(We) can do better

Video and transcript inside: Dr Karen Hitchcock: "My core message is that we really need to think about our ageing population as a triumph and really rethink what it means to be old and what it's possible to do when you're elderly. Most elderly people are not sick, most of them are not in nursing homes, but I think we can do a lot more to integrate elderly people back into our communities and try and reimagine what it is that we want our communities to be. I think we need to start from an ethical perspective of what we want our community to be, and then from that, imagine our society and then find ways to create it and fund it, rather than starting from an economic position." Congratulations to the 7.30 Report, Karen Hitchcock and Quarterly essay for criticising the appalling depiction and treatment of Australia's elderly, implicitly and explicitly advocated by the growth lobby in the mainstream media and government. See, for instance, "Should Jeannie Pratt and Elisabeth Murdoch downsize to high rises in Activity Centers to give young people more room?" The negative message about the elderly has been so overwhelming that most of us find it exhausting to fight. The ABC has often also carried this message uncritically. Perhaps it took a woman-led news commentary program - the 7.30 Report - to try to break this mould. Dr Karen Hitchcock (who is a staff physician in acute and general medicine at a large city public hospital) is a very effective ambassador for the elderly, although she is a young woman herself. Her work deserves our collective support and promotion.

Video and transcript originally broadcast and published from the ABC 7.30 Report at http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2015/s4196703.htm on 12 March 2015.

Elderly 'have internalised' message they're a burden on society, says physician Karen Hitchcock

Transcript

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: By 2050, about five per cent of Australia's population will be over the age of 85, with many of us expected to live to our mid-90s. The challenges of the ageing population are something we've been hearing a lot about in the past couple of weeks, since the Federal Government released its Intergenerational Report. The message is that more old people and falling budget revenues are going to put a huge strain on our health and welfare systems. But now one doctor is raising concerns about the way we're discussing the ageing population. She believes we're sending older Australians a message that they're an intolerable burden.

Karen Hitchcock is a staff physician in acute and general medicine at a major public hospital in Victoria and she's written the latest issue of the Quarterly Essay. It's entitled Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly, she joined me from our Melbourne studio.

Karen, we've been talking a lot recently about the economics of health care as the country deals with an ageing population and declining budget revenue. When you listen to economists and politicians talk about the ageing population and the growing pressures on the budget and sustainability and so on, as a doctor, what do you hear?

KAREN HITCHCOCK, PUBLIC HOSPITAL PHYSICIAN & AUTHOR: What I hear is that the fact of our ageing population is an overwhelmingly negative development. The elderly are portrayed as being a burden on their families and on the state and a drain on the economy.

LEIGH SALES: And what message do you think that the elderly hear?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Oh, I think that they've completely internalised this message that they're a burden. I see evidence of this every day on my hospital ward. Patients, elderly patients apologise for being sick, for being in hospital, for taking up a hospital bed that should be apparently for somebody else.

LEIGH SALES: How does that translate then in terms of the type of care that they want?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Well, I think that sometimes it can mean that they feel reluctant to accept the care that they need.

LEIGH SALES: Like, give me an example of, say, a patient where you've seen that.

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Um, well, I've - there's a lot of patients, but recently I looked after an elderly gentleman who said that he wanted to die and that he didn't want to be in hospital and that he was a nuisance and when I sat down and talked to him, it turned out that his wife had recently died, his dog that was his remaining companion had died and he felt that he had no place in society anymore and that he was a burden.

LEIGH SALES: And so how, as a doctor, did you address that?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: I called him a couple of weeks after he left hospital, given that he had said he never wanted to come back to hospital, just to try and work out a plan for him and he said to me that he says silly things when he's sick. Of course he wants to come back to hospital and that he was very, very happy because he'd managed to get another dog, go back to his part-time work.

LEIGH SALES: What's your attitude towards advanced care directive, which are documents that people sign giving instructions about the sort of treatment that they would like if they're faced with potential end-of-life issues, which of course is often things that older people sign?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: They're being heavily promoted at the moment as something that should be universally adopted and I think that they do have a place, particularly if people have advanced malignancy and are going to die imminently or particularly when people have particular treatments that they don't want to have. But I think that saying that every single citizen in Australia should have an advanced care directive is dangerous and I think that to say that they're unambiguously good sort of relies upon an understanding of the human subject that is breathtakingly simplistic. People change their mind. It's very difficult for us to know how we're going to feel as we become increasingly dependent and debilitated. I mean, my grandmother, for example, she was a fiercely independent woman who, in her 80s, developed a lung disease that meant eventually she was house-bound and oxygen dependent. And if someone had've asked her a year prior to that development whether or not she would rather die or be house-bound and oxygen dependent, she definitely would have said she'd rather be dead. But when it came down to it, she was very happy with her life. She still had her family. She said that she would play in her memories. She was very happy to be alive.

LEIGH SALES: So if you see this idea that we are giving elderly people the impression that they're a burden as being a problem, how would you like to see the debate around some of these issues and the discussion reframed?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Well I think that our focus should be on how can we improve the life of our elderly patients, not that we should be so keen to offer them death.

LEIGH SALES: And so, practically, how would you go about doing that?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Um, I think that we - it would be really helpful if we could somehow integrate medical and social services so that we can encourage elderly people to remain independent and in their communities. If we could somehow integrate services and offer preventative treatment before people need to come to hospital, that would be a really great development and there are international examples of care programs like this where there are community-based, what's called medical homes, that are staffed by GPs and specialists and full allied health to enable people to stay in the community longer and to stay well and independent.

LEIGH SALES: How about the interaction between nursing homes and hospitals, how well does that work?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: It works very poorly. Many elderly people come to hospital as a result of medication side-effects, having too many tablets or etc., and they come to hospital, we stop their tablets and they're discharged back to their nursing homes and they have to continue on the tablets that they were on prior to coming to hospital, sometimes the tablets that caused them to come to hospital, until they can get a doctor to come to the nursing home and rechart their medicine.

LEIGH SALES: You are a busy doctor, yet you've taken the time out to write this lengthy piece of work around these issues. What is the core message that you're hoping to get out there based on your experience working in hospitals?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: My core message is that we really need to think about our ageing population as a triumph and really rethink what it means to be old and what it's possible to do when you're elderly. Most elderly people are not sick, most of them are not in nursing homes, but I think we can do a lot more to integrate elderly people back into our communities and try and reimagine what it is that we want our communities to be. I think we need to start from an ethical perspective of what we want our community to be, and then from that, imagine our society and then find ways to create it and fund it, rather than starting from an economic position.

LEIGH SALES: Just before you go, Dr Hitchcock, there's been a lot of discussion around this week about sexism in medicine. A senior surgeon raised some concerns around the issue of sexual harassment and whether or not raising that impacts on female doctors' careers. Just in your experience, do you think that there is a problem in medicine with sexism?

KAREN HITCHCOCK: I've obviously not worked with every doctor in every hospital in Australia and I'm sure there are individuals. However, one thing I do know is that there is certainly not a pervasive culture of sexism in medicine. I've never been discriminated against because I'm a woman in medicine. In fact I've been enormously supported and encouraged.

LEIGH SALES: Dr Hitchcock, thank you very much.

KAREN HITCHCOCK: Thank you.

Update, 31 March 2015: 15:10min video of President al-Assad's interview (5/3/15, length: 15:10min) embedded here.

Other articles in support of Syria, 1 Apr 2015: Breakin News | President Assad: Russian initiative for Syria is positive(31/3/15), Syrian Free Press | Syrian Women's Commandos Actively Operating in Damascus Countryside: we are all with you, Syrian lionesses(31/3/15), SyrianFreePress | U.S. Senator Richard Black: "Syria fought terrorism successfully and will be victorious" (30/3/15), RT | 70 women, including 9 schoolgirls, left Germany to join ISIS – report (30/3/15), Global Research | Canada's Strikes against Syria. Violating International Law: The Canadian Recipe Against ISIS (28/3/15), PressTV | Iraqi FM in Syria to demand further mutual security cooperation against ISIL (25/3/15), SANA | Belgian politician: President al-Assad is an ally because he fights terrorism(31/3/15), SANA | President al-Assad: European states are making grave mistake allying with terrorism supporters(25/3/15), Land Destroyer | Rebranding AlQaeda's Jabhat Al Nusra as "Moderates" (23/3/15), Global Research | Syria's President Bashar al-Assad: "The West has no Desire to Combat Terrorism". West Channels "Money and Armaments" to ISIS, (6 Mar) - republished with video on candobetter.

MSM articles (mostly anti-Syria propaganda), 1 Apr 2015: Toronto Star | Tories won't say how much mission in Iraq, Syria will cost (1/4/15), NBC| Samantha Power: U.S. Seeking Culprit for 'Monstrous Weapon' in Syria (31/3/15) ('Monstrous' alleged weapon is chlorine gas - see more recent full 60 Minutes interview here), BBC | Syria donors pledge nearly $4bn at UN crisis meeting (31/3/15) - to lure hungry Syrians into terrorist-controlled regions, 'Analysis': Is Canada's ISIS mission ready for Syria's moral maze? (30/3/15), Wall Street Journal | Syrian Opposition Says It Has Taken Over Northwest Provincial Capital of Idlib (30/3/15), SMH | Arm of al-Qaeda seizes major city in northern Syria (30/3/15), BBC | Syria crisis: Idlib 'captured by Islamist groups' (30/3/15), Middle East Monitor | Syria: The Downward Spiral of Desolation (30/3/15), FP | The Pentagon Ups the Ante in Syria Fight (30/3/15), Global News | Canada poised to begin airstrikes in Syria (30/3/15), Globe and Mail | Three scenarios Canada may face in Syria against Islamic State , Fox News | ISIS kills more than 40 in attack on Syrian village (31/3/15), Aljazeera | Syrian rebels capture Idlib city in joint offensive (29/3/15).

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: "I hope the first thing, which is very simple, just for the officials to tell their people the truth, the unbiased truth, without any preconceptions. Just tell your people the truth, and they’ll be able to analyze it." President Bashar al-Assad gave an interview to Portuguese State Television, RTP, which displayed a good range of bias in its questions. The full text of the interview forms the article inside.Article first published on Global Research, March 06, 2015. Portuguese State Television, RTP and SANA Region: Middle East & North Africa Theme: US NATO War Agenda In-depth Report: Syria: NATO's next war? See http://www.globalresearch.ca/syrias-president-bashar-al-assad-the-west-has-no-desire-to-combat-terrorism-west-channels-money-and-armaments-to-isis/5434929

Question 1: In a few days, it will be 4 years since the protests began in Syria against the government of Bashar al-Assad. From then on it has been a massacre. More than 220 thousand people have died, and there are 4 million displaced people. The arrival of Daesh (Islamic State) has made the situation more grim. For this reasons, it’s important to speak to a key figure in all this process. Today, he gives his first interview ever to a Portuguese media outlet. The Syrian President, Bashar Al Assad. How do you describe your country today, Mr. President?

President Assad: Let me start by commenting on the number that you mentioned in your introduction, about the number of victims in Syria, which is 200,000, that’s been mentioned in the Western media recently, 220,000. That number is exaggerated. Always the West has exaggerated the numbers in Syria. Actually, it is not about whether they are hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands. Victims are victims, killing is killing, and terrorism is terrorism. Actually, it’s not about being a mere number represented on a graph, on a chart, like a spreadsheet. It’s about families that lost members, lost dear ones, lost relatives. It’s a human disaster we have in Syria.

This crisis has affected every part of Syria, every Syrian citizen regardless of his affiliation or allegiance. It affected his livelihood, food, medicaments, medical care, basic requirements like education. Hundreds of hospitals were destroyed, thousands of schools were destroyed, tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of students don’t go to school. All that will create the fertile habitat and good incubator for terrorism and extremism to grow. But despite all this hardship, the Syrians are determined to continue fighting terrorism, defending their country, and defying hegemony.

Question 2: Syria is not much of a country nowadays. The Syrian Army does not control all the borders, you have international coalition flying in your skies. On the grounds there are different entities. Is Syria as we have known it lost or finished?

President Assad: You cannot talk about a finished Syria when the people are unified behind their government and their army and fighting terrorism and still have institutions working. We still have subsidies, we still pay salaries, we pay the salaries even in some areas under the control of the terrorists themselves. We still have the-

Question 3: You send money to…?

President Assad: Exactly, we send salaries. Because they are employees, and have their own salaries. We send vaccines to those areas for the children.

Question 4: So you cooperate with the Islamic State?

President Assad: No, no. We don’t. We send them, and we deal with the civilians who are the mediators with the terrorists, or the militants.

But at the end, all these basic requirements reach those areas. So, we don’t have “Syria is finished” and we don’t have a failed state, actually. But if you want to talk about something different you mentioned in your question, which is the breaching of our airspace illegally by the alliance airplanes and by terrorists supported or working as proxy to regional countries-

Question 5: And borders.

President Assad: This is a failure of the international system, this international system that’s been represented by the United Nations and the Security Council, and that is supposed to solve the problems and protect the sovereignty of different countries and prevent war.

Actually, it has failed in doing so. So, what we have now is a failed United Nations; failed to protect international citizens including in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and in other countries.

Question 6: But you also failed. The Syrian Army also fails, because a lot of Christians have been abducted recently in the north.

The role of the Syrian Army, like any national army, is to protect every single citizen

President Assad: Actually, the role of the Syrian Army, like any national army, is to protect every single citizen, regardless of his affiliation, religion, sect, ethnicities, and so on. If you have mentioned this, I would say yes, we would like to and we wish that the Syrian Army would be able to help every Syrian since the beginning of the crisis. But the main obstacle why the Syrian army couldn’t do so, and as part of this couldn’t help the Christians a few days ago that have been kidnapped by ISIS, is the unlimited support that’s been offered to those terrorists by the Western and regional countries.

Question 7: What we have seen until now is several attempts to have a peace conference that all have failed. What we have until now, it’s talks about talks. What can break this deadlock, Mr. President?

President Assad: Do you mean in Geneva?

Question 8: Geneva 1, Geneva 2, the Russian initiative was a fiasco.

President Assad: The solution is political, but if you want to sit with someone or a party that doesn’t influence the situation on the ground, it’s going to be talk for the sake of talk, that’s correct. We didn’t choose the other party in Geneva. It was chosen by the West, by Turkey, by Saudi Arabia, by Qatar. It wasn’t a Syrian opposition that we made dialogue with. You’re right; if you want to make dialogue, you have to make it with Syrian opposition, Syrian partner, Syrian people who represents Syrians in Syria, not who represent other countries.

So, what happened in Geneva wasn’t the model that we have to follow.

Question 9: But, what you are saying, is that an acceptable opposition for you, or…?

President Assad: Of course, any opposition that works for the Syrian, to defend its country, represents Syrians or part of the Syrian population…

Question 10: Within the framework of the Syrian state?

President Assad: No, no. Any opposition who works for the Syrian people. It’s not related to the state, it’s not related to the government.

Question 11: So, you’re excluding the Syrian National Coalition?

President Assad: I don’t exclude anyone as long as he’s Syrian. I’m talking about criteria. Anyone, or any party, who meet with these criteria, we can consider him as opposition. If the coalition is formed in the West or any other country, it’s not considered Syrian.

It doesn’t represent the Syrian people. The Syrian people won’t accept him.

Question 12: But are you able to discuss with them or not?

President Assad: Actually, what we have followed since the beginning of the crisis, we didn’t leave any stone unturned. We tried every possible solution in order not to allow anyone to say “if they didn’t do this, that would have happened.” So, we discussed even with the coalition, although we know in advance that it doesn’t represent Syrians, it represents the countries that formed it. And second, it doesn’t have any influence on the ground in Syria, even with the militants, even with the terrorists, even with anyone who is involved in the problem within Syria.

Question 13: So you’re saying that the “Free Syrian Army” doesn’t have influence on the ground? That only al-Nusra and Islamic State have influence on the ground?

President Assad: Even Obama said that, he said that the moderate opposition is a fantasy. Most of the world now knows, what they called moderate opposition, they called it “Free Syrian Army,” they have so many other names, all of them are fantasy. Actually, who is controlling the terrorism arena in Syria are either ISIS or al-Nusra, mainly, and some other smaller factions.

Question 14: So, in the end, the solution for Syria is a military solution, and not a negotiated peace?

President Assad: No, actually, what we have been doing recently, as long as we don’t have a party to make negotiations with who can influence the militants on the ground, we went to make reconciliation with the militants in some areas, and that worked, and this is a very realistic political solution. Actually, that is how you exclude the military solution, by discussing with them making a safe area.

Question 15: About the discussions, you have Geneva 1, Geneva 2, the Russian initiative, in all of that there are not, how shall I say, things in common. Is there anything, any issue that you know it is possible, why not start with them? Is there anything in common between you and them?

President Assad: If you want to talk about what happened in Moscow, it’s different from what happened in Geneva, because they invited some of the opposition, because we can’t talk about one opposition; we have many different oppositions. You don’t put them in one basket. You have some of them represent Syrians, some of them they don’t represent anyone, and so on. So, we have common things with some of the opposition that were invited to Moscow, so this is just the beginning of the dialogue. The dialogue may take a long time. But at the end, if you want to not talk about dialogue, talk about the end results on the ground, the question is, who of those parties that we call opposition, who of them represent Syrian people and can influence the militants on the ground in order to save Syrian blood? That is the question. We don’t have an answer yet, because they have to prove, we don’t have to prove. We know we have our army, the army will obey the government, if the government gives an order, it will follow the order. But what about the others? Who is going to control the terrorists? That is the question.

Question 16: You pointed out that some countries, like France, don’t want a peace conference to succeed. Why is that?

President Assad: Actually, you have two points, or two reasons, let’s say. First one is not related only to the French; it’s related to every official who is complicit and involved in the propaganda and the aggression against Syria during the last four years. It’s about the end of this war will unmask those officials in front of their public opinion, in a country where there is public opinion. I don’t mean Saudi Arabia and Qatar, where there is no public opinion anyway. But generally, they will be unmasked about the question “what is the revolution that you mentioned, that you talked about? How could a revolution collapse or fail if you have the support of the West, the support of regional countries, all this money and armaments and so on, and you supposed that he’s a dictator who is killing his good people, so the people are against him, regional countries are against him, and the West is against him, and he succeeded.It’s one of two options you’re either lying to us, or you’re talking about a superman. Because you don’t a superman, he’s a regular president, it means he could withstand for four years only because he has the public support. It doesn’t mean full public support, one hundred percent, or absolute public support, but definitely have support from a part, a large amount of the Syrian people.” So, this is a lie that the public opinion in the West and in other countries will ask the officials about. What about the Arab spring that turned out to be – instead of budding flowers – blood and killing and destruction? Is that the spring that you talked about? This is one reason.

The other reason is more specific towards France. Not limited, but more specific, let’s say. It’s about the financial relation between France and the Gulf states. Maybe because they have financial difficulties, I don’t know why. But this financial relations, and I don’t have any proof whether this is about the vested interest of some officials in France or if it’s about public interest, I don’t have any proof, but at the end, these financial interests push those officials in France to exchange their values of liberty and fraternity and democracy, all the things that they used to preach, the exchange those values for petrodollars. So now those French officials and some others in the West, they don’t practice what they preach anymore.

Question 17: But the tide seems to change a little bit. You had French MPs here. It was an organized visit, or it came as a surprise to you?

President Assad: No, no. It wasn’t a surprise, because it wasn’t the first delegation to come to Syria.

Question 18: French delegation?

President Assad: French and from other countries. Different kinds of delegations, activists, mediators, some officials came to deal with us under the table, not-

Question 19: This was organized with your government and…?

President Assad: Yes, it was officially organized, and they had a schedule when they came. It was weeks before, it wasn’t a surprise.

Question 20: With French diplomats as well or not?

President Assad: We had the impression, and it’s a strong impression, that most of the government, the main officials in the government, they know about it in advance, and they didn’t oppose.

Question 21: So, did they send you any message?

President Assad: No, there wasn’t a message, and they came to see the reality on the ground, and I think that’s the reflection – not just this delegation; the delegations that came to Syria recently from different countries, especially from the West, is a reflection of not believing, not taking in with the narrative, the insidious narrative about Syria in the West by their officials. They want to know the truth, I mean it’s a kind of suspicion about the whole propaganda in the West.

Question 22: So, in a sense, the tide is changing because probably there are some people thinking that even though it’s a bad solution, it’s better to deal with Bashar al-Assad than to deal with the worse solution which is going to be the Islamic State.

President Assad: I don’t think the general public thinks about the second part, it’s about the first part, about what’s happening and how everything we said in Syria at the beginning of the crisis they say later. They said it’s peaceful, we said it’s not peaceful, they’ve killing – these demonstrators, that they called them peaceful demonstrators – have killed policemen. Then it became militants. They said yes, it’s militants. We said it’s militants, it’s terrorism. They said no, it’s not terrorism. Then when they say it’s terrorism, we say it’s Al Qaeda, they say no, it’s not Al Qaeda. So, whatever we said, they say later. That created a lot of suspicion in the West. They want to come to understand this part. Why are you saying whatever Syria was saying in the beginning? Of course, in the West, the propagandists, whether officials or media, the added something only to the real story; that ISIS and al-Nusra was created of Assad, or it’s because of his policy, and so on.

Question 23: But you freed a lot of jihadists from the prisons that went to ISIS, to the Islamic State.

President Assad: No, that’s before the crisis. They were sentenced for a few years, and when the sentence ended, they left prison. We didn’t.

We never did. So no, we have institutions, we have a judicial system in Syria.

Question 24: Anyway, Europe is facing more and more threats of terrorism linked to jihadist movements, some of them with connections here in Syria, I mean Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. And the question here: is Syria able to help the European countries in fighting these threats of terrorism?

