibrium between resources and population; intensification of marriage which no longer holds a plethora of children as its inevitable consequence. And, in fact, in 1831, the geographic relationship between the mortality rate and the natality rate was striking. The departments with a high life expectancy were generally the ones with a decline in fertility. But infant mortality remained high, and it still required three or four children per woman on average to maintain the population. Elsewhere, the regional diversity of fertility remained very high.

The middle of the 19th century

The reader may be amazed at how much speculation and hypothesis occupies the description of French peoples’ demographic behaviour. Are there really not better indicators of birth control than the shape of statistical curves and fertility rates? Surveys by economists, writings by moralists, surely the descriptions of great novelists would show more clearly how matrimonial behaviour changed? Unfortunately this is not so. In 1829, Balzac wrote The Physiology of Marriage (La Physiologie du marriage), a book with a promising title. Demographically speaking, there is marriage (middle class or noble, moreover) a view of the Old Regime. ‘Bed theory’ (separate or shared) occupies fifteen pages; contraception, not a line. The Physiological Museum was interested in celibacy and adultery:

”It agreed to enter marital bedrooms when they were unoccupied; but, virgin and a prude, it blushed at the love play side of things.”

Balzac seems to suggest abstinence as the means of preventing births.

”We can allow Napoleon and Frederic to hold a woman in esteem according to the number of her children; but a gifted husband should […] not consider making a child except as a defensive measure…” (p.196 from the Garnier-Flammarion full text edition)

France, and rural France in particular, manifests through its numerical indices, not through its spokespersons. The big behavioural revolution takes place in secret, and its meaning escapes observers.

Throughout the 19th century, the birth rate will basically be maintained at a level just sufficient to assure a constant population. In this period, France is distinguishable from all theother countries of Europe through the stagnation, even the decline of its rural population…. In 1841 already, the population of ten departments reached its historic maximum, before proceeding to a long decline. From 1851, half the departments had a negative growth rate. One cannot emphasise enough that the precocious adoption of birth control contributed to making France what it is today, a country with relatively low density compared to its neighbours. And because there were fewer men in excess in agriculture there than elsewhere, it kept its characteristic rural structure of small properties and relatively modest urban growth.

The fertility transition was remarkably rapid in its beginnings, but it slowed for a moment in the middle of the century. After 1851, legitimate fertility stopped its decline nearly everywhere, and there was even a slight increase in nearly half the departments of France under the Second Empire. This increase is most marked in those departments where the decline was the least progressed. It is thus that fertility in the Brittany departments reached its highest level ever registered, at more than 80% of the Hutterite fertility rate. It turned out to be a rise before the definitive fall. When the decline began to accelerate again after 1876, this time it affected every department, except for Corsica, where fertility would not drop until after 1886.

Thus there are two very clear phases in the French demographic transition. Before 1851, it was a rural phenomenon. The most prosperous departments seem to participate in it. One finds no relation at this time between industrialisation or urbanisation and [fertility] decline. Nonetheless Paris, whose legitimate fertility was less than 40% of that of the Hutterites at the 1817 census, is an exception. Furthermore the number of children born outside marriage in Paris compensates for the exceptionally low number born within marriage there. In general, illegitimate fertility seems to be tied to the proletariat of large cities, and increase in the north of the country with the development of the industrial revolution.

The second part of the transition

France’s demographic transition’s second part began during the last quarter of the century. Although it was accompanied by a parallel decline in other European countries, which had not been the case before, this is what captures contemporary attention. The fact is that France had more than a century of population decline behind it, whereas its neighbours were only beginning theirs. Patrick Festy showed that fertility was still natural in every Western country around 1870. The net rate of French reproduction, however, was close to 1 from the time of the revolution. That is to say that the country maintained a fertility rate only just sufficient, taking mortality into account, to keep national population numbers at zero growth. But whilst up to 1870, most economists and Statistique de France, which up until then had been very impartial, congratulated themselves ‘on the French population’s sensibly circumspect attitude, after the Franco-Prussian war, the intelligentsia began to worry. The problem was that the fall in the birth rate seemed to be linked to the fall in France’s military strength.