President Assad: This is like a building; you cannot build a building without having the foundation, so what is the foundation that you need in this this case? First, you need officials in Europe to have the will to fight terrorism. This is something that we don’t have to this moment. Second thing, to have prudent policies. We cannot have arrogant, stubborn officials that only adopted egotistical policies.

Third, which is very important, fighting terrorism should be a value, should become a value. It cannot be a sort of opportunism, like because now you are suffering in Europe from terrorism, you’re scared, you want to fight terrorism in this region. What about a few years ago? You didn’t suffer.

Question 25: But can you help the…?

President Assad: If they don’t help themselves first, we cannot. If they help themselves, we are ready to help. If you build this foundation, if you have this foundation, you can go to the building.

This is where you can talk about how to integrate the community in your country, how to have exchange of information with intelligence, you have many ways. Of course we can, but you need to have the foundation in order to succeed.

Question 26: Mr. President, let me quote, “the Syrian people aspire more freedom, justice, human rights. They aspire to more plurality and democracy.” Your Foreign Minister said this in the Geneva conference.

However, the state of Syria is perceived differently in the West. Till now, it’s perceived as brutal, ruthless, dictatorial, and it’s not just a question of image, so how is it possible to convince the people that…?

President Assad: This is illogical and unrealistic, because how can somebody who kills his people and oppresses his people be supported by the same people? How? Tell me about this contradiction. Look at it from the outside. Is it palatable, can you understand? It doesn’t.

Question 27: But, Mr. President, the reality is that if you allow me to go backwards, and try to-

President Assad: Before the crisis.

Question 28: Let me just try to… you started four years ago with peaceful demonstrators that were repressed, then you are blamed, your government is blamed, for a lot of allegations of human rights violations in your own ranks, repression. You have the Cesar reported, defected from the army, with photos of massacres, of torture of the opposition. You have allegations that you have used chemical weapons.

You have allegations of using the barrel bombs till now, and so, the human rights reports watcher about Syria, they are not very good for you, your government, and the Syrian Army.

President Assad: You are talking about massive propaganda for four years. We cannot answer every one in one interview, but I will say the demonstrations never were peaceful, because in the first week, we lost many of our policemen. How? How could a peaceful demonstration kill a policeman? It wasn’t peaceful, so, this is the beginning of the lies, it’s the beginning of the propaganda.

Question 29: All lies, all the time? Four years of lies, Mr. President?

President Assad: Exactly, that’s what happened. Because, how do you have ISIS? Suddenly? You don’t have ISIS suddenly, you don’t have armaments suddenly, you don’t have al-Nusra Front suddenly. It’s a long process, you can’t have it just in few weeks. Suddenly, everybody is talking about ISIS. Go back to our statements from the very beginning, and you can see that the evolution of the events was going in that regard from the very beginning, and we said that. They didn’t want to listen; they wanted to listen to their statements.That’s what I say. It’s impossible to only tell lies in the West. How can you tell the truth if you don’t have an embassy in this country? How can you tell the truth if you listen to Qatar and Al-Jazeera that were paying the money to those terrorists?

Question 30: So you blame Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia for being the backbone of the jihadists? You have the proof?

President Assad: Very simple; what is the ideology of ISIS? What is the ideology? It’s the Wahhabi ideology. Do we have it in Syria? Do we have it in Morocco? In the western Arab world? Actually, it existed in Saudi Arabia.

Question 31: It’s the same as in Saudi Arabia.

President Assad: Saudi Arabia and Qatar. This is the Wahhabi ideology.

Second, Erdogan is Muslim Brotherhood. He’s a very staunch advocate of the Muslim Brotherhood ideology which was the first organization in the history of Islam, in the beginning of the last century, who promoted violence in implementing political agenda. So, you have those, and that’s enough. Going back to the Western media, in the Western media, and the American media in particular, they say 80% of the terrorists are coming from Turkey. You have another realistic one, what you called in your media Kobani which is called Ayn al-Arab. It took four months to be liberated, in spite of the attack of the alliance. Why? Actually, a similar city, the same size, and the same terrain, it took the Syrian Army two to three weeks. Why? Because it was supported logistically through Turkey on the border. They send them everything, armaments, all kinds of support. The recent event when Turkey-

Question 32: Did you support the Kurds? Did the Syrian Army support the Kurds?

President Assad: Of course.

Question 33: Because they are also fighting the Syrian Army.

President Assad: Before the issue of Kobani. Before that, we did.

Before Kobani, we supported the Kurds, because it didn’t start there.

It started before, and before the alliance started supporting the Kurds, we did. We sent them armaments. Of course, they’re going to say no, because the Americans said “say no, and we will help you.” If they say yes, the Americans will be angry, just to be cautious, to take precautions about any statement they may say now that we didn’t, we have all the documents about the armaments that’s been sent to them, beside the air raids and so on and the bombardments and everything else.

Question 34: New Syrian troops are being trained in the framework of the “Free Syrian Army” supported by the Americans to fight against the Islamic State. Do you think you will have to fight them as well?

President Assad: You know, and I know, and everybody knows that those 5,000 were announced by the Americans, and this this is my proof that the Western officials don’t have the will to fight terrorism. That is the proof. I told you, the base, the foundation, is to have the will.

It means they don’t have the will. If Obama said the moderate opposition is fantasy, so who do you send the money and armaments to?

Reality. You don’t send to the fantasy, you send it to the reality, and the reality are the extremists. And those 5,000 are going to be another support to those terrorists, because the same grassroots of the organization that’s been supported by the West, by money and armaments, they joined ISIS with their armaments and with themselves.

Question 35: Two questions to finish this interview. This is your first interview with a journalist from a Portuguese-speaking country.

Do you expect anything from these countries?

President Assad: I don’t expect; I hope. I hope the first thing, which is very simple, just for the officials to tell their people the truth, the unbiased truth, without any preconceptions. Just tell your people the truth, and they’ll be able to analyze it. Second, we hope from Portugal as part of the EU to look at the Czech Republic. A small country, ten millions, but it was very wise in dealing with the crisis in Syria. They have their embassy, they can tell what’s going on on the ground, because isolationism is not a policy. When you isolate yourself, when you try to isolate a country by removing your ambassadors or closing your embassies, you isolate yourself from the reality. You shouldn’t isolate yourself, as Europe, from reality. We hope can play that role in the EU to shift this trend that started with the American administration of Bush; when they have a problem with somebody or some area, instead of being more involved, they cut their relation with it. This is not policy.

Question 36: Just one last question, Mr. President. You’re a key player for any possible peace deal. Don’t you feel sometimes doubts, anguish, with this tremendous responsibility? Don’t you feel what history might say about you?

President Assad: Of course, this is the most important thing that any politician or leader must think about, and it’s about, first of all, about having good will and good intention to help your country.

Whether you do mistakes or you do right, you do wrong; this is not the issue. People will judge you by your will, by how much you were related to your country, related to your country, how much you are a patriot, not a puppet or a marionette that’s being moved from the outside. This is the most important thing; how much you do, what’s the best you can do to protect your country and protect your people.

Question 37: Thank you, Mr. President, for this interview, and thank you for being with RTP.

President Assad: Thank you.

The Intergenerational Report is used to claim that we don't have enough workers, and imply that we need more – either migrant workers or people working longer. The reality is the opposite. (Originally published on Kelvin Thomson's blog at http://kelvinthomson.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/victorias-record-underemployment.html.)

Victorian workers are struggling to find enough hours in record numbers, with our under-employment rate now at its highest level for almost forty years. 293,000 part-time workers are looking for and available to work more hours but can't get them. 9.5 per cent of Victoria's workforce is now classified as underemployed, the highest since the Bureau of statistics started keeping records in 1978.

So the real problem we have right now, not the imaginary problem we might have in the future, is nottoo few workers, but too many.

The Intergenerational Report's unsurprising and unremarkable finding that the population is ageing is used to claim that the workforce is constrained by the supply of workers, implying that there is work for all who offer themselves. As the figures above show, this is rubbish. It leads to a "blame the victim" approach in unemployment, welfare to work programs and job readiness training.

The Report is used to claim that population ageing in Australia will be a debacle. Will it?Helpfully, there are other countries with a noticeably older population than Australia, so we can compare our performance with theirs. The Queensland academic Jane O'Sullivan has done this in a chapter in the book "Sustainable Futures", recently published by the CSIRO.

Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Finland and the United Kingdom all have a much greater old age dependency ratio than does Australia. Between 2000 and 2010 Australia's population grew at three times the rate of Sweden, Denmark, the UK and Finland, twice the rate of Norway's, and Germany didn't grow at all.

So with our much faster population growth and our younger workforce, we would have outperformed those countries, right? Wrong. Germany and the UK had the same per capita increase in income in the 2000-10 period, and Sweden and Finland had much higher growth in per capita income. And every one of those five countries performed much better than Australia in terms of the percentage of income received by the poorest quintile. This is important – income inequality in developed nations is strongly correlated with worse physical health, mental health, drug abuse, imprisonment, obesity,violence, and teenage pregnancy.

As Jane O'Sullivan puts it, in stable populations like Germany, people retire with considerable savings, and give more to the next generation than they receive from them. Their retirement opens up recreational opportunities for them and a job opportunity for a young person. In contrast, the vibrancy claimed for a rapidly growing population is often that of the crowded market place with more buyers than sellers, where recreation is something reserved for elites and foreign tourists.

As said by William Grey, from the University of Queensland, growth is the problem to which it pretends to be the solution.

This article by Professor Tim Anderson was previously published on Global Research on 8 Mar 2015. See also: US war on ISIS is a Trojan Horse (7/3/15) and Washington's Al Qaeda Ally Now Leading ISIS in Libya (9/3/15) by Tony Cartalucci. Reports that US and British aircraft carrying arms to ISIS have been shot down by Iraqi forces have been met with shock and denial in western countries. Few in the Middle East doubt that Washington is playing a 'double game' with its proxy armies in Syria, but some key myths remain important amongst the significantly more ignorant western audiences.

A central myth is that Washington now arms 'moderate Syrian rebels', to both overthrow the Syrian Government and supposedly defeat the 'extremist rebels'. This claim became more important in 2014, when the rationale of US aggression against Syria shifted from 'humanitarian intervention' to a renewal of Bush's 'war on terror'.

A distinct controversy is whether the al Qaeda styled groups (especially Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS) have been generated as a sort of organic reaction to the repeated US interventions, or whether they are actually paid agents of Washington.

Certainly, prominent ISIS leaders were held in US prisons. ISIS leader, Ibrahim al-Badri (aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) is said to have been held for between one and two years at Camp Bucca in Iraq. In 2006, as al-Baghdadi and others were released, the Bush administration announced its plan for a 'New Middle East', a plan which would employ sectarian violence as part of a process of 'creative destruction' in the region.

According to Seymour Hersh's 2007 article, 'The Redirection', the US would make use of 'moderate Sunni states', not least the Saudis, to 'contain' the Shia gains in Iraq brought about by the 2003 US invasion. These 'moderate Sunni' forces would carry out clandestine operations to weaken Iran and Hezbollah, key enemies of Israel. This brought the Saudis and Israel closer, as both fear Iran.

While there have been claims that the ISIS 'caliph' al-Baghdadi is a CIA or Mossad trained agent, these have not yet been well backed up. There are certainly grounds for suspicion, but independent evidence is important, in the context of a supposed US 'war' against ISIS . So what is the broader evidence on Washington's covert links with ISIS?

Not least are the admissions by senior US officials that key allies support the extremist group. In September 2014 General Martin Dempsey, head of the US military, told a Congressional hearing 'I know major Arab allies who fund [ ISIS ]'. Senator Lindsey Graham, of Armed Services Committee, responded with a justification, 'They fund them because the Free Syrian Army couldn't fight [Syrian President] Assad, they were trying to beat Assad'.

The next month, US Vice President Joe Biden went a step further, explaining that Turkey, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia 'were so determined to take down Assad ... they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad ... [including] al Nusra and al Qaeda and extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world ... [and then] this outfit called ISIL'. Biden's admissions sought to exempt the US from this operation, as though Washington were innocent of sustained operations carried out by its key allies. That is simply not credible.

Washington's relationship with the Saudis, as a divisive sectarian force in the region, in particular against Arab nationalism, goes back to the 1950s, when Winston Churchill introduced the Saudi King to President Eisenhower. At that time Washington wanted to set up the Saudi King as a rival to President Nasser of Egypt. More recently, British General Jonathan Shaw has acknowledged the contribution of Saudi Arabia's extremist ideology: 'This is a time bomb that, under the guise of education. Wahhabi Salafism is igniting under the world really. And it is funded by Saudi and Qatari money', Shaw said.

Other evidence undermines western attempts to maintain a distinction between the 'moderate rebels', now openly armed and trained by the US, and the extremist groups Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS. While there has indeed been some rivalry (emphasised by the London-based, Muslim Brotherhood-aligned, Syrian Observatory of Human Rights), the absence of real ideological difference is best shown by the cooperation and mergers of groups.

As ISIS came from Iraq in 2013, its Syrian bases have generally remained in the far eastern part of Syria. However Jabhat al Nusra (the official al Qaeda branch in Syria, from which ISIS split) has collaborated with Syrian Islamist groups in western Syria for several years. The genocidal slogan of the Syrian Islamists, 'Christians to Beirut and Alawis to the Grave', reported many times in 2011 from the Farouk Brigade, sat well with the al Qaeda groups. Farouk (once the largest 'Free Syrian Army' group) indeed killed and ethnically cleansed many Christians and Alawis.

Long term cooperation between these 'moderate rebels' and the foreign-led Jabhat al-Nusra has been seen around Daraa in the south, in Homs-Idlib, along the Turkish border and in and around Aleppo. The words Jabhat al Nusra actually mean 'support front', that is, support for the Syrian Islamists. Back in December 2012, as Jabhat al Nusra was banned in various countries, 29 of these groups reciprocated the solidarity in their declaration: 'We are all Jabhat al-Nusra'.

After the collapse of the 'Free Syrian Army' groups, cooperation between al Nusra and the newer US and Saudi backed groups (Dawud, the Islamic Front, the Syrian Revolutionary Front and Harakat Hazm) helped draw attention to Israel's support for al Nusra, around the occupied Golan Heights. Since 2013 there have been many reports of 'rebel' fighters, including those from al Nusra, being treated in Israeli hospitals. Prime Minister Netanyahu even publicised his visit to wounded 'rebels' in early 2014. That led to a public 'thank you' from a Turkey-based 'rebel' leader, Mohammed Badie (February 2014).

The UN peacekeeping force based in the occupied Golan has reported its observations of Israel's Defence Forces 'interacting with' al Nusra fighters at the border. At the same time, Israeli arms have been found with the extremist groups, in both Syria and Iraq. In November 2014 members of the Druze minority in the Golan protested against Israel's hospital support for al Nusra and ISIS fighters. This in turn led to questions by the Israeli media, as to whether ' Israel does, in fact, hospitalize members of al-Nusra and Daesh [ISIS]'. A military spokesman's reply was hardly a denial: 'In the past two years the Israel Defence Forces have been engaged in humanitarian, life-saving aid to wounded Syrians, irrespective of their identity.'

The artificial distinction between 'rebel' and 'extremist' groups is mocked by multiple reports of large scale defections and transfer of weapons. In July 2014 one thousand armed men in the Dawud Brigade defected to ISIS in Raqqa. In November defections to Jabhat al Nusra from the Syrian Revolutionary Front were reported. In December, Adib Al-Shishakli, representative at the Gulf Cooperation Council of the exile ' Syrian National Coalition', said 'opposition fighters' were 'increasingly joining' ISIS 'for financial reasons'. In that same month, 'rebels' in the Israel-backed Golan area were reported as defecting to ISIS, which had by this time began to establish a presence in Syria's far south. Then, in early 2015, three thousand 'moderate rebels' from the US-backed 'Harakat Hazzm' collapsed into Jabhat al Nusra, taking a large stock of US arms including anti-tank weapons with them.

ISIS already had US weapons by other means, in both Iraq and Syria , as reported in July, September and October 2014. At that time a 'non aggression pact' was reported in the southern area of Hajar al-Aswad between 'moderate rebels' and ISIS, as both recognised a common enemy in Syria: 'the Nussayri regime', a sectarian way of referring to supposedly apostate Muslims. Some reported ISIS had bought weapons from the 'rebels'.

In December 2014 there were western media reports of the US covert supply of heavy weapons to 'Syrian rebels' from Libya, and of Jabhat al-Nusra getting anti-tank weapons which had been supplied to Harakat Hazm. Video posted by al-Nusra showed these weapons being used to take over the Syrian military bases, Wadi Deif and Hamidiyeh, in Idlib province.

With 'major Arab allies' backing ISIS and substantial collaboration between US-armed 'moderate rebels' and ISIS, it is not such a logical stretch to suppose that the US and 'coalition' flights to ISIS areas (supposedly to 'degrade' the extremists) might have become covert supply lines. That is precisely what senior Iraqi sources began saying, in late 2014 and early 2015.

For example, as reported by both Iraqi and Iranian media, Iraqi MP Majid al-Ghraoui said in January that 'an American aircraft dropped a load of weapons and equipment to the ISIS group militants at the area of al-Dour in the province of Salahuddin'. Photos were published of ISIS retrieving the weapons. The US admitted the seizure but said this was a 'mistake'. In February Iraqi MP Hakem al-Zameli said the Iraqi army had shot down two British planes which were carrying weapons to ISIS in al-Anbar province. Again, photos were published of the wrecked planes. 'We have discovered weapons made in the US , European countries and Israel from the areas liberated from ISIL's control in Al-Baqdadi region', al-Zameli said.

The Al-Ahad news website quoted Head of Al-Anbar Provincial Council Khalaf Tarmouz saying that a US plane supplied the ISIL terrorist organization with arms and ammunition in Salahuddin province. Also in February an Iraqi militia called Al-Hashad Al-Shabi said they had shot down a US Army helicopter carrying weapons for the ISIL in the western parts of Al-Baqdadi region in Al-Anbar province. Again, photos were published. After that, Iraqi counter-terrorism forces were reported as having arrested 'four foreigners who were employed as military advisors to the ISIL fighters', three of whom were American and Israeli. So far the western media has avoided these stories altogether; they are very damaging to the broader western narrative.

In Libya, a key US collaborator in the overthrow of the Gaddafi government has announced himself the newly declared head of the 'Islamic State' in North Africa. Abdel Hakim Belhaj was held in US prisons for several years, then 'rendered' to Gaddafi's Libya, where he was wanted for terrorist acts. As former head of the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, then the Tripoli-based 'Libyan Dawn' group, Belhaj has been defended by Washington and praised by US Congressmen John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

Some image softening of the al Qaeda groups is underway. Jabhat al-Nusra is reported to be considering cutting ties to al Qaeda, to help sponsor Qatar boost their funding. Washington's Foreign Affairs magazine even published a survey claiming that ISIS fighters were 'surprisingly supportive of democracy'. After all the well published massacres that lacks credibility.

The Syrian Army is gradually reclaiming Aleppo, despite the hostile supply lines from Turkey, and southern Syria, in face of support for the sectarian groups from Jordan and Israel. The border with Lebanon is largely under Syrian Army and Hezbollah control. In the east, the Syrian Army and its local allies control most of Hasaka and Deir e-Zour, with a final campaign against Raqqa yet to come. The NATO-GCC attempt to overthrow the Syrian Government has failed.

Yet violent destabilisation persists. Evidence of the covert relationship between Washington and ISIS is substantial and helps explain what Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Fayssal Mikdad calls Washington's 'cosmetic war' on ISIS. The extremist group is a foothold Washington keeps in the region, weakening both Syria and Iraq . Their 'war' on ISIS is ineffective. Studies by Jane's Terrorism and Insurgent database show that ISIS attacks and killings in Iraq increased strongly after US air attacks began. The main on the ground fighting has been carried out by the Syrian Army and, more recently, the Iraqi armed forces with Iranian backing.

All this has been reported perversely in the western media. The same channels that celebrate the ISIS killing of Syrian soldiers also claim the Syrian Army is 'not fighting ISIS'. This alleged 'unwillingness' was part of the justification for US bombing inside Syria. While it is certainly the case that Syrian priorities have remained in the heavily populated west, local media reports make it clear that, since at least the beginning of 2014, the Syrian Arab Army has been the major force engaged with ISIS in Hasaka, Raqqa and Deir eZour. A March 2015 Reuters report does concede that the Syrian Army recently killed two ISIS commanders (including Deeb Hedjian al-Otaibi) along with 24 fighters, at Hamadi Omar.

Closer cooperation between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon's Hezbollah is anathema to Israel, the Saudis and Washington, yet it is happening. This is not a sectarian divide but rather based on some clear mutual interests, not least putting an end to sectarian (takfiri) terrorism.

It was only logical that, in the Iraqi military's recent offensive on ISIS-held Tikrit, the Iranian military emerged as Iraq's main partner. Washington has been sidelined, causing consternation in the US media. General Qasem Suleimani, head of Iran's Quds Force is a leading player in the Tikrit operation. A decade after Washington's 'creative destruction' plans, designed to reduce Iranian influence in Iraq, an article in Foreign Policy magazine complains that Iran's influence is 'at its highest point in almost four centuries'.

—

Select references

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya (2006) Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a 'New Middle East'

Seymour Hersh (2007) The Redirection

Al Akhbar (2011) Syria: What Kind of Revolution?

The New Yorker (2013) Syrian Opposition Groups Stop Pretending

RT (2014) Anyone but US! Biden blames allies for ISIS rise

Iraqi News (2015) American aircraft dropped weapons to ISIS, says MP

Washington Post (2015) Syrian rebel group that got U.S. aid dissolves

David Kenner (2015) For God and Country, and Iran, Foreign Policy

Reuters (2015) Syrian air strike kills two Islamic State commanders/p>

Weekend of 7-8 March 2015: Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) - Australia’s only environment group campaigning on the impact of human population - will examine the question “Population and Ageing: Disaster or Triumph?” in a half-day symposium to be held in Adelaide. “Population and Ageing: Disaster or Triumph” will be held on Saturday, 7th March at 1 pm, at the Hawke Centre, UniSA West Campus, 55 North Terrace, Adelaide. The public is welcome to attend and admission is free.