Today we know that the German birth rate had begun its decline, as was happening in most European countries, in the last part of the 19th century. This phenomenon was, however, hardly perceptible to contemporaries, and the differences between fertility levels remained considerable. The crude birth rate in Germany was still 35 births per 1000 inhabitants towards 1900, compared with 22 per 1000 for the whole of France. And the German rate was greater than the highest rate among French departments, that of Finistère, which was 30 per 1000. Marriage age remained high in Britanny. In Lot-et-Garonne, where fertility had not stopped dropping since the beginning of the 20th century, reaching 23 per cent of the Hutterite rate, the birth rate was 15 per 1000. The birth rate in more than half the departments in 1900 was not more than 20 per 1000. French reproductive behaviour was remarkably homogenous. Unexpectedly, due in part to their younger population, the birth rate of towns (with the exception of Paris) was higher than in the country.

The birth rate at the beginning of the century was the result of a combination of the old Malthusian strategy of late marriage and the use of quite primitive contraceptive techniques. Around 1900, Jacqus Bertillon conducted a survey amongst doctors in a few departments with the aim of finding out how the French were limiting births. Withdrawal was foremost among the methods. Extraordinarily, it is today possible to measure the degree of use and the efficiency of contraception around 1901, due to a new technique of measuring starting from the distribution by age of legitimate births. The data for this has begun to be published in our era. With the appearance of birth control within marriage we see that the legitimate fertility curve tends to diverge systematically in relation to the age of the natural fertility curve.

American demographer, A. Coale has suggested the indicator m to measure the strength of this systematic deviation. An m less than 0.2 corresponds to natural fertility; above 1.0 shows a high rate of birth control. The results of 1901 are shown on Map 2. The map of m is remarkably similar to the one showing levels of legitimate fertility, although it only shows the shape of the curve by age.

The regions where contraception was still only weakly taken up in 1901 include before all others Celtic-speaking Britanny, the Massif Central, from Aveyron to Ardeche; the High Alps and the Savoy; and Corsica. Uptake was weak in a series of relatively industrialised departments, such as Bouches-du-Rhone, Vosges, Seine-Maritime, the North and Pas-de-Calais, and Seine-and-Oise. On the other hand, Garonne, from the Pyrennees to the Gironde estuary, are notable for the strongest use of contraception. In the agricultural departments Bertillon’s survey found the pursuit of a single child who would inherit all the paternal wealth taken to its extreme. In regard to this, Philippe Ariés would speak of human evaporation.

France in 1901 was remarkable for the diversity of its regional compartments. The high fertility departments became lands of emigration. The industrial proletariat started to conquer birth control. Still on the demographic horizon was the Great War, which would confirm the fears of those who saw military defeat as a consequence of stopping population growth; the 1920 law that was going to try to forbid the dissemination of contraceptive information; and, finally, the homogenisation of behaviour within France and at the European level. Today France has one of the highest birth rates of Europe. However it is not so much that France has changed, but that others have followed its example.

Etienne VAN DE WALLE
University of Pennsylvania
[First published in 1986]
.

The following is to be posted to Facebook.

A number of articles published on GR put views which would be contentious, even amongst most supporters of GR. As President Kennedy (JFK) would have agreed, this is, in fact, a sign of the worth of GR. ₃

On occasions different articles on GR have been mutually contradictory. On such occasions, public discussion would help resolve these contradictions.

I appreciate the huge administrative burden that public discussion would impose on GR's web-site administrators, editors and authors. I would not be surprised if any article attracted hundreds, if not, thousands, or even more, genuine comments, not to mention forum spam.

Nevertheless, I believe that there could be technical solutions to this problem. Below I have outlined two proposals, either of which might provide such a solution:

Proposal 1: Comments posted directly onto Global Research by site visitors

Site visitors be allowed to post directly onto the page on which a Global Research article is posted.

Other site visitors be allowed to vote down or up a given comment. As more people vote against a particular post, its size or the size of its introductory 'teaser', would be reduced, but those who are still interested would be able to read the comment. The font size could also be reduced.

Over time, posts judged to have the most merit by other visitors would be displayed far more prominently than those judged to have little merit.

Proposal 2: Link to articles republished on other sites, where comments have been made.