The SA-NT Branch President of SPA, Dr Michael Lardelli, says development lobby arguments for increased immigration to reduce the so-called problem of an ageing population will be taken apart. “For instance, the government likes to proclaim that the elderly will put huge pressures on the health system, but the truth is that whether a person lives to 50 or to 100 the last few months of their lives are likely to require more health resources. It really has little to do with age – the problem lies in treating chronic health problems for people of any age.”

“On Saturday SPA will have three specialist thinkers who will tell us that any apparent problems associated with ageing are all manageable”.

Dr Katharine Betts, Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Swinburne University, will be speaking on The Challenges and Benefits of an Ageing Population. She agrees that ageing presents some challenges but compared with the problems created by continual growth these are trivial. “The core benefit of an ageing population is that more human resources will be not tied up in the unavoidable labour of caring for the young. In the more mature age structure that is currently blossoming there will be many more real human resources available creating huge opportunities for work, for caring and for building strong communities”.

Dr Betts’ conclusion is that

“the ageing of the population is one of the best things to have happened to the human race in the last 10,000 years”.

Another of the speakers, Associate-Professor Phil Lawn from the Business School of Flinders University, whose topic will be Myths about Superannuation and the Intergenerational Debate says that an ageing population poses no fiscal problem for the Federal Government.

“The secret to providing for future retirees is boosting the productivity of the working population which requires adequate investment in education, training, health, natural capital and low-emissions and energy-efficient critical infrastructure” says Professor Lawn.

Dr Jane O’Sullivan, from the University of Queensland, will present to the symposium on the topic A Sustainable Future Cannot be Reached Through the Pursuit of Youthfulness. She says that the Intergenerational Report released yesterday by the government should be recognised as political spin and that it is deeply flawed.

“We have every reason to expect that future Australian workers will be more productive for longer, provided they are not shut out of the workforce by a flood of imported job-seekers. Population growth, the government’s preferred solution to ageing, is hugely expensive and detrimental to productivity”.

State President of SPA, Dr Lardelli, says that the public is welcome to attend and admission is free.

“Population and Ageing: Disaster or Triumph” will be held on Saturday, 7th March at 1 pm, at the Hawke Centre, UniSA West Campus, 55 North Terrace, Adelaide

Sustainable Population Australia
South Australian Branch
http://www.population.org.au

This article gives a 'good cop bad cop' analysis of Australia's two party history since the fall of the Whitlam Government. It looks at the evolution of economic theory and foreign involvement in wars over this period.

As United States whistleblower Christopher Boyce (aka 'the Falcon') revealed on SBS Dateline on 18 February 2014, after the CIA helped to destroy the Whitlam Labor government in 1975 it attempted to consolidate its victory by buying influence amongst newer leaders of the Labor Party.

Consequently, when Labor finally won office again on 5 March 1983, the reforms of the Whitlam government were abandoned. Instead the Labor government of former ACTU President Bob Hawke helped pioneer in Australia the adoption of neo-liberal 'free market' economic policies that would later be adopted around much of the rest of the world. Australian finance and industry was exposed to globalised international competition, including the removal of government control over the Australian dollar's exchange rate (i.e. the “floating of the dollar”) by then Treasurer Paul Keating in December 1983. Government services and the public servant numbers were reduced. Also publicly owned assets were privatised with no electoral mandate – QANTAS, TAA (the domestic air service), the Australian National Line shipping company and the Commonwealth Bank.

Since 1983, Labor governments have generally played the role of 'good cop' whilst Liberal/National Coalition governments have generally played the role of 'bad cop'. Prior to his defeat in March 1983, 'bad cop' Malcolm Fraser imposed a 12 month wages freeze during which the value of real wages fell 9.1% as a result of cost of living increases not being matched by wage rises. Subsequently the 'good cop' Hawke Labor government with the help of ACTU President Cliff Dolan imposed the Prices and Incomes Accord on the Trade union movement. The accord allowed restricted wage rises and promised increases in social spending.

Labor has also backtracked away from Gough Whitlam's opposition to war. In 1991 the Hawke government sent troops to fight in Operation Desert Storm after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been tricked into believing that the United States would not retaliate should Iraq take action against neighbouring Kuwait for slant-drilling into Iraq's oil fields. Sanctions imposed against Iraq after its 1990 invasion continued until until after Saddam Hussein was overthrown after the 2003 invasion. This continued even after bleeding heart' Paul Keating became PM in December 1991. Many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died as a result. One estimate puts the death toll at more than 1.5 million including 750,000 children under the age of 5. Other wars, which gained bipartisan support from the Labor Party include the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Libya in 2011.

Both sides of Australian politics, with a only a few honourable exceptions, are shamefully complicit in the United States' proxy terrorist war against Syria which started in March 2011. In that war, 210,000 Syrians have so far died at the hands of jihadist invaders from nearly every corner of the Muslim world and a number of other countries . Australia expelled the Syrian ambassador under the pretext that the Syrian government had allegedly massacred 108 of its citizens, including 34 women and 49 children at Houla on 25 May. This allegation that the Syrian government had massacred Syrians in a region particularly renowned for its strong support for the Syrian government is contrary to common sense and all credible eyewitness and forensic evidence.

Both sides of parliament have also sided with the neo-Nazi government of Ukraine which came to power in February 2014 as a result of a CIA-orchestrated coup. Both sides have also unquestioningly accepted the lying mainstream newsmedia narrative that the 298 passengers, including 27 Australians, aboard Malaysian Airways Flight MH17 were murdered by East Ukrainian self-defence forces with a BUK surface to air missile on 17 March 2014. This is contrary to all eyewitness and forensic evidence, including the photos of the pilot cockpits apparently riddled with cannon shells on both sides indicate that MH17 was shot down by 2 Ukrainian Sukhoi 17 fighters.

Both Labor and the Coalition have voted in Parliament to support dragnet collection of all our Intenet and telephone communication meta-data by our spy agencies. This is in spite of whistleblower Edward Snowden's warning that this has never prevented even one act of terrorism.

The above are only some examples of how corrupt Australian and global politics has become since 1975. However while there is still a free and open Internet, and a trade union movement with capable leaders we still stand a chance of reversing the damage and re-establish a quality of democracy comparable to what we once enjoyed.

You can help by using the Internet to help tell the truth, and by contributing an to http://candobetter.net and other alternative newsmedia sites and by spreading the word. This article is published at http://candobetter.net/node/4321 .

Ref: RN Breakfast interview with Joe Hockey on 26 February 2015

Traitor: "A person who betrays someone or something, such as a friend, cause, or principle." Substitute "a nation of people" for "friend".......

Fran Kelly's interview with Joe Hockey provides yet another example of the "don't mention the population growth" policy of Government, all the major political parties and the ABC. This betrays the principles set out in the ABC Code of Practice. This betrays a cause, which is impartial discussion of humane and sustainable solutions for Australia and its international conduct. This betrays a nation of people.

Is the ABC's conduct an attack on causes including:

• Objective assessment of what Australia can do to maximise it's humanitarian support for the world's most needy people using responsible economic management that incorporates detailed analysis of the economic impact of extreme population growth?
• Objective assessment of what Australia can do to optimise its strategy for reducing carbon emissions by considering the impact of extreme population growth on these emissions and on the means (economic and technical) available for their reduction?
• Objective assessment of the impacts of extreme population growth on the Federal Budget and what measures, if any, might be taken to address these impacts?

Australians are a "Weird Mob". In Australian schools in the 60s Australian history lessons made very little mention of the convict origins of Australian settlers and the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples. Was this somehow due to shame and awkwardness?

Today we have Fran Kelly and her colleagues at the ABC using a far more destructive form of concealment and denial to bury the population growth issue. Are they ashamed and confused about the relationship between Pauline Hanson's perceived racism and xenophobic intolerance and the population growth management issue?

The interview with Joe Hockey displayed the contempt for logic we've come to expect from Kelly. She failed to ask Joe Hockey about a significant root cause of demand for real estate in the context of foreign buyers; which is extreme population growth.

The legacy of Pauline Hanson is a different issue to Population Growth Management for Goodness sake! Extreme Population Growth is like Convict Origins and Aboriginal Dispossession. It does exist!

There are three groups engaged in the population growth management debate:

• The inept, Pauline Hanson style, attacks on immigration which supported baser levels of resentment. This is analogous to an Aboriginal throwing a spear at someone from the First Fleet
• The ludicrous, ABC style, Government sanctioned, taxpayer funded, population growth denial
• The moderate, reasonable, scientific, humanitarian, intellectually competent group who may represent a majority of Australians who just want to see open, impartial, public policy debate of population growth management instead of an Intergenerational Report issued once every 5 years as a concocted justification for doing nothing to address the complex myriad of consequential issues

Without allowing the last group to have a voice on the ABC, Fran Kelly, and all who support her, are arguably traitors and criminals.

Politicians do not sign an oath of impartiality.

But the ABC is legally bound to act with impartiality and is therefore an unlawful organisation because it deliberately misrepresents or conceals (otherwise known as taxpayer funded fraud) what is arguably the most important humanitarian, social, environmental and economic issue facing modern Australia.

The United States has been gradually replacing its own military with military contractors to the degree now where they formed 50% of troops in Iraq and 70% of troops in Afghanistan deployed in its name. What happens to those business model troops when the US wants to wind down military activity in a particular place? They are private armies with power and money and the risk is that they will use it to extract a living, as in splintered Libya. The bigger risk is that they will form corporate military states in their own right - as ISIS pretends to. Professor Sean McFate spent some years - mostly in Africa - as a mercenary, largely because he was curious about this. "Mercenaries have always been there, where there is bloodshed going on. The times when whole armies of mercenary troops, or even personal regiments were bought and sold seemed to be long gone. But now, they are called Private Military Companies, and their popularity among the governments rises, with the US leading the trend of shopping at the market of force. Are we witnessing the end of the age of national armies? And why mercenaries are in such high demand these days? We put these questions to Professor Sean McFate, who once was a private military contractor himself." (Sophie Shevardnadze)

Follow @SophieCo_RT Transcript and video originally published here: http://rt.com/shows/sophieco/234639-mercenaries-army-us-leading/

Sophie Shevardnadze: Professor Sean McFate, former private military contractor, now author, thank you for joining us in our show. Now, with the rise of mercenaries, private armies, contractors - are we heading towards a global market of conflict, or does it exist already?

Sean McFate: It’s been existing now for about 10 years, perhaps longer, but we’re definitely on the trajectory of having a more open and free market for force around the world after Iraq and Afghanistan.

SS: How so?

SMF: Well, the private military industry has always existed, but for the last couple of decades it’s mostly been underground with lone, sort of, mercenaries in Africa, in the wars of decolonization, but in 99s we started seeing a rise of it, with companies like “Executive Outcomes” in South Africa which was a truly mercenary corporation, and that the U.S. government hired a couple of companies in the Balkans, likeMPRI, in 1999s. But it wasn’t until Iraq and Afghanistan that the U.S. government really started to invest heavily in the private military industry, and now that the U.S. is winding down in Afghanistan, the question is - where will this multi-billion dollar industry go? They’re not going to sort of fold-up shop and go bankrupt as some policy makers in Washington hope; they’re going to look for future clients, and those clients could be anybody.

SS: We’ll take about it in detail, a little bit later on, but I want to talk about you - let’s take a look back. How did you become a private contractor? Was it for the money or for a thrill and hunger for war?

SMF: I started off as a U.S. army paratrooper, I was an officer and a paratrooper in 82nd AirborneDivision, and like many in the private military industry I got my start in the U.S. military, many serve other national armies or Marines, and then after that, I switched over, if you will, to the industry side. I worked for a company called DynCorp - it’s one of the largest private security companies in the world, and most of my work actually was in Africa. I was actually not in the Middle East. I did it out of curiosity - I mean, the money is a little better, but it’s not as good as some media reports have made it out to be over the years. The true interesting thing about the industry is that you get to be innovative, in ways that you cannot in the bureaucracies of large militaries. It also was curious to me how this industry operates. It’s a lot more pervasive around the world than most people think, they think it’s just Iraq, they think it’s just Afghanistan, it’s everywhere, this industry.

SS: But what was your most dangerous assignment?

SMF: My most dangerous assignment...again, I was in Africa. There was small country called Burundi, in Central Africa, it is next to Rwanda and many of your viewers will recall 1994, there was a huge Tutsi-Hutu genocide in Rwanda, but actually it wasn’t just Rwanda, it was just the entire region, including Burundi. In 2004 U.S. government intelligence believed that a violent extremist Hutu group hiding in the eastern Congo was going to try to assassinate the President of Burundi. They believed, the rebel group, as did the U.S. government that if the Burundian president was assassinated, it could re-trigger the genocide of 1994, in sort of reprisal killings, Hutus would take revenge on Tutsis and Tutsis will then take further revenge on Hutus, and it will spiral into a full-scale genocide. There have been precedents for this in the past. The U.S. government hired DynCorp international, the company I worked for to prevent this, and I was the person who led this program and we successfully did.

SS: Alright, so that mission in Burundi, besides the goal you were assigned - you had to keep your involvement, meaning U.S. involvement, a secret - how did you manage to do that?

SMF: One of the strange things about this industry is that offers what they call “plausible deniability”. That means, if a mission is too dangerous or too risky politically, it sometimes easier for the U.S. government or for clients more generally, to hire company to do it than, say, send in U.S. army people to do it. If the U.S. army soldiers get captured or killed in places like Africa or Burundi, that can cause a great political upheaval, a lot of press attention. But if contractors get killed, people seem to care less. So, by sending in a company to do this, if things get horribly wrong, the government in some ways is insulated from political blow-back.

SS: Obviously, you were a soldier at DynCorp, you had to follow orders no matter what. Did you ever think about right and wrong, did you ever have to weigh your orders against your moral compass? What would happen if you moral compass told you “No”?

SMF: Interestingly enough, you actually have more exercise for your moral compass in the private sector than you do in the public sector. So,if you’re a public sector soldier, if you are in the U.S. army or another country’s army, and you’re given orders - you have to do it. But if you work in a company, you can just say - no way, I am not leaving, sue me. And you can do that. You actually have more control over you assignments and you destiny in some ways as a soldier, working for PMC, than you do working for the U.S. military - which is very appealing to some soldiers who have done several tours, for example, in Iraq, back to back and their family life is a disaster and they don’t know what to do. So, you know, a lot of them actually leave the U.S. army to go to the private sector for some more control over their life.

SS:v Now that you bring up Iraq, there were more contractors in Iraq, employed by the U.S., than there were U.S. soldiers. Have the PMC become indispensable to waging a war?

SMF: That’s a great question, Sophie. The answer is - yes, they have. I mean, in WWII, the U.S. hired about 10% of its workforce overseas, 10% of people in combat zones were contractors. In Vietnam, there was like 20%, in Iraq - it was 50%. So 1 to 1 ratio of contractors to soldiers. In Afghanistan, there was 70%, and the question now is, if the U.S. fights wars… in a generation from now, there will be 80%, 90% - will the U.S. be fighting its wars mostly using contractor labor? The trends indicate “yes”. Either way, we’ve discovered that contractors have proven indispensable for stability operation like Iraq, Afghanistan. Contractors are also very good at raising security forces. So, for example, if the U.S. wanted to help professionalise Iraqi security forces to fight ISIS - that’s a job contractors would do, and that’s a job that… you know, you can put contractors on the ground and not have to report them as “boots on the ground”, which is publicly important to the U.S. of America, for politicians, they don’t want to report too many boots on the ground in Iraq, but if you have contractors, they don’t seem to count. Also, if contractors get killed, nobody seems to care much about that either. They care a lot of if U.S. marines come home in body bags, but nobody’s keeping count of contractor deaths. So, yes, I think, the U.S. has become increasingly dependent on that industry.

SS: Except of the political implications that you’ve just cited, the former CEO of Blackwater, Erik Prince, told me mercenaries are more effective than the U.S. army. Are they, in your opinion? And also, if they are, what’s wrong with using them?

SMF: Well, in some ways, there are more effective. They are certainly cheaper to use. If you have a well-trained a relatively good disciplined private military company, it can leverage innovation in the marketplace, it can lever to lot of private sector good, if you will, to get a job done more cheaply, and using this industry is cheaper than using the U.S. army, there’s no question about that, both in the short-term and also in long-term, because, in the long-term, if you’re done with U.S. army unit, it comes home, you’re still paying salaries, etc; you just end the contract with PMC, you don’t pay anything. But there are long-term risks for it too. Historically, unpaid or unsupervised PMC or mercenaries tended to become predatory. They become bandits, they create conflict, arguably, they elongate conflicts profit. I mean, this is profit motive meets warfare. So there are a lot of long-term risks.

SS: Can you give me an example of where mercenaries, actually, in order to create demand for themselves, can start a conflict or drag on a conflict - can you give an example of that?

SMF: So, less so in Iraq and Afghanistan, because the U.S. government is still there, the Consumer-in-Chief if you will, they pay all the bills; but we’ve seen examples off of the coast of Somalia. So, Somalia is a free market for force, there are mercenaries and privateers, and privateers are basically mercenaries on the seaways, that were hired to counter pirates in Somalia. And one company called “SomCan”which means “Somalia-Canada”, a somalia-canadian counter piracy company, worked for one of the factions in Somalia, and when it had a payment dispute, it became a pirate itself. They started taking down fishing vessels off the coast of Somalia. It is an example out-of-work mercenaries, in this case privateers, became pirates, became the enemy.

SS: So, I want to talk a bit about the reluctance of using PMC services, even though you say that in the long run it’s cheaper and more effective. For instance, Executive Outcomes, a mercenary company from Africa, they offered their help to the UN in stopping Rwandan genocide, and they were rebuffed. They were cheaper, they were effective, and willing to act - so what’s wrong with the scenario like that? Why does the UN refuse to work with mercenaries?

SMF: That’s a great question, and the topic you’re talking about is in 1994, again, at the Rwandan genocide; Mercenary company called “Executive Outcomes” came to the UN and offered to put a halt to the genocide, long enough so that a larger UN peacekeeping mission can get on the ground, which takes usually 6 months to generate, and the UN famously said “No”, it said the world is not ready for privatising peacekeeping. Of course, the world wasn’t ready to 800,000 people to be dead either, but one of the concerns is, with markets of force, will these companies create war for profit? Again, there’s a lot of historical precedent from middle ages to suggest “yes”. When you have an industry, invested in conflict, going to the most conflict-prone places on planet, like Africa, like the Middle East, like South Asia, you’ll have more war, and you’ll have less governance on force. States are losing the monopoly on force, and now its becoming commoditised, conflict is becoming commoditized; In such a world, we’ll have the super-rich that will become superpowers, big corporations will become superpowers, anybody who can afford the means to war and to wage them will become superpowers.

SS: Right, I get what you’re saying, but what I am asking is that, you know, locally, if the UN is helpless, why can it just hire a PMC and solve the problem?

SMF: I think UN should consider it, actually. I think the UN can be in a position that the U.S. was several years ago, where it can become sort-of “consumer-in-chief”. Certainly, its peacekeeping missions are thinning, and are in need of peacekeepers and I think they should consider a way to use this industry to augment peacekeeping missions, but they should do it under strict regulation, they should create a scheme for vetting who the private contractors are, for the type of training that they have to receive, for having accountability and transparency, to do all those regulatory things that the U.S. and others had not done in the last 10 years. The UN is in a good position to do that, and if they could do that, they could also incentivise best practices within this industry; I think the industry is like fire - it can be a force of good, but it can also be a force of great destruction.

SS: But, not only the UN, with the situation we’re seeing today in Iraq and Syria, wouldn’t it make sense to hire the PMC to combat Islamic State? Why doesn’t the international community invest in that?

SMF: Well, that’s another great question. I think the fear is of control. You can take PMC and they are able to do some combat on the ground in Iraq and Syria, whereas the international community, like the U.S. is just giving air-support. We don’t really have troops on the ground, could contractors make up troops on the ground, because you need land forces to control territory. You can’t control territory from air, and if you want to defeat ISIS you have to have people on the ground, so it is possible, but the problem is this: who are the PMC? We don’t really know, and what happens after that contract is done? Are they going to stay in Iraq? Will they set up shop for themselves? Again, looking back to history, a lot of mercenaries sort of took over land and then installed themselves as kings, in Italy. So, the bigger question is what happens after ISIS is defeated, what will the contractors do? Will they stay there, will go into business for themselves… who knows?

SS: So, basically you are saying nation-states are losing their monopoly on use of force. So, who pays these contractors, the ones that are employed? Is it always the government, or could a rich person hire them, for instance?

SMF: Right now, it could be anybody. Rich people can hire them, in fact, in 2008, an actressMia Farrowfrom Hollywood considered hiring Blackwater to stop the genocide in Darfur that was going on. Now, Blackwater andMia Farrowdecided not to go through with that, but they could have. The question is, will that happen again in the future, and I think - absolutely, there’s no reason to assume it won’t happen. Oil companies are starting to use industry, humanitarian organisations, working in dangerous places are hiring this industry… This industry, right now, is operating mostly in the defensive capacity, defending people, defending property, but a lot of the industry has the capability to do offensive combat, using drones, they can make kamikaze drones, they get private air forces, if you will - they think the future of warfare will be increasingly privatised, and there’s no reason to assume that state will own that.

SS: All the drones and military warfare that you’re talking about - where are they getting all these supplies, because I was thinking, it is usually the state who supplies the company with the military equipment.

SMF: No, it’s actually very easy. Small arms and light weapons, there’s an international market, both black and non-black market for this. If you go to conflict zones, where these companies are going to be drawn to, there’s obviously a large black market of small arms sloshing around. When I was in Africa, you could buy an AK-47 in most bazaars, for $20-30. Drones are commercially available, you can order them on Amazon, and you can outfit them yourself. We’re not talking about these huge U.S. air force drones, we’re talking about smaller drones, and you could, you know, make them into a kamikaze drones. It wouldn’t take a genius to arm them with something and make them into flying bombs.

SS: Telll me something - could we see a conflict between private corporations, just going back to what you were saying earlier, like, for instance, if they hired PMC’s not for protection but to a battle for a piece of land, for instance. Microsoft vs Apple ground war? Is that possible?

SMF: Well, I don’t know if Microsoft and Apple will engage in that. I think, certainly, in the extractive industry - it’s a possibility, and it’s not just between companies. Extractive industry is, like, oil, gas, timber - they don’t have a choice as to where their asset is. They have to go, you know, if you’re mining you have to go where the gold, the ore is; and there may be other companies out there, that could be governments and there could be rebel groups to contend there as well. So, you can imagine conflict between several actors, companies, weak governments, rebel groups, separatist groups, etc, and they could all hire PMC, because once you hire one, there’s always a possibility of escalation, where the other sides then must get into a sort of mercenary arms race. So, we might be seeing a lot of PMC coming out of Afghanistan in a year, looking for marketplace, and that might be something that will attract them, very much.

SS: From talking to you, I got the sense that accountability is the most pressing issue surrounding the PMC industry. So, while those in the army operate by army rules, the PMC’s don’t have to follow those rules, right?

SMF: That’s right.

SS: How do you make sure they’re accountable for their actions? Is there any way to make them accountable for their actions and be sure that they will be accountable for their actions?

SMF: That’s a great question, Sophie, and after 10 years or more of using this industry, the U.S. has not created any sort of regulatory framework with any sort of enforcement, nor has international community, and the reason is simple: if you regulate this industry too much, it will simply move offshore, beyond the realm of regulations, just like companies move offshore for tax havens. Really, strong regulation is not the answer, even if you have a regulatory framework, it’s really hard to enforce it. I mean, who’s going to enforce it? Is the UN going to go off and then arrest a thousand private military contractors in the middle of Congo? It will be very difficult to do. I think the only way you can do it is by shaping the market. PMC respond to logic of the marketplace, so if you make good behaviour profitable and bad behaviour unprofitable, that’s, though not satisfying, may be the best we can do.

SS: So tell me something, is there a danger of one company becoming and uber-player on the market, for instance there’s this british G4S security firm, and it’s second biggest private employer in the world, second only to Walmart. What could happen if the private war market becomes monopolised?

SMF: That’s a good question too. We’re talking about a market for force, so market analysis matters. Now, in some ways, you’ll have what they call “balancing” going on, so big companies, other companies who are smaller, will sort of compete against that big company to keep it down, just a way great powers compete each other to keep one down. So, there’s that, but if a company becomes so powerful or so big that it becomes dominant - that would be a huge political player, a new type of superpower that we haven’t seen in a very long time, sort of like the British East India company. That would be problematic for a global security.

SS: Here’s another side to it: PMCs are corporations, and if their reputation is tarnished by working for bad guys or acting out while on a mission - that will hurt business, won’t it? So, won’t the market itself provide best practices?

SMF: It will. So, again, this industry responds to market forces, the logic of the marketplace, so if we could make good, best practices profitable, and bad practices not profitable, then we could shape the industry. I think the UN should it decide to use private peacekeepers, has the power to do it in consistent manner. Certainly, Blackwater, after it killed 17 Iraqis in 2007 in Baghdad - it was sort of bounced out of marketplace. So, absolutely, some market logic can be used as a tool of accountability to some extent within this industry.

SS: Thank you very much for this interesting insight, Sean. We were talking to professor Sean McFate, former private military contractor, now author, talking about modern mercenaries and why the business of private warfare is growing larger. That’s it for this edition of Sophie &Co, I will see you next time.

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the impossible demand from the Greek voters that both austerity ends and that they remain in the euro as currently arranged. They also look at a parallel “future-tax” crypto currency as a possible answer to Greece’s problems. In the second half, Max interviews Liam Halligan, editor-at-large at BNE.eu and columnist at the Telegraph, about the latest on the unpayable debt crisis in Greece. Liam suggests a Grexit will happen but that Greece won’t be the first European nation to leave the euro.

"My question is: what is gained by delisting SBBs? Will the government be able to save some money on fox and cat control and will developers receive the green light to build houses in bandicoot habitat? We certainly have not been told everything. To declare SBBs safe because in one or two areas where fox control slightly increased their numbers is absolutely ridiculous. Take that money away and see what will happen." If readers want to make their voice heard on threatened species the address is species.consultation[at]environment.gov.au

The Director
Marine and Freshwater Species Conservation Section
Wildlife, Heritage and Marine Division
Department of the Environment
PO Box 787
Canberra ACT 2601

Re: Delisting of the Southern Brown Bandicoot

I have been involved with Southern Brown Bandicoots (SBB) for more than 40 years. I live in Frankston where I remember finding SBBs all over the Mornington Peninsula, in the Frankston area and especially in the Pines Flora and Fauna Reserve where they were recognised as the largest and strongest colony in the region. Sadly, I have observed them gradually disappearing from all of these areas and in many of these places they have become extinct.

How could this be allowed to happen? Since 2001, when the species was put on the endangered list, a SBB recovery group was established and SBBs were selected as the flagship species in the Western Port Biosphere Reserve so that they would receive special attention. At least five major workshops were held involving hundreds of people, among them many scientists, government agencies, private consultants and landholders. In addition, countless meetings of the SBB recovery team were held at many different places. During the same time the Victorian government created strategy after strategy for the recovery and protection of them but so far, none of them work.

Sadly, no SBBs or habitat areas were recovered anywhere in this region. At the Pines, where some SBBs were still remaining, at least $120,000 was spent on fox and cat control. It was unsuccessful and the last SBBs were lost as well. It is now high time to admit to the grand failure in protecting this species especially in this region.

As for my understanding, SBBs are not a corridor living species by nature and need to be provided with habitat in large reserves as is the case at the Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne and can be in the Pines Reserve, Briars Park in Mt Martha and several other reserves that are surrounded by a predator-proof fence. We desperately need some insurance colonies before we gamble with the rest that still survive in the wild.

If not, and if this current scenario goes on much longer, we will soon reach the point where the species will come down in numbers as the Eastern Barred Bandicoot did when, at the lowest stage, only 50 animals survived and where captive breeding had to prevent them from becoming totally extinct on the mainland. Even after some numbers were increased, the government managed to make some huge blunders with them (long story). Why have we not learned from this?

My question is: what is gained by delisting SBBs? Will the government be able to save some money on fox and cat control and will developers receive the green light to build houses in bandicoot habitat? We certainly have not been told everything. To declare SBBs safe because in one or two areas where fox control slightly increased their numbers is absolutely ridiculous. Take that money away and see what will happen.

Hans Brunner
M. App. Sc. Deakin University

Australia is in a bad place. Our unemployment rate and our cost of living are rising. Youth unemployment is over 20%, the highest since we began recording such statistics. Candobetter.net Editor: Australian law makes general strikes impossible. This is probably the next best thing. (CFMEU) Take a sign about what bugs you.

Tony Abbott is wilfully destroying our jobs, our families and our communities through his policies on 457s and his free trade deals. He is letting the big end of town get away with dodging taxes and he’s destroying our living standards by increasing the pension age, cutting superannuation, slashing Medicare, and cutting wages, conditions and our rights at work.

But on the 4^th of March we'll be raising our voices as one. Throughout the country we’ll be fighting for our rights as part of a National Day of Action. And regardless of the Murdoch media, we will be heard.

Can you join us on the 4th of March and stand up against Tony Abbott's attacks?

We want everyone who goes to take a picture of themselves at their rally and tag it #SolidaritySelfie. It doesn’t matter if it’s on Twitter or on Facebook, we want to see social media light up with thousands of pictures of Australians rallying against attacks on our rights and conditions. And if you can’t attend a rally we want you to take a photo of yourself wherever you are, tag it #SolidaritySelfie and show that you’re with us.

There are events being held in 14 different locations around Australia. Even Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory is holding a rally. This National Day of Action could be the biggest show of strength against Abbott's agenda, but we need your help.

Find out where the locations of the rallies around Australia are and come along.

Together, we can win this fight and get Australia back on track.

In unity

Michael O'Connor
CFMEU National Secretary

P.S. Have you seen the Victoria Trades Hall Council commercial they're showing on TV yet? Watch it here or below.

Our rights at work are again under attack from Abbott's Coalition Government and big business.

We aren't going to stand by while they destroy our living standards.

The time to stand up and fight back is now.

Regardless of the Murdoch media, this time we will be heard. We want everyone who goes to take a picture of themselves at their rally and tag it #SolidaritySelfie.

Here are the locations and times that rallies will be held around the country - we'll be updating them as more are confirmed.

Adelaide - 12:00pm - Light Square, Currie Street, Adelaide
Brisbane - 12:00pm - Parliament House, George Street, Brisbane
Canberra - 12:15pm - New Parliament House, Parliament Drive, Canberra
Darwin - 4:30pm - Bennett Park, Darwin
Gold Coast - 1:00pm - Pratten Park, Old Burleigh Road, Broadbeach
Hobart - 12:30pm - Franklin Square, Hobart
Launceston - 8:00am - Prince's Square, Launceston
Mackay - 4:30pm - 2/21 Milton Street, Mackay
Melbourne - 10:00am - Victorian Trades Hall, Cnr Victoria & Lygon Streets, Carlton
Newcastle - 10:00am - Newcastle Town Hall
Perth - 12:30pm - Parliament House, Harvest Terrace, West Perth
Sydney - 12:30pm - Parliament House, Macquarie Street, Sydney
Tennant Creek - 4:30pm - Peko Park, Tennant Creek
Townsville - 4:30pm - 340 Ross River Road, Cranbrook

Block Wednesday 4 March in your diary and start encouraging your friends, family and co-workers to join us. Because the bigger the crowd, the stronger the message we send.

We can’t stand by while the Abbott Government destroys our living standards by:

• cutting wages, conditions and our rights at work,        
• slashing Medicare and hiking up the cost to see a doctor,
• introducing $100,000 university degrees,
• cutting the ABC and our public services,
• cutting the pension and superannuation,
• implementing harsh changes to unemployment benefits, and
• cutting community services that support our most vulnerable.

Times and location will be confirmed in coming days, but you can register your interest in attending and we will send you updates. 

Good to see men showing courage on behalf of women in Turkey!
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday mocked men who wear skirts, in an apparent jibe at activists who wore female clothes at the weekend in a protest supporting women's rights.

Erdogan Mocks Male Women's Rights Activists as Model Faces Charges for Sharing Poem

Turkish men wearing skirts demonstrate in Istanbul, to support women's rights in memory of 20-year-old Ozgecan Aslan, who was murdered after she resisted an attempted rape in the southern city of Mersin, on February 21, 2015. AFP/Bulent Kilic

Published Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Updated at 7:03 pm (GMT+2):

Meanwhile, a former Miss Turkey beauty queen faces up to 4.5 years in prison on charges of insulting Erdogan, the latest in a growing number of such cases, reports said Wednesday.

"They call themselves 'men'. What kind of men are they? Men wear trousers, why are you wearing skirts?" he said at a televised speech at his presidential palace in Ankara.

A few dozen men had marched through central Istanbul at the weekend, in a highly-publicized protest calling for an end to violence against women following the attempted rape and murder of a 20-year-old female student by a bus driver.

The killing of Ozgecan Aslan, 20, became a rallying cause for activists and unleashed a wave of public anger.

In his comments, Erdogan appeared to link the skirt-wearing activists to violent protesters the government wants to crack down on using a controversial new homeland security bill.

The bill, currently the focus of fierce clashes between lawmakers in parliament, will outlaw disguises in protests, including the use of masks.

"Unfortunately, they are wearing skirts and think that they manage to hide themselves," said Erdogan.

"Be honest, be honest. They are terrorists and using every means possible."

"Why are you wearing masks? If you are not a terrorist don't hide your face."

Erdogan and members of his government have made a number of sexist comments in recent years. In November, Erdogan called gender equality "against human nature," arguing that women's life calling was motherhood. A month later, he said efforts to promote birth control were "treason."

In August, Erdogan drew mass criticism regarding his attitude towards the media and women when in a television debate he said to a woman journalist that she was a "shameless woman" and told her "to know [her] place."

The Islamic-rooted government of Erdogan has long been accused by critics of seeking to impose strict Islamic values on the private lives of Turks as well as limiting the civil liberties of women.

Former Miss Turkey risks prison term for sharing poem

Meanwhile, Turkish prosecutors said an investigation had been launched against model Merve Buyuksarac after Erdogan's lawyer lodged a complaint in November 2014 against a satirical poem taken from a magazine and posted on her Instagram site, state news agency Anatolia reported.

The prosecutors stated the charges carry a maximum penalty of 4.5 years behind bars.

The 2006 Miss Turkey, who was briefly detained last month, told an Istanbul court that she did not intend to insult the president.

In her testimony, Buyuksarac said she may have quoted a poem called the "Master's Poem" from weekly Turkish satirical magazine Uykusuz.

But the 26-year-old said she later deleted it after one of her friends warned her that such posts could bring criminal charges in Turkey.

The "Master's Poem" — which was shared by the model while Erdogan was serving as prime minister — criticizes the Turkish strongman with verses adapted from the national anthem.

Erdogan, who was elected president in August after steering the country as prime minister since 2003, is often dubbed "Buyuk Usta" (the Big Master).

"I did not make the adaptation. I shared it because I found it funny," she said.

Prosecutors said the posts could not be considered "in the context of freedom of expression" and were guilty of "exceeding the boundaries of criticism" and "overtly humiliating" the president.

The court is due to decide whether to start full legal proceedings and a trial.

Erdogan, then mayor of Istanbul, was himself imprisoned for four months in the late 1990s for reciting an Islamist poem that was deemed an incitement to religious hatred.

But after consolidating his power in Turkish politics, he has repeated the verses again and again.

In a statement posted on her Twitter account, Buyuksarac said "if there will ever be a trial" it would be on charges of "insulting a public official."

She also appeared to defend her conduct.

"If you google the poem I shared (the one that does not include any insult), you will see 960,000 more people shared it... it's interesting, isn't it?"

The case is the latest in a string of recent incidents in European Union hopeful Turkey, where protesters as well as journalists have found themselves facing criminal lawsuits or jail time after being accused of insulting or slandering Erdogan.

In a case that attracted wide attention, teenage schoolboy Mehmet Emin Altunses will go on trial on March 6 on charges of insulting the president in a speech in the conservative Anatolian city of Konya.

Four young people were arrested in four days last week on different charges of insulting the Turkish strongman during street protests this month.

Opponents accuse Erdogan of behaving like a modern-day sultan, his Islamist ideology and intolerance of dissent taking Turkey far from Ataturk's secular ideals.

In the past, he sued a newspaper cartoonist for portraying him as a cat entangled in a ball of wool.

(AFP, Al-Akhbar)

Original source Al-Akhbar.

The U.S. military is causing devastation to the environment. Joseph Nevins writes in 2010 that "The U.S. military is the world’s single biggest consumer of fossil fuels, and the single entity most responsible for destabilizing the Earth’s climate." The article states ". . . the Pentagon devours about 330,000 barrels of oil per day (a barrel has 42 gallons), more than the vast majority of the world’s countries." The amount of oil used by your military machine is beyond belief, and each military vehicle also releases pollutants through the exhaust. Tanks, trucks, Humvees and other vehicles are not known for their fuel economy. Other fuel guzzlers are submarines, helicopters and fighter jets. Each military flight, whether involved in the transport of soldiers or in a combat mission, contributes more carbon into the atmosphere. Candobetter.net editor: Unfortunately the Australian government supports this US war machine. Earth Day is Wednesday April 22, 2015. These letters will be sent for that occasion but they seek to involve the public earlier in this campaign against war.

National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance

http://wombatawareness.com/2015/02/UPDATE 26-02-2015 - The millionaire bequest fell through! Brigitte and the wombats of South Australia are now facing a truly awful situation. She has set up a donation site in absolute desperation, no amount too small: https://www.chuffed.org/project/wombatssoontobehomeless and we hope our readers will spread this news. No-one else is helping the wombats in SA on a large scale and long term; wombats are starving, dying of mange and being killed by cars and farmers. As you know they are adorable and precious... and really worth saving. Thanks for any help.

The strange and unforgivable decline in wombat appreciation in the 20th century

The reputation of the wombat declined over the 20th century and is now at an unforgivable all time low. People may be interested to read "Rossetti's Wombat: A Pre-Raphaelite Obsession in Victorian England". This lecture by Harold White Fellow, Angus Trumble, at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, 16 April, 2003, gives a little-known history of wombat appreciation in Britain by 19th century poets, who called the wombat "the most beautiful creature of all". Here is a quote from a description written about 200 years ago, about a pet wombat which was taken to England (not that we approve the kidnapping of wombats to England):

"The wombat, burrowed in the ground whenever it had an opportunity, and covered itself in the earth with surprising quickness. It was quiet during the day, but constantly in motion in the night: was very sensible to cold; ate all kinds of vegetables; but was particularly fond of new hay, which it ate stalk by stalk, taking it into its mouth like a beaver, by small bits at a time. It was not wanting in intelligence, and appeared attached to those to whom it was accustomed, and who were kind to it. When it saw them, it would put up its forepaws on the knee, and when taken up would sleep in the lap. It allowed children to pull and carry it about, and when it bit them did not appear to do it in anger or with violence."

Whilst we do not approve of kidnapping wombats, we do approve the peaceful and positive interaction with them and wonder why it does not happen more frequently in Australia. Perhaps it is because we have been misled by our governments and education system to believe that they are unapproachable. Maybe this is another case for Gloria O'Possum to investigate.

Wombat Awareness Organisation Ltd., Research Conservation Education Rescue Unit

A hairy-nosed wombat community at Portee Station where this rare and persecuted animal is being rehabilitated and protected.

The site of the Wombat Awareness Organisation Ltd., Research Conservation Education Rescue Unit tells the rest of the 20th and 21st century story and that is where to go to purchase a little piece of outback Australia for the wonderful hairy-nosed wombat.
Here is a delightful film (link has been updated to new address)about this wombat refugee community in South Australia, run by Brigitte Stevens and her partner, Frank Mikela. It certainly bears out the earlier reputation of the wombat as a lovable and cuddly animal.

You may also sponsor a wombat, like this one, called, "Turty"

It is great to see a big effort being made to help wombats and the people who care for them with such dedication.

UPDATE September 21, 2010Millionaire bequest due in 12 months - but money urgently needed now

Brigitte Stevens still needs funding urgently, but urgently only for another 12 months or so, when the release of the first million dollar installment of an $8m bequest is scheduled to come through. Only recently has the news arrived that a US horse-racing millionaire has left to this organisation for wombats!

The millionaire's family has chosen to remain anonymous. According to Kim Wheatley, "US millionaire leaves estate to Wombat Awareness Organisation, the millionaire visited the organisation a couple of years ago to meet wild wombats.

He was shown the shameful conditions in which the South Australian government's laws and wildlife monitoring have reduced the wild population.

"I took him out into the wild population and showed him wombats with mange, wombats that were starving to death and wombats with burrows from motorbike tyres," she said.

Brigitte has another paid job just to pay the bills the organisation generates. According to Kim Wheatley's article, last year's vet fees amounted to $70,000. Now Brigitte hopes to buy two new properties and to run a 24 hour free veterinary advice clinic.

Ms Stevens - who works to help pay bills, including last year's $70,000 vet fees - wants to buy two properties in the Murraylands and run a 24-hour free vet advice phone clinic. But she is having trouble simply maintaining the Wombat Awareness Organisation at the minute, since the first installment of this bequest is still a long way off - around 12 months.

Please consider helping these kind and dedicated people to make it through to the time this windfall arrives.

People are becoming more aware of the contradictions in the dominant (official) rhetoric about Syria and foreign intervention on behalf of the rebels. People hope to find out the truth from women and ordinary people, because they know they cannot really trust the mainstream media or, unfortunately, various NGOs and political organisations. Inside, find a link to an interview with Agnes Mariam about about how Syrian women feel about Islamic fundamentalism, and about the very doubtful role of the UN, NGOs and Al Jazeera in this expanding conflict.

Mother Agnes Mariam in Oct 2012

I would also like to draw your attention again to the Skype interview recorded with Mother Agnes in early January 2014. http://socratesandsyria.com/mother-agnes-mariam/ The link is to a page which contains other videos on the same subject.

We should aim to be pro-peace, pro- the interests of the people of Syria as a whole, pro- the survival of secular Syria and at the same time scrupulous in our chase for the truth, but not a slanted 'truth' which inevitably would lead to ongoing war and the ultimate destruction of the Syrian army and secular society.

In regards to being pro-regime or pro-Assad, they are accusations used to intimidate and stifle dissenting voices. The current government of Syria and its current president are not Syria and not the people, though they represent them in a political capacity at this time.

If their staying in power for some time aids the general public and the society as a whole, then may they stay in power.

It is the future of the Syrian state and the 23 million Syrians that we must be concerned about, the future of generations.

Unfortunately, with the stigmatising of the Syrian government and president all positive efforts made on their part to support the people and society are ignored outside Syria.

Apparently the government has recently introduced laws which will give more opportunity for people who work on the land to have a fairer stake in that land, so the rich absentee land owners will have to give a significant percentage of their land to poorer, working families. Regrettably, the media in Gulf states or western countries won't bother to report on such laws, both because they represent Bashar al-Assad in a positive light and because the democratic local repartition of land runs counter to their globalism values, which are for power and assets in a few international corporate and dynastic hands.