Where an article, or a response to that article is posted elsewhere and GR is advised, a link to that article should be included._{#fn4" id="fn4txt"> 4}

My own web-site, Candobetter.net covers much of the same ground as GR. So far, we have allowed anyone to post and have not yet censored anybody. (Were we ever to censor a comment which were to contain abuse or illegal content, we would do so transparently and not secretively._{#fn2" id="fn2txt"> 2}

Appendix: JFK Secret Societies Speech (full version)

Foootnotes

#fn1">1#fn1txt"> ↑ It seems to me that much of what JFK stated in that speech is clearly contrary to his own beliefs. Elsewhere Kennedy acknowledged that he understood that the war by the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) was more a war for national independence than for 'communism'. Possibly President Kennedy was trying to placate the members of the "invisible government" whom he then had good reason to fear and who on 22 November 1963 were to kill him. Perhaps the speech could have been an invitation to alert listeners to demolish those falsehoods by applying the "truth through controversy" principle?

#fn2">2#fn2txt"> ↑ This is unlike a number of other supposed 'alternate' Australian forum sites I could name. The only other web-site in Australia of which I am aware that does permit free and open discussion is JohnQuiggin.Com.

#fn3">3#fn3txt"> ↑ I certainly hold a number of views that are rejected by alternate authors, for example, the otherwise excellent Paul Craig Roberts. I intend to publish on my own web-site http://candobetter.net, whichever of those views I have not already published.

#fn4">4#fn4txt"> ↑ GR should also expand its list of recommended sites, particularly those sites which republish (with acknowledgement) GR articles.

#fn5">5#fn5txt"> ↑ I don't mean to diminish the efforts and intellect of the contributors to Candobetter by writing this. Quite possibly, if Candobetter had the same resources as GR, what I wrote would apply to our site and not to GR.

The Abbott government's $111 million budget cut to the CSIRO will mean job losses for 489 researchers and support staff by mid-next year. It's a lobotomy of Australia's intellect, and a savage pruning of our nation's ability to be a developed, knowledge-based economy. First the Abbott government removed the title of science minister (the first time it has occurred in 80 years) and folds it into the portfolio of Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane,

Incoming CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall's claim that the organisation had "weathered a sea change in funding" is a mild understatement! "Change" is not always positive, desirable, inevitable or something that should be endured.

The CSIRO has "cut into the bone" to implement successive government funding cuts and further cuts will risk its ability to carry out ground-breaking research, according to its chairman and one of its most senior scientists. Cuts to research funding are more extensive that has been admitted with $6 billion in combined cuts to higher education and preventative health programs also to be taken into account, Labor claims.

It says the impact of lower funding could #10;http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/research-funding-cuts-to-top-6-billion-labor-says-20140826-108r6t.html">slow or stop vital research on infectious diseases such as the deadly Ebola virus. The actual value of the saving to government will be $6.1 billion, with nearly $5 billion of that coming from cuts to higher education, which Labor says will "indirectly impact on research".

The Australian CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) is responsible for the invention of plastic bank notes, WI-FI and Aeroguard, among a host of other amazing innovations in science and technology.

The CSIRO scientists work in areas of climate adaptation, biosecurity, digital productivity and services, renewable energy, biosensor technology in food manufacturing, preventive health measures, medical research, sustainable agriculture and marine science, to name a few. But this research is in danger of downsizing.

Awesome things you never knew were invented by the CSIRO

It's about short-term money-saving at the cost of our future as a developed nation. One of those affected will be the bid to establish a Northern Australia CRC, (Co-operative Research Centre) a bid chaired by former National Farmers Federation president David Crombie. However, it may go ahead because it was a Coalition election promise.

Chief executive of the CRC Association, Dr Tony Peacock, says the cuts are worst than expected, and he's 'surprised and devastated'. The CSIRO had played in assisting the economy through breakthroughs in agriculture. In 1959, Menzies returned to his theme, saying the CSIRO had been a ''dominating'' factor in the development of Australia.

CSIRO research programs will be cut, and the organisation will lose $116 million in funding over four years.