However, in regards to peace activism, it is still amazing how much good work the 'ordinary person' - people like you and me - is able to achieve. I'm referring to people with no other agenda except a search for the truth and a fervent desire for peace and harmony, so children in Palestine, Syria and the region can be sent off to school with joy and dreams in their hearts, rather than grief and fear.

In May 2013, an international peace delegation visited a camp in Lebanon with refugees from Yarmouk, one lady very discreetly told Marinella and me to work hard to get the truth because it was the truth that could save them.
This is an oft-heard remark but it is a powerful one when the continued prosecution of a war is dependent on dissembling and fabrications.

Women will persistently seek the truth in these times perhaps more often than men, given the chance. Unfortunately women's voices are less sought than men's, so the pro-war message gets magnified. Mother Agnes Mariam is a leader among women and her persistence and her bravery in speaking out against war and terror have given her an audience. May we be open to her message and not discredit it because of ignorance and because of a reliance on less informed, but familiar, faces.

On Friday the 13th of February I attended the “Great Debate: To Collapse or Not to Collapse,” hosted by the Sustainable Living Festival at the Deakin Auditorium. The following Wednesday I attended a screening on the movie Cowspiracy, hosted by Animal Liberation Victoria, which explored the impact of industrial animal agriculture on the environment and the resistance from environmental groups to address the issue in a meaningful way.

Both events painted a grim picture of the environment and society if we don’t make considerable changes, however as in most events that prescribe change, they did a good job of focusing on particular issues whilst ignoring others. I have reflected considerably over the past week, and after summarising the two events I will share three points that I feel get overlooked by the environmental and social change movements. I believe these points must be acknowledged if we are to sustain the planet for successive generations.

The Great Debate: To Collapse or not to Collapse

The Great Debate identified climate change as an immediate crisis and six key speakers argued as to whether change should happen as a result of ‘collapse’ (e.g. a breakdown of our current complex and fuel dependent society) into a simpler, more grassroots society, or whether to work within the existing paradigm to a society run on clean renewable energy. The audience had the opportunity to vote at the end of which option they most agreed with or to suggest an alternative solution. With Bendigo Bank and Future Super sponsoring the event and encouraging attendees to divest, it was clear that the clean energy option had more support, however if the MC was hoping for a clear cut debate from the speakers she may have left a little disappointed.

Speakers David Holmgren and Nicole Foss gave the clearest arguments promoting collapse as the best option. Holmgren, who has spearheaded the permaculture movements in Victoria and abroad, suggested that a move from the middle class from grid-dependency towards self-reliance based on permaculture principles will allow a change of culture permitting a smoother transition away from capitalist growth economies that greatly impact the planet. Nicole Foss (see www.theautomaticearth.com) argued that economic collapse is inevitable as we are currently living in a financial bubble. As the bubble bursts, it will not be possible to fund the investment costs required for a large scale transition to renewable energy sources. To the contrary, people will only become inspired to take grass roots action when there is resource and fiscal depletion, she argued.

Phillip Sutton (author of ‘Climate Code Red’); Jess More (Stop CSG Illawarra) and George Marshall (author) were more inclined to argue that economic or physical collapse isn’t necessary. Sutton stated that collapse would not take CO2 away from the atmosphere. Therefore we need green tech technology to reclaim these emissions. These three speakers seemed to believe that there is a failure to talk about climate change on across the political spectrum. So a bottom-up change needs to take place through a conversation with wider society. Hopefully this would eventuate in a critical mass motivated to change society away from fossil fuels and endless economic growth.

George Monbiot (Prominent UK climate change author) had reservations for both sides of the argument and counselled attendees to abstain from voting. He suggested on the one hand how the planet will struggle to sustain our societies with current growth even with a switch to renewable energies. Further, that it is impossible to grow on a finite planet, especially now that limits have been reached. On the other hand, he had reservations about the manner in which basic demands (such as health) might be met in a post-collapse society. He believed that history has shown that post-collapse societies are not a peaceful alternative as and that feudal societies or tribal pockets run by psychopaths tend to be the norm.

Once the votes were counted, it was found that a distinct majority of 123 voted for non-collapse, and 59 voted for a third option (whatever that might be).

Why collapse might be better

I was in the minority who voted for collapse (23 votes) because I believe that the planet and other species that still live in it have a better chance of recovery if we’re in less of a position to systematically exploit it.

I learnt much from this debate and all speakers raised clear and valid points. As I anticipated however, the largest two contributors to climate change and ecological destruction, human population and animal agriculture were never discussed. This is all too common in environmental discussions. Nicole Foss mentioned the ‘P’ (for population numbers) word in passing, and George Monbiot brought up limits to growth on a finite planet, however this was couched as an economic argument rather than in terms of human numbers.

Cowspiracy:

The frustration that I have with environmentalists ignoring animal agriculture as the primary cause of climate change was shared a few days later when I attended ‘Cowspiracy’, in which this was the main premise. Despite the conspiracy theory nature of the title, the movie was much better thought out than that. The documentary referred to the fact that UN reports had been repeatedly reporting animal agriculture as the leading cause of Greenhoouse Gases (GHG), with the World Institute equating this proportion to 51% of GHGs, or 32 000 million tonnes [1] This takes into account Methane (with a global warming power at least 23 times that of Co2) and land clearance. The Standard American Diet is much less efficient in terms of land area use compared to entirely or mostly plant based diet, with many studies suggesting the difference is quite dramatic [2], [3]. livestock agriculture now covers 45% of the earth’s surface [4]. Consider that transportation, the next highest emitter of GHG emission, contributes a much lesser proportion at 13%.

See http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/ for many links to some of these sobering statistics.

The documentary makers were curious as to why many environmentalist groups, such as Greenpeace, were not campaigning on the issue or even providing this information. In investigating, their conclusions were that many environmental groups were either ignorant of the issue, wilfully or otherwise, or had deliberate motives for withholding this information.

Reasons included perceived possibility of alienation of membership and fund base, due to environmental group awareness that people tend to be disinclined to change their own behaviour. Relatedly, campaigns that have a clearer ‘us’ and ‘them’ delineation (such as fossil fuel emissions from corporate giants) are easier to pursue. There was also some leads to suggest that some of the larger environmental organisations may also receive funding from the animal agriculture lobby.

Many of us in the population movement would sympathise with the frustration that the documentary makers felt at this disjointedness of priority. However, I became frustrated at the film of my own accord, because as although the filmmakers acknowledged human population growth, they took the approach of trivalising it in comparison to animal growth. As the two are so intertwined, I was once again left feeling that many loose ends were not tied. This is a sentiment that is now all too familiar to me. Although I understand that everyone needs to pick their battles and focus on particular campaigns, failure to acknowledge important and fundamental issues undermines the whole environmental movement in the long run. I have listed 3 important issues that I believe must be acknowledged if we have any chance on either a clean emission free society OR a soft collapse:

(1) We need to stop eating industrialised animal products

This won’t be a popular suggestion for many due to the fact it suggests such a profound change to our diet and a fundamental change that is difficult for most of us. But inaction now means even more uncomfortable change down the track. Unless the UN changes its statistics more favourably anytime soon, the best single change we can do individually in regards to emission and biodiversity loss is to transition to a mainly plant-based diet.

If there is any benefit to living in a global society, it is that we have an access to a variety of plant foods that allow us to have a complete diet easily. The earth unfortunately cannot sustain 7 billion humans eating at the top of the food chain. The option to change, however, is possible within our current paradigm.

If this line of reasoning sounds logical, it is mainly the animal rights movement that is relaying the message to the wider public at present. It is easy to acknowledge that a fair proportion of people would be wary of the messages conveyed by animal rights activists due to suspicions that their morality may be skewing the validity of an environmental based argument. If a recognised environmental movement were to champion this cause, especially where animal agriculture was not the only focus, than I believe more people would be convinced.

I also acknowledge that most environmental organizations do amazing and tireless work within their areas of focus, and it is impossible to fight all battles at once.

Given the proportion of GHG attributable to animal agriculture, one might have hoped that more attention would be directed towards this industry by all the environmental groups out there. Currently however, there are precious few environmental organisations advocating for this, which probably comes down to a perceived unpopularity of the issue to the membership base, where a fundamental change to the way an individual member lives would need to be advocated for.

As mentioned before, ‘Us vs them’ debates, where the emphasis is on fossil fuel usage by corporate giants resonate better with most people. This may be because it externalises the issue and the individual campaigner is less compelled to change their own lifestyle choices. I completely empathise why environmental groups choose to take this path, but anyone who successfully campaigns against animal agriculture will be much more effective in the long run for the well-being of the planet, if this is the ultimate goal.

(2) Our population growth needs to slow down or not grow at all

Many readers of Can Do Better would rightly suggest that industrial agriculture is an unfortunate consequence of feeding a large world population and would not be a phenomenon if the world’s population were less than it is today. This is theoretically true but the current reality is actually unavoidable. If global populations were to double however, than the savings we’d made on GHG by switching to a plant-based diet would be nullified. Essentially we’d be back to square one again and need to look towards another seismic change in lifestyle.

The major problem is that the demographic transition, or the plateau in global human population that we were hedging our bets on just isn’t happening. We were predicting human population to reach 9 billion and level for around 20 years, and only most recently has this been upped to 11 billion, or a 40% increase from 7 billion. Currently charts show human population growth rate as an almost exponentially rising curve since the 1990s whilst the growth curve of all other vertebrate species on the planet (with the exception of ‘livestock’ of course) going inversely the other direction by almost the same amount.
I personally believe that human population will continue to grow at this rate until we (a) do something decisiveabout it or (b) we overshoot and our environmental rug is swept from under us. Of course, we are at this stage heading for option b.

Population numbers is a difficult subject for many of those people fighting to save the environment. This is probably because most identify with the left side of the political system. They thus struggle to differentiate population stabilization from reproductive coercion of the majority world (on an international scale) and protectionism or xenophobia on the national scale.

There is also a persistent belief that the problem is one of per capita footprint (particularly in the West) rather the total number of footprints. Most serious research has suggested that both need to come down, with population, unfortunately, being the most powerful variable.

Canadian environmentalist Tim Murray suggests that: ‘One new citizen via British maternity ward or airport wipes out 80 lifetimes of responsible recycling’ and ‘The energy produced by a 900 machine wind farm in BC will be erased by the energy demands of just 22 days of population growth’. This certainly paints a dour picture of the effectiveness of a clean economy with today’s rapid population growth.

Another example is that found from the Union for the Conservation of Nature, whose study across the globe in 2004 found that human population density predicted for 88% of biodiversity loss, regardless of nation wealth or per capita consumption.

This latter finding complements my own anecdotal experience volunteering in Western Kenya where the Karkemega forest was being decimated literally before my eyes from a hilltop viewpoint to meet the survival needs of local people, living on a sustenance level on less than $40 per month, whose population numbers had been disturbed and boosted by the political and religious landscape. This suggests that a population living in a lower consumption, non-global or post-collapse society would cause a significant reduction in environmental impact, but as Phillip Sutton and George Monbiot suggested at the Great Debate, environmental destruction just becomes more localized in such societies and more dispersed in industrialised ones. Note that traditional societies, human and of other species, have lived for many generations in local ecologies at numbers that did not overwhelm their environment. We can deduce this from the fact that they obviously co-existed with a full complement of species in Africa, India, America and Australia before colonization. [5]

The good news is that population growth can be a relatively straightforward thing to manage, if the political and social will is there. The United Nations Family Planning association has found that high levels of education and access to NON COERCIVE family planning services result is lower birth rates AND lower infant mortality – essentially when women are empowered and enfranchised away from patriarchal political and religious institutions. This may be a relief to those on the left haunted by China’s one child policy and population control in the majority world as manifestation of Western imperialism. Targeted grassroots foreign aid is the key.

Population is therefore an international concern (total carbon output) and a national and community concern (effect on local eco-systems) with varying implications according to carrying capacity depending on location.

Australia has reached its 23 million carrying capacity [6] according to the Australian Academy for Science calculations in 1994. We are now expected to double our population in 35 years, which means to halve our national carbon output, each individual will need to consume at one quarter of what they consume now. Ironically, in the long run, human psychology would probably predict that most Australians would opt for less people than the dramatic cultural shift that would result in a short-term reduction in the very way they live.

This is, of course, antithetical to the open border ideology to many in the left. I would love to share this ideology, but one must take into account the carrying capacity of Australia in addition to the population growth rate of the world’s poor which, at last estimate, was growing at the rate of 80 million per year. Even if Australia had completely permeable borders, it could never accommodate the total annual population of the world’s poor (at almost 4 times Australia’s current carrying capacity per year).

Unless the ultimate aim is complete diffusion of the problem without addressing the root cause (which benefits no-one in the long term) than an international movement to address population and reduce poverty is the only real solution.

Totally open borders, without addressing the root issue, also don’t address the well-being of all other species and the first custodians of the continent. It may also be argued that unless aboriginal Australians have final say in our immigration policies, that this can be interpreted as further unsolicited colonization.

As it stands most of Australia’s population growth rate (388 000 per annum, or at 1.7% per annum, the highest in the OECD) derives from the ‘skilled’ or employment-related immigration channels (55%) followed by natural birth rate (40%) with humanitarian intake a distant third at 5%.

The job market has been slowing down, and it is evident that the continued push for skilled immigration is social engineering by the right of the political spectrum to raise GDP by increasing the customer base via the housing and asset markets.

This push for high housing prices and low wages is at the expense of the working and living prospects of people with disabilities, the young, the old, the first inhabitants and even our asylum seekers.

This stark local reality puts environmentalists and the left at a seeming crossroads: open borders vs diminished social rights, vested interests and worse conditions for asylum seekers.

Whilst environmentalists and the left remain silent on the subject, or continue to confuse all debate on population with refugees, ironically big business benefits at the expense of most of the social rights that the left are campaigning for in addition to the environmental goals which are diluted by impacts of rapid population growth.

If the left are concerned by Australia’s population growth and the political ideologies that fuel the wrong kind of growth, the good news is that any concerted campaign that succeeds in toppling the property developers, financial institutions and media moguls from power would mitigate the pressure on politicians to promote socially engineered growth without ever having to mention the dreaded ‘p’ word. Currently the cause is championed by single issue advocacy group such as Sustainable Population Australia and a major hurdle for such groups is in enrolling the wider public, many of whom are skeptical that such groups are using environmental green wash to promote a culturally protectionist agenda. Whilst this assumption is false in the most part, multi-campaign environmental groups who also campaign for population sustainability would probably present the message easier, as their true agendas are more trusted by the wider community.

A final consideration would address our national birth rate. Whilst it is already slightly under ‘replacement level’ (1.9%) further cultural change would allow for a more generous humanitarian intake without affecting the population growth rate.

A cultural change would be possible where people did not feel that raising children was the societal norm and that having less or no children was considered an equally valid life choice from the perspective of mainstream society. A community focused upbringing, where a wider network of trusted adults assisted in the raising of fewer children, could be a better alternative to the nuclear family arrangement that is the current norm [7]. Furthermore, the education system could assist, where students could be facilitated in opening considering the many positives in raising a family, alongside the many costs, including financial pressures, changes to lifestyle, and the environmental impact of additional people on the planet. If we are considering that enormous change will happen in most of our lifetimes, including the possibility of economic and environmental collapse, this is something that people will need to carefully consider before deciding on having children.

Summary: we are not going to save our society from collapse if we are catering for a population heading towards a long term goal of infinity people, even with all the green tech in the world.

3. We have to keep our Ego under check

This last point comes more from my own philosophical outlook than through factual research that has resulted in my views on animal agriculture and population. However I do strongly believe that human ego has been at the core of all our problems and issues throughout history and fundamental to our ability to see through transition, whether through a clean capitalist economy or a soft collapse.

If we approach our problems from a place of empathy and compassion for each other and other species on the planet, we are in a better position to accept the facts of our predicament and make the necessary changes, regardless of how difficult the changes may appear to us personally. We’d also be able to work proactively with others and accept different opinions and factual evidence even if it initially conflicts with our own pre-existing beliefs.

I also believe there is some reason for optimism when it comes to addressing ego in what appear to be strong recent western trends to pursuing Taoism, Bhuddhism, mindfulness, and other spirituality which aim to mitigate ego and reconnect the individual to the planet. Not that this pursuit is reserved for spiritualists at the expense of atheists; most modern science, whether it be iquantum physics or biological science, is shifting from a Spencerian (false-Darwinistic) model of competition and reductionism towards one of mutual interdependence, symbiosis and balance.

If we come from a place of ego, we are ultimately coming from a place of insecurity and fear and tend to seek validation of ourselves and our beliefs at the expense of others. It makes us dogmatic and stuck in our beliefs, fearful of letting go and embracing change and the unknown.

These rigid characteristics are associated with big business, seeking short term profits at the expense of a future planet. The challenges for the environmental movement are to engage the wider public, of whom many are culturally conditioned, stuck in their ways and brittle in shifting their schemas.

Yet it would be delusional for those of us active in social change not to see the finger when it points back at ourselves.

Amazing though the work may be that we all do in our respective fields, if we are not addressing fundamental questions required to save ourselves, due to ego and fear, our efforts in other areas to save our planet can only be thwarted.

Ego is an issue everywhere, even in the animal rights and population movements. The animal rights and vegan movements are plagued by internal debate over many issues that can get personal, where this energy would be better diverted towards the animal agriculture industry. Some involved in population sustainability may be motivated to do so from a fear of losing their culture and lifestyle, however we all need to embrace that culture is a constantly changing phenomena, on those who currently live in Australia must also acknowledge that massive cultural shifts that we imposed and continue to impose on Australia’s original custodians. It was interesting at the Great Debate where there was much discussion from many of the speakers of the ongoing issues of promoting a dialogue to the wider public that is empathetic to their current beliefs and life circumstance.

Ego is most certainly an issue for myself. It was frustration which motivated me towards writing this article, itself a manifestation of ego, which means the finished article may be affected by judgment and fixed thinking. I still have a long way to go before I am a paragon of environmental sustainability - although I think I’ve addressed the two ‘biggies’ in regards my diet and my choice not to reproduce, I’m still sure that if everyone lived my carbon footprint that the earth would have been underwater decade ago, and there is still much, much more I can be personally doing. My aim is an ambitious one, to tread lightly on the planet and be as free from hypocrisy as I can. I would invite those inspired to join me in weaving all pieces of the puzzle together, and for those unconvinced, I would invite constructive debate on the thoughts I have raised, so long as it invites further constructive discussion towards a common goal of saving the planet.

Concluding Observations:

In order to authentically save the planet and ourselves, either through green tech, zero growth or through soft collapse, we need a holistic view of change, of which elements such as fossil fuels are more of an accepted given whereas animal agriculture, population, and ego are not given the platform I believe they deserve. These are very difficult issues to address, and history has not given much confidence in our capacity to live rationally and harmoniously with ourselves and our environment, but they are necessary to avoid a hard collapse, as predicted by Nicole Foss and George Monbiot at the Great Debate. If we are unsuccessful, that is perfectly fine in the longer term for the future of the planet itself, as I’m cautiously optimistic it will repair itself in an event where we are no more. It would just be a dreadful pity for the human race if we didn’t face facts and worked together to be authentic about giving it a good shot.

It is ultimately those issues that we find most difficult to confront that are the most essential issues for us to open up to.

Michael Bayliss is Vice-President of Victoria First, an NGO decicated towards better stewardship of Victoria through highlighting population concerns to the wider community. He is a former committee member of Sustainable Population Australia (VicTas Branch) and member of the Sustainable Population Party. He is also actively involved in many animal rights campaigns such as Coalition Against Duck Shooting and grass roots post-growth movements such as Doing it Ourselves.

NOTES

[1] Reference: “Livestock and Climate Change” World Watch Magazine, 2009. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6294.

[2] Reference: Robbins, John. Diet for a New America,StillPoint Publishing, 1987, p. 352

[3] Reference: “Sustainability of meat-based and plant-based diets and the environment.” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2003, vol.78 no.3, 6605- 6635. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full

[4] Reference: “Livestock and Climate Change.” International Livestock Research Institute, Issue Brief, 2011. (https://cgspace.cgiar.org/bitstream/handle/10568/10601/IssueBrief3.pdf

[5] Reference: Sheila Newman, Demography, Territory, Law: The Rules of animal and human populations, Countershock Press, 2013.

[6] In 1994, Australian Academy of Sciences held the Symposium, "Population 2040: Australia's choice". They issued a joint statement http://www.sciencearchive.org.au/events/sats/sats1994/Population2040-section8.pdf Canberra : The Academy, 1995

Sheila Newman tells me that Jonathan Stone and others publicly stated that Australia’s population at the time of the event, which was 17 million, was probably already at carrying capacity. According to her memory, Dr Stone prevailed on those present to suggest they needed to appear generous to refugees and therefore should allow some leeway for immigration which, he felt, would take Australia to 23 million.

[7] In other species and in many traditional human communities, including Australia between the two wars, there is a long tradition of extended families helping one breeding couple. This is known to anthropologists as ‘cooperative breeding’. (See http://candobetter.net/taxonomy/term/6927) Aunts and uncles not directly involved in reproduction are able to engage actively with their local communities and wider politics. Status, position and identity need not depend on reproduction.

Victoria's royal commission into family violence will focus on improving a system that is struggling to cope with the sheer volume of people who need help, the inquiry's head says.

Commissioner Marcia Neave said the year-long inquiry would examine how to better protect people, prevent violence and hold perpetrators to account.

Domestic violence is not the only thing in Victoria struggling with the "sheer volume of people" that need services.

(image:"20081123120727-violencia-de-genero" by Concha García Hernández - Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

At nearly 2% of population growth, this massive increase of over 100,000 new people each year is causing clashing waves and tremors, disruption a once dignified city, and peaceful State.