These cuts fly in the face of our “Food bowl of Asia” ideal and northern expansion! Mining is not a renewable industry. Manufacturing is in upheaval at present; the sector is providing fewer jobs with each passing month. Yet, there are no proposed cuts to the “big Australia” population growth policy! If we are downsizing our industries, and research that supports innovation, and high rates o unemployment, we can hardly have skills shortages?

There will be limited, not more, jobs for graduates and professionals.

The 1400 jobs being sacrificed at the national science agency, CSIRO, will mean one in every five of its staff. This is a move that is likely to save the federal budget a hundred million or so – and cost the nation billions of dollars a year for decades to come, a false economy if ever there was one.

If Australia wants to maintain our place as a leading 21st century, and modern nation in a world of many challenges, we need strong investments in higher education, research, cutting-edge technology and science.   As it is, we are victims of economic rationalisation by politicians with little understanding, or qualifications, in these areas and are incapable of judging their importance.

Ideas, innovations and inventions can lead to industries and jobs.

It's an attack on the heart of our economy, our well-being and our status as a developed, first world nation with ideas, innovation, and cutting-edge technology. With so many modern “challenges” of food security, global diseases, medicine, environmental degradation, alternative energy sources, climate change and overpopulation, we can only descend to a country that imports and parasites on the flow from other nations, with more investments in technology and knowledge.

As delegates from around the world were gathering in Lima, Peru, last year for the latest round of negotiations towards stronger action on climate change, it was revealed that Environment Minister Greg Hunt said that the government had better things to do with the money than donate it to “bureaucratic support” people at the UN!

What “better things” is the government spending on? Certainly not anything for this generation, or future generations. We are going backwards, into isolation from even some of the developing countries that are managing to achieve their ghg emission reduction targets.

Our economic "muscle" should be from focusing on our collective intellect, not just from accumulating generic "skills".  The economic decision to cut-back CSIRO funding is being made in a policy vacuum, and will deprive vital life-blood to our nation's "brain".

See also: Pope Francis condemns human trafficking, slavery in New Year address (2/1/14) on RT.

No to an economy of exclusion: 53. Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape."

[Source of this document extract: "No to an economy of exclusion." Source of entire document: Evangelii gaudium]

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “throw away” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

54. In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.

No to the new idolatry of money

55. One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its dominion over ourselves and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.

56. While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. Debt and the accumulation of interest also make it difficult for countries to realize the potential of their own economies and keep citizens from enjoying their real purchasing power. To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.

No to a financial system which rules rather than serves

57. Behind this attitude lurks a rejection of ethics and a rejection of God. Ethics has come to be viewed with a certain scornful derision. It is seen as counterproductive, too human, because it makes money and power relative. It is felt to be a threat, since it condemns the manipulation and debasement of the person. In effect, ethics leads to a God who calls for a committed response which is outside the categories of the marketplace. When these latter are absolutized, God can only be seen as uncontrollable, unmanageable, even dangerous, since he calls human beings to their full realization and to freedom from all forms of enslavement. Ethics – a non-ideological ethics – would make it possible to bring about balance and a more humane social order. With this in mind, I encourage financial experts and political leaders to ponder the words of one of the sages of antiquity: “Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs”.[55]

58. A financial reform open to such ethical considerations would require a vigorous change of approach on the part of political leaders. I urge them to face this challenge with determination and an eye to the future, while not ignoring, of course, the specifics of each case. Money must serve, not rule! The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the poor. I exhort you to generous solidarity and to the return of economics and finance to an ethical approach which favours human beings.

No to the inequality which spawns violence

59. Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples are reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence. The poor and the poorer peoples are accused of violence, yet without equal opportunities the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode. When a society – whether local, national or global – is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programmes or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility. This is not the case simply because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root. Just as goodness tends to spread, the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence and quietly to undermine any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear. If every action has its consequences, an evil embedded in the structures of a society has a constant potential for disintegration and death. It is evil crystallized in unjust social structures, which cannot be the basis of hope for a better future. We are far from the so-called “end of history”, since the conditions for a sustainable and peaceful development have not yet been adequately articulated and realized.