Victoria's Premier, Daniel Andrews, has vowed to jail family violence thugs, make intervention orders easier to get and enforce tough new laws to make women and children safe. These are bold words, and chest-thumping promises, but he will be hard-pressed in light of Victoria's pressure-cooker environment.

The dystopia of unemployment, the uselessness of searching for non-existent jobs, pressure on house prices and mortgages, cuts to education, and the stresses of having to cope with many changes and impacts of course causes violence and crime! There's no predictability, stability, assurances of a future, and pressures on individuals and families for survival.

Our population has grown from 4.4 million people (1994) to over 5.7 million by 2014, yet the numbers of people who deliver services on behalf of the Government has dropped from 48,359 to 29,568 over that 20 years. Thanks to heavy cutbacks by the Napthine government, there are now fewer workers servicing more Victorians!

People under pressure explode, or resort to drugs or alcohol to ease the pressure. The population of women who are homeless because of domestic and family violence is increasingly becoming a group with complex and multiple needs due to drug and alcohol dependency, mental health issues and disability.

Overloaded prisons and correctional services

The prison population in Victoria grew by more than 14 per cent between December 2012 and December 2013 and rose every month. The recidivism rate is based on the number of prisoners who return to jail, under sentence, within two years of release. Unpublished state government figures obtained by The Saturday Age reveal the recidivism rate for 2013-2014 is at a 10-year high of 40 per cent, up from a low of 34 per cent four years ago. Prisoner numbers have grown almost 40 per cent from 4350 in June 2009 to 6454 on January 16. The government's forecast prison population for June 2015 is 7169.

Urban sprawl and housing challenges

Melbourne's rapid expansion, and urban sprawl, means that families are separated by a gulf of distances, due to limited affordable housing. Instead of being able to settle close to family support, in the suburbs where people grew up, they are forced either to rent, or buy in far flung urban fringes, with little infrastructure, support services, and away from access to family connections.
People could be forced into rental properties, in transience, and nomadic existence due to rent costs and job availability. It's crumbles a sense of permanence and stability that fosters long term relationships.

Added to the mix is the "diversity" of peoples, with various values proportioned to women, and children. The rising number of homeless, of families and women, is the tip of the iceberg of those who are falling between the safety cracks in our society - based on greed for growth, at all costs.

Last year I did research into, and gave speeches about, the public health benefits of public open space. [See also, "Kelvin Thomson: Too few trees make high-density Coburg and Glenroy risky during heat waves"] My view about the importance of this is reinforced by recent statements in the Moreland Leader by University of Sydney Associate Professor Tonia Gray that research shows that neighbourhoods with more green spaces are much healthier and socially cohesive. She says, "Nature has a calming effect, it recalibrates your body. Australian kids spend an average of 52 hours a week in front of a screen but an average of 40 minutes outside". (Originally published at http://kelvinthomson.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/melbourne-heat-island-effect.html)

The importance of trees and vegetation cover is also reinforced by research calling for Melbourne suburbs to increase their tree cover to combat rising temperatures. The urban heat island effect occurs when built-up areas with surfaces such as roads, concrete and buildings absorb heat on hot days. It is dangerous to public health. In 2013 and 2014 over 400 Victorians were admitted to hospital for heat related illness. Researchers say "heat islands" are only going to get hotter unless more green spaces are incorporated.

Given this, it is folly to allow dual occupancy, multi-unit and high rise developments to lead to the cutting down of trees and shrubs and the paving over of open spaces which are presently cooling Melbourne down. We need to push back against plans by property developers and council officers to allow more buildings in what are already built up suburbs.

Age Discrimination Commissioner, Susan Ryan thinks that Treasurer Joe Hockey somehow deserves congratulations for suggesting that people's life expectancy may extend to 150 on the basis of some very speculative 'medical science'. [1] Futhermore, she's using this medical theory to jump on the moving retirement goal bandwagon. [2]
Is Susan Ryan, losing her marbles or simply doing what she has to to keep her job? Who do you know that you think is likely to live until they are 150 years old? And who do you know that wants to work until 70 or beyond? The value of elderly people is being sold out by the likes of Susan Ryan and Joe Hockey

Real trends

Nevermind that people young and old are dying early from poverty associated with unemployment in this country, fancy believing on the basis of past statistical curves, that most people are going to live to 150 even if some amazingly wealthy person like Murdoch might just aim, using cloned organ replacement, diet, blood transfusions and 24 hour slaves in attendance to aim for such longevity. How can Susan Ryan not be aware that the 'developed' nations are faced with actual declines in life-expectancy due to diet-linked diseases, notably diabetes, fatty liver, and the strain of obesity on their systems (which is not necessarily always present in the raised risk of diabetes.) [3]

Susan Ryan and Joe Hockey need to read more widely instead of relying on actuarial information from the past, hitched to a junk-science wagon. In this case past trends do not predict the future. Current trends break from the past. Joe Hockey is either poorly educated in health matters or pragmatically abusing economic stats. Probably both. If he really wanted to save money on medical costs, he would call for high taxes on denatured processed food and its advertising.

The church of the workhouse

Susan Ryan, like Julia Gillard, idealises payed work. To pretend that all work is good for health, rewarding or fulfilling, rather than a depressing and onerous treadmill, or a frighteningly tense battle to please capricious bosses, shows the insensitive submission of the work-privileged to a self-serving economic ideology. Although I supported quite a lot of what ex-labor PM, Julia Gillard, appeared to stand for, I felt sorry in advance for disabled people in the new National Disability Scheme if their only chance at dignity and security could be the 'right' and thereby the duty, to work. It isn't as if the were all guaranteed positions as well-paid neurosurgeons, party bosses, lawyers or chief executives. It isn't as if most of us have jobs like that.

Conditional love

In this Australia of very conditional love and self worth we must constantly struggle against the economic measure of our status. For this reason most women must struggle all the harder, meeting demands to be 'good' and obedient at home as well as at work. The elderly must struggle even harder. We are not taught how in simpler societies simply being a member of the society guarantees you a place, shelter, worth and rights. If we were we would rally to protect traditional societies instead of consigning their masses via 'development' to overpopulation, exhaustion, malnutrition, epidemics new and old as well as the same ones as the poor in the developed world: fatty liver, diabetes and its complications, and the political irrelevance and isolation of the mass consumer.

The value of elderly people is being sold out by the likes of Susan Ryan and Joe Hockey

Not a word in Susan Ryan's celebration of wage-slavery of the fitness of citizens, the rewards of political engagement in real life rather than effective total hours lost to unfair and redundant economic systems. Nothing about the loss of natural increase in status accompanying seniority in most societies before ours.

Evolutionary theory on longevity

The wisdom of older people and their retreat from sexual and warrior competition made sense of longevity in our species. Why do we have life expectancies around 3 score and 10 years? Because the presence of old people is fundamental to knowledge conservation in societies.

On the subject of how long humans lived, Kaplan et al [4] argue that humans had potential to live for about 70 years in hunter-gatherer environments. They theorise that reaching age 65 must have played a part in human evolutionary adaptation for the acquisition of life learning and storage of environmental knowledge over long periods of time and distance in elderly humans.

On the subject of causes of mortality, they assert that the comparatively isolated populations that persisted in localized environments pre-agriculture and large-scale settlement would have become genetically adapted to local pathogens. The effect of this would have kept disease mortality low.

Of course now, in our huge and cumbersome cities, local adaptation is no longer possible, since our diets and frequentations are globally sourced and mostly beyond any individual's control. We now eat industrially produced glop that our livers cannot break down, but can only store in ever increasing fatty deposits. In our global economic culture that may be just as well, since accumulated learning is not conducive to processed food consumption or widget production. Then again, if we did allow elderly people to transmit their accumulated knowledge from a position of authority, we might outwit the consumer-economy monster.

NOTES

[1] "The first drugs that can slow the ageing process are likely to become available within five to 10 years, raising the prospect of people eventually living to 150 or more, researchers say." Source: http://www.theage.com.au/technology/sci-tech/drugs-may-let-us-live-to-150-20111016-1lrm5.html

[2] Source: Susan Ryan, "The economic potential of older people is being ignored," The Age, 22 February 2015, http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-economic-potential-of-older-people-is-being-ignored-20150222-13lfgt.html.

[3] For anyone interested in the theory, I refer to Dr Lustig of the University of California's and associates work on excessive fructose consumption in particular but also on excessive consumption of any simple carbohydrates. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHlEuDHpE2k These epidemic problems are now affecting children within six months of birth. There are many other lectures on you tube around this subject besides this one that explores the evolutionary signficance of fructose.

[4]See Kaplan, H., Gurven, M., Winking, J. 2009, “An Evolutionary Theory of Human Lifespan: Embodied Capital and the Human Adaptive Complex,”. For: Handbook of Theories of Aging. (Editors: Bengtson, V., Silverstein, M., Putney, N., Gans, D). Springer. Pp. 39-66. Also available at http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/kaplanetal_ch3.pdf.

Historically, this latest eruption of American militarism at the start of the 21st Century is akin to that of America opening the 20th Century by means of the U.S.-instigated Spanish-American War in 1898. Then the Republican administration of President William McKinley stole their colonial empire from Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; inflicted a near genocidal war against the Filipino people; while at the same time illegally annexing the Kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the Native Hawaiian people (who call themselves the Kanaka Maoli) to near genocidal conditions. Additionally, McKinley’s military and colonial expansion into the Pacific was also designed to secure America’s economic exploitation of China pursuant to the euphemistic rubric of the “open door” policy. But over the next four decades America’s aggressive presence, policies, and practices in the “Pacific” would ineluctably pave the way for Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 194l, and thus America’s precipitation into the ongoing Second World War. Today a century later the serial imperial aggressions launched and menaced by the Republican Bush Jr. administration and now the Democratic Obama administration are threatening to set off World War III.

By shamelessly exploiting the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001, the Bush Jr. administration set forth to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and peoples living in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf and Africa under the bogus pretexts of (1) fighting a war against international terrorism; and/or (2) eliminating weapons of mass destruction; and/or (3) the promotion of democracy; and/or (4) self-styled “humanitarian intervention”/responsibility to protect. Only this time the geopolitical stakes are infinitely greater than they were a century ago: control and domination of two-thirds of the world’s hydrocarbon resources and thus the very fundament and energizer of the global economic system – oil and gas. The Bush Jr./ Obama administrations have already targeted the remaining hydrocarbon reserves of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia for further conquest or domination, together with the strategic choke-points at sea and on land required for their transportation. In this regard, the Bush Jr. administration announced the establishment of the U.S. Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in order to better control, dominate, and exploit both the natural resources and the variegated peoples of the continent of Africa, the very cradle of our human species. Libya and the Libyans became the first victims to succumb to AFRICOM under the Obama administration. They will not be the last.

This current bout of U.S. imperialism is what my teacher, mentor and friend Hans Morgenthau denominated “unlimited imperialism” in his seminal work Politics Among Nations (4th ed. 1968, at 52-53):

“The outstanding historic examples of unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have in common an urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own successes and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the confines of the political world. This urge will not be satisfied so long as there remains anywhere a possible object of domination–a politically organized group of men which by its very independence challenges the conqueror’s lust for power. It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of moderation, the aspiration to conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimited imperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialistic policies of this kind… “

It is the Unlimited Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon and Hitler who are now in charge of conducting American foreign policy. The factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the First World War and the Second World War currently hover like twin Swords of Damocles over the heads of all humanity.

About the Author:

Francis A. Boyle is is a leading American expert in international law. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. He served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court. He served as legal adviser to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993.

In 2007, he delivered the Bertrand Russell Peace Lectures. Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign and is author of, inter alia, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, Foundations of World Order, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, Destroying World Order, Biowarfare and Terrorism, Tackling America's Toughest Problems, and The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka.
He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University.

He is the author of several books including Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three-Decade U.S. Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution, Clarity Press, 2013, where he relates his experiences as Libya's legal advisor in several international affairs.

"A classic case study of the conduct of US foreign policy as it relates to international law." Most Australians seem to get their opinions on world events from some well-known ABC, Murdoch and Fairfax commentators, and some newer ones sourced from corporate 'think tanks' like the Lowy Institute, and some questionably alternative sources like the Green Left Weekly, who all basically run the same line. If that is how you get your news, then you won't have any idea of what happened to Libya in 2011. To have any understanding of events in the Middle East, it is necessary to read much more widely. I came across this book recently and snapped it up because it was by an international US law professor who personally represented Mohamar Qadaffi in Libya's defense against the Lockerbie airplane bombing accusations and documented successive NATO attempts to draw Libya into war. Written very clearly, with a proper thesis, the book proved to be a fascinating and moving document of one man's attempt to represent his people honestly and truly and to synthesise a way forward for Muslims, men and women together, as a national participant in global affairs.

This is a book review of Destroying Libya and world order: The Three-Decade U.S. Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution by Francis A. Boyle. ISBN: 978-0-9853353-7-3.

This book gives us a perspective that no newspaper can on the repetitive accusations against Eastern and Middle Eastern states of weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapon stockpiles and airplanes falling out of the sky.

It tells of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi's legal fight to defend himself against US and UK allegations of being responsible for the Lockerbie Aircraft bombing in 1988. Libya filed two World Court lawsuits against the United States and the United Kingdom at the International Court of Justice in The Hague to convene an emergency meeting of the World Court and to request the Court to issue the international equivalent of temporary restraining orders against the United States and the United Kingdom so that they would not attack Libya again as they had done before.

After these two World Court lawsuits were filed, President Bush Senior ordered the Sixth Fleet to stand down. Thus Libya managed to avert war with the United States. Because of these legal suits, as Francis Boyle records, "There was no war. No one died."

Unfortunately that was not the end of NATO attempts to bring chaos to the Middle East and war to the world.

Boyle describes how, time and again, the United States would invade Libya's coastal waters and attempt to draw fire. The US seemed to make up the law as it went and NATO went along with it all. Qaddafi followed Francis Boyle's legal advice and documented Libya's peaceful responses in world legal forae. You would think, reading of these considered documents, that the US, the UK, and NATO would have desisted for fear of being tried for war crimes. But they did not. They went further to support Qadaffi's enemies who pursued Libya's leader with guns and knives and killed him along with about 60 of his supporters, in a war-crime as yet officially uninvestigated. One concludes that the leaders of the countries involved truly believe they can get away with anything. They must think they are beyond punishment.

Francis Boyle describes Colonel Qaddafi's rule as 'secular-nationalist'. He decreed that women in Libya were equal to men. He wrote a 'Green Book' that attempted to find a third way between capitalism and communism, consistant with Islam. Although most Libyans were moderate Sunni Muslims, Qaddafi's biggest opponents were Muslim fundamentalists in Libya itself.

In order to overthrow Qaddafi in 2011, the U.S. and NATO states worked hand-in-glove with Libyan and imported foreign Muslim fundamentalists including elements of Al Qaeda and Salafists. There were many assassination attempts by the West and, in 2011, when the bombing of Libya campaign began, Qaddafi went to ground, trying to stay alive. Eventually he was assassinated in the most brutal way, defending his country. In the wake of his removal, Libya has fallen into chaos. Extremism of the most brutal kind has sprung from this chaos, radiating outwards. This was not the fault of Qaddafi, but of the international forces that armed his enemies.

Francis Boyle explains how the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect evolved to be abused. In 2011 the Obama administration directly took over Libya’s oil fields under the pretext of the so-called Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

- Sheila Newman

From the publisher's website at http://www.claritypress.com/BoyleXLibya.html

AUTHOR FRANCIS A. BOYLE is a leading American expert in international law. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. He served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court. He served as legal adviser to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations from 1991 to 1993.

In 2007, he delivered the Bertrand Russell Peace Lectures. Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign and is author of, inter alia, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, Foundations of World Order, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, Destroying World Order, Biowarfare and Terrorism, Tackling America's Toughest Problems, and The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka.
He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University.

“Let the free people of the world know that we could have bargained over and sold out our cause in return for a personal secure and stable life. We received many offers to this effect but we chose to be at the vanguard of the confrontation as a badge of duty and honour. Even if we do not win immediately, we will give a lesson to future generations that choosing to protect the nation is an honour and selling it out is the greatest betrayal that history will remember forever despite the attempts of the others to tell you otherwise.” Muammar Qaddafi* (“Qaddafi website publishes ‘last will’ of Libyan ex-leader”, BBC News, 23/10/2011)

Synopsis

It took three decades for the United States government—spanning and working assiduously over five different presidential administrations (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II , and Obama)—to terminate the 1969 Qaddafi Revolution, seize control over Libya’s oil fields, and dismantle its Jamahiriya system. This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened, and what was both wrong and illegal with that from the perspective of an international law professor and lawyer who tried for over three decades to stop it.

Francis Boyle provides a comprehensive history and critique of American foreign policy toward Libya from when the Reagan administration came to power in January of 1981 up to the 2011 NA TO war on Libya that ultimately achieved the US goal of regime change, and beyond.

He sets the record straight on the series of military conflicts and crises between the United States and Libya over the Gulf of Sidra, exposing the Reagan administration’s fraudulent claims of Libyan instigation of international terrorism put forward over his eight years in office.

Boyle reveals the inside story behind the Lockerbie bombing cases against the United States and the United Kingdom that he filed at the World Court for Colonel Qaddafi acting upon his advice—and the unjust resolution of those disputes.

Deploying standard criteria of international law, Boyle analyzes and debunks the UN R2P “responsibility to protect” doctrine and its immediate predecessor,“humanitarian intervention”. He addresses how R2P served as the basis for the NATO assault on Libya in 2011, overriding the UN Charter commitment to state sovereignty and prevention of aggression. The purported NATO protection in actuality led to 50,000 Libyan casualties, and the complete breakdown of law and order. And this is just the beginning. Boyle lays out the ramifications: the destabilization of the Maghreb and Sahel, and the French intervention in Mali—with the USA/NATO/Europe starting a new imperial scramble for the natural resources of Africa.

This book is not only a classic case study of the conduct of US foreign policy as it relates to international law, but a damning indictment of the newly-contrived R2P doctrine as legal cover for Western intervention into thiird world countries.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction

Chapter 1.
Using International Law to Analyze American
Foreign Policy Decision-Making.

Chapter 2.
The Confrontation Between the Reagan
Administration and Libya
over the Gulf of Sidra and Terrorism

Chapter 3.
The Reagan Administration’s Criminal Bombings of
Tripoli and Benghazi

Chapter 4.
Resolving the Lockerbie Dispute by Means of
International Law.

Chapter 5.
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) versus International
Law.

Chapter 6.
The 2011 U.S./NATO War Against Libya.

Conclusion

In a new stand-up special, "Russell Brand takes a very literal approach in explaining immigration, and further points out the absurdity of fearing others due to "imaginary geopolitical borders." Aren't we all just part of the same, mysterious, rotating sphere?" Huffington Post

Russell quite rightly points out the absurdity of being anti-immigration. The poor, or under privileged, or others simply seeking a better life may wish to move from one country to another. Nobody can reasonably oppose that basic aspiration; within reason.

But each country does have some role to play in managing the flow of people across its borders. Society, by definition, is the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community. If restricting migration flows serves the greater humanitarian good in both the emigration and immigration countries, then open minded due diligence in verifying that reality (or otherwise) will serve that greater good. Globalisation, in the Darwinian sense, is a planet-wrecker regardless of how it occurs.

Global social order does rely on the management of the parts of a whole. The "rotating sphere" that Russell Brand refers to is not a perfect world and management of each part, and the whole, tends to be slightly more complex than a "funny" joke.

For example, there are over a billion desperately poor in the developing world. Most live under autocratic regimes where GDP per capita is less than $1,000 per year. Under such regimes this calculation of GDP per capita can be misleading when the autocrats "own" and control most of the wealth.

In countries like Australia (or the UK for that matter), the Budgetary cost of supporting each individual is far higher than $1,000 per year. In Australia it is roughly $17,000 per person per year. Escalating debt in developed countries is testimony to the cost of supporting the populations of such countries exceeding the capacity of GDP to sustain them. Free market capitalism sucking the lifeblood from the economy is clearly one part of this problem as Russell seeks to highlight.

Many of the poorest people need the most help, but assisting them by facilitating their migration into Australia or the UK is not possible from a humanitarian perspective. A billion people cannot be accommodated in Australia and $17,000 x one billion is $17 trillion dollars a year. The current Australian Federal Budget is less than $400 billion per year and already struggles to support 23 million people. The same logic applies globally to mass migration from the developing world to the developed world.

So there is a shred of logic in seeking to help such people in their home countries where each dollar spent can do more good, rather than sanctioning the preferential mass migration of relatively fortunate people into high cost countries that do not have the capacity to support such rapidly growing numbers of people. If mass migration reduces the capacity of a developed country to provide much needed philanthropic aid to the world's poorest people, why simplistically mischaracterise that reality as anti-immigration? Is this part of a world view based on ideological dogma that lacks a rational, coherent action plan?

Russell spends a large part of his time rightly condemning the free market capitalism that drives global destruction in the name of GDP growth (which is driven by extreme population growth). He promotes equitable distribution of wealth. Does he realise that mass migration of relatively fortunate people into high cost, developed societies is in direct conflict with his popular ideological dogma? This migration clearly exacerbates the redirection of spending on growing migrant populations in the developed world at the expense of the poorest in the developing world.

Here's what Russell had to say:

"Do not pause to reflect that free movement of global capital will necessitate free movement of a global labour force that meet the demands of the free movement of that capital. That is a complex economic idea and you won't understand it."

It seems to me that Russell Brand doesn't understand it either.

Previously published on New Eastern Outlook (17/2/15), Land Destroyer (18/2/15). See also: About Ukraine.