60. Today’s economic mechanisms promote inordinate consumption, yet it is evident that unbridled consumerism combined with inequality proves doubly damaging to the social fabric. Inequality eventually engenders a violence which recourse to arms cannot and never will be able to resolve. It serves only to offer false hopes to those clamouring for heightened security, even though nowadays we know that weapons and violence, rather than providing solutions, create new and more serious conflicts. Some simply content themselves with blaming the poor and the poorer countries themselves for their troubles; indulging in unwarranted generalizations, they claim that the solution is an “education” that would tranquilize them, making them tame and harmless. All this becomes even more exasperating for the marginalized in the light of the widespread and deeply rooted corruption found in many countries – in their governments, businesses and institutions – whatever the political ideology of their leaders.

Source of document extract: http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html#No_to_an_economy_of_exclusion

[Changed from original title of "Quantifying 62,000 visa overstayers in terms of population impact and our history".] The Australian Immigration Department has released a report, "Migration Trends 2012-2013," in which it estimates that 62,100 people were unaccounted for in Australia during 2014 - roughly 1.2 per cent of the 5.5 million people who enter the country each year on temporary visas. Visitors (44,800) and students (10,720) were the largest cohort of visa holders to overstay their permitted time here, and people from China (7690), Malaysia (6420), the US (5220) and the UK (3780) led the field. In this article I try to quantify and qualify this number of people and their impact in the Australian system.

Impact of 62,000 people as rural town

62,000 people makes for a town the size of Gladstone, in Queensland, 2014. Interesting to ponder the ramifications in a typical example of population growth in Australia. Gladstone has several primary schools, three high schools, (Gladstone State High, Toolooa State High and Chanel College), one university campus, Central Queensland University, and CQIT (TAFE) Gladstone Campus. It has a major public hospital and at least two private hospitals. An employment base is provided by the following industries (mostly mining) and those that service them - retail, health, cleaning, real estate, etc

Boyne Smelters Limited
Cement Australia
NRG Gladstone Operating Services (Coal generated electricity plant)
Queensland Alumina Limited
Rio Tinto Alcan – Yarwun

There are plans to development LNG facilities, among other industrial projects.
It is right on the barrier reef and it is advertising for skilled migrants.

Originally inhabited by the Baiali (or Byellee), Goereng and Goreng Goreng Aboriginal tribes.

Established as a colony in 1847 with 87 soldiers and convicts, but ordered to close down after two months. 1872 non-convict settlers began arriving. In 1893 a meatworks was established. In 1963, the aluminium industry started up there and the port facilities were expanded. In the 1868 photograph of Gladstone Port, you can glimpse the once vast forests in the background.

A cultural heritage assessment published in 2000 indicates that the Boyne Valley was home to aboriginal people for thousands of years prior to European discovery.

The first recorded meeting of the two cultures was on Curtis Island in 1802. After showering Matthew Flinders and his party with rocks and stones on their arrival, the “Indians” observed them for a fortnight before making contact. Two seamen became lost and spent a night tortured by mosquitoes in the mangrove swamps. They were rescued, fed, examined in a “personal manner” and guided safely back to their ship. Living on a diet of seafood, kangaroo and bird life they were described as, “stout, muscular men who went entirely naked, understood bartering better than most and were curious but not over excitable”.

The first white settlers in the Boyne Valley referred to a large permanent aboriginal camp on Raggote Creek. Their lands extended along the river between the Boyne and Many Peaks Ranges, downstream to within a few miles of the coast and upstream to The Bluff. Beyond this point a related tribe of several hundred individuals had camps around the numerous waterholes paralleling the river. One hole was called Euboba. The name remains as Ubobo, the adaptation used in 1899 by W.A.F. McDonald to name his 4000-acre selection.

Little is recorded of the life of these people but in less than thirty years their populations were decimated. McDonald (1988) reports, “The Toolooa, which still numbered about 700 in 1854, had dwindled to forty-three in 1882. The Byelee in the same period were reduced from 300 to thirty-two.” Source: http://boynevalley.org.au/history/

Goldmining in 1853. Rail in 1910. Soldier settler blocks in 1920s. All these activities would indicate that the forests were Dairy industry, which went bust from drought in the 1970s. Like most Queensland towns beautiful giant forests were probably chopped down for fuel and wood export and to build those cute little houses you see in Queensland that are too expensive to replicate now, due to lack of wood. In the 1970s a huge drought, possibly related to removal of the trees, ended the dairy industry.