Ulson Gunnar - NEO) - US President Barack Obama previously commented on the Ukrainian conflict, claiming Russian President Vladimir Putin was speeding past all the "off ramps" offered by the US and its NATO military alliance to end the violence. And just as it appeared the US and the rest of NATO were about to take their own advice and use the Minsk accord as their own face-saving "off ramp," they've decided to put the pedal to the metal instead.   To Barbara Miller and Michael Brissenden, ABC Re "The Debaltsevo 'cauldron'": "Battle rages for key Ukrainian town despite ceasefire agreement" Dear Barbara and Michael, As a well informed observer of current events in East Ukraine, and of the distorted picture of them presented in the Western media, I was very concerned about this morning’s report on the crisis in Debaltsevo, or what the Novorussians call the ‘Debaltsevo cauldron’. They call it this, because a few weeks ago, some 8000 Ukrainian troops with heavy armour went deep into territory east of the current ceasefire line, with the intent to separate Luhansk and Donetsk and launch attacks against both centres of the ‘new republic’. Not long before Angela Merkel’s rush visit to Moscow, the ‘separatist’ forces had succeeded in cutting off the access to this ‘cauldron’ by taking control of the main route in west of Debaltsevo. The Ukrainian troops were surrounded and faced with a choice – fight to their deaths with no support from Kiev, or surrender to the Separatists. As we saw from news tonight, some small number of Ukrainian troops did surrender, but many thousands remain. The leader of the Kiev Junta, President Poroshenko, refuses to admit that these troops are trapped, and refuses to let them surrender, while making wild and ridiculous assertions about Russian involvement. President Putin by contrast has asked Kiev to allow their surrender, so that the crisis can be solved peacefully, and the terms of the ceasefire respected. As long as Western media organisations, including the ABC, continue to parrot the rubbish and lies being told by their governments, if merely by simply reporting them without ever revealing the truth, then we will see a further deterioration towards a major conflict over Ukraine. I am appealing to you to consider the multiple reports and perspective in all Russian media, and in many alternative internet fora, to better understand the nature of the powerplay here, and start telling us what has really happened. A good place to start is with this blog by a ‘Russian’ living in the US, with many contacts in Russia and superb analysis: http://www.vineyardsaker.blogspot.mx/ ["The Vineyard of the Saker"] I would like to start hearing news on the ABC which presents even a moderate view of the Russian perspective, rather than none at all. with regards, David Macilwain, Sandy Creek, Victoria. Topic: Russia ABC bias Ukraine Kiev Poroshenko David Macilwain Debaltsevo cauldron for the record complaint Obama's ISIS project is nothing but a pretext to murder and destroy Syrian society Tue, 2015-02-17 17:23 by Denis G. Rancourt The US-Empire's present preeminent position of brutal global thug is a self-evident truth based on hard facts regarding the magnitudes of death and destruction; counted in millions of lives, millions of refugees, and nation-wide obliterations of civil infrastructure, not to mention annihilations of national and civil institutions. US crimes do not diminish the importance of injustices perpetrated by non-aligned regimes, but there is an obvious asymmetry of magnitudes that simply cannot be denied. (Article originally published here: http://activistteacher.blogspot.ca/2014/09/obamas-isis-project-is-nothing-but.html The US military-finance-corporate empire (US-Empire) is characterized by (LINK): global military projection using over 1000 military bases control over the global finance instruments (and the money supply) corporate exploitation of labour and resources on the scale of entire continents dominant influence on World organizations such as the United Nations a demonstrated willingness to annihilate entire populations and societies -- directly or by proxy -- in order to ensure complete compliance The nations entirely destroyed recently by the US-Empire include: Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and so on. These actions are outright crimes of mass aggression viciously targeting entire peoples, using combinations of military devastation, political overthrows, and brutal economic blockades. No other regime in today's world is responsible for such premeditated and repeated acts of mass murder against entire modern societies. The US with its military allies, most notably Israel, is presently by far the greatest threat to peace and the greatest purveyor of terror on the planet. This is not debatable by reasonable people. The US-Empire's present preeminent position of brutal global thug is a self-evident truth based on hard facts regarding the magnitudes of death and destruction; counted in millions of lives, millions of refugees, and nation-wide obliterations of civil infrastructure, not to mention annihilations of national and civil institutions. US crimes do not diminish the importance of injustices perpetrated by non-aligned regimes, but there is an obvious asymmetry of magnitudes that simply cannot be denied. It is also apparent that the US-Empire's projects of nation destruction are strategic and premeditated. Having built an instrument for annihilating nations, it appears difficult for the US-Empire to not use it, irrespective of any moral or legal considerations. US "diplomacy" has become strictly an exercise in promoting its wars for geopolitical design. It is in this realistic context of a ferocious, rogue and barely-constrained superpower that we must understand Obama's emanations about ISIS as nothing but a pretext to "remove Assad". And "removing Assad" can only mean destroying the Syrian nation and its people because the Syrian army and the Syrian people stand together and overwhelmingly support Assad against the foreign invaders. The legitimate political dissidence in Syria was used as a front and a pretext to inject massive numbers of externally-funded foreign rebels into a proxy war for the US-Empire and its regional partners-in-crime. This is established by every credible researcher. (And, of course actively masked by the US-Empire's propaganda.) And now an element (ISIS) of the injected foreign rebels is used as a pretext for all-out war US-style. For Syria, this means complete annihilation of the national defence forces, and total destruction of civilian infrastructure to bring the population to its knees and lay siege to any resistance. Straight-up crimes against humanity as the modus operandi for "regime change", a la USA, followed by US corporation predation, territorial control, etc. Obama's ISIS project is nothing but a pretext to murder and destroy Syrian society. Obama's ISIS project is nothing but a pretext to murder and destroy Syrian society. Obama's ISIS project is nothing but a pretext to murder and destroy Syrian society. * * * Dr. Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and Full Professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is known for his applications of physics education research (TVO Interview). He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals, and has written several social commentary essays. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism. While he was at the University of Ottawa, he supported student activism and opposed the influence of the Israel lobby on that institution, which fired him for a false pretext in 2009: LINK.  Topic: Middle East refugees NATO anti-war Syria war crimes warmongering US-Empire Denis G. Rancourt Revolutionary male contraceptive Mon, 2015-02-16 21:24 by Sheila Newman The internet provides the general public, almost anywhere, with access to contraceptive information which your local GP and well-trod academic paths have failed to provide. Here is a male contraceptive that provides months of temporary sterilisation to men. It only requires bathing the testes in hot water (46C or 116F) for 45 minutes a day for three weeks for six months infertility. Bathing in water of water at 43.3C or 110? produces at least four months of infertility. Longterm practice can apparently permanently reduce fertility. Voegeli's method was recommended and used in India in the 1940s by a Swiss doctor who ran her own hospital in India and advocated for the poor. Why have educated people lost this information? My reading leads me to surmise that this was (a) because it was recommended by a female doctor; (b) because you could not make money out of it (c) because it undercut commercial methods [1] (d) due to overvaluation of possible long-term effects in certain cases. All these concerns fail to take into consideration the dire situation of people in countries of high birth rates who do not have access to 'modern' and costly contraception. Note: This article has been retitled from "Simple Male Contraceptive - hot water" to "Revolutionary male contraceptive" because some readers thought it was a joke and, although the concept and practice is simple, this kind of simplicity is revolutionary today. Of the reasons I have surmised for the failure of this method to be popularised, it seems to me that its very cost-free nature may be why the method has not been promoted widely. In our commercialised global culture, money-making opportunities receive the widest promotion of all ideas. This also explains why population growth is widely promoted but population restraint is not. The first makes money for focused beneficiaries; the second simply removes diffuse costs. Dr Voegeli's method apparently gained local popularity in India during a famine, but who knows what subsequently disorganised the societies and their cultural knowledge in the areas where Dr Voegeli practised? Below I have copied and pasted a letter to the Lancet written by the woman who introduced this practice to India in the 1940s. [2] This Swiss woman doctor's battle to have the method taken seriously is alluded to in this article, http://www.newmalecontraception.org/heat-methods/: "In 1949, Voegeli began a 20-year campaign to publicize the heat method so that, if the results of further studies were favorable, the method could be widely used (Corea, 1985; Robinson, Rock, & Menkin, 1968). Voegeli’s impassioned pleas for the method make fascinating reading and show how in some ways, the plight of the poor has changed very little in the intervening 50 years. Her attempts to publicize this free contraceptive were generally unsuccessful, although in 1954 the Japanese government requested the information and conducted several successful experiments (Corea, 1985 ch. 9)." The same article also warns that "It is now clear that fertility may not return completely after long-term use of heat methods. After keeping meticulous records during more than 12 years of use of the special underwear method, one long-term user has found that his sperm count after quitting is only a fraction of what it was before. Keep in mind, if trying heat methods, that they may gradually impact fertility over time. Except for short-term use, heat methods should not be used as a reversible method– they should only be used by men who are okay with potentially being less fertile, or not fertile, in the future." The same article also provides theory on why heat methods work based on the location of the testes outside the body. M. Voegeli, M.D. "Marlefried" Goldiwil-ob-Thun Switzerland January 4, 1956 The Editor "The Lancet" 7 Adam Street Adelphi Terrace London W.C.2 England Sir: I am sending you the enclosed article in the hope that you may find it of value for publication in "The Lancet". For your information I may say that I hold the Master's degree from Columbia University of New York City, and my Doctor's in medicine from the University of Berlin and the University of Paris. In India I practiced in my own private hospital, specializing in surgery. In 1950 I retired and am now living in my native Switzerland. Yours very sincerely, M. Voegeli, M.D. CONTRACEPTION THROUGH TEMPORARY MALE STERILIZATION by Dr. Martha Voegeli In view of the fact that the problem of over-population, instead of being solved, looms ever more largely in the minds of thoughtful, conscientious people, it might be of interest to those trying to solve the problem to know how I met it during my thirty years of life and practice in India. Working in an environment where the need for a practically useful contraceptive was of the utmost urgency, a type was aimed at which would meet five basic requirements, namely, effectiveness, reliability, safety, cheapness and simplicity. Such was the method finally evolved in my own laboratory. I called it the method for temporary male sterilization. The name indicates that it is for men. It requires the application of heat which reduces male fertility to the extent of producing in its stead sterility for a period long enough to be of value practically, without however sterilizing a man permanently. The treatment consists in a sitting bath of 45 minutes, at a temperature of 116 F, daily, for a period of 3 weeks. This treatment results in sterility which lasts for at least 6 months. After that time, normal fertility returns. Where sterility of longer duration is desired, the treatment must be repeated every 6 months. This formula was arrived at after ten years of experimentation, with the free and intelligent cooperation of nine male patients. While results differed at a temperature lower than 116 F, at 116 F they were uniform in all cases and remained stable. Race, nationality, age, climate made no difference. Among the volunteers were two English, two Americans, two Scots, two Indians, and one Austrian of Semitic origin. They lived in climates where average temperatures ranged from 60 - 100 F; ages varied from 25 - 45 years. In all cases it was found that at a temperature as low as 107 F, motility in the specimens observed was visibly reduced. Timely treatment with a stimulant solution would promptly restore it to normal. This suggests that sterility resulting from exposure to heat is due to impaired motility of the spermatozoa rather than to their destruction. At 116 F, movement of any kind ceased altogether and could not be restored. Here it was impossible to determine whether this was due to simple paralysis or to complete destruction of the spermatozoa. Were they doped or were they dead? That was the question. In neither case could it be ascertained whether the matrix they produced them had not also been affected. It must be borne in mind that in every case under observation normal fertility returned when the term of temporary sterility had expired. This would indicate that the matrix, if affected at all, had not been affected to an appreciable degree. The heat applied may have led to a reduced output of spermatozoa or to impairment of their motility, or both. Certain it seems, that the temperature necessary to the suspension of fertility does not affect the matrix permanently. Conclusive answers to this and other questions will probably be forthcoming shortly through further research. In the meantime, the method evolved in my laboratory was found to be effective, reliable, safe, cheap and simple. Its effectiveness and reliability were established beyond doubt. Daily baths of 45 minutes' duration at 116 F, over a period of 3 weeks, resulted invariably in sterility lasting for a minimum of 6 months. Successive applications of this formula yielded the same result. This was established by a test period of ten years. In the field of practice, control was possible to a very limited extent. Only a fraction of those treated would report regularly and for any extended time. To establish reliable statistics was therefore next to impossible. Nevertheless, the results were obvious. In families who could not feed even the children they already had, babies ceased to be born, or their arrival was spaced. Moreover, gratitude, expressed by gifts of flowers and fruit, by a happy smile or a gracious bow, or where it was very deeply felt, by bodily prostration before the doctor, left no doubt of the practical help which the method had given. It often happened too, that parents would pay a courtesy call, all smiles, just to exhibit the new baby decided upon after hard times were over. The safety of the method was likewise evident. Whether its systematic use for a period longer than twenty years would have had any undesirable side effects is not known, but within that period no such effects, local or general, physical or psychic, could be observed. To ascertain this was easy in laboratory cases all of which had been followed up and checked periodically for that span of time. In these it was found that temperatures below 116 F would produce sterility for a time of varying length. At 107 F, for instance, the ensuing sterility would last for two to five months; at 110 F, four to seven months, and at 116 F for a minimum of six months and a maximum of eight months. But where the sperm count is abnormally high, sterility lasts for only four months. This was pointed out by a research scientist in a university where the method is currently being put to the test. In such a case, the bath temperature would have to be raised, or the number of baths increased, or both, in order to insure sterility for six months. This could indeed be done without risk of any kind. In the laboratory as well as in practice, temperatures of 125 F were comfortably supported. In no instance were there undesirable after effects; heightened temperature merely lengthened the period of sterility. In no case did it produce permanent sterility because no degree of heat within the range of physical tolerance is high enough to sterilize a man permanently. For this purpose, other more drastic methods, operative or chemical, would have to be resorted to. As to the effect of the method on physical health, in not a single instance where it had been used systematically and for years did it affect the body adversely. Except for the period of treatment, marital relation was normal. From the psychological point of view, far from being detrimental, the method proved to be beneficial to both husband and wife. It did away with a number of psychic disorders arising from inhibitions and forced restraint which manifested themselves in perverse habits and moral aberrations of various kinds. Again and again, couples would express in their humble way their relief from the mental strain due to the fear of the coming of another baby they could not feed. Now they could mean more to each other and to their family than ever before. Children subsequently born to such parents were normal in every respect. The cheapness of the method was guaranteed by the fact that the only cost to the individual was that of a bucket of hot water. To a government adopting it the chief expense would obviously be that attached to the dissemination of information. This could be accomplished through existing clinics, centers of public health education and other channels suited to the purpose. The simplicity of the method is obvious. There is hardly a method now in use as simple as the method for temporary male sterilization. Apart from the mentally deficient, the most backward individual can grasp and apply it. Its technique is suited admirably to people in countries like India, where the poorest avail themselves of every opportunity for bathing, where time is as yet no factor, and "squatting" a favorite mode of relaxation. In actual practice, containers used in the household or in everyday work were adequate for the bath. Naturally, thermometers were not generally available. To give men an idea of the correct temperature, they were offered a sample "feel" by dipping the hand into water heated to the required degree. Where a timepiece was lacking the men had more than one way of knowing when the forty-five minutes were up. One was the position of the sun, another their own uncanny sense of time, not easily comprehended by the foreigner. For western man, or those living in the more highly industrialized places, the sitting bath might prove to be too cumbersome and time-robbing to be practical. For them an electrically heated gadget, such as a cushion, pad, chair, or suspensory would perhaps be more acceptable. Here a fresh series of experiments would be needed* to determine the factors of temperature, and the number of baths. It is possible, even probable that by use of such gadgets the duration of the treatment could be considerably shortened. Where the procedure is now being tested the sitting bath is used. I wish to point out that between the years 1930 and 1950, the method was used in practice on a constantly expanding scale in places where famine had broken out. At that time there was no other method in sight that was cheap, simple and effective. The poor took to it readily and with gratitude. Advice, instruction and treatment were given without charge. No propaganda was needed. Fear of being censured or penalized by those representing special interests - priest, employer, family, headman and party boss - would deter some from seeking help. When they were assured that they could come under cover of night and that no name and address would be asked, many would seek the help offered. Those who did so were, among non-Christians, about equally proportioned between Mohammedans and Hindus. Among Christians, Catholics were in the majority. Opposition, sometimes violent, came only from among the well-fed, motivated as a rule by prejudice - religious, cultural, economic, political. A good deal of encouragement and understanding was given to the movement by the intellectual members of the community. In closing may I say that from the practical results which were obtained, there can be no doubt as to the value of the method. From a more theoretical point of view, some questions are justified. For example, it might be said that the method rests at present largely on empirical grounds; that the purely scientific basis I was able to provide was not substantial enough to justify its application on a large scale in practice. But confronted as I was on the one hand with the appalling misery caused by overpopulation, and on the other hand aware of the utter harmlessness of the sitting bath as a means of implementing the treatment, I had no compunction about putting it to use without further temporization. Here I must emphasize that those who volunteered for experiments were motivated by truly humanitarian considerations. They were all willing to help to the point of sacrifice. Their distress at the sight of the misery around them was as great as my own. Again, from the moral point of view, it might be asked if dissemination of the knowledge of the method could not lead to its misuse. To this question the answer is yes. But what plan or invention for man's good has not been misused? Such misuse would hardly result in increased licentiousness, for men so constituted will follow their inclination with or without knowledge of the method. Conversely, wide-spread information about it would certainly reduce the number of unfortunate children born out of wedlock. Faced with the case of a man who by reputation was a libertine, I decided, after much thought, that he too should be given the information. My reasons were, first, it might protect an unsuspecting, gullible or even morally defective woman; second, prevent the coming of a child unjustly doomed to suffer the liability of offspring of his type. Considerations such as these convince me that misuse of the method, in itself to be deplored, is an inconsequential factor, as against the benefits which will accrue to family and to society where it is used with conscience and with discrimination. M. Voegeli, M. D., M. A., B. D. Chalet "Marlefried". Goldiwil-ob-Thun. Switzerland. March 31, 1956. * This would also apply to other substitutes for the sitting bath such as sunbaked rocks, sand, or the direct exposure to the tropical sun itself in places where hot water is not easily available. Factors like these may have caused some of the sporadic cases of temporary sterility reported after the second world war. NOTES [1] For instance, a 2007 study (Transient Scrotal Hyperthermia and Levonorgestrel Enhance Testosterone-Induced Spermatogenesis Suppression in Men through Increased Germ Cell Apoptosis) reports that soaking the scrotum in 43C water for 30 minutes for only six days 'was found to accelerate oligo-spermia (reduced sperm count) when combined with TU (testosterone undecanoate) injections every 6 weeks but not to the extent of TU combined with oral levonorgestrel and never to contraceptive levels of less than 1 million sperm/mL. Now, why would you lower the temperature and lower the number of days employed and add powerful and potentially dangerous hormonal injections to a time-proven simple workable method that does not require any prescription? [2] Originally from http://www.puzzlepiece.org/bcontrol/voegeli1956.txt Topic: overpopulation free contraception male contraception non-prescription contraception non-surgical male fertility reduction natural contraception temporary male sterilisation male birth control Video: Ukrainian town resists 4th conscription attempt by Kiev military Sat, 2015-02-14 19:43 by Anonymous Tonight (14 February 2015) SBS TV news 1 made a terribly biased report of events in Donetsk (East Ukraine). In the most unprofessional manner they reported that a weapon had been launched onto a kindergarten playground in East Ukraine and they allowed people to think that this had been sent by the East Ukrainians fighting the Kiev government, although it was obvious they had no evidence of this. They then showed President Poroshenko insisting on television that Russia was supplying soldiers and arms to East Ukraine, however, as usual, he gave no details or evidence. He appears, as expected, to be undermining the Minsk attempts at peace, in an effort to please the United States. And Australian television is amplifying this propaganda. The video inside this article shows how things really are on the ground. It is extremely hard to find anyone East or West, who wants to fight for the Kiev Government against the East Ukranian independence efforts. The video, "Ukrainian Town Resists 4th Conscription Attempt", is around 5 minutes long. It appears at http://www.ForbiddenKnowledgeTV.com/page/27039.html" The written Commentary in this article is by an unknown author. Provenance email. Apparently, the rally in this video rally and several like it were organized by the Kiev military to convince locals to submit to mobilization, and the whole thing blew up in their face. The fourth wave of forced conscription in Ukraine is going very poorly. The most extreme case, as of February 9 was in a small town by Odessa, where hundreds of enraged locals surrounded the soldiers, took away their rifles, and burned the conscription papers. Video (around 5 mins): Ukrainian Town Resists 4th Conscription Attempt The United States has been providing the Kiev regime with military training, and there are already American boots on the ground, ostensibly to "strengthen the rule of Law." The US has been bolstering a government that has declared war on its own people, and is rapidly closing off all legal means of dissent - charging political opponents with "treason," banning political parties, and unleashing ultra-nationalist mobs on anyone who daresdissent. (How do ya like them Tax Dollars?) Significantly, no representatives of the US government were present during the 17-hour ceasefire talks recently held between the current Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, Russian President, Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor, Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande, who agreed to a ceasefire starting in three days, February 15, 2015. These talks would not have happened, were it not for the courage and will of the Ukrainian people, themselves, as seen in the video below. This extemporaneous dressing-down, of the Kiev Military Recruiter, by a local East Ukrainian woman, in front of her townspeople is absolutely priceless! Here's a tasty morsel: WOMAN: "You say there are enemies there? You go fight them, we have no enemies there!They're our people there, best friends and family! Why do you conscript people? We'retired of listening to the poison on TV! How much longer must we endure the propagandalies? Do you think we're all idiots, here?! Do you think people are sheep, that you can lie to us and scare us and we'll do what we're told? No! We're tired of it! We will also defend ourselves! CROWD: Well said! WOMAN: Quit ruining our families, our human lives! Enough, already! Look at Donetsk and what's going on, there. The poor people are hiding in cellars, hungry - and Russia sends them humanitarian aid! Did Kiev send them any food?! Did it send them anything, at all?! They're sitting there, without electricity, heating or food. Why are they suffering? What for?! They've lived their whole lives there. They built the place! Have you built anything, at all there, during the 23 years of "independence"?! You only know how to destroy! Show us something you've built! Appendix: transcript of SBS report Fighting has raged in Ukraine, throwing doubts on a ceasefire deal due to take effect over the weekend, as the US said Russia was still deploying heavy arms. Critical footnotes are included below - Ed Source:AFP 14 Feb 2015 - 6:14 PM Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the continuing bombardment of civilians in eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian separatist rebels 2 was already undermining the peace plan reached in Minsk on Thursday. At least 28 civilians and soldiers were reported killed in Friday's upsurge in fighting. "Unfortunately after the Minsk agreement, Russia's offensive 3 has significantly increased. We still think that the agreement is in great danger," Poroshenko said during a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. "After what we concluded in Minsk, these are not only attacks against civilians but also against the Minsk agreement." The ceasefire, due to take effect from midnight on Saturday (Sunday AEDT), will be the first test of the commitment by Kiev and pro-Russian separatists to the freshly-inked peace plan. But with separatists fighting to conquer more territory ahead of the truce and Kiev forces digging in, there are fears over whether anyone will observe the truce, considered vital to the success of the peace roadmap. The United States said it believed Russia was continuing to deploy heavy weapons 3 ahead of the ceasefire. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the United States had received reports of heavy weapons being moved into eastern Ukraine from Russia over the past few days, and more apparently on the way. "This is clearly not in the spirit of this week's agreement," Psaki told reporters. She said the Russian military had deployed large amounts of artillery and multiple rocket launcher systems and was using them to shell Ukrainian positions. 3 Friday's fresh fighting came after rebels and Kiev agreed to the wide-ranging plan on Thursday following marathon talks in the Belarussian between the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned Russia that the EU, which has already slapped Moscow with sanctions over the crisis, is not ruling out further measures if the truce fails. The fragile agreement was seen as the best hope of ending the conflict, which has killed at least 5,480 people and ratcheted East-West tensions to highs not seen since the Cold War, but scepticism remains high after the collapse of a similar previous peace plan. The new Minsk agreement is broadly similar to an earlier failed deal in September, except that the new heavy weapons-free zone will be 50 to 140km-wide, depending on the range of the weapon, double the width of the buffer zone agreed in September. Kiev will also begin retaking control over the approximately 400km stretch of Russia's border with rebel-held Ukraine, but only after local elections are held. Separatist-held territories will be granted a degree of autonomy to be established through talks. Footnotes 1. ↑ See: Ukraine fighting kills 28, ceasefire looms (SBS News, 14 Feb 15). Transcript included above as Appendix. Footnotes, critical of the SBS report, are include below. 2. ↑ As also noted above in the teaser, claims by Poroshenko and a spokesperson for the Ukraine Army that the East Ukraine Self-defence Forces are bombarding the very civilians who support them is reported here uncritically by SBS news. 3. ↑ As alluded to above in the teaser, the lie that the Russian Army is directly participating in the war in Ukraine has been repeated ad nauseum for months now by the likes of President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Kerry, the Ukrainian regime and their allies and duly reported by all the Western Mainstream media including SBS. I have yet to see SBS News point out to its viewers that no evidence to support this claim has ever been produced. Topic: Ukraine East Ukraine Kiev conscription efforts failing Jeremy Bowen BBC interviews President Assad and what this has to do with Australia Thu, 2015-02-12 02:33 by Sheila Newman The full text of the interview has been published by the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA). The interview inside between a BBC journalist, Jeremy Bowen BBC, and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, is wonderfully calm, logical and informative despite the interviewer's many tendentious questions. Assad's analytical answers invite the viewer and journalist to logically evaluate reports which Australians are used to having presented emotively by anti-Assad forces. Assad's English syntax is sometimes unusual and the journalist at times fails to follow his statements and arguments. For instance, towards the end of the interview, Assad is asked if it is true that his government denied aid convoys access to areas held by the enemy. Assad's answer is that if they could stop aid convoys they would presumably be able to stop arms convoys. Since the areas are being bombed by 'rebels' continually, obviously they are unable to stop those arms. If his government were to stop any convoy, military interests would suggest it would be one bearing arms, not one bearing aid. Conversely, if the enemy fighters are able to import arms, then they should be able to import food. If so-called humanitarian organisations report that food is not arriving, but acknowledge that arms are, then the enemy is responsible for lack of food in a situation of well-armed violence. Bashar al-Assad's performance seems so superior to that of Australian leaders that I could not help taking the comparison further. Judging the Syrian leader by Australian leadership standards During the Syrian conflicts President Bashar al-Assad has made himself available to journalists in a manner far freer than any Australian, US, British, French or German political leader. It is hard to imagine Australia's Prime Minster or its opposition leader being able to survive such a detailed interview about their conduct and policy rationale in Australia, say on democratic and humanitarian grounds. They simply are not morally, intellectually or educationally up to scratch and they expect journalists to stick to a narrow and predictable field. The reader might exclaim that Australia is not currently in a condition of civil war and question the relevance of such comparisons. On the other hand, we are constantly told by the popular press that we are in danger of terrorist attacks. The much anticipated prospect of such attacks has been used to make fundamental changes to requirements of evidence, proof, right to know of what one is accused - requirements famed as having brought our legal system forward from medieval times. (See, for instance, "Action on inept anti-terror laws must get priority") So, if we are not at war, we are still treated as if we are in some kind of quasi-war state of emergency. Why Syria is at war with terrorists and Australia only legislates against terrorism Unlike the Syrian government, Australian politicians - government and opposition - toe the United States and NATO line, which many consider to be dictated by global financial institutions. (See, for instance, Sharon Beder, "Neoliberalism and the global financial crisis" (pdf)). This line is most unpopular amongst the general public who retain less and less of the available wealth or political power in this country, as suggested by high unemployment, housing unaffordability, foreign ownership deregulation, industrial conditions deregulation, privatisation and population growth engineering. Australia's farmers and its middle classes have lost almost all effective right to object to having their homes, livelihoods and environments torn up - by gas and coal-seam frackers and by state roads authorities and corporations to make way for state engineered population growth.[1] So, what (apart from laws against secondary boycotts) keeps Australians from holding general strikes and standing up to their false leaders? Two things mainly: 1. Political disorganisation following on from social and geographical disorganisation carried out by successive governments and corporations, supported by a mainstream press and state press which have feudal-like tenure [2] 2. the well-known fact that people can now be arrested and detained without explanation in this country, a situation brought about by skilful use of the threat of terrorism to make us agree to the loss of our basic rights at law.[3] In Syria, however, terrorism has been turned from isolated threats into brutal armies backed by the US-NATO alliance of which Australia and Saudi Arabia are both sort of client-states, and supported by aligned media propaganda. (See for instance, "Syria whom to support whom to trust?" Here is a probable reason why Syria is at war on its own territory but Australia is not. Syria has or had until recently, a well-functioning dirigist economy and strong national identification by its people. Syrian law, based on French civil code and some local and sharia law supported this situation. The global financial forces do not like national solidarity. They don't like people's banks, free education and free hospital and medical care. If they cannot corrupt a state (as they appear to have done with Australia) they arm dissonant forces within it and send in mercenaries to back them up. We have seen this in Libya, Iraq, Bahrain, Ukraine and Syria. So, why isn't Australia torn by civil war? Because, despite the rising alarm of its people (whose current only option is to try to elect independents), Australia is doing the bidding of globalising finance, supporting illegal wars and turning its own polity into a feudal regime with a commodity economy overseen by foreign oligarchs and monarchs of a distinctly fascist outlook. Even our Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has reinstituted knights and dames and recently even knighted British Prince Phillip in a move which, whilst decoratively redundant, could not go ignored and was probably not meant to. Remember, Australia has no code of civil rights, subscribes to a bill of very vague 'human' rights,[4] and is sacrificing ordinary people's homes and farms to higher financial turnover uses - freeways for highrise rentals and quick and dirty coal mines and gas fracks.[5] The corporates and dynasties are taking over. Now we have a leader who takes knighthood seriously. The reaction is that he is ridiculous. But the reality is that he has formally, legally resurrected a major feudal institution, to bestow knighthoods on public figureheads of power. How far is Australia from a feudal state? What rights and obligations do knights have to the Australian PM and what obligations, if any, do Australians have towards them? NOTES [1] See, for instance, http://candobetter.net/taxonomy/term/3930 [2] See, for instance, ABC Bias; Murdoch media. [3] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-20/new-powers-for-police-under-proposed-anti-terror-laws-amendments/5758178. Some would argue that our governments and the press that influences them got us into this mess by supporting illegal wars which have given rise to real acts of terrorism. http://candobetter.net/node/4257. [4]Human rights. [5] How corporate terrorism is dispossessing Oz farmers Topic: terrorism Syria Bashar-al-Assad BBC interviews al-Assad NATO wars feudal Australia Kelvin Thomson MP opposes "canned hunting"-speech in Parliament Thu, 2015-02-12 02:03 by quark Australian Federal MP Hon. Kelvin Thomson speaks in Parliament opposing the practice of "canned hunting" in Africa and specifies ways in which Australia can make this unattractive for Australian would-be "canned hunting" tourists. Speech against canned hunting given to House of Representatives by Kelvin Thomson Monday, 9 February 2015, Page 148 Proof of Hansard, Federal House of Representatives. Mr KELVIN THOMSON (Wills) (17:45): Canned hunting is the practice of intensely breeding and domesticating lions within confined areas in South Africa, in particular, in order to create easy targets for tourist hunters, and I support the member for La Trobe in condemning this practice. It is barbaric killing for macabre trophies. Hunters from all over the world, but notably from the United States, Germany, Spain, France and the UK, go to South Africa and send home lion body parts, such as the head and skin preserved by taxidermists, to show off their supposed prowess. The animals involved are habituated to human contact, often hand reared and bottle-fed, so are no longer naturally fearful of people. Such animals will indeed approach people expecting to get fed but instead receive a bullet or even an arrow from a hunting bow. This makes it easy for clients to be guaranteed a trophy, and thus the industry is lucrative and popular. There is a spurious argument made that somehow hunting brings conservation funding into a country through hunting permits. Yet this has been shown to be patently false. The steepest declines in lion populations have been in countries with the highest hunting intensity, and it has been shown that the funds reaching the local community are minuscule. Born Free USA, along with the Humane Society International, the Humane Society of the United States and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, commissioned economists at large to investigate the facts. That study, published in June 2013, shows that the trophy-hunting industry makes a minimal contribution to national incomes. It is an absolute scandal that the continental lion population has fallen from an estimate of over 75,000 as recently as 1980 to around 32,000 in 2012, with a further concern that the numbers could now be as low as 25,000 distributed over only 22 per cent of their historical range. This demonstrates that African lions require increased international protection from all threats including over utilisation for commercial or trophy hunting. Between 1999 and 2008 offtake for recreational purposes was unsustainable by any standard in at least 16 of the 20 range states trading in wild source lion parts. An Australia Institute report has shown that the economic impact of an Australian restriction on the import of African lion trophies would be minimal because trophy hunting plays a negligible role in African economies, lion hunting is a minor part of the trophy-hunting industry and trophy hunting makes a minimal contribution to rural development. The Australian Institute identifies the trophy-hunting industry as a small part of the African tourism industry. By contrast, the overall tourism industry generates over $13 billion in countries with lions and trophy hunting represents only around two per cent of tourism revenues. The member for Calare asked in the debate: what can we in Australia do? In response, I support the member for La Trobe's proposal that all animals listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, the CITES appendices I, II and III to which Australia is a signatory, are banned from being imported into Australia. I also concur with him that we should change the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to not only stop imports of canned hunted African lion body parts but also stop all species listed under the CITES Appendix 1, Appendix II and Appendix III from being imported unless specifically approved by the Minister for the Environment. As the member for La Trobe outlines on his website, video footage of this practice depicts many distressing scenes including one of a lion lying on the ground where, at close range, a not-so-skilled or brave hunter takes several shots to kill the lion. The lion does not try to escape as it does not regard the hunter as a threat, due to past positive contact with humans. This cruel and barbaric activity needs to be stopped and a change in the law, preventing the importation of animal trophies resulting from canned hunts, will help achieve this while also assisting in protecting the future of international wildlife. The idea of killing animals for sport is frankly barbaric and medieval but, if people really want to do it, then at least we should have a level playing field. The lions have teeth and claws; so give the hunter an appropriately sized knife and fire up the lions a bit before the contest by not feeding them for a couple of days. That would be fairer. Topic: conservation animal abuse Kelvin Thomson African wildlife Why Public Banks Outperform Private Banks: Unfair Competition or a Better Mousetrap? Wed, 2015-02-11 08:31 by admin by Ellen Brown – Previously published (10 Feb 2015) on The Web of Debt Blog, Global Research. See also: A Public Bank Option for Scotland (7 Sep 2014). Public banks in North Dakota, Germany and Switzerland have been shown to outperform their private counterparts. International private competitors have responded by pushing for regulations limiting the advantages of the public banking model, but public banking advocates are pushing back. In November 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the nation's only state-owned bank, "is more profitable than Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and hasn't seen profit growth drop since 2003." The article credited the shale oil boom; but as discussed earlier here, North Dakota was already reporting record profits in the spring of 2009, when every other state was in the red and the oil boom had not yet hit. The later increase in state deposits cannot explain the bank's stellar record either. Then what does explain it? The BND turns a tidy profit year after year because it has substantially lower costs and risks then private commercial banks. It has no exorbitantly-paid executives; pays no bonuses, fees, or commissions; has no private shareholders; and has low borrowing costs. It does not need to advertise for depositors (it has a captive deposit base in the state itself) or for borrowers (it is a wholesome wholesale bank that partners with local banks that have located borrowers). The BND also has no losses from derivative trades gone wrong. It engages in old-fashioned conservative banking and does not speculate in derivatives. Lest there be any doubt about the greater profitability of the public banking model, however, this conclusion was confirmed in January 2015 in a report by the Savings Banks Foundation for International Cooperation (SBFIC) (the Sparkassenstiftung für internationale Kooperation), a non-profit organization founded by the the Sparkassen Finance Group (Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe) in Germany. The SBFIC was formed in 1992 to make the experience of the German Sparkassen – municipally-owned savings banks – accessible in other countries. The Sparkassen were instituted in the late 18th century as nonprofit organizations to aid the poor. The intent was to help people with low incomes save small sums of money, and to support business start-ups. Today, about half the total assets of the German banking system are in the public sector. (Another substantial chunk is in cooperative savings banks.) Local public banks are key tools of German industrial policy, specializing in loans to the Mittelstand, the small-to-medium size businesses that are at the core of that country's export engine. The savings banks operate a network of over 15,600 branches and offices and employ over 250,000 people, and they have a strong record of investing wisely in local businesses. In January 2015, the SPFIC published a report drawn from Bundesbank data, showing that the Sparkassen not only have a return on capital that is several times greater than for the German private banking sector, but that they pay substantially more to local and federal governments in taxes. That makes them triply profitable: as revenue-generating assets for their government owners, as lucrative sources of taxes, and as a stable funding mechanism for small and medium-sized businesses (a funding mechanism sorely lacking in the US today). Three charts from the SBFIC report are reproduced in English below. (Sparkassen results are in orange. Private commercial banks are in light blue.) Swiss Publicly-Owned Banks and the Swiss National Bank: Marching to a Different Drummer The Swiss have a network of cantonal (provincially-owned) banks that are so similar to the Sparkassen banks that they were invited to join the SBFIC. The Swiss public banks, too, have been shown to be more profitable than their private counterparts. The Swiss public banking system helps explain the strength of the Swiss economy, the soundness of its banks, and their attractiveness as a safe haven for foreign investors. The unique structure of the Swiss banking system also helps explain the surprise move by the SNB on January 15, 2015, when it lifted the cap on the Swiss franc as against the euro, anticipating the European Central Bank's move to embark on a massive program of quantitative easing the following week. Switzerland is not a member of the EU or the Eurozone, and the Swiss National Bank (SNB) is not like other central banks. It is 55% owned by the country's 26 cantons or provinces. The remaining investors are private. Each canton has its own publicly-owned cantonal bank, which provides credit to local small and medium-sized businesses. In 2011, the SNB pegged the Swiss franc to the euro at 1 to 1.20; but the value of the euro steadily dropped after that, and the SNB could maintain the peg only by printing Swiss francs, diluting their value to keep up with the euro. The fear was that once the ECB started its new money printing program, the Swiss franc would have to be diluted into hyperinflation to keep up. The SNB's unanticipated action imposed heavy losses on speculators who were long the euro (betting it would rise), and the move evoked criticism from the European central banking community for not tipping them off beforehand. But the loyalty of the Swiss National Bank is to its cantons, cantonal banks, and individual investors, not to the big private international banks that drive central bank policies in other countries. The cantons had been complaining that they were no longer receiving the hefty 6% dividend they had been able to count on for the previous century. The SNB promised to restore the dividend in 2015, and lifting the cap was evidently felt necessary to do it. Publicly-owned Banks and the Trans-Pacific Partnership The SBFIC is working particularly hard these days to make information and technical help available to other countries interested in pursuing their beneficial public model, because that model has come under attack. Private international competitors are pushing for regulations that would limit the advantages of publicly-owned banks, through Basel III, the European Banking Union, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). In the US, the current threat is from the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) and its European counterpart the TTIP. President Obama, the Chamber of Commerce, and other corporate groups are pushing hard for fast track authority to pass these secret trade agreements while effectively bypassing oversight from Congress. The agreements are being sold as promoting trade and increasing jobs, but the effect of international trade agreements on jobs was evident with NAFTA, which hurt US employment more through the competition of cheap imports than helped it with increased exports. Moreover, only five of the TPP's twenty-nine chapters are about trade. The remaining chapters are basically about getting government off the backs of the big international corporations and protecting their profits from competition. Corporations would be authorized to sue governments that passed laws protecting their people from corporate damage, on the ground that the laws impair corporate profits. The trade agreements put corporations before governments and the people they represent. Particularly targeted are government-owned industries, which can undercut big corporate prices; and that includes publicly-owned banks. Public banks are true non-profits that recycle earnings back into the community rather than siphoning them into offshore tax havens. Not only are the costs of public banks quite low, but they are safer for depositors; they allow public infrastructure costs to be cut in half (since the government-owned bank can keep the interest that composes 50% of infrastructure costs); and they provide a non-criminal alternative to an international banking cartel caught in a laundry list of frauds. Despite these notable benefits, under the TPP and TTIP, publicly-owned banks might wind up getting sued for unfair competition because they have advantages not available to private banks, including the backing of their local governments. They have the backing of the government because they are the government. The government would be getting sued for operating efficiently in the best interests of its constituents. To truly eliminate unfair competition, the giant monopolistic multinational corporations should be broken up, since they have an obvious unfair trade advantage over small farmers and small businesses. But that outcome is liable to be long in coming. In the meantime, fast track for the secretive trade agreements needs to be vigorously opposed. To find out how you can help, go to www.StopFastTrack.com or www.FlushtheTPP.org. Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 200+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com. Topic: Ellen Brown public banking Switzerland North Dakota Pages « first ‹ previous … 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 … next › last » Tags in Topic overpopulation population democracy Syria Australia overdevelopment immigration environment growth lobby democracy alert Propaganda Watch Victoria Russia Ukraine climate change Julian Assange economics wildlife development Kelvin Thomson counter-growth lobby dystopia water US-NATO privatisation More Help save injured wildlife How to contact wildlife rescuers Recent comments Journalists will be held to account for complicity in genocide 3 days 3 hours ago That’s typical. 3 days 7 hours ago 6 June-Inquiry into Community Consulation Process Vic Parliament 3 days 19 hours ago Vegans are not animal lovers 4 days 15 hours ago Keep an eye on these Australian alumni of Claus Sshwab of WEF 4 days 16 hours ago Nicolas Reece is a real Polyanna 1 week 1 day ago Dumb Animal Justice vote means dogs tp be euthanised, abandoned 1 week 3 days ago Gerard Rennick: People First to become large grassroots party 1 week 5 days ago I agree, it is complicated 1 week 6 days ago Foreign uni students in US and University tax-status may change 2 weeks 1 day ago Raphael Epstein sounding like Orwell's Winston Smith 2 weeks 6 days ago Says nothing about why housing prices are so high 3 weeks 1 day ago excellent article 3 weeks 1 day ago Reply to Greg 3 weeks 2 days ago Supports Vic govt 'solution' to crisis caused by Albanese govt 3 weeks 3 days ago Apartment debt 3 weeks 3 days ago First lady of fascist president of Azerbaijan awarded in Moscow 1 month 4 days ago Every voter who does not understand should watch this 1 month 2 weeks ago "Prototypes (both) put in 1 month 3 weeks ago Arguments put here about the frame-up of Bryant not addressed 2 months 1 week ago Democracy First independents crisis 2 months 1 week ago Andrew Gatley challenges Dunkley candidates to a debate 2 months 1 week ago The Majors Trying Every Trick In The Book 2 months 1 week ago 30 March -Stop theTowers Community Rally - Elsternwick Plaza 2 months 2 weeks ago Immigration lies and statistics 2 months 2 weeks ago Martin Bryant is guilty 2 months 2 weeks ago Age propaganda piece on Morgan Cox and homelessness 2 months 3 weeks ago What about a life outside commuting ? 2 months 3 weeks ago Vic Planners raise parking fees to reduce car use - 15min cities 2 months 3 weeks ago A sign of realisation ? 2 months 4 weeks ago Click to read all comments.