In 1985, after a succession of dams and weirs, each bigger than the last, the land was inundated by the Awoonga Dam to meet Gladstone’s growing water demands. In 2014 housing is unaffordable to anyone with an income less than $80,000 p.a., according to the Property Council of Australia, which engineered this situation. It demands 'more land release' (but not less immigration). This is typical of the Property Council who are major investors in population growth, which the rest of us all pay for in rising housing prices, power prices etc.

What a species! I should say, What a system! Because the Australian Aborigines are the same species, but didn't have the same system. The British system is kind of like a wrecking ball that has an inexhaustible supply of fuel and people. See, "Demography, Territory and Law2: Land-tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain" The Aboriginal system seems to have been steady state. See, on steady state land-tenure and political sytems Demography, Territory & Law: Rules of Animal and Human Populations (2013) They probably didn't even burn much, if any, forest. See "Video lecture: Did Australian Aboriginals burn the bush as we are told? Joel Wright, "The language of fire." "

Finally, although the government admits that about 62,000 people are outside of its 'control', the real problem is more like 240,000 planned invited economic immigrants who are outside Australians' democratic control. Most Australians have no idea of this number and how it is mounting up, year by year, with the Property Council of Australia and other growth lobbyists, constantly pushing to increase this number, which is three times the size of average annual net immigration from the 1960s to the 1990s. For more information on Australia's immigration history (and a comparison with France) see http://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/vital/access/services/Download/swin:7395/SOURCE7

Note: This introduction has been edited for a number of small but important inaccuracies. Candobetter.net editor 29/12/2014.] Fuel reduction and ecological burning etc. are based on the assumption that all Aboriginal people undertook fire-stick farming. Joel Wright, traditional owner in southwest Victoria, is an indigenous language, culture and history researcher. He finds no evidence of wide-scale burning in Aboriginal language and culture, but does find other explanations for the history of aboriginal fires observed by Europeans. These were often smoke-signals exchanged between clans, for general communication and warning of approaching Europeans etc. There was also defensive burning to hinder explorers by burning feed their stock might otherwise eat. Other fires were to 'cover their tracks' when they were being pursued, etc.. Many of these fires were mistaken for landscape burning. Joel also found one record of burning small portions of dry grass around marshes to expose an area to attract birds to scratch for food there, making the birds potential meals for the indigenous hunters. Nowhere did he find anything to justify the destructive and dangerous annual incineration of the landscapes of the Gunditjamara by the Victorian Government. He was concerned that burning the bush as we do now kills the birds and animals so important to vegetation stories, removes scar and burial trees and 'burns micro particles from axes and spears that holds the clues as to what they were used for.The video was recorded from Wright's presentation at Australian Wildlife Protection Council Fire and Wildlife Conference, "Pause and Review Victoria's Fire Management." November 2014

Candobetter.net Editor's comment: The long delay in publishing this remarkable report from researcher, Joel Wright, has nothing to do with its excellence. The delay was the result of fire policy politics associated with the recent change of government, which encouraged candobetter.net and others to suppress discussion until the passing of the Napthine Government. I will try to write about these politics in another article.

I am also waiting on a transcript of the contents of the filmed lecture. - Sheila Newman

[Candobetter.net Editor: To view entire poem, you need to click on the title]

I had trouble keeping up with it a few short years ago ,
But I’m here to tell you all today that I’m still on the go,

I found a way around the fact that “Toys North Pole's" too dear to run
So I globalized activities, outsourced , off-shored and won.

Instead of one big trip each year, I spend nearly all the year in flight,
Placing orders in the Orient in the night and in the light

My emissions rate has risen as the reindeer can’t do this,
I use a jet, its pace is set, orders made just will not miss,

I like to think I’m viable, future proofed and in the black,
My suit is red , my trim is white so don’t give me any flack.

I’m rushed today and in a spin, it’s hard to make things rhyme
It’s all very well for you who sell, but I haven’t any time,

I must away as dawn approaches, westward as my reindeer know
Yes, they do the trip , they do not slip responding well to “Forward ho!’